Virtually every general history of cinema awards hegemony to the commercial narrative feature film. The various documentary traditions are dealt with in a subsidiary manner; independent and avant-garde filmmaking is treated as an appendage, if it is even mentioned at all. While it is not difficult to understand how this state has arisen, given the prominence of commercial entertainment films in our mass culture, the present condition of our film histories is, in my view, impossible to justify.
A complete history of cinema should be a history of all types of films made since the invention of the medium. It is hard to see how any objective person could argue with so tautological a claim, which makes the fact that film historians have not attempted to put this principle into practice all the more inexcusable. While a “complete” history is admittedly impossible to construct fully, the film historian who holds this principle as an ideal would at last be led to treat documentary and avant-garde traditions with the equality they so richly deserve. But, one must also ask, what of the cartoon, the newsreel, the ethnographic film, the travelogue, the medical and scientific recording film, the industrial documentary, the instructional film; and what of our present subject, the home movie? Questions of aesthetic merit, overall influence on the medium, social importance, or the historian’s individual tastes, often influence the choice of works focused on in histories of cinema, as is the case in other arts, and these are certainly legitimate criteria. However, the relative newness of cinema as a medium argues against awarding too much weight to one’s own tastes, or even to generally accepted evaluations of aesthetic merit. The medium is far too young for an even semi-definitive list of masterworks to have sifted itself out from the natural chaos of multiple tastes.
It seems likely that the history of cinema has seen the creation of far greater numbers of home movies than of any other type of film. And while we tend to think of the cultural influence of feature films as dominant, the instructional film, for example, has surely occupied a great deal of the viewing time of most of us at very formative periods of our lives. To every argument about how the dominant ideology conveyed by the form of the narrative feature has shaped the world-view of the masses, one might counter that the functional equation of image equals word that informs most instructional films has likely had an equally prominent role in determining how we perceive, and relate to, imagery. Indeed, each of the filmmaking modes mentioned comes complete with its own varied set of stylistic motifs, each with its own aesthetic, moral and cultural implications. The prominent place that the home movie has played in the lives of many families, not simply as a recorder of events, but in the way in which the making of, and showing of, home movies becomes an important family event in itself, has surely had a cultural impact of major, but hitherto largely unexamined, proportions.
It is often remarked that important phenomena, both natural and man-made, are often appreciated only at the moment of their demise. In our nation's recent history, the celebration, by artists, of the spiritual values of our wilderness emerged largely in the mid-nineteenth century, during the period when that wilderness was being rapidly destroyed1. In a certain sense there seems something almost inevitable about this pattern; that which always existed, or so it seems, tends to be taken for granted. Perhaps the demise of the home-movie as a dominant form, as a result of home video, will awaken us all to an appreciation of what is surely a major aspect of American folk-art.
No one should confuse the home movie with home video, however much they may be related. Perhaps the primary technical fact of the home movie is the time limitation: for almost all cameras, whether 8mm or 16mm, the usual length of a roll of film is about three minutes. This enforced brevity, together with the other limits of the medium of film, has helped determine the distinctive shapes that home movies assume.
The home movie, of course, is extremely various in its manifestations. I am making no claims of aesthetic accomplishment either for particular home movies or for the genre as a whole. What I think is clear, from even a preliminary examination of some of its varieties, is that the way in which home movies are filmed, the particular relationships established between camera (representing implied filmmaker/family member) and subject-matter, are extremely revealing of the attitudes adults have about themselves, each other, their homes, family events, their children. It would be hard to imagine a richer source to mine than these primary creations of “the people” themselves, and when one regards the lengthy tomes of sociological analyses of Hollywood films that have been produced, the neglect of the home movie seems all the more inexplicable.
Just as Sol Worth and John Adair studied films made by Navajo to discern truths about the Navajo's perception of the world, so one might examine the relation between style and subject-matter in the home movie for a richer awareness of the nature of our own culture.
It would be presumptuous to offer anything but the most preliminary of taxonomies of the home movie. What is needed is first of all an archival source, in which all type and manner of home movies are collected and preserved. Then scholars could go about the work of screening, studying, evaluating. My primary goal here is to assert that such work should be done, especially now, when families are increasingly transferring their home movies to video. There is always the danger that this aspect of our cinematic heritage may be lost.
