Search Results

This chapter analyzes the home movies and family albums of Eva Braun. As Adolf Hitler’s mistress, Braun had unprecedented access to Hitler and his immediate circle, thus giving her images the potential to reveal many secrets about herself and Hitler. It interprets the images for their conversation with visual modernity in their midst, as well as their contribution to a more complicated picture of Braun and, by extension, the role of women in the political and social elite of Nazi Germany. It describes their uniqueness, being documents of a single person’s life and extends to their documentation of her identity as a well-known historical figure, thus belonging to a different memory culture. It explains her association with the images as the reason for their distance to the present. In turn, this distance enables a different kind of witnessing from that explored in relation to other images.

The turn toward intimate terrains and private life is a major trend in contemporary documentary. Materials, styles, and themes germane to the photo album and the home movie increasingly migrate to the documentary screen and into the public sphere. As this chapter discusses, this move does not represent a retreat from the social and the historical in favor of atomistic or narcissistic self-involvement but rather a changing approach to the sociohistoric, which is rendered through the self-conscious and refracting lens of personal experience and located in the microcosm of interpersonal relationships. Engaging with the history and theory of familial image-making, this chapter explores the reworking of the home mode in Consuelo Lins’s Babás (2010), Gabriel Mascaro’s Doméstica (2012), and João Moreira Salles’s Santiago (2007)—three films that deal with relationships of power, labor, and servitude in private life and the home.

This chapter provides an in-depth interview with Péter Forgács about filmmaking. Through his series of videos, Forgács dedicates himself to the retrieval of home movies and amateur films made in Europe from the 1930s to the 1950s and to recycling these films into memorable excursions into moments and places not available in official histories of this momentous era. While home movies and amateur films exemplify general historical developments or the human condition, Forgács does considerable research into the particular films he works with so he can provide specific information about nonprofessional filmmakers and about the family members and friends recorded in the imagery. The resulting films create very unusual experiences during which we are able to experience, seemingly from the inside, the real lives of families not our own.

This chapter marks a return to De Palma's roots in comedy with Home Movies (1980), which was similar to The Wedding Party (1964–65), Greetings (1968), and Hi, Mom! (1970), all made in the 1960s. Another sense in which the new film marked a “coming home” for De Palma was that he returned to Sarah Lawrence, the college where as a student he had gained his first filmmaking experience under mentor Wilford Leach. Now De Palma would be the mentor, giving later students some hands-on filmmaking experience, since Home Movies would be made by them as part of a class that De Palma was teaching on how to make a low-budget film.

This chapter examines Péter Forgács’s slow-motion technique and manipulation of the film time. It discusses that the effect of repersonalization brought about by Forgács’s films is not only the result of the specific genre of home movies but also the result of his intensification of qualities of the broader genre of the moving image as such. Forgács manipulation of moving images—back and forth movement, slow-downs, the stopping for a few seconds—creates a rhythm that makes the aliveness of the movements a deeply sensorial experience. The technique creates a distance between real time and the time of the moving images. This denaturalizes the viewer’s reception of time and movement, as a result of which the viewer become overwhelmed by the life embodied in these moving images.

Amateur stereo photography and 3D moviemaking are traced and their influence, along with that of 3D photo clubs, on the beginnings of the 3D movie boom in Hollywood. The practice of amateur 3D moviemaking with “home movies” and 3D is also traced up to the present day.

This chapter analyzes the film The Bartos Family in which Péter Forgács establishes the principles behind his use of the home movie as document. The use of home movies as documents is the factor that contributed most significantly to the legitimacy of this scorned genre. Almost everywhere in the world film archives are opening collections of amateur cinema. Forgács himself created the Foundation of Private Photograph and Film in Budapest in 1983. The manner in which Forgács introduces the different members of the Bartos family aims to make us aware of the hierarchical nature of the bourgeois family. The chapter also argues that cinema is integrated into the life of the Bartos family: it is a facilitator of family connections.

The memory of political militancy and of the dictatorship (1964–1985) is a frequent topic in recent Brazilian films. This chapter maps out the historical context for these films and offers ways to understand the significance of these works, which deal with the transfer from communicative and embodied forms of remembering to durable memory formats, as well as with the transfer of memory from one generation to another. The chapter discusses films by former political militants, such as João Batista de Andrade, Silvio Da-Rin, and Lúcia Murat, but focuses especially on outstanding new works by the daughters of political militants, such as Petra Costa, Flávia Castro, and Maria Clara Escobar. While the work of former militants emphasizes testimonial memory and indexical records, second-generation works emphasize the fragmentary inheritance of memory and deploy an abundance of familial tropes and forms of filiation and affiliation to negotiate their subject positions vis-à-vis private and public pasts.

This chapter reviews Diary of the Dead (2007). Written and directed by Romero and co-produced by his partner, Peter Grunwald, Diary of the Dead explores the very nature of contemporary spectatorship and the dangers inherent in new technologies that make their users little different from carnivorous zombies. The film is Romero's version of Jean-Luc Godard's “return to zero” in Le gai savoir (1969). It also parallels Brian DePalma's intention in directing Home Movies (1979). Diary of the Dead may also be seen as an equivalent of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980) but lacking that film's big-budget pitfalls and other flaws. While Heaven's Gate reveals late-nineteenth-century corporate capitalism planning genocide for European immigrants and working-class Americans in the same way that they did with the original inhabitants of the Land of the Free, Diary of the Dead unveils a similar dehumanization operating within a supposedly diverse twenty-first-century media apparatus. Diary of the Dead is a devastating critique of a contemporary human condition in which the media has a certain investment.

