On the season finale episode of Ephemeral, host Alex Williams invites his wife, Victoria, and Ephemeral producer Matt Frederick, to talk about some of the most nostalgic ephemera of all: home movies. From Dictabelts to cassette tapes to VHS tapes to iPhone videos, the small moments we find worthy of documenting preserve a lot of things worth remembering: the sound of a loved one’s voice, tiny differences in nomenclature (granny and papa, memaw and pepaw, grandma and papu are just some of the names we hear throughout the episode, for example), and other little hints of the past that otherwise would fade from memory.
Victoria, a filmmaker, says her grandfather was the historian of the family, followed by her mother, and now it’s her. For Matt, it’s the same: his grandfather recorded all the time, telling Matt it would be his job in the future. “Certainly that motivation was placed on me a lot and I think I took it to heart,” Matt says. “Papa always would call me his one and only...because I was his only grandson...I feel that now, heavily.” Victoria’s inheritance was less direct: “When he was [in a convalescent home], he said...to either me or my mother, ‘Keep shooting the video.’ I didn't realize that was a mantra of his, but my mother says it all the time and so it's a mantra of mine now, too, to document.”
The equipment, the tapes themselves, play a large part in the nostalgia, too, as Matt illustrates. “You hit the eject button on your cassette player, you slide that cassette in...you close it, you hit that play button, and then this voice comes through of someone that you love. That's a magical thing.” Alex agrees, saying, “It kind of connects you more with the past.” On the other hand, Victoria points out that thanks to smartphones, cameras aren’t as expensive to have. “I think it's amazing that cost doesn't weigh into whether someone can be the documentarian in their family now.”
But, Alex wonders, can the documentarian really be in the moment they’re trying to record? “I’ve got my phone out and I’m recording something and I wish I was just interacting with this moment and living in it, but I turn my phone off, then I’m worried that I’m missing it.” Matt also has doubts, saying, “I want to be there with those people in those moments, but at the same time, if we don’t record it in any way, then it is gone and those two ideas exist always together at the same time.” Victoria, with her treasure trove of childhood memories saved on VHS tapes, is more confident: “I guess it is a delicate balance of when to record and when to quote-unquote ’be in the moment,’ but I don’t think that those two things are mutually exclusive,” she says. “You’re in the moment and you’re recognizing that it’s a very special time and you want to preserve it.”
Perhaps Matt’s grandfather, in one of those home recordings, said it best: “The sounds you are hearing now are the ones that were precious then, and are still precious now.”
Tune into this episode and binge the rest to reflect on the history and value of ephemera like telephone switchboards, reel-to-reel tapes, sketchbooks and crossword puzzles, the beauty of silence, and more in this season of Ephemeral.
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