The Home Movie Heritage: From the Archive to the Web - Text 2
Home movies have only recently become part of our cultural heritage and a topic of special interest for film archives and cultural institutions all around the world, and consequently for artists, filmmakers, academics and more generally for a new audience. In the past two decades, a major effort has been made by numerous film archives devoted to the home movie heritage of the previous century to make their collections accessible online, facing the possibilities and the potentials of the Internet and at the same time keeping track of archival processes.
The whole preservation process consists in different archival activities that are behind the process of safeguarding these long-neglected film materials: collecting, inventorying, restoring, digitizing, gathering oral histories and cataloguing. Preserving and making these films accessible to a new audience, outside the family itself, in artistic, academic and public contexts, raises a series of problems concerning their status. Films conceived and realized to be shared in a family and a private setting become through a specific archival path accessible publicly as documents of collective memories of twentieth-century daily life. In this transition from private to public setting the home movie heritage needs to be strictly linked to its original context, and film archives play a crucial role in this scenario.
Among the essential parts of the archival preservation path to provide these films with a new life, besides conservation and the digital interventions of the film elements, stands the process of gathering oral memories in such a way that the amateur filmmakers and their families become a fundamental part of the safeguarding procedures. This methodological approach transforms the cataloguing work in an active and valuable description process, bringing the archivists and the documentarians to describe not only what they can see in the images, but by going deeply into what the images hide or are not able to say through the surfaces, bringing to light the social, historical and biographical contexts in which these films were made.
Hundreds of film archives around the world, mainly in the Western countries, have shared their home movie collections online in different ways and following different approaches: a mare magnum of websites, catalogues, databases, repositories and other online resources in which everyone can have access to millions of home movies provided with contextual information of varying degrees of detail.
All these films portraying glimpses of private and public life, in private and public settings, are organized and structured in various forms, and compose an endless work-in-progress moving-image fresco of the twentieth century. Countless different private gazes, at the disposal of historians, sociologists, anthropologists and other scholars, but also a new wave of filmmakers, artists and various typologies of explorers who can watch, re-use, re-contextualize, re-frame and expand the meaning of all these images in new art forms or historical formats. In this broad scenario, it is certainly important to mention some of the web portals that stand out in Europe and the United States and are representative of different approaches to making home movie collections accessible online.
In France, a country with a solid commitment in this domain, it is worth mentioning the Mémoire normande project curated by Normandie Images in which, besides the traditional access to a database through a set of keywords, it is possible to follow different thematic paths; the Ciclic Centre-Val de Loire, which has released a very large number of films, more than twelve thousand home movies, enabling the various explorers to make a contribution to the cataloguing work directly through an online form; and Cinémémoire: cinémathèque marseillaise de films amateurs, which is not only specifically devoted to the home movie heritage of the whole region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, but has an important focus on the home movie heritage of the old French colonies, and female amateur filmmakers, a minority in this twentieth-century practice.
In the Netherlands, one of the first countries in Europe where a national home movie archive was created in the early 1980s, the Smalfilmmuseum of Hilversum, the Dutch Amateur Film Platform brings together different home movie collections coming from different Dutch film archives, but mainly from the National Institute for Sound and Vision (Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid) – which acquired the amateur film collections of the Smalfilmmuseum in 2006 – in which explorers can follow different thematic paths curated by the archivists themselves, such as “The Liberation of the Netherlands” or the “Life in the Netherlands in the 1950s.”
In Italy, it is important to mention the Home Movie Archives and Home Movie Collection Survey project, promoted by the Central Institute for Archives (ICAR-Istituto Centrale per gli Archivi), through which ten home movie collections from three different Italian home movie archives, Cineteca Sarda (Cagliari), Superottimisti (Torino) and Cinescatti (Bergamo) have been released in the Ancestor Web Portal of the National Archival System, in a form resembling biographical web documentaries, created by the archivist and curator of the project using the Klynt software. These series follow the life of different Italian families chronologically, covering the whole twentieth century, providing all the films with information gathered during the archival process through title cards and subtitles.
In conclusion, it worth mentioning the significant American repository Home Movie Archives Database (HMAD) in which the home movie collections of more than 200 film archives and university libraries are gathered together to be explored and discovered.
