Just Do It

Home Movie Day

by Kathryn Lipman

Sat., Oct. 18, noon-4 p.m, free, Community Education Center, 3500 Lancaster Ave., homemovieday.com/philadelphia

If VHS tapes aren't retro enough, Home Movie Day has you covered. The local incarnation of this international event — which takes place as far away as Argentina, Slovenia and Japan — invites the public to screen their home movies on 16mm, Super 8 and 8mm film.

Expect to see footage shot in Philadelphia backyards from as early as the 1930s. Last year's event at the Free Library almost exclusively featured family films shot locally, in contrast to other locations, at which attendees frequently showed travel films. "It really highlighted local family life," says Dwight Swanson, one of Home Movie Day's founders, who now lives in Philly. Since many people have kept film past the time they threw out their old projectors, the event allows them to re-live events and see images of relatives for the first time in decades.

As more people transfer family films to digital media, Swanson and fellow film archivists want to make clear the downsides of digital storage. Transfers may not preserve the vibrant color of the original film, and film will long outlast the physical storage medium of digital files. The relatively short-term life of file formats is also an issue: Just as documents created by early word processors are not readable by today's Microsoft Word, digital video files may not be viewable by popular digital video players a decade from now.

At Home Movie Day, archivists at an inspection station will make sure film is in good enough condition to be played without being damaging. Each person plays one of their favorites at a time, the majority of which are silent. "We encourage the filmmaker or whoever brought the film to narrate as it's going on," says Swanson. "It usually turns into a dialogue as the audience stays over the afternoon: They have memories of that neighborhood, that building or that business. It really works best when it turns into a conversation."