Why Sam Klemke Filmed Himself Every Year For 35 Years

"The experience of seeing your whole life condensed into 90 minutes is daunting," says Sam Klemke. His life has been turned into Sam Klemke's Time Machine by Matthew Bate, the South Australian documentarian who previously made Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure. The footage of Klemke's life was self-recorded: in 1977, as a 17-year-old in suburban Colorado, he began videotaping himself for posterity. But it wasn't until 2011, when he cut moments, reverse-chronologically, into a video called 35 Years Backwards Thru Time, that Klemke shared any of this footage.

"It was only when YouTube came around that I had a platform for these videos," says Klemke, now 56. "People say over and over again: 'Wow, you're so brave to talk on camera about your most personal details.' But I didn't think I was talking to anybody, I thought I was just talking to myself with the camera on. It felt good to talk about my problems, and once I had told them to someone, even if it's just a camera, a burden had been lifted."

"It felt good to talk about my problems, and once I had told them to someone, even if it's just a camera, a burden had been lifted."

Klemke's video confessions made him both a spiritual precursor to the current climate of YouTube 'stars', but also distinctly different. "In the '70s, '80s, and '90s, there wasn't anyone watching me. It was just me talking to a camera. It was a way of saying: 'I'm real, I exist, I'm not an illusion,'" Klemke offers. "Whereas there's a performative aspect to people putting their lives on social media; they're so aware that people are watching them. Everyone's trying to portray a happy, idealised version of themselves online. They're leaving out the harder times and darker truths of their lives, the unhappy or embarrassing parts that we don't want to think about. And that's almost exclusively what's shown in this film."

Sam Klemke's Time Machine chronicles what its subject admits is "a pretty aimless life", with bouts of depression, battles with fluctuating weight, no upwardly mobile careerism, fleeting romantic entanglements, and no children. Klemke considers himself an "existential" sort, obsessed with temporality and man's place within the cosmos. In turn, Bate juxtaposes his life footage with the story of the Voyager space probe, which was launched in 1977 on a mission into the unknown reaches of the universe. "Juxtaposing my footage with the story of the Voyager tapped into the existential questions that came with documenting myself," he says. "Matt had a saying that the Voyager was the idealised, golden A-side of humanity, whereas Sam Klemke was the burpy, farty, grungy, punk-rock B-side."

Yet, all that aimlessness has amounted to something remarkable. While in Australia for screenings of Sam Klemke's Time Machine, Klemke recorded his annual year-end summary, for 2015, and it was a year to remember. "It's been an amazing year, honestly," Klemke says. "It started out, in January, at the Sundance Film Festival. We screened the film four times, I met a lot of celebrities, people kept coming up to me telling me they loved my film, someone told me they loved it more than Boyhood, which was amazing for me, because I've always loved the films of Richard Linklater. I've been trying to live my normal life this year, but now this film has added a whole new dimension."