"High School Home Movies" 1980, New Haven, Conn. Photo courtesy of Wendy Horowitz, part of "Living Room Cinema Vol. 1," Watchmaker Films

Talk about family: Watchmaker Films has released the first of what it promises will be a series of DVDs collecting authentic home movies that have been gleaned from the global phenomenon called Home Movie Day, an annual celebration (first set in 2003 for the first Saturday in August, now in October) in which people all over the world simply set up venues where other people can bring their families' old small-gauge films and show them to rapt audiences.

The DVD, "Living Room Cinema Vol. 1," holds films shot on four continents and over eight decades (1920 to 1998), but shot by average people for their own reasons, with little or no sense of artifice, and focused almost entirely on family rituals and passing moments.

It's spellbinding, for obvious reasons -- this is history and life captured in amber, without a substantially controlling hand. It's time travel, pure and simple, but still saturated with rue and melancholy. (You watch baby footage from the '20s and you know it's likely that the child has already grown old and died, a realization that then infects even recent nursery photographs. Time passes, regardless of how much you photograph it to keep it still.)

There are weddings, too, and Orthodox Seders and bar mitzvahs, vacations to Miami and Havana -- a modern family even films the superstitious yard burial of their newborn's placenta. The film used ranges from 8mm to the bygone amateur stock 9.5mm to 35mm -- capturing San Francisco in the early '60s in CinemaScope, no less.

When you think about it, the implicit philosophy behind Home Movie Day and this nascent DVD series is so much more embracing and humane and genuine than the ideas that govern almost any other entertainment production. What's more important, anyway? It's fitting that the included booklet steers clear of contextualizing the films themselves (they all have commentary and titles provided by scholars and family members), but instead spends pages detailing how you, too, might organize and stage your own Home Movie Day.

Taking that cue, this October you could reawaken the pasts of dozens of forgotten families and generations' worth of ardor, hope, memories and drama, exactly as people around the world are doing the same thing.

"The Secret of the Grain" (Criterion Collection) is now available on DVD and Blu-ray; "Living Room Cinema Vol. 1" (Watchmaker Films) is now available on DVD.

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