There's No Place Like Home Video (review)

James M. Moran's There's No Place Like Home Video, as the title suggests, makes an ambitious foray into the analysis and theorization of amateur video. While significant contributions have been made to the study of home movies and amateur film, little has focused specifically on amateur video production. As Moran points out, works such as Richard Chalfen's Snapshot Versions of Life and Patricia Zimmermann's Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film have made mention of amateur video in passing, but haven't dealt adequately with the specificities of video. Too often, Moran argues, amateur video is viewed as an extension of home movie production eliding the important differences between the two media. Thus his book takes an important step in establishing amateur video as a significant field of inquiry.

If film scholars writing on home movies have not provided appropriate models for investigating amateur video, neither have video scholars. Pointing out how video scholarship tends to read video as either television or art, Moran refuses to frame his analysis within this restrictive paradigm and opens up his inquiry to the larger question "What is video?" His first chapter delves into the complex terrain of video's ontology, arguing for video's complexity, but stops short of defining either video or amateur video. Instead, Moran argues that video's ontology defies categorization as any one thing. As he puts it, "video's diversity of formats, flexibility as a means of recording, and multimedia configurations have escaped ontological categories" (5). Rather than pin down video to one immutable definition, Moran argues for its hybridity and adaptabil- ity as a medium. He points out that video exists in a myriad of forms and media—it is evident in film, television, computers, telephones, and even architecture. He argues that video isn't anything specific, but is rather in the process of ceaselessly becoming: "the specificity of video is precisely that it lacks one" (13).

Moving away from the question of video's ontology, Moran focuses his second chapter, "From Reel Families to Families We Choose," around theories of the home movie and amateur film that have failed to service the needs of amateur video. Drawing on the work of Chalfen and Zimmermann, Moran is critical of their "ideology thesis," that is, their attention to the role that familialism played in structuring home movies. These theories of familialism see home movies as replicating bourgeois values of the postwar nuclear family in which unpleasantries were carefully eliminated to put forth a representation of a cohesive, happy nuclear family. Moran, however, points out the significant ways in which amateur videos differ from home movies. Paying particular attention to the specificities of video technology, he suggests that videos do not selectively eliminate as much material as home movies did. With its ability to record sound and run for long durations of time, video is capable of recording much of what had previously been omitted from home movies. For example, a camera could be placed on a tripod and left to run for hours, catching everything in its frame. Moran suggests that home video portrays the family in a manner that is much more conflicted and complex than the home movie ever allowed. Thus, as the chapter title underscores, Moran's contention is that video has been better equipped to deal with the reality of the modern-day family structure (including chosen nonbiological families, such as gay and lesbian households) in contrast to the stereotypical postwar nuclear families presented in home movies. While I suspect that Moran is correct in suggesting that video records a broader spectrum of experience, he provides no amateur video examples to support his arguments. This lack of evidence proves to be one of the major weaknesses of the book, as nowhere does Moran describe an amateur video made in the domestic sphere by a so-called average user.

Moran's lack of analysis of...