Revisiting My Pumpkin-Headed Self,Via 8-mm Home Movies

In the days before VCRs and long before affordable camcorders, American families had two choices when it came to preserving their memories visually. Either take a lot of snapshots, or get hold of an 8-mm home movie camera and projector. There was a time when every family, it seemed, had a boxful of 8-mm films, even if they weren't exactly sure where they came from. n Our movie camera, I remember, was a small, gray brick of a device. I forget the make. It used no batteries?instead, there was a hand crank on the side that tightened a spring that allowed the film spools to roll for about three minutes before you needed to wind it up again. For indoor use, it also came with a light attachment that required special bulbs that burned so hot they could only be left on for a few minutes before they blew out every fuse in the house.

The images captured by these cameras were flickering and grainy and silent, but they served their purpose.

Once or twice a year, my dad would go into the storeroom and drag out the projector and the box of 3-inch-wide spools of film; my mom would make popcorn, and we'd gather in the basement, where we'd shout at the screen, make fun of each other and laugh until tears flowed freely down our cheeks. My sister and I would groan initially when we saw my dad setting up the projector, but it always turned out to be a good night.

About half the footage we had consisted of things my dad shot overseas?the Azores, Singapore, Thailand?or while 30,000 feet up, riding in the glass bubble in the belly of a KC-135. As a result of the latter, watching home movies with us was kind of like watching the credits sequence from Dr. Strangelove over and over and over again.

The other half of our films were more traditional?birthdays, Christmases, vacations, family gatherings, first steps.

This year for the holidays, my parents did something I'd been hoping they'd do for a long time?they finally had all those old home movies transferred onto videotape.

"Remember," my mom warned me before the tape arrived in the mail, "your sister was around a lot longer than you were." It was her way of letting me know that there wasn't too much of me to be found on these films. What little there was, though (to once again quote the great Percy Dovetonsils), was full of clues.

When my copy arrived a few days before Christmas, I opened a beer and popped in the tape.

It's a different experience, watching these things on a television screen, rather than projected on a basement wall. The images are still grainy and flickering, the colors faded, but the clacking of the projector is gone. The resulting silence is almost eerie. It's also different watching them alone, instead of surrounded by people making fun of you the whole time.

You see this sort of thing in movies a lot?a man sitting alone in a living room after his family's been killed by thugs or whatnot, watching old home movies, a drink in his hand, quiet tears in his eyes. In my case, nobody had died, there was no tragedy surrounding any of this. Everyone was just fine. But I hadn't seen my family in a couple years, and I missed them. For a while at least, this was as close as I'd be able to get. The melancholy air was hanging pretty thick in my cold apartment.

The films?a dozen of them all strung together seamlessly, span from about 1960, shortly before my sister was born, to 1968, when I was three, and we'd just moved to Green Bay. They also spanned four states (not counting vacation footage)?Nebraska, North Dakota, Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Wisconsin. I recognized few of the faces. Neighbors and friends who were long gone before I was born. I was happy to see the only film ever shot (so far as I'm aware) of my dad's father, Roscoe Knipfel. He was an enormous man, bespectacled, with thick, curly black hair. He died shortly after I was born, and while I never knew him, really, I've heard plenty of stories, and I'm told we would've gotten along just fine.

The films work as a kind of time capsule for the hippieless middle-class American heartland of the 60s. The hairdos, the eyeglasses, the clothes, cars that still proudly sported tailfins. The old console stereo that stayed with us until the mid-70s. My mom throwing a snowball at a "Welcome to New Mexico" sign. Deer brazenly strolling up to car windows to beg for food at a roadside zoo in the Badlands. A Disneyland that had yet to take on the air of imminent horror. Haywagons loaded with kids being pulled through snow-filled woods by weary-looking horses. My dad?younger here than I am now?shoveling the driveway in his flight jacket. My sister never letting her knees touch the ground as she crawled and, later, dancing on the hassock.

As my mom had warned, there wasn't much of me to be found here. What there was, though, was telling. A shocking blond crewcut and a frighteningly large head teetering on top of a roly-poly body wearing pajamas with feet. Most of the footage is devoted to an endless montage of my early, failed attempts to walk. What it amounts to, really, is a series of quick cuts of me at age one, falling down behind various pieces of furniture, or being pushed down by my sister. I'm not sure if these were shot before or after I wore the leg braces?but it was clear that I never really got the hang of walking. Still haven't. These were also the days before anyone knew how bad my eyes were, though some evidence is there?the wide, roving eyes, the nose pressed against the television screen in an effort to see what was going on, the endless, careening charges toward whoever was holding the camera.

Then we cut to Green Bay, two years later, thick horn-rims as firmly in place as my crewcut, where I'm making my earliest, failed stabs at various sports. Baseball in the backyard with my dad and sister, football across the street, burdened with a too-large helmet that left me helpless as a turtle on its back whenever I fell. While I could neither hit a baseball nor catch a football, I had already mastered some of the extraneous behaviors that came along with professional sports?tapping the dirt off my imaginary cleats, throwing my hat to the ground in disgust whenever I disagreed with a call. Actually, I seemed to throw my hat to the ground after every call. And falling down. I was real good at falling down.

After about 10 seconds of refueling footage, the tape ends with two of the films I made when I was nine. No new home movies had been shot in six years, and the camera had been lying fallow in the back room. One day I asked about it, and my dad pulled it out and showed me how to use it. Given that it was such a simple, hearty device, it still worked like a charm. We went to the drugstore and picked up a couple rolls of film (even by that time, simple 8-mm film was becoming increasingly difficult to find). I developed an idea and, armed with that, a G.I. Joe and my 25-pound rabbit Charlotte, I marched out into the snow-filled backyard to make my first movie.

It was a simple idea?G.I. Joe, though dressed only in a blue jumpsuit, played an arctic explorer who, at every turn, was attacked and mauled by a giant rabbit-creature. Sort of like Night of the Lepus, but on an even smaller budget (in the end, about $6). She chewed him up, buried him in the snow, threw him off mountains?and, in one scene, beat him with a socket wrench before setting him on fire.

I had two things that made my job very easy. First, the camera was designed to allow me to shoot a frame at a time, so I could animate Joe without too much fuss. The other thing was the fact that Charlotte was an ill-tempered beast, driven to bloodlust by a steady diet of candy canes. She'd attack anything and anyone?neighbor kids, stray dogs, squirrels, birds?anything but me. Put a G.I. Joe in front of her and she was more than happy to knock him around for a while.

The movies (I shot two) came together quickly (a day each) and, when I first saw them, I thought they were pretty damn good. The animated Joe climbing up snowdrifts and into caves and around rabbit hutches, Charlotte chomping on cue.

Seeing them now, though, well, I have to keep reminding myself that I was nine, and didn't really know what I was doing. I didn't realize, for instance, that when you're doing stop-motion animation, the camera needs to stay perfectly still between shots to be effective. Shooting a frame at a time, and moving the camera to a new angle for each frame?it just doesn't work out too well. Seeing them now just makes my head hurt. I guess in that way, they're sort of like re-reading old stories.

I thought watching these old films would affect me much worse than they did. That initial fog of melancholy burned away pretty quickly. I think I know why, too. The pumpkin-headed kid in these movies is so far away now that I no longer recognize him?and, as a result, no longer miss him very much. Not as much as I expected I would, anyway.