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SATURDAY

What are the cave paintings at Lascaux but the first home movies? Likewise, the portrait artists of the Renaissance royal courts were just attempting to freeze moments in time. The matter of capturing our own images and boring our friends with them is a long-standing tradition, but it wasn’t until mass-marketed Kodak cameras came on the scene that the home movie actually moved—or at least had the 24-frames-per-second optical illusion of movement. Thus, humans rushed to save every holiday, vacation, birthday, and backyard barbecue in celluloid form. (It was through an 8 mm home movie camera that young Stevie Spielberg caught the filmmaking bug, after all.) And now practically every computer arrives with home-movie-editing software, so this narcissistic trend is not going away—in fact, it’s being celebrated. Amy Gallick and Linda Shah, members of the Small Gauge and Amateur Film Interest Group of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, have organized the Washington incarnation of Home Movie Day. The regionally organized fest is a grass-roots, international “show-up, bring-your-films, watch-them, get-advice-on-how-to-store-them/where-to-transfer-them event,” says Gallick. Film is the preferred medium, but if—like the Nuttycombes’—your originals were tossed (thanks, Dad!), bring the videotapes. Michael Dolan, author of The American Porch and researcher into private cinema (he found family footage of Sigmund Freud at home—imagine!), will discuss what it all means. As these frame grabs from the Nuttycombe Archives (pictured) attest, the one constant in home movies is the wave. Wave to the camera, wave to Daddy, wave to the nice lady. Everybody wave at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 16, at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, 545 7th St. SE. Free. (202) 527-5650. (Dave Nuttycombe)