This week, some great shots of huge turtles, a snoozing alligator, Mt. Rushmore, and vistas of the Grand Canyon. All from our contributor Ashima, who adds this:

My mama had a hard time remembering the year, but she thinks it is 1977. I do clearly remembering waking up that alligator in my little brown suit. I didn’t want to get mud on it! We took this trip from Chicago to California and these were some stops along the way. I think the trading post at the end of the video is the Hubbell Trading Post, a national historic site. Honestly, I have no idea where the turtle and alligator were located. I asked my mama and she cannot remember either. BUT, doesn’t that guy look like Steve Irwin only skinnier? I doubt it was him…

The Hubbell Trading Post is the oldest operating trading post in the Navajo Nation of the U.S., located in Northeastern Arizona.

For high-resolution footage of this film and more, click the “MPEG-2″ link above to access the Internet Archive.

I love the way this film is shot – meandering, exploring, unafraid. This film offers attention to the interesting details of these scenes: kelp rolling on the surface of the water, kites and seagulls overhead, playful interactions with friends. It’s an unusual kind of home movie in which the filmmaker directly participates in the film’s making, rather than simply observing and documenting. I’m sure it made a difference that these films were shot by Janet in her teens and early 20s – there’s a youthful eye behind this camera.

–Jen

Find high-resolution extended versions of this film on the Internet Archive through our File Directory.

Music: “Baby That’s Me” by The Cake

As a teenager, I bought my own Kodak Super-8 camera, and between 1967 and 1975, I shot dozens of rolls of film. Most of the 60′s films feature the daily lives of my childhood friends, and are located primarily around the Boston, Cambridge, the South Shore, Cape Cod, and New Hampshire. The 70′s films include scenes from my misspent college years, including Worcester Massachusetts’ first-ever gay pride march. This one, however, is a pride march in New York City. I peg the year at 1974, although I am not 100% sure. Look for Kate Millett and Boston’s “Lavender Rhino” float, as well as early (founding?) members of what would become PFLAG. Note that in those days, we marched from downtown up to Central Park, instead of vice versa.

Download high-res versions of this film and more from the Internet Archive, available through our File Directory. Music: “Prowlin” by the Whitefield Brothers

This footage is from the Fort Worth Zoo back in 1979. There used to be ‘rides’ at the zoo, and some of my earliest memories are of spending time out there… I know I must have been taken there quite often….

… my mom had that camera and took lots of pictures back then.. she must have been about 21 years old during this video… the guy in the clip was her boyfriend of the time, “Ronnie.” That’s us at his house in the end… his sister and mom and little dog are there too… I remember them being really nice, and loving that little white dog a lot… they took me to the Shrine Circus too once, Ronnie’s whole family did…

… the sad thing about that video was my understanding of Ronnie. My mom and him split and went their separate ways not long after this video was taken. I remember always thinking that Ronnie was my biological father, and I had these vague memories from before and around age three… Even though I was so young, I remember feeling he was great to me, taking me to the duckpond with loaves of bread, buying me the Snoopy Snow-Cone Machine, letting me sit on the back of his motorcycle with his blue helmet on… I just remember being happy around him. Only when I was maybe 11 or 12 after he’d been gone for 8 years did someone tell me that Ronnie wasn’t my real dad after all…

This film and more from Joshua’s films are available as high-resolution download at the Internet Archive. See our File Directory for links from this entry and others.

And, for a beautiful, flattering review of Lost in Light from the French publication Télérama, with an especially nice discussion of the Carrier 1959 film, go here (in French).

This week’s post is one of my favorites on Lost in Light – behind the scenes footage of a Spaghetti Western in production in Spain, 1975. Gorgeous footage that takes us right inside the extravagant, but totally lo-fi, sets and action. California’s Diane Dobronte shares the story behind the film that goes behind the film:

It was 1975 and my boyfriend, Tony Anthony, had written, produced and was starring in an American-Italian co-production film called Get Mean – in the spaghetti western genre. Tony had already done several of these: The Stranger in Town, The Stranger Returns, Blindman (a fave of mine – with Tony as a blind cowboy with a seeing-eye horse – and Ringo Starr as a Mexican bandito) to name a few, and he had an international following but never really released in the US.

