The Scent of Celluloid: On Finding a Lost Year in a Databank

It was the ammonia that hit me first. That specific, sharp, almost sweet chemical odor that can only mean one thing: decaying film. I was seven years old, standing in the basement of my grandfather’s house, surrounded by the ghosts of his 8mm reels. He would thread the projector, and the flickering light would bring to life birthdays I was too young to remember, Christmases before I was born, a world in saturated, slightly unstable color. I remember the sound of the film clattering through the gate, the heat of the bulb, and the way my grandmother would sigh, a soft sound of both joy and loss, at the sight of her own younger self waving from the screen.

Decades later, that sensory memory rushed back as I scrolled through a municipal open data portal. I wasn’t looking for family history; I was researching zoning laws. But a link labeled “Historical Parks & Recreation – Special Events (1978-1995)” caught my eye. I clicked, expecting a dry spreadsheet. Instead, I was greeted by a directory listing of digitized film reels. My city, it turned out, had a long-forgotten public access film unit that documented local events. And there, among the files labeled “Centennial Parade” and “Summer Arts Fair,” was one simply called “Maple Creek Park, Spring Festival, 1987.” The year I was seven.

I downloaded the file, a hefty, unwieldy .MOV transfer. The opening frames were shaky, the color was bleached by time, and the soundtrack was a warble of muffled audio. But then the camera panned across a crowd, and I saw it: a striped tent, the very same striped tent from a photograph in my own childhood album. I was there. Somewhere in that jittery celluloid scan was a version of me, a ghost in a machine I never knew was watching.

This wasn't like browsing a curated archive like the Wayback Machine, where you go looking for a specific webpage you already know existed. This was different. This was a stumble, a moment of serendipity powered by open data. The file wasn't presented as a precious artifact; it was just another record, dumped into the digital commons alongside permit applications and budget reports. Its preservation was almost accidental, a byproduct of a bureaucratic process of digitization. There was no context, no narration, no carefully written description. It was a raw, unvarnished data point, waiting for a memory to give it meaning.

In that moment, the abstract ideals of open data—transparency, accessibility, permanence—collapsed into a deeply personal experience. The public record became a private mirror. The data wasn't just bytes; it was the scent of ammonia, the clatter of a projector, my grandmother’s sigh. It reminded me that preservation isn't always about the grand narratives of history. Sometimes, it’s about saving the seemingly insignificant traces, the municipal ephemera, because you never know whose lost year might be hiding within, waiting for the right person to stumble upon it and bring it back, flickering, into the light.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: