With Home Movie Day just around the corner (the national celebration is August 18th while Roanoke’s event will take place November 1st), I thought I’d share some stills from a fascinating Super8 film installation I stumbled upon while vacationing in Berlin this summer. I found out about the event, appropriately called 100x Berlin, thanks to large posters in the subway stations around the city with an unmistakable Super8 film projector as the central image.
From June 7 to July 6, 100 vintage Super8 film projectors purred away in the cave-like basement of the Berlin’s KulturBrauerei showcasing glimpses of life in Berlin as seen through lost and found home movies. The projectors and “small films” of Berlin cityscapes and backyards were scavenged from yard sales and eBay by SmallFormat magazine editor, Juergen Lossau.
Lossau and his volunteers were able to keep the film excerpts running non-stop thanks to a wire coat-hanger type loop mechanism he and volunteers attached to each projector. (Click the link for a closer photo of his loop.)
While there was a small entrance fee, I was happy to pay a few Euros for the visual feasts of images. Based on the great condition of many of the projectors in the installation, I’m sure the cost of the installation equipment–not to mention the labor cost for the time and care put into the curation of the films–was near impossible to recoup. Nonetheless, 100xBerlin was an inspiring celebration of the beauty and mystery of home movies, those luminous artifacts of our private histories – histories that each of us carry with us.
Upon returning home, my filmmaking partner Paul Harrill and I set up a more modest home movie celebration of our own as a storefront video kiosk in the window of the Center in the Square in downtown Roanoke. For our installation, we blacked out the windows to the storefront with black kraft paper leaving squares for three iMac computer screens. The computers were programmed to automatically play three speeds and versions of home movies each day from noon to midnight during the month of July. (To learn more about the tech side of the installation, see Paul’s blog post.)
If you’d like to see more images, read a nice recap of the Berlin event with visitors’ comments, or find out how to locate Super8 equipment and resources for your own installation or filmmaking projects, check out the latest edition of SmallFormat. If a subscription would put too much strain on your budget (it’s a steep $79 for 6 issues), then try to get your local library to subscribe for you and all the other cinephiles in your community. That’s what I plan on doing!
