Super 8

For those of you that are under 40, you probably don’t remember the ritual that was watching home movies.  Not to sound like an old fart, but back in the 1960’s we didn’t have the instant playback that you have with digital video, your cell phone or hell even VHS video back in the 1970’s.  First you had to get a super 8 camera where you could take home movies and purchase the cassettes which held about 50 feet of film or two and a half minutes of action.   Needless to say, you couldn’t linger too long on one subject because after a little over two minutes, your film would run out.  This situation led to wedding movies going from a quick ceremony, to a few seconds of the first dance, a quick look at the sharing of the wedding cake, a few seconds of the tossing of the bouquet and finally leaving the reception in a hail of rice.  Your wedding could be condensed to a few minutes with no editing needed, and no audio.  There was no sound to go with the movies until 1973 when a sound track was added to Super 8 film. So if your drunk uncle got up to give a toast, there was no audio record of it.  All you saw was either people laughing or mortified but no sound to give you a hint that he blurted out that it would never last, he slept with his sister-in-law or that he was pretty sure the bride was knocked up.  When it was played back, the only sound you heard was ticking of the projector as the film popped up and down.      

The limited amount of time that you could record on a movie cassette led to people trying to pack in as much action into 150 seconds as possible.  Many of these movies ended up feeling like you were seeing the 1960’s through the eyes of someone who had Attention Deficit Disorder.   Even if you had 10 to 15 rolls to record that special event, it still took a few seconds load between switching out cassettes so you would still have lost pieces of action between where the last roll ended the new one began.  Worse, it would take at least a few days to send off the film and get it developed so you couldn’t really be sure that you got everything.  Primitive as it seems now, it was the best technology that we had at the time.   It was the only way we could go beyond capturing  a nanosecond of action in a photo.  Rather than explaining how your child learned how to walk, you could show them taking those precious tentative steps out into the world.  You could see them doing it in those ridiculous puffy pants with ruffles on the back, the hair in a silly sprout and toddler saddle shoes.   You could see the pride of the Mom or Dad taking their child's hand and leading them down that path with a big silent smile on their face – and appreciate how timeless that moment is.   Different clothes, different decade, but still those tentative steps have to be taken by every toddler and experienced by every parent.

I guess the reason I’m waxing nostalgic about all this is because for my holiday project for my mother and my brothers and sisters this year, I decided to convert a few reels of personal home movies into digital video.  I tried at first to do it myself but trying to get a 40 year old projector to gently play the precious moments of my recorded childhood  didn't work out so well.  I found that the decades of dust made the machine smoke and when I tried to un-jam the film, my finger got shredded in the sprockets before I could even get my video camera set up.  I decided then and there to have the professionals transfer it.  The quality would be better and the chances of bloodshed were much lower.

My brothers got a selection of home movies from my mother’s house which has been pretty empty since she moved from Miami to Tallahassee to go into assisted living.  The films spanned from 1957 from when they lived in Medford, Massachusetts to various vacations up to 1974.  My mother was pretty meticulous about labeling the outside of the film canisters so it was easy to see what year it covered and what activities were documented.  I got a dual 8 mm viewer from the place that I was having the film transferred so that I could see the movies in advance to decide which movies were worth transferring.  Putting the film on the spools and cranking them through the viewer brought  back to life those memories that had remained still for all these decades.  Birthday parties with pony rides, trips to Mathason Hammock, a family vacation to Pioneer City, or just playing in the backyard were all subjects of these long forgotten films. 

