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calsfoundation@cals.org
calsfoundation@cals.org
Home Movie Day 2024 Will Reel You In
The CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies and the UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture are partnering to celebrate Home Movie Day 2024–this weekend!
Get ready to relive cherished memories and celebrate the art of home movies on Saturday, October 19, from 1-4 PM at CALS Roberts Library on the third floor.
The afternoon will be dedicated to preserving and sharing home movie history. Bring your home movies for inspection and play back on original equipment and explore the CALS DIY Memory Lab. Don’t have any home movies to share? No worries—enjoy clips from our diverse collection with complimentary popcorn and drinks.
Home movies don’t just hold personal memories; they are important historical artifacts. They can capture changing facets of culture and society and document important historical moments. Perhaps a building in the background doesn’t exist anymore, or your family witnessed a historic event in their community.
In home movies, even ordinary events—a birthday party, kids playing in the yard, Christmas morning—can become extraordinary windows into the past.
We invite you to bring your own cherished home movies, so our skilled archivists can inspect them. We will have equipment available to view 8mm and 16mm films, Betacam tapes, VHS tapes, and MiniDV tapes. Attendees will also receive resources to help them identify and preserve their historical home movie media.
Archival staff and staff from the CALS DIY Memory Lab will be on hand to assist participants in recognizing different formats. We’ll provide informative materials outlining best practices for preserving different types of media, including tips on proper storage conditions and handling techniques.
We will also discuss the importance of digitizing formats for long-term preservation.
By empowering attendees with this knowledge, we hope to encourage a greater appreciation for their personal histories and encourage ongoing preservation efforts, ensuring that these unique stories can be enjoyed for generations to come. This event will not only highlight the importance of preserving home movies, but will also foster a sense of community and shared experience.
In addition to bringing your own movies, you can view a curated selection of notable clips from both the UA Little Rock and CALS Butler Center collections that showcase our local history and historical family moments from the 1910s to the 1990s.
Highlights include childhood animal encounters at the Little Rock Zoo and the zoo’s construction by the New Deal–era Works Progress Administration; Governor Winthrop Rockefeller’s honeymoon beach trip; and scenes of downtown Little Rock’s historic architecture. Adventure awaits with footage of a trip to Devil’s Den, highlighting the work of the CCC in the park, while footage of family gatherings throughout the years will warm the heart.
Rounding out the screening are vibrant performances from folk musicians at a meeting of the National Lum and Abner Society, and contestants in an early iteration of the Miss Gay Arkansas pageant, celebrating the diverse cultural heritage of our region. Each clip offers a unique glimpse into the past, inviting viewers to connect with the stories and experiences that shape our community.
We hope that you will bring your home movies in any format or join us just to view the clip reel at UA Little Rock Downtown for Home Movie Day 2024.
By Danielle Afsordeh, community outreach archivist at the CALS Butler Center for Arkansas Studies/Roberts Library
