Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (review)

This is an informative and useful collection of essays on the historical and cultural significance of home movies, or, more broadly, amateur film. It grew out of a conference organized by coeditor Karen Ishizuka at the Getty Institute in 1998 and attended by a group of film archivists, scholars, and filmmakers. Coeditor Patricia Zimmermann introduces the essays and traces the development—before and after the 1998 conference—of a now well-established international movement to collect, preserve, and study amateur films. The collection of essays reflects not only the multicultural and international perspectives of the contributors but also a diverse range of approaches to their subject. Leading film curators present overviews of their growing archives of amateur film or highlight specific films from their collection, filmmakers discuss the uses they have made of home movies, and academics try to make scholarly sense of these “orphan” films.

There is much to learn from many of these contributors, but Zimmermann’s “collage” arrangement leaves the reader with little guidance as to how to navigate through all twenty-seven essays. There are no subheadings and seemingly little order to the placement of the contributions. I would have liked at least some attempt at organization by geography or time period, or simply by some identifiable theme.

I discovered—somewhat laboriously—that the trauma of World War II as recorded by amateur filmmakers was the content of a significant number of entries, with five essays largely concerned with film of the internment of Japanese Americans. Topaz (footage by an inmate of a Utah internment camp of that name) is only the second home movie, after the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, to be accepted on the National Film Registry, and this important milestone is discussed at length in the entry on the work of the Registry. The Holocaust is invoked by London’s Imperial War Museum’s home movies of a Belgian family who successfully sheltered two Jewish children during World War II and also by a critical analysis of The Maelstrom, a movie by contemporary filmmaker Péter Forgács, which incorporated home movies of a Jewish family in Holland, most of whose members later died in the Holocaust. Forgács himself contributes a theoretical essay on home movies, with some discussion of his own films.

Zimmermann mentions that many amateur filmmakers imitated Hollywood narratives (and she explores this theme in greater length in her 1995 Reel Families, an important social history of American home movies), but none of the contributors seriously examine the links between Hollywood and the world of amateur film. The Academy Film Archive collects not only Academy Award–winning movies but also has a large archive of the home movies by Hollywood professionals, as does the Library of Congress. This footage raises the question of how “amateur” some of the films in these collections actually are.

Certain essays note that film equipment was too expensive for most working-class citizens in Western European countries up to the 1960s, and this lack of affordability still persists for people in many places. Understanding the class perspective of those who made amateur films can be illuminating, and a perceptive reading by Heather Norris Nicholson of some films shot by middle-class hobbyists of factory workers says much about the class structure in northern England in the 1940s and 1950s. Another illuminating essay, by Nico De Klerk, concerns films made in the Dutch East Indies in the early twentieth century. By singling out key shots of Dutch colonialists interacting with their native servants, De Klerk demonstrates that the “situational rootedness” of home movies can cut through abstract theorizing about colonial relationships and reveal important details no other medium can provide.

Roger Odin’s theoretical essay on the family home movie is the only one to mention the availability of contemporary home movies on the internet. The increasing significance of YouTube and other web outlets suggests the...