Filming Half a Century of Club Memories on Video

Two cameras, three soft lights and fifty people who helped build Assamese cinema from the ground up. That, in practical terms, is the project we finished this winter at Gauhati Cine Club. We sat down with fifty longtime members, many of whom joined in the 1960s and 1970s, and recorded their reflections on film. The result is a growing video archive that already feels like a living document of how a cultural club in Guwahati survived six decades.

The idea had been floating around for years. Anyone who has spent time in our archive room at Panbazar knows that paper records, photographs and reel-to-reel tapes can only carry so much of a story. So we approached the membership list, asked who wanted to talk, and began a slow, deliberate process of preservation. What we learned along the way applies well beyond our region, and we hope it offers a useful template for other volunteer-run clubs in Australia, India and elsewhere.

Why We Chose Video Over Audio Alone

Audio is cheaper and easier to store, but we quickly realised that faces were doing much of the storytelling. One member, now in his eighties, kept reaching into a worn leather bag to pull out old membership cards while he described the early screening nights. Another laughed so hard at her own memory of a 1971 fundraiser that her hands moved in wide arcs for a full paragraph. None of that survives in a waveform.

We also filmed the surroundings on purpose. Readers of the project are encouraged to picture the green baize table in our reading room, the cracked plaster of the original 1962 hall and the row of framed posters from regional premieres. By keeping the camera rolling between questions, we captured ambient sounds that even a careful listener might miss, like the whirr of a pedestal fan, the creak of a wooden chair, a passing scooter outside on the MG Road. Visual texture, in our experience, makes an oral history feel less like an interview and more like a visit.

Preparing the Questions Without Leading the Witness

Before we set up a single tripod, we combed through club bulletins from 1962 onwards, read old minutes and noted every name mentioned in festival programmes. That homework shaped our questions. We did not want to fish for gossip or push any narrative. We wanted each member to remember on their own terms, then gently nudge them toward the parts of the archive we knew were thin.

For example, we knew very little about the club's 1970s film festivals in the Brahmaputra valley. A former secretary, after tea and a long pause, pulled a small notebook from his jacket and read aloud the guest list of a visiting Czech delegation. He had never thought to share it before, and we had never thought to ask. Preparation matters, but so does patience. We learned to let a silence run for several seconds before repeating the question in a softer tone, and we never rushed a story that was still unfolding.

The Equipment and the Room We Built for It

Our setup is intentionally portable. A pair of mirrorless cameras on small tripods, a clip-on lapel microphone for each speaker, a small LED panel for fill light and a portable digital recorder as backup. The total cost would be modest by Australian standards, comparable perhaps to the kit carried by a community broadcaster in Brisbane or a documentary student in Melbourne. We edited on open-source software and stored raw footage on two mirrored drives kept in separate buildings, a practice borrowed from archival projects at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra.

The room itself mattered more than the gear. We cleared out our archive store, hung a dark curtain to kill the glare from the window, and added a small table and two chairs. Members came in, sat where they had sat for committee meetings decades earlier, and seemed to settle quickly. A few asked whether we were working under any privacy law. We were, and we explained it in plain language before any recording began.

Consent, Privacy and Cultural Sensitivity

In Australia, oral history work is usually framed around the Privacy Act 1988 and the protocols published by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. We followed the spirit of those guidelines even though our project sits in a different cultural setting. Every participant signed a release form that clearly described how the footage could be used, who could see it and how long it would be kept. We offered the option to pause the camera at any time, to skip a question and to withdraw a clip after recording.

We also recorded in Assamese and Bengali, the two languages our oldest members use most comfortably, and we are now producing English subtitles for every interview. A handful of stories touched on politically sensitive periods, and we agreed in advance that any mention of an event still affecting a living person would be reviewed by the club's history committee before publication. Trust, we learned, is the actual infrastructure of an oral history project. The cameras and microphones are only the visible part.

The Trouble with Memory

Memory is generous but uneven. Two former treasurers gave us slightly different figures for the club's 1985 budget. One long-time projectionist remembered a particular screening as a Saturday afternoon, while a programme printed in our archive clearly said Sunday morning. We did not treat these moments as errors. Instead, we kept both versions on the record, and where possible we checked the club's printed bulletins to settle the factual side of the story.

We also found that the most valuable material often arrived in the first three minutes of small talk before the formal interview began. A comment about the weather, a complaint about the bus ride, a question about whether the camera was comfortable, these off-the-cuff lines helped us understand the person's state of mind, and they often revealed details the prepared questions would have missed. We began every session with a quiet cup of chai and a minute of unscripted conversation, which turned out to be the most productive minute of the day.

Where the Footage Will Live Next

The full archive will stay inside the club, but we are preparing shorter edited portraits that can be screened during membership drives and at travelling events. Our next idea, which we wrote about in this piece on a film trivia night for new members, is to weave clips into a relaxed evening where younger members can guess the era, the film and the person behind each story. The trivia format makes the archive social rather than scholarly, and we hope it will give the recordings a long second life.

A small selection will also be sent to regional museums and to the state archives in Dispur, with full consent from each speaker. In time, we would like to share the protocols and the release forms with sister organisations in Kolkata, Shillong and beyond, so that other volunteer clubs can adapt the model to their own communities.

If you have ever wished you could hear the voice behind a still image, or if you belong to a club that worries its history is slipping away one retirement at a time, our advice is simple. Pick the room, trust the members, press record and let the stories come. The footage you gather this year will outlast most of the equipment you used to record it, and the people who sit down in front of your camera will thank you for it before the tape stops rolling.