From the collection of
Established in 1992, the South West Film & Television Archive collection spans from 1893 to the present day containing more than 250,000 items. Formed from a variety of depositors, including broadcast news and programmes material from the Westward and TSW archive. In 2018 the archive collection transferred to The Box in Plymouth.
A whistlestop tour of Devon and Cornwall is filmed in this holiday home movie.
By the late 1950s joy has returned to the hearts of people and ordinary families are holidaying and making films. This enthusiast prefaces each location with titles (and a misspelt Devonport and Caerhays) and captures the essence of the whole holiday and the many locations visited including two boat trips, one to the Eddystone Lighthouse and the other off the coast of Mevagissey. This film also shows swimmers and surf riders at Perranporth with Crest surfboards.
This is before the days of steadycam technology or the realism of the Dogme 95 collective whose directors took an in among the action view of filmmaking using no tripods, props or effects. Interminable pans and wobbly shots are normal for the amateur on a handheld camera and acceptable to the private viewers reliving holiday moments months later in their living rooms. The colourful 16mm film stock is distinctly Kodachrome, popular from its launch in the 1930s until 1961 when Eastman Kodak introduced Kodachrome II film. Kodachrome, discontinued in 2010, was also the preferred film of National Geographic stills photographer Steve McCurry.
Home movies give us unique permission to step inside the lives of people who we've never met and never will.
Home movies are always acutely personal - in subject and perspective - and most were never intended for audiences beyond family and close friends. But even so, these private films share generously with the uninitiated stranger. Watching home movies transports us into other lives and other times, where the actions of people we never knew, in places we've never visited, resonate with our own memories. The home movies of the stars, the rich and the famous, the royals - see past the familiar faces and they're much like anyone's: intimate film portraits of loved people and places, colourful moving picture albums of experience and emotion. These simple point-and-shoot home movies seem to connect with the past in a profoundly authentic way - their images unfiltered by filmmaking technique and artifice.
