?2012 Event Report City: Groningen
Event Venue: Groningen City and Province Archives (RHC Groninger Archieven),
Cascadeplein 4, 9726 AD, Groningen, the Netherlands
Event time (screening): Saturday October 13th 2012, 11 AM – 5 PM
Event time (inspection): same as above. Also, inspections are done throughout
the year at the archives.
Total Audience: HMD was part of a bigger event: the annual Groningen History Day, attended by approximately 3,000 visitors.
Number of people bringing films: 5
Films screened by Gauge:
8mm: – Super 8: – 16mm: – 9.5mm: – Video: 10
Volunteers:
Gert Plas (staff)
René Duursma (staff)
Marij Kloosterhof (staff)
Tjerk Bekius (volunteer)
Ferdie Wielstra (volunteer)
Henk Doeve (volunteer)
Sebastiaan Vos (staff)
Press (pre-event and post-event):
The information about the HMD appeared on websites and was broadcasted on two local radio shows. Also we had a commercial for local television stations.
Report submitted by Sebastiaan Vos
The Home Movie Day by the Groningen City and Province Archives was organized within the scope of the Amateur Film Platform project (www.amateurfilmplatform.nl). The aim of the project is to make a diverse and broad range of amateur films of four Dutch archives available online. Together with project lead The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and the two other regional archive partners, four HMDs were organized within the scope of the project. Unique about these four days was that the focus lay exclusively with video, since one of the main project goals is to save amateur recordings from the video era (+/- 1980-2005) before it is too late. The target of the project is to acquire 100 hours of new material.
The Groningen HMD (also covering the other two northern provinces of the Netherlands, namely Friesland and Drenthe) was a success. A lot of people showed up (mostly for the Groningen History Day, but still a great attendance) and many of them walked by in the reading room where we had our wall of screens on which we played the home videos that people brought with them, along with a compilation of home videos from our own collection.
The yield of videos wasn’t that big on the day: 10 tapes. However, a lot of tapes were sent after the event, after people had been stimulated to dig up videos from their personal archives. Watching some home movie footage of children playing etc, people that walked by during the day, reacted: “Well, if you’re looking for this kind of footage, I have tapes like these at home as well!” So there is a lot more stuff out there at home. And off course we know there is. The question is how to get these tapes into the archives. We’re glad to report that since the HMD, we have received approximately 200 videotapes (by several people), with amateur footage, with (hopefully) many more to come. We are working hard on getting the contributions we’ve gotten so far into our archives now
The day before the HMD I was in a radiobroadcast of the local radio station to which many people in Groningen tune in, to talk about the HMD.
In a couple of minutes four people made a telephone call to the radio, made clear what kind of videos they had and asked me, directly into the broadcast, if that is what we were looking for. Sure! For example, an older woman told that her late husband had filmed all the bridges in the city of Groningen around 25 years ago. The next day she came along and showed us the tape. Indeed, almost 50 local bridges came by, very interesting stuff. Not only because of the bridges themselves, but also because of the traffic and people passing by, buildings on the background etc. A magnificent time image altogether.
It’s hard to say how many people exactly have been at our placing and to how many we talked during the day. In any case, there were always at least some people around.
To summarize: For us this HMD has been a great starting point to collect amateur home movies for our audiovisual collection in the near future, and for the Amateur Film Platform Project as well.
See also the event reports of the other Home Movie Days of the Amateur Film Project:
• 14 October, Rotterdam, Stadsarchief
• 20 October, Amsterdam, Sound and Vision
• 27 October, Venlo, Limburgs Museum
Project URL: www.amateurfilmplatform.nl