There are several ways of categorizing the home movie. Several forms of subject-matter commonly recur. There is the film of the special family event: a child's birthday party, a wedding. There is the portrait of a family member of the group: Auntie observed on her visit; Junior playing with his toads. And of course there is the travel movie, with or without family members included in the image. One can also, however, categorize the home movie by the mode in which the subject is depicted. There are the pseudo-narrative forms, with an editing style that often borrows from classical narrative, and devices such as intertitles. This form is relatively uncommon, though if one merely reads publications on how to make home movies rather than examining the actual objects one might assume that it was the norm. There are the unedited presentations of a subject in which filmmakers have tried to observe their subject-matter with a minimum of interference. Equally, if not more common, are those films in which the subject, rather than ignoring the camera, actually poses for it, even to the extent of mugging or waving at the lens; the filmmaker often interacts with this subject in turn. Finally, there is the most extreme case, those films in which it seems that the subject exists only for the camera, such as the children's party in which all the children are seen in obvious poses.
The existence of the latter two modes is partially attributable to the brevity of the home-movie roll. To capture an event in one, or even a few, three-minute segments, filmmakers must try to limit themselves to the “highlights,” rather than recording the entire affair continuously, as home videomakers have begun to do. At the very least, the home movie-maker has had to exercise their own selectivity. Such films reveal, if nothing else, what the “filmer” (most typically, the father) finds worthy of preservation. To the extent that those filmed pose for, act for, and even at times seem to exist solely for, the camera, such films offer an implied commentary on the ways in which we see each other. Feminists, for instance, have noted the ways in which little girls are encouraged to look pretty for the eyes/lens of daddy-filmer. More generally, there is a sense in which the children of home movies are seen by the camera/parent not as human beings, but as objects and images, as appearances to be preserved rather than as whole persons with their own independent psyches. When adults film each other, by contrast, the result is often different. A neat, posed appearance is often replaced by a greater willingness to mug, to call attention to oneself, to appear as unusual as possible. Children mug for the camera too, to be sure, but they are frequently filmed in ways (most simply, from above, from the perspective of a standing adult) that tend to encapsulate that mugging within the whole made image, whereas adults, filmed from eye-level, can with the same gestures violate the image, disrupting compositional dominance.
The process of the subject reacting to the camera, and the even more extreme case of the event created for the camera, which is almost always perceived as such, inevitably tends to break the particular kind of illusionistic grip that representational filmmaking can exercise on the viewer, an illusion which depends upon an effacement of the camera's presence. The many technical “inadequacies” of most home movies, such as shaky camera, jumpy editing, and varied and discordant lighting effects, all must be seen as distancing it from the realm of the commercial feature, even in many of those cases in which the filmmaker is trying to imitate same. But one must be careful not to over-ascribe meanings to every aspect of a home movie. For every instance in which a camera placement, composition, or editing juxtaposition, can be read as revealing of the maker's intention, there is another moment that can best be explained as an unintended technical event, something that the filmmaker himself might call a “mistake.” Thus the home movie possesses a degree of randomness not present in more polished forms. It is indeed the combination of individual intentionality and technical lack of control that gives most home movies their peculiar flavor. An oddness enters, in the juxtapositions between people and things as a result of the framing, in a surprising in-camera cut, in what in conventional terms might be called “poor” camera placement, to the extent that it is often not clear how much of the style is due to technical lapses and how much to the eccentric attitudes of the filmmaker.
I have seen many curious, and not a few near-magical moments in such home movies. The relationship between seated adults and living-room decor will seem oddly out-of-place, as if nothing fits quite as it was intended to. A pet such as a dog will enter the frame in the foreground, and its size relative to the people present is humorously disruptive. The admixture produced by such events is like nothing else in cinema, with its peculiar filmic incongruities, inconsistencies of point-of-view, and with the way in which its accidents seem to in fact reveal something not quite specifiable about the subject-matter.
A home movie screening is, as often as not, accompanied by the extemporaneous narration provided by the filmmaker, who usually doubles as the projectionist. While the intention of the narration often appears to be the most conventional imaginable, that of providing a lucid identification and explanation of the events shown, the actual result is generally quite different: the filmmaker will tell jokes, make his own personal comments on the people and events, let pass many slips-of-tongue. In many cases home-movie narration has the same degree of randomness as the films themselves.
A home movie is neither a transparent record of an event nor is it a modernist critique of illusionistic modes of representation. It is not as unified as a classical narrative, but neither are its incongruities as carefully calculated as the discordant architectural elements in a “post-modern” building. In short, the home movie fits into none of the neat categories film critics have constructed, and for that reason alone it is of interest. Indeed, the particular combination of intention and error varies from one home movie to the next, making generalizations about the genre difficult. One result common to many home-movie forms is a sense in which the movie itself, rather than the event depicted, is the real event. Thus, it can seem from some travel movies that the sole purpose of visiting Paris, Mount Rushmore, or wherever, is to have oneself photographed there. The resulting film then has little to do with the places visited, and everything to do with the way in which the participants see themselves, each other, and the external world, which becomes a terrain into which one continually inserts one's own image. A peculiar insularity emerges: one's image remains constant around the world, which world seems designed only to serve as a background for the superficial self. When all the images of children in a birthday-party film seem posed for the camera, one similarly has a sense not of any actual party, but rather of a gathering by, for, and about, the camera, the images it makes, and the “filmer” behind the lens. A theme of modern mass culture, which many have commented on, is nowhere more apparent than here: Our existence as whole beings is made secondary to, or worse, seen only in terms of, the images we make of ourselves.
