Ongoing Research Projects
Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI), founded by Dr Caroline Frick, Austin, TX. TAMI’s online archive includes alongside commercial, advertising and instructional films a large collection of home movies and amateur films. Moreover, TAMI collaborates with the Office of the Governor’s Texas Film Commission to administer the Texas Film Round-Up / Texas Moving Image Archive Program. TAMI is one of the few film archives/projects to be currently and actively involved in supporting the use of home movies and amateur films as primary educational sources for the social studies curriculum.
‘Private Pasts and Future Publics‘ by Daniel Mauro (University of Texas at Austin, US)
Mauro is exploring research questions such as whether home movies are ‘truly “representative” of the everyday on a larger scale?’ and ’Do curators/filmmakers/scholars/etc. have the goal of making these films representative, or, is it the context of their selection that necessarily positions them on a representative scale?’. For ongoing feedback relating to this project see the respective in media res webpage.
‘Ephemeral Films: National Socialism in Austria‘
Among the goals of the project are the preservation, scientific exploration and analysis of a unique collection of “ephemeral” films on National Socialism in Austria. The group includes more than fifty films, largely unknown and in need of restoration, which relate to the rise of the NSDAP since 1932, Austria’s “annexation” in 1938, the war period from 1941-42 as well as Jewish everyday life before the expulsion and the Holocaust. These documents – mostly amateur films, but also “Kulturfilme” and other types of sponsored films – derive from the collections of the Austrian Film Museum and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. The two institutions have, in 2011, begun to intensify their collaboration in this field. During the course of the project, the preserved films will be contextualized and made accessible to a broader public in order to complement and correct a discourse which has been dominated to an extreme degree by the imagery of propaganda film.
Events
20th October – the 10th HOME MOVIE DAY. Highlights:
- Vienna: event hosted by the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute and the Austrian Filmmuseum.
- Amsterdam: Special Home Movie Day events at EYE
- Tokyo: 最新のお知らせ
- Canary Islands: at the Filmoteca Canaria
- Los Angeles: Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre
- Bologna: organised by Home Movies-Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia
- Paris: ‘L’inversible’, at Café L’affiche de L’Espace Saint-Michel (Paris, 5e)
- Vasa(FI):Biblioteksgatan 13, Vasa.
- Berlin: Zillestr. 9,(Charlottenburg)
News from the Archives
September 2012: ‘Pageant of Ashdown Forest 1929′, film belonging to the Nightingale Family Collection held by Screen Archive South East, shows Christopher Robin Milne dressed as Winnie-the-Pooh character ’Christopher Robin’ alongside children dressed as Winnie the Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger and Kanga.
September 2012: Farming at Gifford, 1953. Scottish Screen Archive.
August 2012: Lance House Collection, Screen Archive South East, University of Brighton.
August 2012: Amateur films of Mexico, 1935-1941, ‘Stefan Hirsch and Elsa Rogo papers’, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
August 2012 ’Lever-Karst family home movies‘ collection held by the Moving Image Research Collections, University of South Carolina.
July 2012 ‘Discussion of personal film’: Several art and cultural historians have been recently invited by the Northeast Historic Film to discuss amateur film culture and to consider aesthetic intent, audiences and interpretive strategies.
July 2012 ’Enthusiasts: archive‘– a collaborative artwork based on extensive research amongst the remnants of amateur film clubs in Poland under socialism.
See more News from the Archives
Amateur vs Independent
July 2012 Cameron Jamie’s black-and-white ‘BB’ (Super 8, 2000), the first film in his trilogy on ‘ritualized social theatrics in America’. The film is currently screened at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
See more Amateur vs Independent
