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MINING THE HOME MOVIE: EXCAVATIONS IN HISTORIES AND MEMORIES Karen L Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmerwann, eds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, 333 pp.
Beginning in the 1970s, filmmakers from both the independent and studio world systematically began to incorporate home movies in the visual tracks of their work. Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973), Alfred Guzzetti's Family Portrait Sittings (1975), and Michelle Citron's groundbreaking Daughter Rite (1980) paved the way for both the commercial and independent uses of home movies in cinema. Home movies, amateur film, archival footage, and found footage have since enjoyed a broad popularity in commercial and non-commercial media work, and today are a visual staple of many films and videos.
Scholarship has curiously lagged behind in this area. Although Jonas Mekas's lifelong dedication to the home movie aesthetic has often formed the basis for research in the avant-garde, rigorous intellectual inquiry into the history and nature of the home movie itself (and its ancillary "amateur film" cousin) has been intermittent. In 1986 the Journal of Film and Video dedicated an entire issue to home movies, and subsequently scholars such as William Wees The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films, 1993), Patricia R. Zimmermann (Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film, 1995), Michelle Citron (Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions, 1998), and James Moran (There's No Place Like Home Movies, 2002) produced book-length studies on the multifaceted areas of home and amateur film and video.
Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories promises to construct a historical collage of the home and amateur movie by bringing together "contradictory modes of interpretation" (22). Providing a range of approaches to the topic from a variety of people including media makers, theorists, historians, and archivists, editors Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann have...