225: Home Movies
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Okay, you know the rules. No smoking in here. Cell phones off. They're talking during the show. Ready? Okay, let's roll the film. This is a home movie, and it looks like any other home movie. People go to summer resort, white cottages with screened in porches and red ruse. There's a woman with an 18-month-old girl running around. Oh, there I am. I like you. Look at that chubby. Something's just on change. Kathy Alexander is the 18-month-old in the film. Now I'll grown up. What interests her in this film is the woman. Kathy has adopted, and she thinks that this woman, whose name she does not know, might be her real mother. The woman's face is mostly obscured because they're in the shade. It's fuzzy. The film's old. Kathy strains to see the resemblance. Oh, here she is. See, almost right in here you can see her face, and if I could just get that lightened, some point right here. See, what happens is lighter, and again, there's my profile. And then right here, this right here is like my pasture. Just looking at that looks like I'm looking at myself on one of my other home videos. I mean, here, I mean, if you could just take a look, I mean, if I can even just show you that thigh, then nobody's got thighs like that. Those are mine. That's a hereditary feature because I could see my daughter has just like I did. She watches this minute of film over and over. She gives copies of it to friends the way that other people hand out pictures of their kids. It's one of the most important things she owns. But to look at it, you'd never know because all home movies will go like. When they mean anything, it's small, and it's private. Pictures themselves don't tell much. You know what I'm talking about. Birthday parties, weddings, the rights of passage, first steps, babies and bassanets. Alan Berliner spent six years of his life going around finding old home movies and watching them and collecting them and finally condensing them into this amazing film that he called Family Album. There's invariably the baby that they put on the back of the family dog. That's a standard shot. You've seen that a lot. I've seen several that. Yeah. The beach is also big, big, big, big time beach, summer beach. The beach figures bigger into our movie, into our home movies than into our lives. Yeah, I would say swimming is a big thing that earthlings do according to home movies. Yes. You know, life on earth is a life of leisure without struggle. Again, it mostly takes place in the summer, in the water, in beaches or around pools. If beaches are around pools. Home movies are also primarily about children. Perhaps 60, 70 percent of home movies contain images of children. I would say up to about the age of 12 or so, and then it stops. In fact, I've seen many, many collections of home movies and it'll be a frog mistake. Imagine a girl named Adrien. The cans will be labeled Adrien H1, Adrien H2, H3, H4. And at about age 11 or 12, it stops. There's no more Adrien until perhaps she gets married. And that's because puberty happens. You know, adolescence happens and, you know, you suddenly have a kind of tension within the family in terms of the relationship between parent and child. So when there are kids in the films, they're cute and they're little and they're happy. All the time. All the time. Home movies are a family's way of preserving forever, the thought. We were a nice family. We loved each other. Any feeling, any fact about the family, besides that fact, generally does not make it into the films. And that's true. Alan Berliner says of the black and white films that he's watched from the 1920s as the video's taken last month at his niece's birthday party. Because all the images in everybody's home movies are the same. Because the pictures are all the same. All the meaning comes from things that are not in the pictures. Which makes them, I have to say, the perfect subject for a radio show. New Year Be Easy Chicago. It's this American life distributed by Public Radio International. I'm out of class. Today on our program, Home Movies. What they say in spite of themselves. We bring you five movies for radio in five acts. Including stories from David Sedaris and Jonathan Goldstein. A look at the cinematic output of 12 year old Auteurs. And with the producers of America's funniest home videos know about America that you don't. Stay with us.
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