Recycling Home Movies

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Notes

[1] Other small-gauge films, which are no longer manufactured, include 9.5 mm, 17.5 mm and 22 mm.

[2] A section of los superocheros' manifesto reads:

For anyone with an honest mental lucidity, a Super-8 mm film represents the values, the true criticism that can be made of a system, which has virtues and defects, that is, that the economic cost of a film does not correspond to its quality, because with the twelve millions used for the production of Zapata, for example, we could have made 10,000 super-8 films which would represent all our historical, social and artistic content. (Lerner, 1999, p. 37)

[3] Microcinemas can be broadly defined as ‘a range of small screening spaces specializing in moving image media that hovers out of range of national distribution, air-conditioned art houses, and sleek museums’ (Alston & Peters, 2002, p. 28).

[4] This kind of historical grounding of technologies in origins of the familiar is marked in Marshall McLuhan's approach to technological advancements:

novels are the already obsolescent content of television; writing ‘turned a spotlight on the high, dim Sierras of speech’; the movie is the ‘mechanization of movement and gesture’; ‘photography is the mechanization of the perspective painting and the arrested eye’. (Kroker, 1984, p. 55)

[5] Although it is beyond the scope of this essay, it would be interesting to consider the continuities and differences between small-gauge home movie making and the more public practice of videoblogging. Considering these two practices together throws open questions about the relationship between public and private audiences, the material and immaterial, and the fleeting and permanent.

[6] For a discussion of moving images and digital archives, see Gray and Sheppard (2004).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jane Simon

Jane Simon is a PhD candidate in the Department of Gender Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include experimental film, obsolete media and microhistory.