Take the Home Movie Quiz

1928

Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. Edited by Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. 360 pages; bibliography, filmography, and index.
Reviewed by Dan Streible, in Film Quarterly (forthcoming, 2009).   

Which of the following is an accurate characterization? 

Home movies are _______ .

(1) documents of the everyday,
(2) not documents of the everyday,
(3) counter-documents,
(4) films without an interest in profit,
(5) colonized by Hollywood,
(6) lost histories of a frequently invisible working class,
(7) feminine; professional films, masculine,
(8) a stimulant for nostalgia,
(9) a medium of joy,
(10) boring,
(11) the greatest record of our culture,
(12) deceptive documentaries,
(13) hidden histories of the world,
(14) a festival of Oedipal relations.  

The anthology Mining the Home Movie argues all of the above, each phrase proffered by one of its contributors.

Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmermann's collection of 27 essays by 27 authors is a compendium whose time has come.  As the sampling of definitions and descriptions suggests, the scholarly analysis of home movies has established a foothold in media studies. While the amateur mode of filmmaking has yet to be integrated into comprehensive histories of cinema (especially in textbooks), a new literature has emerged focusing on this twentieth-century phenomenon. 

Writing about home movies is not entirely new. Scholars have sporadically published essays for at least a generation. No sustained wave of publication immediately followed the English-language breakthrough work on the subject, Zimmermann's oft-cited Reel Families (1995). The book's serious treatment of home movies was original, but also tendentious.  It remained for amateurs and archivists to advance the literature. Collector Alan Kattelle self-published his authoritative tome Home Movies (2000), which became an essential reference source. Moving image archives began to give small-gauge films higher priority. Curators and archivists gave amateur films greater visibility and made them accessible for researchers. 

This coalescence of archival, academic, and artistic interests is manifest in the roster of contributors to Mining the Home Movie.  Most, like co-editor Ishizuka, have hybrid identities – archivist-scholar, filmmaker-historian, curator-researcher. But assigning a single identity to each, the fifteen archivists outnumber the seven scholars and five media artists. This archival bent reflects how the study of home movies has recently unfolded. Small-gauge and amateur film enthusiasts are a strong constituency among moving-image archivists. They have shared their interest with evangelical zeal, with worldwide Home Movie Day screenings being their most notable achievement (see homemovieday.com). 

Half of the essays profile single archives at which the respective authors work. For readers not familiar with the archival world, these deliver a valuable, succinct introduction. Alongside the major established film archives (at the Library of Congress, the Academy, UCLA, the Netherlands Filmmuseum) are important regional institutions that have keyed interest in home movies. Northeast Historic Film (US) and North West Film Archive (UK), for example, have established collecting, access, and outreach policies for amateur films that generate scholarship – and of a magnitude that surpasses our expectations of regional archives. Karan Sheldon and Dwight Swanson write about NHF's rediscovery of a series of 16mm shorts, each entitled The Movie Queen, made by itinerant filmmaker Margaret Cram in the 1930s. Each re-enacts the same script in a different small town in the Northeast, with casts of local amateurs.  An essay by the late Maryann Gomes analyzes images of working-class people of the North West found at NWFA (where amateur films outnumber professionals two to one). Nearly all of the home movies were made by middle-class families, so she gives the only two working-class cineastes represented in the archive (one of whom made 93 films) special notice for their rare recordings of daily life in 1950s Britain.

The book grants material from the Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles) more attention than any other set of films. As the editors say in their introduction, the depth of interest in the home movies of Dave Tatsuno has been exceptional. Most were shot clandestinely between 1942 and 1945, while he and his California family were interned at the Topaz "relocation" camp in Utah. Four essays analyze the significance of this silent 8mm color footage. Ishizuka and Robert Nakamura detail their use of the Topaz films in their documentary Something Strong Within (1994). Robert Rosen then discusses "memory workers" who transform these events and recordings into historical memory: the documentarians, home moviemakers, and spectators. After a profile of the museum, Ishizuka and Zimmermann argue that the addition of Topaz to the National Film Registry in 1996 helped validate the larger enterprise of studying home movies. While the rare and atypical films from Topaz concentration camp receive disproportionate coverage, the essays make a convincing case for the impact its canonization has had. Certainly the creative, academic, and archival afterlife of Tatsuno's home movies has had a more salutary effect on our understanding of the phenomenon than that only famous home movie, the Zapruder film.

