Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories [Paperback]

Karen L. Ishizuka (Editor), Patricia R. Zimmermann (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 5, 2007

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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

"By claiming home movies as essential tools of historiography, Ishizuka and Zimmerman manage to break down artificial barriers between public histories and private records. In this groundbreaking volume, their selection of visionary essays offers a way to reclaim devalued work and turn the tables on the cataloguers. Absolutely required reading for historians, curators and media analysts."--B. Ruby Rich, author of Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement

About the Author

Karen L. Ishizuka is an independent writer, curator, and documentary producer and is the author of Lost and Found: Reclaiming the Japanese American Incarceration (2006). Patricia R. Zimmerman is Professor of Cinema and Photography at Ithaca College. She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (1995) and States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (2000).

Product Details

• Paperback: 360 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (December 5, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520248074
• ISBN-13: 978-0520248076
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #896,539 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars The B.L.O. v. 2.0: Liberating Your Brain, One Cell at a Time, May 5, 2010

By 

Cybracero Holdout - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (Paperback)

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!