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Let's get reel and preserve those precious home movies.

By KIM BAER

Date published: 8/8/2006

PERHAPS you have old movie reels piled up in your basement.

Perhaps beautiful images of beloved relatives lurk on those reels, along with scratchy renderings of your childhood home. Maybe there's even grainy circa 1974 film of your goofy, plaid-bell-bottomed brother opening Christmas presents and making faces.

You don't know because you've never seen them. Shame on you.

Bring those reels to a workshop Saturday at the Germanna Center for Advanced Technology in Culpeper County and find out what's on that film. Maybe you'll laugh, maybe you'll cry. Don't you owe it to yourself to find out?

Film archivists from the Library of Congress will inspect, repair and talk about home movies, particularly those shot on film.

The inspection will take place from noon to 3 p.m, said Liz Stanley, a film archivist with the national library. Volunteers will check for film damage and make repairs with splicing tape if necessary, she said.

People can then watch their movies from 6 to 9 p.m. on big screens. They'll have projectors for 8 mm, Super 8 mm and 16 mm films, Stanley said.

A national Library of Congress Audio-Visual Conservation Center is scheduled to open in Culpeper in the spring. The center will house the library's entire motion-picture and sound-recording collection.

The center also will have preservation laboratories where deteriorating old films and recordings will be restored.

The workshop is part of a month-long series the college is holding with the library. Other topics include how to watch movies and preserving family treasures.

The workshops are part of the library's effort to reach out to the community, said Kathy Habel, the college's dean of workforce and community education.

"They are very interested in the community of Culpeper and the region, making sure they are a good professional neighbor," she said.

The Culpeper workshop takes place on International Home Movie Day, which was started in 2002. This year, cities across the country and in Canada, England, Japan and Italy will host events.

The heyday of these films was from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. Most people no longer have projectors for these films. In many cases, attendees at home movie days haven't seen their films in years, if ever, Stanley said.

What: Home Movie Day When: Saturday Where: Germanna Center for Advanced Technology in Culpeper Time: Inspection, noon to 3 p.m. Movie viewing, 6 to 9 p.m. Cost: Free Contact: Liz Stanley at 540/825-3731 or Lynanne Schwieghofer at 540/825-3630

Date published: 8/8/2006