Bright Lights, Old Memories

My memories of holidays when I was very young are suffused with the light of a thousand suns.

Or one movie light. It was hard to tell sometimes.

My grandfather had a Super 8 movie camera that was a pride and joy to him and it would come out every Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthday, or other significant event that took place at his house or, in the case of weddings, any nearby church. It was a small, handheld little thing and each roll of grainy film lasted about five or six minutes which meant that there were a lot of short snippets of action as he tried to cover everything that was happening. Super 8 film wasn’t very light sensitive so the camera came with a floodlight that etched everything in white glare while you were living through it, though it looked good on film. Without it the film just came out muddled and dark.

He'd haul it out and spend time happily capturing various moments – we learned to ignore him so he didn’t have to have us staring into the camera all the time – and when he’d finished the roll we’d be plunged back into the relative darkness of ambient light, returned to our holidays.

Several weeks later the film would come back from the processor and we’d find out how it turned out.

My grandfather was not a great cameraman. People would routinely get lost out of frame or have various body parts cut off by the edge of the action, and he had a rare talent for focusing on things in between things. But they were good memories and we enjoyed them when we saw them.

Just the other day my brother sent links to some of the movies that he’d had digitized so we can all see them again. It’s a treasure trove of the 1960s and 1970s.

You forget, in this age of iPhones, that those old movies were silent. People come onto the screen, obviously talking to each other or laughing at something, caught in the middle of a moment, and their mouths are moving but nothing comes to you as you watch. It’s kind of eerie, in a way, as if you were a ghost outside of the flow of time, watching events through a filter, which of course in a way you are.

So many of those people are gone now. My parents. All three of my grandparents. The great-aunts who would only come by every few Christmases even though they only lived forty minutes away. All just memories and images on film.

My grandmother is almost exactly my age now, in this screen grab from Christmas 1970. She’s looking at my cousin, who is all of about sixteen months old here and I can’t tell if he’s blurred because of the way my grandfather took the shot or if that’s just how sixteen-month-olds are. But she looks happy, and even now I can hear the whooping laugh that she had when things struck her just right.

This is my brother and my parents, Christmas Eve 1979.

And me, a bit later that evening, when it came time to open gifts. We never did play that game more than a handful of times as the rules were fiendishly complicated – or at least more complicated than we felt like dealing with – but I was excited at the time. I still have it somewhere. Maybe I should give it another shot.

This is the man himself, the photographer photographed. As we got older we’d each take our turns with the Super 8. It was something of a rite of passage. The gift he’s opening is a handheld calculator, which was an impressive thing in 1979.

Eventually the Super 8 got retired, and for many years after that we just had still photographs – they’re easier because they don’t take the photographer out of the moment for so long. You can take your picture and still be part of the celebration.

But there is something about seeing people move – especially people long gone – that can’t be duplicated by a still photograph.

I’m still working my way through all of the files my brother sent. It’s a lovely and rather bittersweet way to spend an October weekend, and I’m glad for it.