Shot List

When you live in the old house on Staten Island that has been in your family for seventy-five years, you inevitably inherit some ghosts. Sometimes they’re shadows, sometimes sounds. And sometimes they turn up in the form of brittle Super 8 celluloid.

When the pandemic hit and I, like most people, had time on my hands, I took a stab at organizing an accumulation of family artifacts, most of which had been collecting dust for decades in the unfinished cellar. Amid all that clutter – between the license plates from the 1960s and the pilfered street signs from who knows when or where – I found a small laminated box labeled “MOVIE ALBUM.” Inside there were more than a dozen reels of Super 8 film that I shot when I was in high school. I had almost forgotten about them. My vintage movie projector disappeared long ago but I had noticed some ads online for digitizing old home movies and thought, what the hell? So I sent them in, sight unseen.

When I got the files back, I was looking forward to a magical memory tour of my adolescent past. Instead, my initial reaction was deep disappointment in 1970s filmmaking me. The footage amounted to about 45 minutes comprised largely of dull panning shots – very fast, usually shaky panning – mostly of trees and sky and open water. Apparently, I was an aspiring nature cinematographer, which I don’t remember at all. Still, there were a few moments that evoked something more.

First up were the scenes from a class trip with some of my fellow nerds from Monsignor Farrell High School, the all boys’ Catholic institution where I was (as far as I was concerned) incarcerated for four years. In the film, you can see us trudging from a school bus onto Floyd Bennet Field in Brooklyn, near Jamaica Bay, which was a naval air base back then. In fact, my older brother served in the Navy and was stationed there in the early 1970s – luckily for him, since the war in Vietnam was still very much a going concern.

It must be 1972 or so, the war is raging, and there we are goofing around next to jets on the tarmac like idiots, which makes sense because we were idiots. At one point, mid-pan, you can catch a glimpse of Father Cassiero, the priest who must have picked the short straw and got to be our chaperone that day, hanging back and looking slightly embarrassed. He was actually a kind and intelligent man, which is not something I would say about most of the ham-handed Christian Brothers and dodgy priests on the Farrell faculty of that era.

There was also a short film I made for one of my religion classes at school. We had to take these classes every semester along with regular academic subjects, but I have to say they were more sophisticated than the rote catechism I had been force-fed in elementary school. The pinnacle was probably a course in thanatology – the study of death – taught by a robust, opera-loving, fifty-something, Italian-American priest who promptly died of a heart attack a few weeks after the course ended. This seemed above and beyond the call of pedagogical duty.

In any case, the film I made was pretentiously entitled “Pyramid (and other conclusions)” and starred my only real friend at the time, a boy named Jack. I had to talk Jack into participating in this epic, shot on location in a patch of woods that later gave way to tract housing in our Rosebank neighborhood, not far from the bridge to Brooklyn. As I recall, he agreed on the condition that his face would not appear onscreen. That was fine with me; I thought it added to the movie’s artsy appeal. Jack’s character wanders around the woods until he finds a small white pyramid that I cobbled together out of cardboard and tape. He throws it away and stiffly walks around some more. By means of a choppy montage, he contemplates some other vaguely pyramid-shaped objects (pine trees, a church steeple, for some reason a Saturn V moon rocket, etc.), then realizes the error of his ways and comes back to retrieve the cardboard one. Very deep. Lots of panning and trees.

Next came some shots of my family. Not many, though. I suppose I didn’t like them much at the time. In one scene, my sister Maureen is jumping up and down in our above-ground backyard pool and holding my nephew, Chris, who is naked. He’s about three years old in the film. He turned fifty-three in February of this year, having now lived longer than his mother, my sister-in-law, who died at fifty when Chris was still a very young man. In the film, she looks on from a picnic bench with the bemused smile that was a signature expression of hers. Tempus fugit.

On another reel, there were some rapid-fire, disjointed shots of my mom looking disheveled and annoyed, which was unusual for her. I mean, the disheveled part. She got annoyed frequently. In this sequence, she’s wearing a housedress and her hair is a mess as she walks from the backyard to the side door of the house. It’s just a random moment, which makes it joltingly real. She lived in the house until 2014, when she died at the age of 103. After the glimpse of mom, not at her best, the film shifts to a pastiche that includes some crude animation and other quick cuts. I suspect that it was a matter of finishing off the reel so I could bring it to Korvette’s, the department store, for processing.

But probably the biggest payoff for my pandemic investment in the miracle of digitization came from one of the last video files I watched. It is footage of my father from a trip we took to visit his brother in California around 1974 – memorably, the first time we ever took a plane anywhere. In one brief shot, dad is pulling our slick rental car out of a parking spot. I think it’s an Oldsmobile Cutlass. Then does a drive-by for the camera, flashing a smile.

What’s great about these few seconds, for me, is that my father loved driving so much. It may have been his favorite thing in the world. He wasn’t the most emotionally available fellow and his politics were antediluvian and often angry, but put him behind the wheel of a car and he was a happy man. In the parking shot, you can see it at the end, when he smiles at the camera/me. In this sense, it is kind of a perfectly typical George Ledwith moment, but in another way, it’s a unique one.

Because my mother lived such a long time, she was around for the era of video camcorders and camera phones. But my father died at sixty-seven, in 1981, so we didn’t have any of those things when he was alive. Of course, I have plenty of family snapshots of him, but as far as I know, those fleeting flashes of light caught on Super 8 film in a California parking lot are the only moving pictures of my dad that exist. And for that reason, they move me.

Drive on, dad, you’re looking sharp.