This wick of light
This white apple full of bites
A white apple full of what
Has slipped away from me
Full of flesh sweet as memory
--Blind Pilot, “White Apple”[1]
Between 1981 and 1983, the number of U.S. households owning a video camera shot from 6% to 28%, partly due to the release of the Sony Betamovie BMC-100, the first home video camcorder. By the time I was old enough to use a camera in the early 2000s, cameras were common and cheap,[2] and I had easy access to this mysterious technology that is both a privilege and a burden. Video technology is a privilege because it allows us to unhinge the door of time, to retrieve something almost forgotten, to relive moments bright and dark engraved forever within the circuits and shutters of a camera. But it is also a burden because in the end neither memory nor film can reverse change; they can only offer a momentary respite from it, and one wonders whether it wouldn’t be easier, less haunting, after all, to lack such precise record of the past. Film serves to ignite memory. These two powers—one technological, one mental—offer a tantalizing taste of manipulating time, undoing loss, preserving the present. But it is only a taste, a taste that leaves us struck and thirsting.
Due to the technological developments of the late 20th century, I had the ability to make many amateur movies with my friends growing up. This essay is for them, in part. When I watch clips of our old films and the related behind-the-scenes footage, those videos remind me that I did not appreciate what I had enough. The elusive present became the past, and I hardly noticed. I did not say thank you. I did not tell them all just how much they meant to me. Now it is too late, at least for some of them. Through the experiences of reliving the past in film and memory, I know better now the importance of appreciating each moment and each person in the present, before it’s too late.
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