In 2011, after 35 years of obsessively recording his life, Sam Klemke finally had an outlet to share six and a half minutes of his personal home footage. Through YouTube he presented “35 Years Back Through Time” to the world, a video that quickly went viral and has since been viewed by millions.
Sam started video journaling his life in 1977 with end-of the year recaps, assessments and reflections, but also chronicling moments throughout the year. This includes everything from personal situations with significant others, reactions to major news events, mundane moments with his cat, and footage of his current work life. He declared that “the purpose of all this is to stimulate growth and improvement year to year, but also I hope to monitor the current events of my life and changes I go through as I go through them.”
His YouTube video was but a mere glimpse of his extensive home video collection and when documentarian Matthew Bate (Shut Up Little Man!) saw Klemke’s video he had a hunch that his personal footage was something that could be examined further. He delved into Klemke’s room full of videotapes to uncover more and edit Sam’s footage in a cohesive and engaging manner. With Sam Klemke’s Time Machine we get an in-depth and deeply personal look at Sam’s videos, watching with a voyeuristic gaze at this average man’s life. The film, which premiered at Sundance, is now available on Vimeo.
When we first meet Sam he presents himself as an optimistic 19-year-old, with his heart set on on being a great filmmaker. We watch him go through various phases of his life. From a 25-year-old wallowing in his obesity while sitting in bed eating nachos, to an optimistic and in love 36-year-old, and finally a gray haired 50-year-old traveling caricature artist. The documentary balances Klemke’s videos with archival footage of NASA’s launch of the Voyager Spacecraft and the Golden Record, which made its way to Space the same year Sam started his yearly video chronicles. What transpires is an engaging reflection on aging, nostalgia, and time.
I Skyped with Sam Klemke, who was in Australia at the time of our chat, to talk about his life, his filming, and what it’s like to go back in time.
When you started filming yourself and having yearly reviews did you find that, from year to year, your intent with it changed?
I probably, gradually, intensified. It got to be more and more urgent. The more I did it the more I had to do it, the more momentum I generated. It’s something I got into from a very young age and I couldn’t stop. It took on a greater importance. It’s interesting because I’m actually using this trip to Australia as my location for my 2015 summary, which I’m doing now.
Oh yeah, it’s that time of year.
Not quite, I usually do it at the end of the year, in January. But this year I’m doing it a couple months early because it’s such a great location.
So I guess after so many years it becomes just a habit, it’s second nature for you at this point. How often do you watch your footage?
It varies. It’s been more so in the past four years since this film is being produced. I’ve watched it a lot more because I’ve been digging through stuff to organize it. Don’t forget that most of this stuff was sitting on shelves as VHS tapes or even 16mm, 8mm film before that. So it wasn’t until the digital age that I was able to tie it together, put it on my computer, digitize it. That’s been 10 years now. I’ve had plenty of time to rewatch it. I’ve been familiar with it. The first few years were very short, like three minutes. That’s all you got in a role of film. You’ll have to ask your great-grandfather about that one [laughs]. We use to have this thing called film. You would actually get a spool of film and hold it up to the light and you could see the images on the celluloids.
Did you have a year in mind of when you wanted to eventually share the footage with other people, or put it together in a way that could be shared? Or did that just happen more naturally when things like YouTube came out?
Well YouTube certainly changed things. YouTube gave me a vast opportunity to put stuff on the air and share it with the world. It was a vast repository for me. It really felt like it was tailor made for me because now I had a place to show and share all my stuff. For about 10 years I’ve had three or four YouTube channels with all kinds of fun stuff, not just the year end summaries but all kinds of stuff. I’ve been shooting films and movies all my life.
But before that you never had a set date in the future for when you would share the material.
