disjointed clips imitate life
It came to me as 400-foot reel of 16mm, silent, black-and-white film a decade ago. A friend had purchased it at an estate sale, but lacking a projector, passed it on to me.
I love old film. It is like getting a gift from the past. But, when I started to unwind the brittle acetate from the reel, I discovered this gift came with responsibility. The film was not a continuous roll; it was short clip after short clip—most only a couple of feet in length—seemingly disparate and disconnected in content from one “scene” to another. I placed the reel in a plastic bag and put it with all the my other delayed film-transfer projects. It stayed there through two moves and ended up in my “film vault” in West Virginia.
While recovering from open-heart surgery last year, I decided to tackle the huge task of assembling the clips into a continuous reel that could be transferred to video. It was a tedious task, but well suited to my limited strength at the time.
I transferred the film, exported the film … and forgot about. While cleaning out the RAID drive last week, I stumbled across the transfer and decided to finally take a look at what the past had gifted me.
The scenes appear from to be from the late 1920; the setting an upper-middle class neighborhood, most likely a Cleveland, Ohio, suburb in the early stages of development. There is charming footage of toddler playing in a pool and sandbox, and an adult man mowing his lawn; of young men hamming it up for the camera (oh, if only I could read lips!), and a far too brief shot of a man with an “Auburn” sign on his truck.
The film tells no story, has no titles. Perhaps the clips were “out takes” due to technical issues or impertinent content. Perhaps there existed a longer reel of film of which these were once a part and told a story. Yet, as art does, this amalgamation of movements, movements, and mammon captured in silver is life. Nonlinear, disjointed, and yet most likely belonging to the same reel and having been exposed by the same camera, this film is very much like our days on this wide screen. We perform myriad tiny, often unrelated acts, that comprise our life. Our mind selectively captures what it considers important and discard the rest. We give them little thought, but as I age, I find myself recalling these specific, random moments of the mundane days that better than the out-of-focus, gray memories of the big days—my 16th birthday, high school graduation, weddings, moving into a new house and losing a loved one.
I wonder if the folks in this film, all of them most certainly deceased by now, or with heads as gray as the grass, recalled these moments more than their big ones? Perhaps there are reels of the birthday parties and weddings that did not come to me. The past’s gift was clips only, a cinematic stream of consciousness that would deny an editor’s determination to organize them into a coherent experience. It’s best they remain disparate, and thereby more accurate to life.
And for that, and many other reasons, I love old film.
