The ‘Private Films in Public Spaces‘ session is curated by Karianne Fiorini and Dwight Swanson.
“In the last twenty years, more or less, numerous film collectors, families, and film archives devoted to the home movie heritage of the last century have put their home movie collections (or at least part of them) online, providing them with the images and information needed to give us an idea of which kind of materials the virtual spectators are going to have access to. Curated by home movies specialists Karianne Fiorini (Italy) and Dwight Swanson (the United States), “Private Films in Public Spaces” is a program of home movies and amateur films found online, a virtual voyage around Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world, with a spotlight on two of the main characteristics of the home movie heritage’s most enlightening subjects: private lives and public events.
Talking about home movies on the Internet means diving into a mare magnum of websites, catalogs, databases, repositories, and other online resources in which you can completely lose yourself in the huge amount of film materials available online in terms of beauty, customs and traditions, social richness, geographic spaces, and the cultural peculiarities which have brought the viewers through time and space. This program is an attempt to outline some possible personal paths by surfing through different routes: film archives, countries, cultures, people, historical eras, and events.
All these journeys all around the world through the eyes of the “amateurs” and their small gauge cameras will offer to the public a glimpse into what we can find online and on what home movies are (or can be) without any attempt to be exhaustive. After following the whole path, each home movie reveals itself to be different from the others, so at least from now on we hopefully will no longer hear the usual comments about these films, “they are all the same,” or “if you watch one of them you have seen them all!”.
