Thousands will line up this week with their tickets in hand for the Traverse City Film Festival. But a few miles to the south, the Traverse City Filmstrip Festival at East Bay Branch Library will celebrate a less glamorous medium.
Before YouTube and before videotapes, school kids saw a lot of filmstrips, like the one Rosie Flickinger shows. It’s a story told and sung by the late Pete Seeger.
She clicks the filmstrip ahead every time she hears the beep on the audio cassette.
Flickinger, a librarian, started the so-called filmstrip festival 10 years ago, when the Traverse City Film Festival was young. The event is really just a couple showings of filmstrips.
“I like it because it just brings you down back to when you were a kid and it kind of slows you down a little bit,” Flickinger says.
The event is for kids, but adults often attend out of a sense of nostalgia. She’ll even have adult-only showings from time to time of filmstrips that might not be appropriate for kids these days.
“The depiction of smoking and drinking and abusing children or animals or things that might have been standard in folk tales of even 50 years ago, or even 25 years ago,” she says. “Our perception of what’s appropriate for children has really changed. You know, I don’t want to sanitize every single thing. I’m a big fan of the Brothers Grimm, but you have to be sensitive to what your audience wants, too.”
It’s a low-tech medium, for sure. But Flickinger often ends a children’s story time session with a filmstrip.
Flickinger says filmstrips started to disappear around the mid-1980s, when videotapes were popular. That makes the strips, the projectors, and even the screens hard to get these days.
“I love my screen,” she says. “And over the years I’ve used five or six of them because they rip and tear, but they’re getting harder to find too, because they don’t make them anymore.”
Flickinger has been contacted by people all over the country looking for old titles. But they’re not easy to find and there doesn’t seem to be much of an effort to save them.
There is the Filmstrip Preservation Project in Utah. It’s the effort of B.C. Sterrett.
“Filmstrips are interesting to me because they’re really another form of time capsule,” says Sterrett. “You get to see how things were once taught and what people once believed.”
Still, Rosie Flickinger says she’ll do what she can to keep this medium alive.
“As long as I’m still here and I can find the bulbs for my machines, I will continue to show filmstrip stories,” she says. “It really does kind of slow you down and take you back to a simpler time.”
Flickinger will show filmstrips at 1:30 on Saturday. Both showings are at the East Bay Branch Library.