Benjamin Home Movies

December 9, 2014 § 6 Comments

Growing up there was a rusted metal box in one of our closets that was filled with cans of 16mm film. As a child they seemed kind of creepy to me. Trapped memories. We had no way to watch them. By the time I was old enough to appreciate their value they had started to disintegrate. They had that vinegary smell that old film gets. Now working at a post house in New York that transferred film to tape, on one of my visits to my mother’s I put all of the film in ziplock bags and took it back with me on the plane to New York. I was able to transfer most it. A few rolls were badly melted and fused together, so had to be thrown out. Most of the film was so delicate that we opted not to clean it before we transferred it. Again like the family photos there was little information written on the film boxes. –Sometimes I think of the journey that the photographs and films have made. Leaving New York, traveling thousands of miles to sit in a closet for years untouched then back to where they started. I’ll never forget the feeling of seeing them come to life. When I began my blog almost a year ago I posted this clip, so some of you who have been following may remember it. It’s a short sampling of some of the film footage I put together when I was working in Post Production.