News.

Celebrating Home Movies

30 July 2007

Spring (George Eiby, 1963)

Saturday 11 August marks International Home Movie Day, an annual event started in 2002 by a group of film archivists concerned about what would happen to all the home movies shot on film during the 20th century.

As Martin Scorsese writes, " Home movies do not just capture the important private moments of our family's lives, but they are historical and cultural documents as well. Consider Abraham Zapruder's 8mm film that recorded the assassination of President Kennedy… Imagine how different our view of history would be without these precious films.”

Home Movie Day will be celebrated in Wellington at the Film Archive with an exhibition and special screening. Wellington writer and film maker Kathy Dudding spent over seven months watching hundreds of hours of New Zealanders at play, at work and most importantly, at home, during her first contract at the Film Archive. Employed to catalogue boxes and boxes of home movie film footage shot on all gauges (8mm, Super 8, 16mm, 9.5mm) from the 1920s until the video camera made film obsolete in the 1980s, Dudding says it was a dream job.

Dudding delighted in the job. “I watched it all. Over seven months I saw hundreds of “baby on the lawn” shots, weddings, anniversaries through the ages, scenic holiday destinations, and some spectacular gems which made the job constantly exciting. I never knew what might come next and the excitement of hunt for treasure never waned.”

A self-confessed amateur film buff, Dudding’s catalogue work with the Film Archive, her previous film making background and her love of the medium, has led to her upcoming exhibition, This is not a family album which opens at the Film Archive mediagallery on 10 August. This exhibition will coincide with a talk by Dudding, a special film screening of home movies and a music event on Saturday 11 August.

This is not a family album is a video art installation which explores the relationship between image and text. One group of monitors display images selected from home movies shot in the 1950-60s, while on the other are short typewritten narratives. The home movies are dreamscapes: happy images of happy families. Conversely, each of the texts relate a traumatic event. The stories and the home movie footage have various levels of incongruity - some have more obvious connections than others.

The home movie footage in the exhibition is drawn from Dudding’s own archive of found film which she has sourced from various places around the globe: either gifted by friends, purchased on Trade Me or even more unusual locales, including a secondhand Catholic shop in Rome.

In addition to using found footage in her video art work and films, Dudding also has an academic interest in home movies having presented a paper ‘Leaving Home: From the lounge room to the medialounge’ at the Film and History Conference of Australia and New Zealand (2006). Dudding will re-present this paper as part of an afternoon of events at the Film Archive celebrating International Home Movie Day, Saturday 11 August.

The celebrations will also include a collection of home movie treasures from the Film Archive’s amateur collection and a live soundtrack performance by DJ Alphabethead.

Following the talk and film screening DJ Alphabethead will perform a live soundtrack set to four films from the Archive’s collection. The former national turntable champion is a relentless explorer of musics perimeters combining turntable samples from pipe bands to free jazz to hip hop. He will be performing during a screening of home movies.