Aspects of the Wind

Lost Masterpieces Dept.: Forty years ago, as a high-school senior, I participated in a film-study class project to make a movie. These were the days before camcorders, never mind cell phones, so most of the kids were shooting in Super 8. Thanks to my friend Harry Minot, I had access to a 16mm Bolex camera. We also used Harry's house, where I was living at the time (my family had moved to the Chicago suburbs). I believe we gave exchange student Roger Graham five bucks to use the title of a story he'd written for a class assignment, and used nothing of the plot -- except for the type of wind the aspects of which we were examining.

The movie was shot on Double-X negative stock, because someone, probably Harry, had a bunch of it. I edited the film directly on that stock, damaging frames and sprocket holes, and that's how it sat until the early 1980s, when I paid to have it transferred to VHS with the polarity reversed to create a positive image. We shot it wild, but I was able to crudely sync the few spoken sections. With a 40th-anniversary high-school reunion looming, I digitized the VHS version and created new title cards. My filmmaking career may well have peaked at age 17 . . .