20.7.09

Debbie Family History - A Nostalgic Requiem

debbie family history from Kyle Anderson on Vimeo.



Squared and I were lost and strayed into random back alleys until we came upon a pile of discarded VHS tapes and old SNES games. We took as many as we could carry, found our way home and later in the year, would drink and watch whatever we popped in.

One video, "Debbie Family History" was especially intriguing but only when the gears started turning did we realize what we discovered.

8mm home videos, mutely filmed decades ago, memories transferred from negatives to positive to VHS to digital, dissolved a hundred times over until the spaces where the light hit the film barely remains.

This lone tape, now sitting on a bookshelf in my room, is possibly the only remnant of these things that happened.

So we had the brilliant idea of melding the six-hour video together with music and some of my words. We tried to keep the nostalgia as intact as possible.

The writing was inspired by an even older VHS tape I once watched as a kid. The BFG, a cartoon adaption of the Roald Dahl classic that terrified me but left poignant imagery in my head for years.
The story goes, a giant lives in a cave in the sky and captures floating dream things in jars and releases them into little kids minds. I took that concept and reversed it, an unknown being that takes memories and dreams that are no longer being used. As discarded as the cassette we found.

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