A Typical Home Movie from the 1960s

This post features a standard 8mm film from the early 1960s which shows a typical home movie covering several different subjects.

With 8mm film being so expensive this was a typical way a reel of film would be used by an amateur cinematographer – several small clips of things which happened as they had their camera with them. Although many serious amateur photographers would make a film which covered one subject and try to tell a story, others would use the film in the way shown here to remind themselves of a holiday or a series of events and cover them all on a single film.

Typical home movie film

There are certainly a number of different events in this film:

• A man walking towards the camera with a large engine in the background behind him.
• A military band playing and marching up the street towards the photographer. In my detective work to locate where this film could have been taken I tried to read the street signs in this sequence but couldn’t make any of them out unfortunately
• A sequence showing a steam powered engine, with smoke billowing from it’s chimney, towing a van or lorry which I assume has broken down.
• A yellow and black horse drawn carriage being driven along the road.
• A paddle driven boat on a river somewhere.
• The horse drawn carriage again, but this time with lots of people sitting on it.
• A longer sequence on the river – I wondered if the building shown could be the theatre at Stratford on Avon, but I’m not certain.
• A man opening a bottle of beer and sitting by the side of the road for a picnic
• And finally a sheep being fed chips from a car door on a mountainside

That is certainly a long list of different events in the course of a 2 1/2 minute film, but as I said above it was a typical home movie senario for many photographers in the 1960s.