The War Against Clutter (Part 3 - A Candid Camera Moment)

In the early 1920's, Dad began a fifty-year love affair with home movies: 17.5mm, 9.5mm, 16mm, 8mm, and Super 8 which he helped develop in his film laboratory on Wacker Drive in Chicago. Scores of heavy steel film cans lined his projection room in our basement, all meticulously marked with indelible ink on fabric tape: Palace Posters and Mechanical Displays; Four Generations: Little Grandma, Mom, Ev, Alice; Around the World, Part One; Stephanie and Piano March 1947; and so forth.

After Dad died in 1973, the film cans in the basement sat untouched for nearly twenty years, but for spiders and dust motes. Then one day while Elliott was home visiting from Colorado, Mother asked him to set up a projector in the dining room so we could look at the old movies. Some films were odorous and brittle and plunked directly into a trash basket. Others, upon being viewed and deemed silly or otherwise unnoteworthy, rewound themselves directly into the trash. Mother no longer had a need to hold onto the films or the memories they evoked. The movies we didn't have the time and patience to look at that day went downstairs, back onto the projection room shelves.

Six years later after Mother died in 1998, the remaining film cans fell under my jurisdiction. The house was sold, I was moving out, everything had to find a new home.

Two dozen weighty cans moved with Bill and me into a condo in Glenview for three years, up to a condo in Wisconsin along the shore of Lake Michigan for a year, down to a house in Tulsa for the past seven years. Inside the Tulsa house, the cans have lived in the dark shadows of a high closet shelf until tornado season when they have been sequestered in hall drawers, so as not to clunk us on the head if we have to wait out a tornado in the closet. And every single time I move them I say, "This is absolutely the last time I'm moving these cans!"

A few days ago was absolutely the last time. I sat on the office floor carpet with the cans spread around me, their provocative titles like fish hooks in my heart. Should I spend the money to have these films transferred to DVD? How many times would I even want to look at them again? The prospect of spending so much money for what might be little return disturbed me. I picked up a 10.5 inch steel can marked 1927-1928 Pathex Pictures, Wedding, Grandpa, Willow Pattern, Mary Wedding, Love and Sand, Charleston, Adolph Weidig. I really wanted to see Love and Sand again, a silent movie Dad had created and photographed on the sandy beach of Illinois State Park with Mother in the role of femme fatale. I opened the can. Inside sat a reel big enough to hold 800 feet of film, but the reel was empty. Not one foot of film. I opened Second Trip to South America Aboard the Santa Maria and Paula. Another empty reel. And then I laughed out loud.

If you're going to keep it, move it around, fret over it, at least know what it is you have!