I picked out the best of our collective toddler-hoods.  I got 200 feet of film from 1957 when my parents still lived near Boston and my sister Sharon and I were still six to seven years from existence.   It was interesting seeing my older sister Kathy playing with her baby brother Bill in the pool in their backyard, seeing her climb on monkey bars and totally mug for the camera.  Again, these films were silent so any sound of her little voice singing to her brothers was never captured.  There’s the footage of my brother Bill’s second birthday which proved that no matter how advanced we as a species become, kids will always love ice cream, cake and getting presents – those emotions are pretty timeless.  Then there are the images of my brother Steve as an infant being passed around and adored as infants always are.  Then there is the footage of my parents young and just starting out with their family.  My mother is wearing bright red lipstick which was your make-up basic back then with matching nail polish.  She looks vibrant even in light of the fact she had three children in five years.  My dad looks thin and has no problem pushing a stroller or shooting some of the movie footage so that my mother is actually documented in the movies.  My grandparents still look like my grandparents but with less gray and more energy.  It’s a little freaky to see all these people and how they looked before I was born.  I’m not jealous mind you, just interested in the dynamic before I came along.  There is one part where my mother is throwing back her head and laughing out loud - something I rarely saw growing up probably because probably after having five kids to look after, she didn’t has as many LOL moments.

When I got to the footage of 1966, I got to see myself at three and my sister at two playing in the backyard.  My brother Steve who is about nine at this point is clowning around as I douse him with a hose.   My sister Sharon running around topless in the backyard with me in my favorite bathing suit (I still remember how much I loved that suit!)  The two of us were so close then, she was my little Dee-Dee. I was 16 months old when she was born and I couldn’t say Sharon but I could call her Dee-Dee.  It stuck through the time we went to college.   I remembered how much she hated sand on her toes and would insist on sitting in a chair while the rest of us played in the water.  It’s those little seemingly small details you remember the most.

I decided to get about 600 feet transferred which would be about 40 minutes of digital video.  Ironically, I had to drop off the film and wait for about a week for it to be transferred much like my mother used to when she took her movies to be developed at Zayre’s or Walgreens.  I asked them to put it in a Quicktime format so that I could edit on iMovie.   I uploaded the video into my computer and watched these images come to life once again but without being washed out by a projector bulb.   There we were, the Cody kids in all our youthful glory – just learning to walk, play and swing.  I looked at one scene of me at three getting ready to jump into a plastic pool with a blue two piece bathing suit.  I take a running start then hesitate and go back and run back before stopping again and then plopping with both legs bent.  I’d watch that piece and want to tell that little girl that it’s okay to be bold – jump in without hesitating.   As I grew older, I would often hesitate – sometimes it worked in my favor but most of the time it didn’t.  I guess that’s why I became so attracted to improvisation in college – you can’t hesitate if you want to be any good at it. 

I finished the editing the video and put the holiday footage together at the end from 1957 and 1963.  I hoped my mother and my siblings would like it.  I took it with me to Tallahassee so that my sister Kathy, my brother Bill, my mom and our families could watch it together.  I also uploaded it on Vimeo for my sister Sharon and Steve to watch.  The time came for us to watch it in Kathy’s living-room on her DVD much like we used to as kids when my mom got our the projector so we could see the footage she had just gotten back.  I was amazed how much Kathy and Bill remembered of their Massachusetts days.   We laughed at the our antics as children and at the patience my father had at trying to keep a band of five kids together while my mother documented what she could.  My mother remembered people we couldn’t and it felt good to hear her connect to those old memories and see herself as that young mother excited to have her daughter try on a coat from Felines Department store.  Here’s a link to a 60 second mock movie promo I did for The Codys – A Party of Seven.

I guess my hope with all this is to remind the Cody kids how close we used to be before adulthood, marriage and our own families got in the way.   Our mother is beginning to lose her memory and soon these home movies will be all we have to connect us to our past because she won’t be able to recount those moments to us anymore.  In a way, I guess that’s what this blog is about.  If my kids ever wonder who I was, they can look here and get an idea of what their mother thought and the things I went through, both good and bad.   It also makes me think for all the video equipment I have around here - I need to take video of them and save it because they will be grown and out before I know it.  I’ll want them to remember the good times and not all the times I had to say that we need to watch our money. You know, the silly times in the park or on vacation in Chattanooga or just playing around in the living room.  I'm going to be 50 years old this year and yet I still remember vividly playing in my childhood Miami backyard, the smell of the fresh cut grass and how much my brother Steve used to make me laugh.  It seems like yesterday and yet it was 47 years ago.   I just want my kids to remember their childhood and to be able to smile about it because it all goes by so very, very fast.