1928Mining 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).
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.