I never set a timeline in the future. But when I was really young I was really ambitious. I use to think that 1977 was going to be “the year that was” and I even declared it so. When I was 19-years-old I declared right on camera, “this is going to be the year to top all years.” Sort of giving myself impetus to have the best year ever. After that I got a little more realistic or blasé about it and then it just became more and more of a habit. It lost its zeal or its special status. It became this thing I had to do at the end of the year.
There were certain years that were my favorite for you and others that made me sad. I’m curious what your favorite and least favorite years have been and if your memories of those years change when you look back on the footage.
I’ve always had a really strong memory so it’s more that there were cumulative things that were negative and not pleasant to remember. I’ve always been a year person so I organize my life as a grid. A lot of people, most people I find, don’t do that. It’s kind of hard to talk to people who don’t have that built in grid like I do. I’ve always been able to chronicle and delineate my years and where I fall into them. Still, I think what you’re talking about is emotionally the sad parts of certain years. There were certain years that went by super fast. Your probably noticed how the early ’90s just zoomed by and that’s because there wasn’t a lot going on. I’ve discovered the year goes a lot faster when you don’t do things and a lot slower when you do. It’s not so much about the year, it’s about your whole life. But because I was chronicling yearly that’s how it seemed to me. So that became sort of a decision I made, do more things [laughs] so that time would slow down, it slows time down. That’s what it’s all about, time.
I think about my past a lot and also think of my life in terms of years. Do you feel like because you record yourself that it frees you from having to think about the past? That because it’s all recorded you can actually spend less time being nostalgic?
I think about the past just because it’s natural for me. But I also have a pretty good understanding and I’ve always had a grid of what month, what year, what decade I’m in. So it’s been a very natural thing for me. I remember when I was a little kid, I was 13-years-old and I was having nostalgia about being 10. I think I was one of the only kids my age who did that because most kids, as you know, are in the moment. They’re not thinking about the past or the future. They’re just being right here in the moment. So I was a weird little kid in that sense. [Laughs.]
Oh man, I really relate to the early-onset nostalgia.
I always say that nostalgia was my favorite narcotic.
So do you wish you had started recording yearly reviews sooner?
Oh sure, absolutely. There are all kind of things I wish I had done sooner. When I was 12 years old I begged my parents for a movie camera because I wanted to capture time. I was fascinated with time and motion and sound. I had a tiny reel to reel tape recorder where you had to spool it on and push the record button. So I had one of those first and I had all these tapes so I thought, oh man, if only I had a camera to film I could actually make movies. I could be in the movies. And that was kind of my goal, it was just about capturing time. So that happened and I realized that if you put your camera in front of someone old you could capture them before they die because we’re all going to die and I think I was aware, at a very young age, that my grandparents and their relatives were not going to be around much longer. So I begged my parents to take me to Nebraska, where they all lived, and film them talking on camera with sound. I was 16 at that point and that was a revelation to me, I had this thing in my hand, I knew that whatever happened to them, however much older they got and died, I’d always have a record. So it started this whole obsession for me with time and documenting my life and the people in it.
Is there footage that is painful for you to watch?
Oh yeah, there’s all kinds of stuff that’s painful. Don’t forget, I wasn’t just doing the year-end summaries, because that is the majority of stuff you see in the film. But I’ve also been filming other people as well, I’ve been behind the scenes as well as in front of the camera. So it’s probably more painful for me to watch scenes of people who are gone and scenes of anger. Conflict is a really hard one to capture because you don’t want to, like when you’re having a breakup of some kind, when a relationship is breaking up that’s a hard one to capture. You can’t really convince a girlfriend, “Oh wait, don’t get angry yet. Let me get the camera out. Okay ready? All right, action!” [Laughs.]
But you’ve tried.
I think I tried, I did try a couple of times. “You turn that thing off right now!”
We’re you surprised that Matt wanted to take your footage and make this documentary?