At such moments, the whole idea of a film as an object which is separate from life disappears; film and reality are collapsed into each other in a manner far more total than can occur in the so-called “illusionistic” or “transparent” narrative. There is no world external to the people depicted in the film; the landscapes of a travel movie or the reality of an event which is in fact only staged are thus reduced to mere back-drops. When the filmmaker is present as narrator, and some of the people who appear in the film are also in the room, it not only seems as if the event was staged only for the film, but that the film was made only for the projection one is now witnessing.
One might speculate that the advent of home video may make this collapse even more complete. With film, each roll is quite short, so that in home movie screenings there is commonly a thread-up break every three minutes. Film has to be sent away for processing; it is most typically at least several days after an event before the movies of it can be viewed. A projector must be set up, and the room darkened; the whole process of screening a film has a certain ritualistic quality to it that implies a certain separation between film and life.
Video, by contrast, can be viewed instantly, even while the event is still in progress, so that one's image and the images one has produced on video can be instantly compared. It is often viewed in a lit room, and seen as part of, rather than separate from, its surround2. The dominance of the images we create of ourselves over our actual bodies can thus grow even more complete, as those images become a real-time part of our daily lives. A home video can last an hour or more, so that the maker is not forced to be selective in what is recorded. It requires no special projection set-up, but can be readily viewed in any room already set up for television. It is even better suited, in short, to become continuous with the life it depicts.
Perhaps most extraordinary are those home movies in which there is a tension between film as illusionistic representation and moments in which the persons depicted acknowledge the camera's presence. When a character stares directly into the camera, he also stares out of the screen at the viewer, and in doing so breaks the spell of illusion, the sense one is watching a world separate from oneself. The movements and gestures that accompany such gazes in home movies contribute to this rupture. But the rupture is rarely complete; the gaze is not unvarying. Other movements, other positions, occur, so that one is aware of a constant oscillation between a represented world contained within a series of film frames and those moments in which the very borders of the frame appear to collapse into a particular personage. Such films are constantly leaping out of themselves, and then settling back into the mode of simple recording. Curiously, the gaze into the camera is in some ways a more powerful illusionistic device than any in conventional narrative film. The paradox here is that that same direct stare that breaks the "spell" also replaces the frame-created illusions, which depend upon the artifice of a whole frame, with the direct physical presence of the character, in which whatever else is contained in the frame borders has no relevance except insofar as it reflects directly on the character shown.
Perhaps the most powerful insight into this aspect of the home movie is to be found in Jonas Mekas's Lost Lost Lost, a three-hour masterwork and one of the most extraordinary works in American cinema. Indeed, it must be noted that many avant-gardists, among them Ken Jacobs, Stan Brakhage, and Bruce Baillie, have drawn considerable inspiration in some of their own works from certain aspects of the home-movie form. Mekas's film is a record of his own early years in America, in part seen through a series of home-movie images of characters waving, mugging, and so on. A soundtrack provides Mekas's poetic commentary and distances the viewer from the imagery. We simultaneously experience images of recent immigrants to the U.S. struggling to assert their identity, before each other and to the camera; the way in which those assertions dominate the frame; and Mekas's own meditations on displacement and times past. The home-movie elements function here partly as they do in ordinary home-movies; character gesturing implies that one is observing not an actor placed in the artifice of a composed frame, but an instant in a life that was once lived, in which the filmed object insists on asserting his humanness before the photomechanical machine. The veil of lapsed time that Mekas's narration and editing lays over the image hyperbolizes an effect that such mugging has in any home movie: at the same time that we see the gestures dominating and collapsing the image into the person represented we are aware of the impossibility of this collapse; that, illusions aside, we are finally observing mere images. It is part of Mekas's achievement that he has included this dual awareness, one which is usually supplied by the viewer himself, in his film's expressive form.
The home movie is a form of cinema unlike any other. Its varied forms have different effects and implications than the narrative feature, the documentary, the commercial travelogue. Its presence in our culture has been strong since the 1930s and pervasive in recent decades. Film historians should cease their worship of commercial narrative and open their eyes to "see" all the varieties of our medium.