Home Movies, Anonymity, and Viewership

By Diana Bilbao

Having spent some time browsing the Home Movie collection of archive.org, I am becoming increasingly aware of the entirely different mode of viewership required by these films.  Ishizuka and Zimmerman write that "As dreamscapes condensing and displacing memory and history, home movies suggest a rethinking of and reorientation about which language and theoretical models are appropriate to decipher their syntax, grammar, codes, and production of knowledge" (18).  Indeed, watching them requires a recalibration of one's analytical thinking, as their very amateur nature and intent often cause them to operate on a different level and in a wholly different realm from traditional documentary.

Some home movies may have a narrative bent in their smaller vignettes, but they still require a great deal more deciphering than their nonfiction relatives.  One film I discovered, entitled Home Movie 97074: Iowa, 1942-1946, begins with a shot of a semi-circular canvas laid out on a grassy field.  Its edges are held down by stones, and it is painted with trees and shapes.  After a cut, animal shapes have been painted on.  Soon, a human is in the frame painting the canvas.  More people are shown painting in the following shots, with the low exposure on a sunny day creating an eerie, ominous look.  Eventually, a quick cut shows us that the canvas has become a teepee.  Once the teepee has been revealed, the film moves on to another vignette, sans explanation or resolution.

While the sequence in and of itself has a kind of goal to it - clearly, the desire was to document the process of teepee creation - the lack of voiceover, closeup, or titles prevents the viewer from fully understanding the action.  We do not know why the teepee is being constructed or who the participants are.  In fact, because of the low quality and exposure, we can barely see the faces of the people involved enough to differentiate them.  While this affects us on a viewing level, however, it was an irrelevant concern at the moment of the film's conception.  The filmmaker knows all this information because he or she is involved.  This marked difference in intent between home movies and other nonfiction film is what creates the unique viewing experience.  We as viewers are faced with a filmmaker who neither knows nor cares that we are watching.

The almost careless montage construction of home movies in general makes for a very active viewing experience.  The viewer is forced to engage with the film on an almost shot-by-shot basis.  After the teepee vignette, Iowa, 1942-1946 moves on to landscape shots, people at the beach, a deer walking slowly through tall grass, and other short, isolated moments.  For each one of these shots, the viewer must attempt to establish time, place, the participants, and the reason the person decided to shoot in the first place.

Another example of the kind of analysis necessary in home movies is a sequence from Home Movie 98752: Possibly in Connecticut.  This whimsically titled film is even less coherent than Iowa.  It begins with animals at the zoo, cuts to tourist shots of Washington, D.C., spends a minute at a college graduation, etc.  Eventually, however, it does begin to establish some sort of familiarity.  We start to see the same two dogs, the same baby, and the same children.  At this point, the viewer can begin to attempt to decipher the actual relationships between the figures onscreen, rather than the basic "what's happening?" Here, the film begins to have a slight semblance of a narrative through sheer consistency and visual quality.  This huge variation in accessibility is part of what requires such different analytical tools in approaching home movies.