L’Arrivée d’un Train à la Ciotat (1895):The Lumière Brothers

Three months since my last post! I’ve been busy writing my Home Movies thesis and am slowly making progress. Early cinema – documentary, home movies? They were made before we began defining moving image ‘terms’. I thought this film was a good companion piece to my Randwick Race day tram clip post.

DAVID LYNCH: INTERVIEW PROJECT

INTERVIEW PROJECT has just been launched online. It comprises short interviews with people who Lynch encountered on a 32,000 kilometre road trip across America.

A new instalment will be posted every three days for the next 12 months.

People sharing their stories. Neat!

Home movies|modern memories

HOME MOVIES: REEL TIME

Home movies have escaped the domestic confines of family gatherings, lounge-room walls and dark cupboards, to enjoy a renaissance within contemporary, image-saturated society. Why this relatively recent shift in attitude and representation of historical home movie footage within media production and archival practice? I’m interested in exploring how home movie footage and aesthetics have been incorporated into Australian screen practice, particularly documentary film and screen-based art, since 1998. By focusing on several case studies and examples of work, I want to see who is telling stories; how they are inserting home movies back into public history and what are the social implications.

That’s it…a four-line abstract that sums up what I hope to achieve this year when exploring home movies in contemporary life. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point. While I don’t presume ‘the rest will be easy’, I do feel that now I have this statement, things will fall into place a lot easier.

nun dolls & polio

I’m researching memory. I’m watching home movies. Not surprisingly, this seems to trigger sudden images in my head and flashes of my childhood. Just watched a ‘educational film’ about children with polio (on the wonderful Australian Screen website). I remember hearing about the devastating effect polio wrought on 70,000 Australians (mostly children) between 1930 and 1950 and remember seeing people walking around with calipers on their legs. This was a common sight for those affected by polio and I always remember being gruesomely fascinated by their legs banded in steel. Somehow this memory lead to Nun Dolls. Go figure!

I had a nun doll in primary school; dressed in black. Don’t know what happened to her. Maybe she threw the Habit and turned into a Barbie Doll (or Cindy), while I wasn’t looking.

Check out the Nun Doll Museum or better still, find some of your own memories on Australian Screen online.

The age of historical mythology

Whichever way I turn in my home movie research, I keep bumping up against ‘memory’. Recently I’ve been reading an essay written by the historian Inga Clendinnen called “The history question: who owns the past?”, which was published in The Quarterly Essay.

I’m interested in the history wars and Clendinnen’s illuminating argument about national identity, myth, fiction and history. In a nutshell, her essay questions ‘how we should record and regard the nation’s past’. Clendinnen quotes Milan Kundera, who famously declared that “the struggle of men against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” What we remember, what we forget. How do we remember what we forget? Why does it matter anyway?

Clendinnen’s essay dovetails nicely with research I did recently while visiting Sydney. Ten years ago, an installation Places of Memory was exhibited at the Museum of Sydney. It was created by the screen-based artist Virginia Hilyard and explored the private and collective memories of Sydney through home and amateur movie footage. It included archival and contemporary footage – the latter being shot by Hilyard.

I spoke to several people (curatorial staff at the Museum, access officers at the National Film and Sound Archive, etc) involved in organising the exhibition. During a conversation, one sentence really stuck in my mind. “This (use of home movies) is quite commonplace now, but what Virginia was doing back then had never been done before – it was quite extraordinary”.

This casual remark proved to be the tipping point in my research. An installation I’d never seen, comprised of home movies of people I didn’t know. Where’s the interest? What’s the point? I’ll let Virginia explain in her own words:

Memory can come from the images of others. I was born a quarter of a century after the completion of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, yet I have memories of it during its construction. I can picture the incomplete arc of the bridge even though it is impossible for me to have physically experienced this. Modern memories of a city are found within a living archive – its people and the ways in which they interpret their lives through stories, writings, snapshots and home movies. These provide a place where their private and public experiences converge.

Our memories aren’t necessarily our own, nor are they 100% accurate. Sometimes, we are trying to remember a scene, while on other occasions we try to remember an experience. Home movies are the documents of history. They trigger memories of people, places, experiences (both our own memories and our stolen memories).

Peter Emmett, the senior curator at the Museum of Sydney (circa 1998) argues:

What we call History has established itself as the guardian of an ‘objective past’, but it really dwells within an archive of pictures and text from which to erect a summary vision of the past. It has banished subjective storytelling and lived traditions, the stuff of memory, substituting a fictional order of time progressing towards a future, ever improving on the past. It has severed the present from the past, imposing myth over memory. Have historians and museologists become the guardians of forgetting rather than agents of memory?

So, with Hilyard as my starting point, I’m curious to explore how home movies have been incorporated into screen-based art and documentaries since 1998. I hope to do this by interviewing filmmakers, visual artists and those working in screen culture. I want to see how home movies have managed to ‘leave home’, found their place in the world at large, made friends and are now doggedly challenging historiographic practice.

Cited Works
Clendinnen, Inga. “The History Question. Who owns the past?” Quarterley Essay, Black Ink. Melbourne. Issue 23 2006.

