The search for home movies from the 50s and 60s shot on 35mm

Owen A. Davies · December 7, 2025

I’ve been collecting a lot of old Kodachrome slides from the 1950s and 1960s the past two months. Recently, I managed to get my hands on a couple of old 400ft reels of various home movies of events such as vacations, events, parades, sports games, races, weddings, parties, etc--things of that nature, shot on Kodachrome. It got me thinking: how many people back then shot home movies on 35mm motion picture film? Obviously, I am not insinuating that anyone would have had a giant, 1,000ft mag, 90lb, blimped Mitchell camera ready in their backyard to shoot Dale’s high school graduation party. However, small, light, little MOS cams like the Arriflex 35 IIB were widely available at the time.

I imagine Kodachrome was by far the most commonly used consumer film stock in that era, so I suppose most of any home movies would've been shot using it. Unless I have my facts crossed (feel free to correct me if I do), I believe Kodak briefly sold canisters of 35mm Kodachrome intended for motion picture use in the 1940s. The stock was called Kodak 5267, and was introduced in 1942.

I know next to nothing about how the market for motion picture film worked back in the day. At the time, did Kodak also sell the 35mm variants of their color negative motion picture films—such as Kodak 5250—to consumers via mail order like they do for their VISION3 stocks today? To be direct, if old home movie reels on 35mm such as these do exist, they’re something I would definitely be extremely motivated to get my hands on. Let me know if anyone has any leads.

Edited December 7, 2025 by Owen A. Davies
Additional context

Simon Wyss · December 7, 2025

You can read up about Kodachrome on Wikipedia and other sites.

Home movies are as old as film cinematography. The pioneers all shot their environment, more or less. Le Prince turned the crank in Roundhay garden, the Lumière made repas de bébé, baby’s meal, and so on. Several attempts were undertaken by various equipment manufacturers to conquer everybody’s home, the Pathé brothers, Alexander Victor, Bell & Howell, and others. The first real hit was the Pathé-Baby system with 9.5-mm. film in 1922-23. Eastman-Kodak brought 16-mm. film in 1923 and Double-Eight film in 1932.

35 mm was by then long established as the commercial cinema standard. Only few people made private pictures on 35. That hasn’t changed until today. The short 35-mm. Kodachrome movie experiment has never been resumed again.

Daniel D. Teoli Jr. · December 7, 2025

9 hours ago, Owen A. Davies said:

I’ve been collecting a lot of old Kodachrome slides from the 1950s and 1960s the past two months. Recently, I managed to get my hands on a couple of old 400ft reels of various home movies of events such as vacations, events, parades, sports games, races, weddings, parties, etc--things of that nature, shot on Kodachrome. It got me thinking: how many people back then shot home movies on 35mm motion picture film? Obviously, I am not insinuating that anyone would have had a giant, 1,000ft mag, 90lb, blimped Mitchell camera ready in their backyard to shoot Dale’s high school graduation party. However, small, light, little MOS cams like the Arriflex 35 IIB were widely available at the time.

I imagine Kodachrome was by far the most commonly used consumer film stock in that era, so I suppose most of any home movies would've been shot using it. Unless I have my facts crossed (feel free to correct me if I do), I believe Kodak briefly sold canisters of 35mm Kodachrome intended for motion picture use in the 1940s. The stock was called Kodak 5267, and was introduced in 1942.

I know next to nothing about how the market for motion picture film worked back in the day. At the time, did Kodak also sell the 35mm variants of their color negative motion picture films—such as Kodak 5250—to consumers via mail order like they do for their VISION3 stocks today? To be direct, if old home movie reels on 35mm such as these do exist, they’re something I would definitely be extremely motivated to get my hands on. Let me know if anyone has any leads.

I've been a film archivist for a decade or so. A big part of my cine' film archive are home movies. About 98% of my films comes from eBay. I've seldom seen any home movies shot on 35mm.

But...

I did pick up a 35mm home movie clip shot in Ireland, so they do / may exist. And I say may, because we don't know the history of the Ireland footage. It may be B roll material and not a home movie.

The seller had a bunch of 35mm home movie clips from Ireland, but they were too much $ for me to speculate on because they may never get scanned. But I threw some $ at one to take a chance.

I work mainly in 16mm and a small amount of 8mm. I speculated that maybe someone with a 35mm scanner would be interested in taking a look at the content and sharing the output. But I got no takers.

Commercial scanning companies are interested in $. And that comes under the auspices of no $ = no work. I'm the opposite. I won't do work for $, but I will do the work for free. But only if the material is interesting to me.

They have a member here that shot some home movies in 35mm. Name escapes me, but he is the guy with all the hair.

A quick search on eBay for 35mm home movies...

35mm Home Movies for sale | eBay

Edited December 7, 2025 by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.

Geffen Avraham · December 8, 2025

If anyone has a high-quality scan of 35mm Kodachrome, I am very curious to see it.

Daniel D. Teoli Jr. · January 1

This thread made me wonder about 35mm home movies. I had an eBay search posted for December up until January.1.2026. For that time period no 35mm home movies ever came up for sale. They must not have been very common. Something may come up eventually, but I took the search down. Every day unrelated 35mm film comes up and don't need to keep wasting time on it. My interest is just academic. 35mm is for the big boys. You need space and $ for 35mm!

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