![]() ![]() At most, the title of a film roll implies a certain interest on the part of its creator. Home moviemakers generally did not produce or leave behind any reliable information on the production or reception of their movies. This is why historians, even when doing visual history, privilege written sources. ![]() Thus, one challenge for historians in the case of home movies is the lack of contextual information. So what distinguishes these film reels from other home movies is the context: a vacation movie from the US is not the same as a vacation movie from the GDR. Eva Braun was the partner of the German dictator, the man chiefly responsible for the Holocaust, whose visitors were mostly mass murderers. However, this very example illustrates that not all home movies are alike, simply because these are not some orphan films of just any home moviemaker. If we were to watch the home movies of Eva Braun without having any further information, he claims, Adolf Hitler would appear to be a sympathetic elderly man, who regularly wears uniforms, likes playing with his dog, and jokes around with visitors against the backdrop of mountain scenery. What purpose would there be in analyzing such sources, if hardly any social, cultural, or political differences are visible when comparing home movies from the US, France, the UK, West Germany, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, or East Germany? However, Odin contradicts himself in the same article. If Odin were right, then research on home movies would be more than merely challenging for historians. With such repetitions, discouragement and lassitude sometimes overtake spectators, weakening informational value. The same ritual ceremonies (marriage, birth, family meals, gift-giving), the same daily scenes (a baby in his mother’s arms, a baby having a bath), the same vacation sequences (playtime on the beach, walks in the forest) appear across most home movies. Nothing resembles a home movie as much as another one. Why this reservation among scholars? One reason is due to the characteristic features of home movies, which French film scholar Roger Odin concisely describes as follows: Accordingly, they should examine modern cultural and economic developments in countries like the GDR. ![]() If historians want to understand socialist societies in the twentieth century, they need to consider not only their distinguishing features, but also their similarities to Western societies. It is an intriguing contradiction that people were offered an individual content production device under a dictatorship, and yet historians and media scholars have overlooked such sources in the last decades. 5ĭespite the unfree press and suppression of political opposition, politicians wanted the GDR to be recognized internationally as an industrialized country, which included the use of visual recording devices in people’s leisure time, a technology that enabled them to express themselves visually outside the state’s sphere of influence. East German advertisements popularized these devices with images of nuclear families filming abroad and then screening their movies at home this was a transnational iconography of technological consumerism. Nonetheless, narrow-gauge devices were sold in the GDR from the late 1950s until the 1980s, because they symbolized modern ideas of family, consumption, and technology. Whereas 18 percent of US households owned a camera in the early 1970s, at the height of Super 8, the figure for East German households stood at just 2.7 percent. 3ĭue to shortages in supply and shifting priorities in the centrally planned economy, 8 mm and Super 8 cameras and projectors were not a bestseller in the GDR. Home cameras and projectors were also available in socialist societies like the German Democratic Republic (GDR). For more than fifty years, people around the globe preserved their lives on celluloid under changing political and cultural circumstances.īut it was not just in liberal consumer societies that families recorded vacations and rites of passage. With the growing global prosperity after the Second World War, from the 1950s onward narrow-gauge devices became mass commodities in the United States, Japan, and Western Europe. In the beginning, this expensive technology was predominantly used by middle-class people to document family events. Such movies were neither produced by famous artists nor screened for political reasons. Footage with this familiar aesthetic was shot on 8 mm between the 1930s and 1980s and on Super 8 from the 1960s until the 1980s. Unknown people wave to the camera or speak directly to the audience, but remain silent because there is no sound. They show snapshots of vacations, and then suddenly jump to a family celebration. Home movies are often over- or underexposed. ![]()
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