Virginia Hilyard and Peter Emmett essays in “Places of Memory: Sydney Home Movies”. Exhibition installation at the Museum of Sydney. Monograph published by Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, Sydney 1998.

Yayoi Kusama

I was in Sydney last week and went to the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I entered a surreal world filled with organic shapes and lots of polka dots. Yayoi makes large paintings, soft sculptures and environmental sculptures. As a child, she suffered from hallucinations and began seeing dots – lots of dots. They have become a lifelong obsession.

Art makes me think in different ways; it gives me the ability to view the world through someone else’s gaze. I assume this is the case for most people. What I got from Yayoi’s vision was a sense of boundlessness – freedom from space, time, gender, location & ‘normality’.

Entering her Infinity Room initially takes your breath away. You walk through a door into a room. You know you are in a tiny room, but you feel suspended in a space that has no walls, floor or ceiling. Through lights and mirrors, I could instantly suspend believe and simply float in infinity. You become a small part of this silent, colourful, magical, timeless cosmos.

It’s an exhibition I wanted to immediately revisit and explore in greater depth. I returned to Melbourne without doing so. Hopefully I’ll get back to Sydney before the exhibition closes in June.

Yayoi Kusama Dots Obsession

Where everyone’s seen a Godard film

Yesterday I attended a one day forum “New Directions in Film Research“, run by Cinema Studies at La Trobe University, Melbourne. I thought it time to re-engage with ‘all things cinema’ and start to flesh out ideas for my Honours project for 2009. New Directions sounded ideal!

Although I felt rather intimidated by the presence of a battalion of erudite cinema academics, of which I am patently not, I’m pleased I attended. There were three speakers, but my main reason to attend was to hear Deb Verhoeven speaking about how research technologies, new to Screen Studies, can contribute to and expand the type of discovery and articulation within the discipline. Her particular focus, in this instance, was on the use of databases and maps in key screen research projects. And I thought I was the only one interested in mapping cinema…go figure!

Deb spoke about her project ‘Greek and Italian Cinemas in Melbourne’ and the cultural mapping it involved. Her project examined audience experiences and business practices of the independent Greek and Italian cinema chains that operated in Melbourne, Australia from the late 1950s until the late 1970s. This project raises questions about National cinemas in relation to diasporic communities, itinerant cinema and indeed, cinema’s place within the wider social milieu.

What was fascinating was the way Deb has been working with geo-spacial scientists to create maps and databases to track Greek and Italian cinema in Melbourne. This included population location (and movement over time), cinemas opened and closed and exactly where Italian and Greek films were distributed throughout Australia. These visualisations provided a lot of information in a short period of time. Now I just need to focus on narrowing my field of exploration.

how power is organised – ‘antisocial notworking’

Geoff Cox is an artist, teacher and organiser of events connected with digital experimentation in the United Kingdom. Within his curatorial route for Arnolfini, an organisation dealing with contemporary art, he developed an interesting project whose topic is the intersections between critical theory of social networks and critical practice of the world of art.

Geoff’s developed an interesting project called Antisocial notworking. These are the notes about the project and an interview with Geoff talking about social networks. Fascinating stuff – just make sure you’ve got a clear head when attempting the Notes…there’s a lot to take in, but it’s worth the effort.

Also see Art & Social Technologies , which is a research group in the UK that examines creative practice at the intersection of art, technology and society.

Reel Families – the junkheap of private culture

Reel Families

Amateurism deflected the chaotic, the incoherent, and the spontaneous into leisure and private life so that public time would persist as methodical, controllable, and regulated (Zimmermann 11).

Written by Patricia Zimmermann in 1995, Reel Families, is the first historical study of amateur film.  It provides an in-depth account of amateur filmmaking and equipment from the late 1890s to the present, focusing on the changing discourse of aesthetics, creativity and innovation, standards of production, rhetoric and politics.  Zimmermann charts the progress of science, industry, leisure and private life, while firmly situating amateur filmmaking within the domain of ‘upper-and middle-class leisure’. 

The discourse on amateur film technology positions it as opposed to professional technology, or as the intermediary between both the past and the present: filmmaking to chronicle family life.

Two historical articulations of home movies:

Represented technological progress as a popular tool and remedy for interpersonal relations.

They retrieved the past as material could be measured and quantified in footage or reels like workers in time and motion studies.(Zimmermann 44)

In the 1950s, ‘the position, function, and definition of amateur film shifted from aesthetics and technology into a social configuration exclusively administering bourgeois, nuclear-family ideologies’ (Zimmermann 111). It’s interesting to note that familialism, ‘an ideology and social practice that emphasized family relations above other kinds of social or political interaction, wedded amateur film to the blissful domain of the home’ (Zimmermann 132). The domestic domain, a world of women and children was generally captured by a man behind the camera.

The book provided me with an excellent overview of the medium. Still lots of investigating to do!

Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film
By Patricia Rodden Zimmermann
Published by Indiana University Press, 1995
ISBN 0253209447, 9780253209443
187 pages

Bookshops

Anyone who buys from Amazon may be interested in Zoomii. It’s a virtual bookshop, where you can browse the shelves, before placing your order with Amazon. Looks great!