I had borrowed my dad’s camera so I could send family some film of what I was doing in Spain and Italy. This piece is filmed on location in Spain, where the Sergio Leone films had been done – extras were mostly Spanish, most of the other stars and crew were from Italy…. and post production was in Cinecitta Italy outside of Rome. You can see the big fan they were using to get the tumbleweed tumbling and the dust up……It was an exciting and romantic time and brings back some interesting memories.—diane dobronte, taos, nm. Sept 2007

Music: Justin Gordon, “High and Lonesome” and Al Foul, “Ever Been Hit by a Flying Saucer,” both courtesy the Podsafe Music Network.

For a high resolution version of the complete Spaghetti Western footage, visit our File Directory for a link to the mpeg at the Internet Archive.

The adventure takes place on the Rogue River in Southern Oregon in 1979. The fishing outfitter, River Trips Unlimited of Medford, Oregon, is still very much in business and celebrating 41 years of river tripping on the wild Rogue.

From California, contributor Diane Dobronte offers a little bit of the fish tale:

The trip was during the time that my dad, Dr. Frank Dobronte, was in private practice as a periodontist in Pleasanton, CA. There were 10 or so other dentists in his study group and they met once a month to study together and keep up to date on the latest information in dentistry – they went on fishing trips together every year or every six months plus other fun stuff with the wives. My dad was about 10 years older than all the other men and outlived them all but one….. He always thought they exercised too much….haha…his love was fishing and vodka…I do know they had a great time together.

Be sure to check out our File Directory for a link to the unedited, full resolution version of this film on the Internet Archive, which also includes footage from Washington, D.C., and a Mother’s Day celebration with the kids — all with glorious SOUND!

The full reel is available as a high quality download at the Internet Archive, and includes images of kids with horses, camping, climbing trees, a snowy winter, a young woman in a high school graduation robe, and other wonderful scenes of everyday life.

Music: “Colt” by Savage Kong

Family Movie is a short reconstruction of my parents’ super8 home movies from the 1970′s. I shot the reconstructions on video, at my parents’ home in Chicago and at the former Marco Polo Hotel on Miami Beach, where the original movies were recorded. My brother couldn’t join us in Miami, though he makes a cameo in the Chicago wrestling scene.

In the original footage, my parents alternate between the roles of filmmaker and subject (never appearing in the same shot but implicitly together in the construction of the scenes.) In my new footage, they are subjects, or “actors,” and now I am the one behind the camera. The split screen is the framework for this reversal: I am absent as a subject but present at the scene. When I first viewed the old movies, I felt depersonalized, disconnected from the image of myself as a toddler onscreen. And though I can recall that sensation I can no longer identify with it – I am now depersonalized from that depersonalization.

Most of my work on the project was spent in front of Final Cut Pro. The first task was to log the full two hours of original footage and organize the shots according to subject and location. (The idea for the project actually occurred to me in the course of this exercise.) On location, I experimented with different ways of reconstructing the scenes. While in Chicago, I kept the original footage on my laptop. My parents and I would study each shot at the kitchen table and then went through numerous takes of the reconstructions.

The real challenge was to get my parents’ gestures to work in concert with my camera movements. For the long panning shot at the Marco Polo Hotel, I had my handheld dv camera, and two dv tapes: one blank for the shot, and one with my dad’s original pans. Once I was able to identify his original position at the pool I memorized his fairly simple panning routine: left, up, left, down, right. Still, it required a lot more time in Final Cut to smooth it all out. And even then, the shots do not mirror one another exactly – it’s really not possible to reconstruct the past.

Elliott Malkin lives in New York City. His work can be seen at www.dziga.com