Yeah, I guess so. I kind of suspected that could happen at some point. But YouTube, again, came to the rescue. My viral video, “35 Years Backwards in Time with Sam Klemke,” when that went viral it got all this press and people were calling me from all over the world. And I was getting attention on CNN.com and all these big websites. It was kind of interesting and tantalizing when someone called from Australia and wanted to take all my old footage and make a film. Because Matt knew there was a lot more footage where that came from. [Laughs.] That six-minute film was me basically saying the year, maybe a couple other things, but the tantalizing thing about it is I did it backwards, from the present to youth. In other words, people got to see me youthing, to grow younger. I think the thing that was fascinating and scary to a lot of young people was they got to see the aging process, “Oh my God, that’s going to happen to me. I’m going to lose my hair, I’m going to get gray, and I’m going to get a pot belly.” All those things that do happen, it’s called aging. That’s why I’ve been fascinated with youth. Youth is such a fleeting thing. I was so intent on capturing my youth, and everyone’s youth, while I could. It’s not precious, it’s a precious record of their freshness and their idealized, when we’re young we have all these idealized visions of ourselves and all the things were going to do. And very often, in most cases, we don’t accomplish them. We start to make compromises and we have to get real. That’s certainly what happened to me. I wanted to be a great filmmaker but I ended up being a traveling caricature artist, as you saw in the film.
Were you afraid of aging when you were young?
No because it happens gradually. It’s not like an abrupt thing. But I did start to notice things happening. You wake up when you’re 28 and think, oh wow, my hairline isn’t as full as it use to be. You have these little moments of revelation. It depends on what your priorities are moment to moment, day to day. I’ve always loved to sit and watch things and take things in so that’s the opposite of someone who is physical and gets out and does thing on a very active level in their life. So that took it’s toll on me physically. If I could go back and talk to my younger self I think one of the things I’d do is be more active in my younger days. Make your body really be your slave instead of be a slave to your body.
In your YouTube video we really only get a glimpse of what was going on in your life. I was reading through the comments and someone wrote “I wonder what happened to him in ’96 that made him so happy.” I loved that, and then we get that answer in the documentary when we see more footage from that year. But do you agree with that outsider perception, was ’96 a good year? A happy year?
Yeah, I think when you say happy it’s nostalgia. That’s the narcotic of nostalgia and of love. I do look back very fondly of that year because that’s the year, what happened? You just saw the movie.
You found love with “the very Jewish-looking woman.”
That’s right. Esther. [Laughs.] We had a five year relationship that was blissful and transcendent on many levels. I think back on that with great fondness and she also motivated me. It’s not that she tried to motivate me. It’s just that I was self-motivated to be the best I could be around her. That’s what happened, that’s when I started losing weight and gave up a lot of vices. It was a really pivotal moment in my life at age 39. I had a really great late 30s, early 40s [laughs]. Life begins at 40, is what they always said.
My dad is 67, he says that it’s the best age, it’s a golden time.
That’s right. Because you still have most of your youth. You can still move around, if you take care of yourself, but you also still have enough of your mind that you can enjoy it. There’s a point when you start to realize, oh gosh, my memory is not as fast as it use to be, or your body can’t handle things as quickly so you have to spend your day and energy just getting through the day. My parents are 87 and they’re dealing with that right now. In fact, interestingly enough, the Denver Film Fest was going on last week and my father actually went to the premiere of it, the screening. He was a bit overwhelmed, I have to say. But I said, “Well, dad, how did you feel being on camera? Seeing yourself in a big movie theatre around you watching yourself? And he said, “Well I think I did okay, but I don’t know if I got the movie.”
Yeah, from his perspective, I can’t imagine how it would feel to watch.
One of the things he said to me, “Nice boners Sam.” [Laughs.] So what can you say to that?
Right, you have to feel comfortable sharing intimate moments from your life with your parents, and now the world. Were you always comfortable sharing yourself, intimate moments and your emotions so publicly?
