The anthropologist Richard Chalfen researched home moviemaking (along with photography and later home video making) in 1980s USA. The collections he researched had material created between 1940 and 1980 (Chalfen, 1987, p.2). Chalfen found that domestic filmmaking conformed to what he described as ‘home mode’ that is capturing life events for posterity to be watched in private, normally by the participants who appear on screen. Furthermore, Chalfen recounts the ways in which ‘how to’ manuals and magazines – part of the commercial ecosystem of home moviemaking – encouraged readers to buy more equipment to allow them to edit their films and improve the end results. However, he found:
In actuality, however, most home moviemakers were extremely reluctant to do any editing at all. They simply did not want to be bothered with cutting, “gluing” or taping pieces of film; it was hard enough to keep all of their reels of movies in order “never mind fooling around with individual shots.” Few attempts were made either to cut out poorly exposed (or even unexposed) footage or to rearrange shots within one roll of film. When some form of editing was observed, it generally meant cutting off some excess leader at either end of the 50 foot roll and splicing two or more rolls together. The motivation for this accumulative “cutting” was simply to produce a movie that would take a longer time to show on the projector. (Ibid., p.55)
Few of my Super 8 films seem to have content identifiable as Chalfen’s ‘home mode’, but it is intriguing that they conform to the ‘unedited’ and disorderly state outlined above, nor were they ever watched in the way Chalfen found to be ubiquitous – a family gathering in a darkened room with the father at the controls. Roger Odin (2014) moves beyond Chalfen’s ‘home mode’ to propose two modes of engagement with home movies. The first is the ‘private mode’ of viewing in which a family collectively reminisces during the projection of a home movie where “what is said (the film as textual production) is often less important than the very fact of its being said: the importance lies in the exchange between the actants who participate in the communication.” (Ibid., p.17) Odin’s second mode is ‘intimate mode’:
By intimate mode, I mean the mode by which I recollect my own life and reflect upon the family’s past. During the projection of a home movie, the intimate mode happens by means of an interior dialogue: there is no externalization of communication. It is pointless to insist upon the force of effects that motivates this internal projection and upon the role that it plays in the construction of the individual’s identity; a construction that comes into being because of a differentiation from other individuals. (Ibid.)
Having spent a great deal of time with my film collection during this research project, my engagement with the films feels much more like Odin’s ‘intimate mode’. It is through the research that my interior dialogue has become externalised, at the same time the rushes have changed status to become an archive.
Chalfen, R. (1987) Snapshot Versions of Life. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, Ohio, USA.
Odin, R. (2014) The Home Movie and Space of Communication. In Amateur Filmmaking: the Home Movie, the Archive, the Web, (Eds, Rascaroli, L., Monahan, B. & Young, G.) Bloomsbury Academic, New York, pp. 15-26.