I gave a bit of background to these cine films from the 1960s in an earlier post. Quite a lot of my earlier life was documented on film and my parents made quite a few short films as well. Usually funny, sometimes dramatic, but always short, snappily edited and interesting. The whirr of the cine camera is a strong childhood memory, as is the sight of my parents holding the developed reels up to the light to find edit points, cutting the footage ruthlessly and using a small contraption and sticky tape to stitch the edited film together.

I put a couple of these on YouTube a few years ago but over the past few weeks and this morning, I retitled them and freshened up the music. The films above all give a flavour of what my parents got up to when they weren’t working, and what I got dragged in to from an early age. ‘Dragged in to’ sounds as if it was a chore. Of course it wasn’t any such thing. In ‘Hats, How Are Ye?’ I was obviously too young to know what was going on. In most of the others (yet to be posted) I was a willing participant. I quite liked getting dressed up, acting in front of a camera and being part of a family project. Sure, what else would I be doing on a Sunday afternoon?

 

 

 

I didn’t really enjoy the this next one, to be honest. Someone had told me that being in a forest during a thunderstorm was dangerous. And, hey, guess what: part of ‘They Were Chaste’ was shot in Killiney Hill Wood during a thunderstorm. So, the scene of me (yes, that’s me in a wig, wearing a dress) crying, was me actually crying, in a state of terror. My mum, as a drama teacher, was always on the look out for conviction and authenticity in acting. So, she found it impossible to resist including that scene in the finished product.