Piña Beach Redux - Yes, we were goofy - so what!
Archival footage from my assignment to the Panama Canal Zone in the late 70s. This is a 2024 edit from my Panama Playlist. If historical footage interests you, check out more in my playlists section (My Panama/Mi Panamá).
We start with a view of Piña Beach from the old Spanish Fort, San Lorenzo. We see the mouth of the Chagres River with our "deserted" beach on the right. Piña Beach - East: It is (was?) a rather desolate stretch of Caribbean coastline that runs west from the mouth of Panama's Chagres River about a mile to a point with a huge boulder. It's not a picturesque "postcard" kind of beach - it feels more like the kind of place one gets shipwrecked on. In the 1960s, the US Army had an artillery range there. By the end of the 70s, the range was gone, but they would still perform various training exercises on occasion.
Piña Beach - West: If one is curious enough to see what is beyond the point, a little bit of walking will render the most spectacular stretch of coastline. Luscious green jungle draped over Mars-red cliffs with the Caribbean crashing on coral reefs. I will never forget seeing it for the first time. Piña Beach - West runs about 2 1/2 miles up the coast ("up" meaning towards North America) to the one-time border between the old (now nonexistent) Canal Zone on this side and the República de Panamá on the far side. The Panamanian town of Piña is just beyond that, which lends its name to "our" beach. There were pillbox gun emplacements along this stretch with a pair of decaying signposts. The sign was long gone. My guess is that it was either the border of the Canal Zone with Panama, or a warning indicating the old firing range.
When I lived in Panama, this was one of my favorite places. Piña Beach - East was perfect for camping. Many lost weekends were spent there, and more often than not, we had the beach all to ourselves. There were mild waves good enough for body surfing. There was a small fresh water stream to wash the salt off. There were no authorities and no rules! Bonfires and parties were the "rule" of the day. We could listen to loud music if we wanted or just the natural sounds of the surf as we looked out over the Caribbean Sea and reveled in life itself. It was our most carefree time, a dream. Jack London once wrote that when you are most alive, you forget you're alive. There may be more picturesque places in Panama, but we would find ourselves longing for another "lost weekend" at Piña Beach. This longing came to be affectionately known as the "Piña Syndrome".
Unfortunately, these are the best photos that I have. I only had a pocket instamatic for about half of them, and in some the clouds don't help to bring out the colors. A small percentage of my film reels lost clarity and color, and my guess is that it was due to the few times I used film other than Kodak, but I can't be sure. I did my best to digitize my old super-8 movie film using a digital transfer machine ... it worked but still needs tweaks. Plus, many past showings through the movie projector damaged some of the sprockets, rendering some of the shakiness you see here.
Regarding movie film transfer: If you want to take on a similar project, I highly recommend doing as much online research as you can. Besides the machine, you will need professional film cleaner - some household cleaners may damage film - and one of those hand operated editing machines, which you should already have if you were a serious home movie maker. A manual film splicer may come in handy as well. I had to do some film splices, and believe it or not, the splicing tape that I had bought in 1979 still worked! Whatever you do, don't run the old movies through a projector as it will damage the film even more. Also, projecting the movie onto a screen and trying to capture video with a digital camera produces a flicker effect - the digicam can't always synch up with the 18 frames/second of the movie film. Hence, the need for a digital transfer machine.
Cameras
Kodak Pocket Instamatic 110
Canon AE-1
Cosina HDL-875 Macro Super-8
Digital Transfer Machine
Wolverine MovieMaker Pro Version 3.1
6 июл 2024
