The Home Movie Heritage: From the Archive to the Web - Text 1
One of the themes often addressed in webdocs is that of the use of archives. In fact, this is a genre of the web documentary. Personal archives, non-institutional and even imaginary archives, archives threatened with oblivion: these are the paths from which many web docs start out. Examples include Lost and Found (2012); Pékin sans transition (2012); and Please Call, Very Sentimental (2011). What is common to all these cases is an action by a collector in the beginning: a rag-and-bone collector find (collections of orphaned images, possibly from a lost media age – a Polaroid, a slide, Kodachrome, etc.), and the invention of a form, of an interface for mixing the presentation of these found archives with the narrative the author of the webdoc wishes to impose on these materials. Viewers making their way through the web documentary discover elements of an archive at the same time as they learn to explore the narrative paths now ordering them. What role, then, do archives and cinema’s other institutions play before this appropriation of historical documents by the webdoc?
— Martin Bonnard and Viva Paci
