En Passant: Once upon a home movie time

YEARS AND years ago, over half a century ago, in fact over 60 years ago, my Dad, ol’ Dave, got it into his mind that he could make movies like Cecil B DeMille. Who? Ag, my child… OK, like Steven Spielberg; you recognise his name, right? Stone me…

So, ol’ Dave threw caution to the wind and invested in a Kodak Brownie 8mm movie camera, that was so advanced for its day that you still had to wind it up. No batteries – you wound it up like a flippen clock, short only of a flippen cuckoo. I am assuming it was advanced because I have seen pictures of movie cameras that you had to crank BY HAND! And of course it had no sound track recording ability.

Among its features, this old Kodak Brownie had three rotatable lenses, the most powerful of which was supposed to be TELESCOPIC. Yeah, right. It had all the ocular properties of a short-sighted mole-rat.

So when Dad, in 1957 (I kid you not) at great expense travelled down to the Wanderers in Johannesburg, to watch the MCC touring team play South Africa, in the fourth test of a five match series, he returned home with some of the match recorded for all time by his faithful Kodak Brownie.

History records that the fourth test was particularly exciting as five-day tests go.

South Africa won it by 17 runs thanks to Hugh Tayfield who bowled all day on the final day, and took nine wickets. Nine wickets! The tenth wicket was taken, caught by Tayfield, off Trevor Goddard’s bowling. Amazing stuff!

Dave’s record of the match might go down in cinematic history as the world’s most boring, boring, mind-blowingly boring home movie EVER! It showed repetitive shots of tiny little white-clad unidentifiable figures running around in a field of green. The telescopic lens was incapable of picking up the ball, so the figures looked like they were chasing… nothing. Then they’d do it again. And again. And again…

If ol’ Dave said it was Statham bowling to McLean, or Niel Adcock bowling to Colin Cowdrey we had to take his word for it. Besides, at the best of times Dave didn’t take kindly to contradiction, let alone from his children. It would have been a brave man (and an idiot child) who’d have said, “Hold on, Dave, isn’t that Peter May batting?”

That was just the cricket, but generally he filmed the family, on holiday, at the school gala and sports day, up Table Mountain, weddings, in the game reserve, quite often eating padkos on the side of the road, and other sundry family affairs and gatherings.

Now in them days, my child, after Dave had finished filming a reel of film, he had to send the reel to Jo’burg to be processed. There was no instant feedback like on modern recorders, no editing possible nor the ability to delete a shot and re-record.

Nope, about a month later we’d get the developed film back and then it was time for… wait for it… *H*O*M*E M*O*V*I*E*S*.

This was a special occasion; there was no cinema in our dorp; this was our cinema. Indeed, this was our entertainment. Back then there was no television and there was no FM radio, just shortwave radio which was prone to interference from thunderstorm static, however remote the thunderstorm.

Anyway, Dave bought a Eumig P8 projector (made in Austria, I see) and even invested in a small roll-up-roll-down screen upon which, over time, errant moths got squashed if you (and the moths) weren’t careful when rolling it up. It turned the Silver Screen into a Silver Screen with brown moth blotches.

So on the night, us kids in our jarmies, the adults with their chairs turned round, the dogs curled up and positioned where they’d get under Dave’s feet in the dark, and one child poised by the door to turn out the lights, with a click of a switch on the projector our past lives would come to life again on the Silver Screen. Briefly, we were movie stars!

Yep, home movies. Right up to the late 1970s and the introduction of television, movies were what entertainment was. When I worked in Eshowe at Adams, the big departmental store, we used to rent out projectors and movies.

And then someone invented videos, which changed things forever, home movies included, and a few years later DVDs, and the old projectors (and there must have been thousands of them) became relics of the past, museum pieces if not scrap metal.

I dug Dave’s old projector out last week. It had been sitting unused in the bottom of a cupboard for years and years. It made me remember home movie nights – the flicker of the picture and the ticka-ticka of the projector, and the family moving like Charlie Chaplain on the moth-blotched Silver Screen, and ol’ Dave stumbling over the dog in the dark.