I Am an Amateur Moving Image Archivist

I am a ninety-year-old amateur moving image archivist. All my life, I have had two irresistible impulses—to record and to preserve moving images of life around me—not for money, just for fun. I am a relatively new member of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), but it has opened up to me a whole new world of fellowship with professional film preservationists from all over the country and, indeed, the world.

I have always been a movie buff. My earliest film hero was the swashbuckling adventurer Douglas Fairbanks Sr., with his 1920s silent versions of epic stories like The Three Musketeers (1921), Robin Hood (1922), The Thief of Bagdad (1924), and The Black Pirate (1926). In the 1930s, at the start of my teen years, Tarzan took over as my favorite movie hero, as embodied by Johnny Weissmuller in the series of feature films produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, including Tarzan the Apeman (1932), Tarzan and His Mate (1934), and Tarzan Escapes (1936). My two younger brothers and I would play Tarzan games in the park across the street from our Hartford, Connecticut, home.

At about this same time, I developed a great interest in home movies. My parents got me a small, hand-cranked 16mm Kodascope film projector, and I would buy short reels of cartoons and silent comedies and charge neighborhood kids five cents to come and watch them projected on a sheet hung on our basement wall. Then I acquired an early Eastman 16mm boxed movie camera and started taking family movies on my own. I always tried to make them interesting, with little stories or incidents and humorous tricks involving the whole family. And I didn’t want simply to expose the film, look at it a couple times, and then throw it out; I wanted to preserve these visual, moving records of little pieces of our lives so that they could be recalled and reenjoyed in future years. I got a small editing machine or splicing block, with brush-applied film cement, which I used to sort out the various film scenes and piece them together in suitable sequences, generally with very little leftover film to be thrown away.

This all came together in 1936, when I produced my first, major, home-made movie epic, Tarzan and the Rocky Gorge.¹ While visiting some family friends who had a cottage in the woods in the small, rural town of Granby, Connecticut, northwest of Hartford, we came across a tall natural gorge, with rocky sides at least fifty feet high and a small stream running along the bottom with several deep pools. “What a great setting for a Tarzan movie!” we all exclaimed.

So we three brothers got together to dream up an original story. At the age of sixteen, I was the oldest and tallest, so naturally, I would be Tarzan. We decided on the simple plot framework of having a young adventurer go to Africa to see Tarzan in person. We named this eminent African explorer Paulus Rufus Barstinio, a variation of Paul Rogers Barstow, age ten, the youngest of us three brothers. Of course, we needed some kind of a villain, to provide suspense and excitement. Our middle brother, John, age fourteen, took quite seriously the fun challenge of playing the treacherous Mahahatmi Slinkaround, who would try to thwart Paulus’s jungle quest. To balance us three male characters, we persuaded three neighborhood girls to go with us on our filmmaking excursion as members of Paulus’s safari. I bought several hundred-foot reels of 16mm black-and-white film and loaded the camera, and we all set out to spend an entire day of creative filmmaking at the rocky gorge location.

We had plotted out ahead of time the general story line, but we had no script. We made things up as we went along, depending on the varied opportunities the natural setting provided. I had to get one of the other participants to take the scenes in which I appeared as Tarzan. But everybody was highly cooperative, and it was a very fun experience for all...