Home Movies as a Cultural Artifact
Home movies exist as fragments. Slices of differentiated reality come to life, frequently without a beginning or end. The projector plays a vital role in the reclamation process. Without projection, all this film footage is inanimate, a mass of junk lacking any value. Home movies function more as fossils than as discrete images. As a series of stills pass through the gates of a movie projector, this fossilized footage is transformed into movement and memory.
-- Ayisha Abraham (1)
The archive, then, is not simple a depository, which implies stasis, but is, rather, a retrieval machine defined by its revision, expansion, addition, and change. (1) Jacques Derrida, in his book, Archive Fever, has stated, “The archivist produces more archive. The archive is never closed. It opens out of the future.” (3)
Back Story
In March of 2012 a cousin posted a series of family movies on Facebook. The movies were are of family events, gatherings and what must have been memorable moments that the filmmaker thought it would be important to record. I was struck by the beauty of the distortions of the moving images. As I started to think about a project with these movies at the core, I tried to examine the images in multiple ways. Aesthetically, nostalgically, and through the lens of memory. I started at the place I always do, at the image itself. I was interested in the moments in between the posed shots, the shapes and colors that came from repeated duplication and digital compression. I froze certain moments of the moving images and painted them in a way that I hoped would bring out the colors and light of images projected on a family sheet or an old projection screen.
As I painted still after still I couldn't help but think about why I was so intrigued by these images that represent memory and the passage of time. As I rounded the corner into my 50s, time seemed to be slipping out of my hands faster than I could hang on to. As I peered past the dark edges of the images I found friends and family I could remember but no longer had contact because of death, time and distance.
The Human Experience: Who am I?
What is it about the faces and long-past events that occupy the moving image and stills? Any photograph from the past has a similar effect on me. In the book Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, essayist Peter Forgacs addresses this fascination:
The home movie or private film, not unlike the letter and diary, is biographical. It is one of the most adequate means of remembrance. It is a meditation on “Who am I?” The original context of the private film is the home screening rite, the celebration of times past, or recollection, and of hints of the nonverbal realm of communication and symbols. It is a recollection of the desired intimate vision and aims to immortalize the face of a lover, son, or father or to capture ephemeral moment, landscapes, and rites. The meditation inspired by these screenings is: What has been revealed by making visible that which had remained imperceptible before? (1)
Ranajit Guha, author of History at the Limit of World-History, suggests that history requires regrounding in the specifics of everyday life through a creative engagement with the human condition: “No continent, no culture, no mark or condition of social being would be considered too small or too simple for its prose.” (2)
Guha proposes that "home movies are stories from the listeners, not the storytellers." We are looking at home movies in an important new way that is grounded in the everyday.
In March of 2012 a cousin posted a series of family movies on Facebook. The movies were are of family events, gatherings and what must have been memorable moments that the filmmaker thought it would be important to record. I was struck by the beauty of the distortions of the moving images. As I started to think about a project with these movies at the core, I tried to examine the images in multiple ways. Aesthetically, nostalgically, and through the lens of memory. I started at the place I always do, at the image itself. I was interested in the moments in between the posed shots, the shapes and colors that came from repeated duplication and digital compression. I froze certain moments of the moving images and painted them in a way that I hoped would bring out the colors and light of images projected on a family sheet or an old projection screen.
As I painted still after still I couldn't help but think about why I was so intrigued by these images that represent memory and the passage of time. As I rounded the corner into my 50s, time seemed to be slipping out of my hands faster than I could hang on to. As I peered past the dark edges of the images I found friends and family I could remember but no longer had contact because of death, time and distance.
The Human Experience: Who am I?
What is it about the faces and long-past events that occupy the moving image and stills? Any photograph from the past has a similar effect on me. In the book Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, essayist Peter Forgacs addresses this fascination:
The home movie or private film, not unlike the letter and diary, is biographical. It is one of the most adequate means of remembrance. It is a meditation on “Who am I?” The original context of the private film is the home screening rite, the celebration of times past, or recollection, and of hints of the nonverbal realm of communication and symbols. It is a recollection of the desired intimate vision and aims to immortalize the face of a lover, son, or father or to capture ephemeral moment, landscapes, and rites. The meditation inspired by these screenings is: What has been revealed by making visible that which had remained imperceptible before? (1)
Ranajit Guha, author of History at the Limit of World-History, suggests that history requires regrounding in the specifics of everyday life through a creative engagement with the human condition: “No continent, no culture, no mark or condition of social being would be considered too small or too simple for its prose.” (2)
Guha proposes that "home movies are stories from the listeners, not the storytellers." We are looking at home movies in an important new way that is grounded in the everyday.
Guha advocates for an opening up of all the pasts, not simply one, to retrieve retellings, reperceptions, and remakings of our narratives, which are always, and ultimately, acts of invention of possible futures. (2)
In the essay “Wittegenstein Tractatus,” Peter Forgacs proposes that home movies permit us to see the unseen to deconstruct and then reconstruct the human through the ephemeral and microhistorical, where the real and the performed exist side by side. (1) For me, the images of family members moving from posing (performance) to doing what they were doing, oblivious of the camera, gave me an opportunity to see the unseen (moments between performance and living) that I froze in time then reconstructed in paintings. With these collected memories I was able to examine a part of my life lost through time and distorted through the fading of memory. By reexamining and recontextualizing them, I could connect to listening (visually), something I had little interest in doing previously in my life.
Amateur film provides a vital access point for academic historiography in its trajectory from official history to the move variegated and multiple practices of popular memory, a concretization of memory into artifacts that can be remobilized, recontextualized, and reanimated.(1)
Notes:
1. Ishizuka, K. L., & Zimmerman, P. R. (2008). Mining the home movie: Excavations in histories and memories. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
2. Guha, R., (2002). History at the limit of world-history. New York: Columbia University Press.
3. Derrida, J., (1998). Archive fever: Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1. Ishizuka, K. L., & Zimmerman, P. R. (2008). Mining the home movie: Excavations in histories and memories. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
2. Guha, R., (2002). History at the limit of world-history. New York: Columbia University Press.
3. Derrida, J., (1998). Archive fever: Chicago: University of Chicago Press.