In its synergistic research, the book reaches wide. The term home movies is not defined, but shifts in meaning.  Too often it is used interchangeably with amateur film, a broader category. As authors detail the content of specific works, the diversity of home movie subjects and styles emerges. At times the collection digresses into exploring films of other genres (itinerant productions, local newsreels, documentary outtakes, et al.), which are worthy of study, but which mine territory distinct from home movies.
Additional assets of Mining the Home Movie include a translation of French film theorist Roger Odin's provocative work on "family films" (see "festival of Oedipal relations"). Odin's essay reminds us that an "amateur film movement" has been apparent in European scholarship since the 1980s and remains strong. Liz Czach's select filmography and bibliography will prove valuable to readers interested in teaching or writing about this subject. Her annotated list of 72 film and video works that make significant use of home movies – and which are actually in distribution – is well selected and her bibliography smartly supplemented with relevant works of critical theory and historiography. 

DAN STREIBLE teaches cinema studies at New York University.
 

 

Ow, Canada

Keeping the Canadian theme going just a little longer, a belated follow-up to Dan's detailed mini-history of the worker-training film in his last post. It's hard not to think of these brilliant PSAs, produced for the Canadian workplace safety organization WSIB, as films made in the image of the kind of NFB films we've been watching, and possibly as slightly-winking parodies of them (or homages, who can say?). Canadians of a certain age grew up with the admonition "we've got it [the intelligence to avoid workplace injuries], let's use it," usually while waiting for the hockey game to come back on. These spots take a different tack, one more in tune with the dramatic character-based naratives of PAUL TOMKOWICZ and HIGH STEEL. (The WSIB seems to have gotten some flack for the earliest spots; in the "Current Spots," you'll see that they try a different narrative angle.)

There's a rumor that David Cronenberg directed one of these; I haven't seen anything to confirm that, but you can see where it comes from.

All the Chimps That's Fit to Print

Apropos of next week's reading, Derek Bousé's Wildlife Films, we might find something interesting in the recent spate of news in the New York Times and elsewhere about human-animal relationships, and particularly about chimpanzees who have been placed in the role of humans. Bousé raises fascinating questions in his opening chapter (which you'll notice is slower-going than the following chapters, but well worth the work) about the ways and reasons that documentary has been distinguished from wildlife or nature film, arguing that the same moral, ethical, and cultural paradigms that have been used to justify the independent existence and aesthetics of documentary film as a genre can be found in nature, and that wildlife films become a place to get away with everything that would be beyond the pale in documentary. This op-ed from a week or so ago in the Times makes a similar point about animal "actors" in film and TV, their sad afterlives, and what both tell us about humans.

Shake Hands with High Steel

Seeing the interesting and beautiful High Steel in class today reminded me of a less serious, but in its own way wonderful, film: Shake Hands with Danger (1980). It rhymes with High Steel not only because of the dangerous industrial labor depicted, but because of its repetition of a catchy country song.

It's an occupational safety film (a genre, for sure) made for Caterpillar Tractor Company. Skip Elsheimer (avgeeks.com), also the popularizer of Ro-Revus Talks about Worms, has been screening this 16mm film for several years and entertaining many. Centron Corporation (1947-1981) produced many industrial and educational films. Shake Hands with Danger was one of their last. House director Herk Harvey shot this work-for-hire, but is best known to cinephiles as the auteur behind the indie cult horror film Carnival of Souls (1962). The latter is now on Criterion DVD (in its original release form and "director's cut"), but HH was still making Centron industrials twenty years after making his masterpiece. (It's a tough business, the picture racket -- especially in the middle of Kansas.)

Curiously, and I think significantly, Shake Hands with Danger is still being shown to industrial workers as a straight safety film in 2009 -- in Canada, no less. (See the comment on the Internet Archive page.)

A creative YouTuber took the theme song and made an animated version of the film.

Elsewhere on YouTube you can see and hear the anonymous voice (both singer and narrator) of SHWD, Jim Stringer, playing recent gigs in Austin, Texas.