This chapter provides an overview of Péter Forgács’s film The Maelstrom. It argues that Forgács’s challenge as a filmmaker, as an archivist, and as a film explorer is to preserve the ordinariness of his subjects even as he frames them for us in extraordinary times. Melodrama, skepticism, and irony are three standard responses to the nonfiction film, responses that may have more potency with regard to the reframing and rethinking of home movies that is part of Forgács’s project. Forgács introduces a mode of comparison into Maelstrom that is both extreme and delicate. The Peerebooms are not the only family pictured in the film. He also takes us into the world of the Seyss-Inquarts by showing earlier clips from an amateur film of a Nazi youth group in Holland in 1935 and by voice-overs that announce Hitler’s welcome in Vienna in 1938 and the attack on Western Europe in 1940.

This chapter focuses on Péter Forgács’s video films. Forgács’s video films concentrate on periods of extraordinary upheaval and cultural loss—World War II and the establishment of east-bloc Communism. His video films are structured almost entirely of home-movie footage shot by amateur photographers between 1929 and 1969. A home movie focuses on emotionally charged moments, and with the exception of occasions like weddings, it is more concerned with personal than with social events. Forgács uses home movies because he is not interested in recounting history in any of the usual ways. The significant moments of the twentieth century are always present in his films. Forgács marginalizes official history because he wants us to understand that time does not unfold through a collective narrative.

The focus of this chapter is on Sam Fuller’s May 1945 post-liberation 16mm film depicting the dressing and burial of corpses at the Falkenau camp, which housed prisoners of war in deplorable conditions. American troops forced local townspeople to perform this act of repentance and witnessing. This film is unique in its depiction of such a singularly traumatic and important event in the filmmaker’s life, and of such a carefully orchestrated ritual. The chapter also examines the rest of Fuller’s previously unexplored amateur war footage. This footage, shot well before Fuller directed his first film in Hollywood, forms the basis of Fuller’s raw and complex relationship to images of violence, trauma, and conflict.

Chapter 1 traces the split screen forms at issue in the book back to a widespread impulse in the mid-twentieth century to map the United States via moving images. This impulse emerged, the chapter argues, in the convergence of multiple strands of mid-twentieth-century culture, including booms in road culture, the family, patriotism, and small-gauge filmmaking. Analyzing screen maps of the nation from a range of non-theatrical (a.k.a. “orphan”) film road trips, including amateur film (home movies) and corporate films promoting bus and car travel, it detects across them shared tropes for seeing, imagining, and reimagining the nation as a whole through a more and less pronounced regionalized screen rhetoric of national citizenship. In it, the South is variously marked by audiovisual signs of trouble, and the West routinely emerges as the onscreen space with which to champion national ideals.

Austrian filmmaker Gustav Deutsch has been a major contributor to what has come to be called “found-footage filmmaking” and/or “recycled cinema”—that is, he is best-known for making films from other films. This interview focuses on a range of his projects: his first found-footage project, an exploration of home movies made by Austrians visiting the Italian coast in the years after Super-8mm became a popular film gauge for documenting family events; a collaborative diptych of Place, made with an Algerian friend, comparing the Algerian oasis Figuig and Deutsch’s native Vienna; his revisiting of proto-cinematic technologies in the construction of a panoramic camera obscura on a Greek island; his remarkable feature film Shirley—Visions of Reality (2013) in which he (and his partner Hanna Schimek) dramatize a series of canonical Edward Hopper paintings; and the recent Notes and Sketches 1: 31 Pocket Films. 2005–2015, a panorama of everyday events, made with new camera technologies.

Cary Grant had good reason to dislike biographies. Many of his own biographers (including those writing before and after his death) insisted that he was defined by a “dark side’ that lay hidden beneath his charm and good looks. The starting point of this book is the aim to offer a fair, sympathetic, documented account of Grant’s life, and one based on extensive archival research, including the star’s own personal papers and home movies. The Introduction also addresses what in recent times has become one of the key issues in accounts of his life, his sexuality, stating that there are few signs that he had gay relationships but many signs that he had genuinely romantic and sexual relationships with women.

In this chapter, Michael McCluskey looks at amateur films/home movies about rural Britain, including footage of Sussex, Yorkshire, Cornwall and Kent, in order to understand changes in rural areas and to make new connections between media history and social history. He argues that these films, preserved in the collections of Britain’s regional media archives as well as the British Film Institute and private collections, offer ‘visible evidence’ of the impact of modernization: what was destroyed, what was preserved, who adapted, who did not. They show interest in farming, rural crafts, village traditions, and threats of intruding motorists and the spread of the suburbs, but they also offer access to places and exchanges otherwise absent from these familiar depictions. The films participate in a broader process of what Andrew Causey calls ‘stocktaking’: an interwar interest in documenting what were feared to be disappearing people, places, and patterns of behaviour.