It’s something I’ve grown into. Of course I was more guarded about it in my youth. But part of that was just the fact that I was not a very social person early on. I had to learn to be social in a vacuum because my parents were not very social. We never had friends over, we never had parties or anything like that. So I had to come of age in a vacuum, which is interesting because most of my heroes, I’ve discovered, had to do the same thing. If you look at most young people they have most of their ideology down. But they don’t have a way to figure it out yet. They’re still struggling with their personality and how do I do this? And how do I navigate through my life with talking to people and affecting them and persuading them and things like that. That often doesn’t happen till middle age or later.
In your video you made you were youthing. What do you think of the decision to show it chronologically in the documentary?
By the way, is that a R.Crumb Harold and Maude drawing behind you? Did Crumb do that drawing.
Oh, I’m actually not sure who did the drawing. The poster doesn’t say, or there’s no signature. Can you tell?
I love that movie but also it looks like Robert Crumb’s style of cross-hatching.
Yeah, I can see that. I don’t know though. When I was in college this was in the university’s media lab, so I just took it from there.
I’m just curious. Sorry to be distracted. There’s so many things I love about film. I’m a film person myself and I always wanted to be a great film director. And that was one of the things I had to let go for many reasons. I didn’t know how to do it, mainly. I knew how to make film but I didn’t know to engage with the business end of things and also I didn’t know how to collaborate really at an early age. I was all by myself and filmmaking, as you know, is a very collaborative art. So I found it was easier for me to do drawing because it’s a very solitary experience. So that’s when I began to pursue more. As I got older and older I let go of my ambitious dreams. I kept filming. I was always filming. But I didn’t think of myself as the next Orson Welles or Woody Allen quite as much.
I think a lot of people who watch this documentary will relate to that, something they had to let go of. Have people opened up to you, after seeing the doc, about a passion they had to give up and shared those sentiments?
I think so. Most of the people I’ve seen the film with are passionate about film. We were at the Sundance Film Festival this year and I went to London’s Film Festival and one in Brooklyn, New York. And at Cinefamily in L.A., and there right in the front row was Adam Goldberg and he was the first person to ask me a question and I looked right at him and I thought, oh my God, that’s Adam Goldberg. So it made it hard for me to pay attention to the content of what he was saying. [Laughs.] Internally I was thinking, oh my God, it’s Adam Goldberg. Outside I as going, hmmm that’s fascinating.
Do you remember his question?
It was a good question. I can’t remember the exact detail of it. But it had to do with time and aging and the big questions. The stuff that we all think about. The material of life.
Are you the type of person who has regrets? Or are you of the belief that there should be no regrets?
No, I absolutely have regrets. In fact I think people who say they have no regrets are putting on false front to some degree. I think everybody has regrets and I’m certainly one of them. There’s all kinds of things I could have and should have and would have done differently. I’ll write you a list. [Laughs.]
What do you think of the parallel of the Golden Record being launched to space the year you began your end of the year recaps?
I was aware of the Voyager, of course. I also think the filmmakers did a brilliant job of putting it together and making it relate to and juxtapose against my life, I think was great. So in that case it’s not necessarily about me. It’s not the Sam Klemke story. It’s not a traditional documentary in that sense. When they first wanted to do it I naturally thought that’s what it was going to be. But this is something different. It’s something more lofty and idealized. A treatise on human nature and humanity and the cosmos and aging and all types of big questions. It’s a very existential piece. So it appealed to me and I’ve seen it 15, 16 times now and it’s really well done. It’s a well crafted piece and its new. You have to admit when you saw it you hadn’t seen anything quite like that. Right?
Right, and it is one of those movies were you feel compelled to re-watch. I’ve seen it twice and would like to watch it again because once we get to where you are now we want to remind ourselves of your youth and how you became who you are.
That’s the beauty of film and that’s what I’ve been doing with my whole life, in a way. I’ll say, well gosh, I miss 1988 and I haven’t talked to my 1988 self in a while, let’s go back to 1988. It’s like having a time machine. [Laughs.]
