A Weird Avant-garde 8mm home movie from the 1960s

This post features a rather weird 8 mm home movie, which seems to have been filmed in a very 1960s, Avant-garde fashion. I don’t know if this was someone experimenting with the camera or if they were really trying their hand at ‘experimental cinema’.

About this film

I actually digitized this film about a year ago and put it into a folder of ‘films for consideration’ and it’s stayed there from that day. I had intended to keep publishing films on a regular basis, but unfortunately life got in the way and it’s not been possible to keep the site updated.¹

A few days ago I thought again about trying to get some new content on Vintage Home Movies, and looked through the folder to see if there were any films and re-discovered this one.

The film is shot on standard 8mm Kodachrome film and doesn’t seem to have any physical edits – all the changes of scene were carried out, ‘in camera’.

Some images from the Avant-garde movie

The small sample of images in the gallery below give an indication of the content of the film.

Avant-garde film from the 1960s

The film is shown below – it consists of about 2 dozen different scenes which are mostly of views of flowers but start and end with a sequence showing a record player dropping a 45 rpm disk onto the platter and playing it. I wonder if the projectionist played that record when they showed the film to their audience? If I could have seen what the record was, I could possibly have added the music as a sound track!

If you have any ideas about the story the photographer was trying to tell, please let me know in the comments form – I’d love to get some different perspectives on it.

1. In the intervening months we have had an extension built on the house, completed a garden landscaping project and are now in the middle of a garage conversion so the vintage photography sites I run have had to take a back seat. [↩]