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(More customer reviews)As the first decade of the 21st century comes to a close, the film world is abuzz: the future of 3D technology, a female winning the Oscar for Best Director, the divorce of a woman named Sandy B. I choose, instead, to present to you something that creates a more natural buzz--one that will get your neurons firing by threatening and unsettling the comfort of today's dominant visuality.
Mining the Home Movie, artfully edited by Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann, boldly asks readers to turn one's thinking about cinema inside out, to reverse popular-culture assumptions about home movies. Bringing together a diverse group--a semiotician, a film historian, a genographer, a film theorist, a philosopher of history, an anthropologist, a librarian, archivists, postcolonial theorists, a writer and producer, and filmmakers--a series of questions is opened and explored. The authors attempt to answer and probe the promise and problematics of home movies and amateur film--the unseen cinemas of public memories and traumatic histories.
Presented are abstractions of race, class, gender, and nation as they are lived and as a part of everyday life. The range of amateur film discussed in this volume represents a diversity of voices operating within different discursive formations--travel films, missionary works, narratives, amateur ethonographies, industries, family films. Navigating between private memories and social histories, they stand as a variety of forms as they are lived and as a part of everyday life.
Mining the Home Movies reclaims amateur film as an active, constantly changing historiographic practice that creates collaborations and convergences across borders of nations, identities, genders, ethnicities, races, sexualities, politics, and families. Home movies, we are reminded, are always fractured, incomplete, historical memories.
Amateur film urges us all to reimagine the archive and film historiography. Rather than ending, Zimmermann reminds us, we need new beginnings; home movies constitute an imaginary archive that is never completed, always fragmentary, vast, and infinite. In popular imagination, archives are often framed as the depositories of old, dead cultural artifacts--and yet archives are always in the process of addition, always expanding, always open.
As an individual who works with a disenfranchised population within the lowest socioeconomic status, I was particularly moved by the editors' essay on Topaz--home movies taken in one of the United States World War II prison camps for Japanese Americans. We are reminded that Topaz is the first film in the Library of Congress National Film Registry that is truly a collaborative history, born of a grassroots ethnic American community, produced as a form of participant observation in an American concentration camp. Not simply the documentary evidence of a lost evident, Topaz marks the tracing of a trauma unresolved, yet worked though in images.
Reflecting on the title, which one of us cannot begin to feel as though the collective mine has begun to collapse? Surely Zimmermann's grandfather said it best. "When the canary died, we all could die, so it was time to move out--together." With the year 2010 upon, now is the time: let us reimagine, reinvent, and remobilize. Miners unite!
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The first international anthology to explore the historical significance of amateur film, Mining the Home Movie makes visible, through image and analysis, the hidden yet ubiquitous world of home moviemaking. These essays boldly combine primary research, archival collections, critical analyses, filmmakers' own stories, and new theoretical approaches regarding the meaning and value of amateur and archival films. Editors Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann have fashioned a groundbreaking volume that identifies home movies as vital methods of visually preserving history. The essays cover an enormous range of subject matter, defining an important genre of film studies and establishing the home movie as an invaluable tool for extracting historical and social insights.
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