James' World 2

It was a grainy video, autoplaying in my Facebook feed, that first grabbed my attention. It seemed vaguely familiar — like a home movie from my childhood in suburban Boston but without the main characters, leaving only a warm, generic 1980s ambience. In the clip, kids in wide-collared shirts amble around a school cafeteria with burgers, tater tots, and little square boxes of chocolate milk served by lunch ladies in those big buglike eyeglasses my grandmother used to wear. The video ended after about two minutes. Next, I watched a street glide by from the window of a moving vehicle: Kenmore Square, Boston, January 1977. The camera panned across storefronts — Strawberries, Paperback Booksmith, College Donuts — but I didn’t recognize anything until it zoomed out and the famous Citgo sign was revealed, perched atop the building where it still sits today.

Discovering these videos felt like time-traveling back to some precise moment when nothing of note happened. They are just short, contextless clips of old B-roll — the background film cut into broadcasts to break up the main footage — culled from the collections of WGBH, a 69-year-old Boston public-television station. In 2018, James Auclair, a station employee, began regularly posting the videos to social media. They infiltrated my own Facebook algorithm in the fall of 2023, which, it turns out, was just when I needed them. That August, I eagerly applied for a dream-job faculty position at a university, and I knew I was in for months of consistent, nagging anxiety about my professional future. When I came across the footage Auclair was posting under the handle GBH Archives (they dropped the “W” a few years ago), I was hooked: Here, finally, was a reprieve from the swirl of negative thoughts in my head.

I’ve devoured, by now, countless hours of B-roll. I’ve watched shoppers peruse CDs at the long-shuttered Tower Records on Newbury Street in the ’90s, transporting me back to Saturdays in high school when my friends and I browsed the rap and hip-hop racks for hours. Cars as big as boats — station wagons, sedans, and vans like my parents drove — roll over the Tobin Bridge in 1979; drivers reach out their arms to pass cash and coins to toll attendants. I’ve watched ice skaters gliding over the frozen Charles River in the late ’70s and hairsprayed teenagers in leather and oversize sweaters smoking cigarettes outside their high school in the ’80s.

I’m not the only one hooked on these B-roll clips: YouTube is full of “retro B-roll” material, and GBH Archives alone has more than 200,000 combined followers on Facebook, X, and Instagram. For some viewers, the appeal is pure nostalgia — many comment wistfully on the absence of cellphones or the predominance of suits and ties, and dresses. Others note changes in the ever-evolving cityscape. Every so often, someone recognizes their younger self in a video.

What I love most is that the videos contain no narrative; they feel like ambient music — hypnotic, meditative. Rather than tell you what to think or fear, they just show you things. There’s a funny intellectual twist here: Television is an entertainment medium, and the primary purpose of these B-roll clips was to keep viewers visually engaged so they wouldn’t get bored watching a single shot of a newscaster talking. Watching this remediated B-roll subverts that purpose. There are no quick shots and snappy edits, no breaking news alerts or sensational chyrons, just slow and boring slices of life. Where the format of television news can crowd out thought, these videos create space for it.