The YouTube frenzy that has been well shaking the western hemisphere in the past two years has still not provoked significant infection in our country; if we do not take into account video clips with music, sports and political "lulus", the absence of Serbian home production on YouTube channels is rather noticeable.

On the contrary, every American teenage girl has her own "channel" on which she hooks video clips from her bedroom, from school and different other fun-offering places. Internet is flooded by shots of thousands of beds, shelves, toilet bowls, toys, slippers, panties, asses, plugs, night lamps, pillows, curtains, room posters, Christmas trees, fridges, cookers, philodendrons, puppies, kittens and countless other banalities from the middle-class everyday life. Without any care for broader relevance of their life experiences and interiors of their apartments, an armada of children, teenagers and students produce these shots with their web and video cameras and selflessly dump them on the world.

The filmed commonness of one’s own life had a different phenomenology in the past decades. It was not accessible to millions of watchers but was consumed in more or less the same narrow family circle in which it was made. Authors mainly were not minors but their parents. And last but not least – visual recordings were not done electronically but on film tapes, mainly of Super 8 and standard 8 mm formats.

The Super 8 tape emerged only in 1965, exactly in the period of intensive socialist building of the legendary SFRY and it was warmly welcomed in many of our homes in which means of payment had considerably grown. In the course of 1970s and early 1980s, before the mass phenomena of video cameras, these narrow film formats were the most available aspect of shooting the moving pictures of family banalities of our just grown up and too soon suffocated middle class. Those were mostly silent recordings of very characteristic visual poetry, immortalized by unskilful amateur hand. The most frequent motives were personal memories and the growing-up generation. Children in those shots were Tito’s pioneers blowing their first few birthday candles, playing in the sand and amusing the delighted parents in other ways. The YouTube room exhibitionism did not exist; the footages were watched only on rare occasions, when the critical mass of the family members gathered, large enough to turn the projector on.

Then video arrived and the footages of the first steps of Tito’s pioneers moved to attics, cellars and other forgotten places.

Twenty and more years later, some of those pioneers became big shots. BELEF wishes to remind that all of them once were children, and some of them shot on a narrow film tape, in the years that we remember with a childish smile. Those footages are now a part of valuable archaeological material from the history of privacy before webcams.

leksandar Gubaš