From 8 mm to iPhone: views from the crowd provide a rich source of local history

Abstract

Home movies and videos have not traditionally been seen as key resources informing cultural or historical studies. Yet recent moves to raise the profile of home movies and acknowledge their value as historical documents, particularly focused on the family and locality, has seen a growing awareness of the need for their acquisition and preservation. For local-studies collections, movies, video and now digital media should feature as part of the broader collecting policy. This paper presents an overview of the media and their importance, focusing on their relevance to such collections, and discusses a range of approaches to their acquisition, handling and management.

Keywords:

• home movies
• local studies
• digital media
• audiovisual collections

Implications for best practice

•	Local-studies librarians need to be proactive in acquiring home movies, video and digital productions relevant to their locale;
•	This can be tied in with focused activities celebrating History Week or Home Movie Day;
•	Managing and making available such collections can be quite straightforward, with only a modest commitment of time and resources needed to train staff and manage the collections.

Most of us have seen it – grainy, scratchy, silent amateur film footage of a family occasion or event that has been incorporated into a modern production in order to bring in a personal and evocative touch. Home or amateur movies – the terms will be used interchangeably – have long been recognised in the documentary film and television business as having considerable power to evoke an emotional response in audiences. Despite their original purpose of documenting a highly personal situation, many have an almost universal appeal or resonance with viewers, which can make them a valuable resource for documentary-makers worldwide. However, these personal visual narratives can also be significant historical documents in their own right, perhaps the best example being the Abraham Zapruder footage of President Kennedy's assassination in 1963 that formed the primary piece of evidence studied by the Warren Commission in their investigations of the shooting. More recently, of course, with the ubiquity of mobile phones with cameras, the opportunity for the passer-by to capture critical events has never been better.

The traditional terms ‘home movies’ and ‘amateur films’ in the context of this paper describe productions, in any media, that are undertaken by the creator with no commercial or public-broadcast intent. Originally such productions would have been on 16 mm film, then more commonly on 8 mm, shot by an amateur with no other thought than to record a family activity (weddings, holidays and travel are very common) for viewing by a very limited audience of family and friends. They are usually silent (though some form of soundtrack is often added later, particularly if the footage has been digitised), black and white, and with very little editing. The typical three-minute reel of 8 mm film shows family members hamming it up for the camera, with no intention of creating anything other than a trivial snapshot of their lives. As Waters (2012) has said, ‘[T]here's no such thing as a bad home movie’, with the viewer interpreting it from within their own context – what is seen as ephemeral, poorly shot and of little consequence to some may be a moving memory from a semi-mythologised past to others.

Due to the costs involved in filming (the camera, film stock, developing), most early home-movie footage was created by the middle class, recording their activities and interests on 16 mm (or occasionally, 9.5 mm) film. With the availability of smaller, cheaper 8 mm film and cameras in the early 1930s, followed a few years later by the introduction of colour film by Kodak, the popularity of movie-making amongst the broader population increased considerably. However, it was the post-war period that saw its heyday, with Kodak launching a cassette-based Super 8 mm format in the mid-1960s to great success (Marriott and Marriott n.d.). The lower processing costs associated with the smaller-gauge film, the simplicity of using a cassette-based system and the relative cheapness of cameras led to amateur movie-making expanding out to all sections of society.

This expansion accelerated with the introduction of the hand-held video recorder, offering the potential for easy video capture, complete with sound and the possibilities offered by one-hour-plus videotapes with no further costs after their original purchase. See for instance the Minolta C-1E (1987) promotional video, emphasising its ease of use and the level of automation built into the camera. This ease of use and the availability of 60-minute-plus tapes led amateur videographers to tackle not only the traditional source materials of home movies – family events, holidays and the like – but also to branch out into longer, reporting-type recordings. Thus home movies no longer captured just a short slice from a family event, typical of a three-minute home movie, but could now capture the entire event – the whole parade, football match, gymkhana or wedding. This far more wide-ranging coverage, with opportunities to capture local detail in so much more depth, can make videos an especially valuable resource today. Yet little has been written regarding home video, the focus being still firmly on film, with Hetrick (2006) commenting that amateur video has only recently come to the attention of archivists. She goes on to make a call for cooperation and community outreach by archives in order to develop programs for video acquisition.

Since around 2000, there has been a rapid take-up of digital cameras, again with lower entry costs, greater portability, and simplicity of use and ease of playback being key features to their success. And since the introduction of smart phones in particular, with built-in reasonable-quality camera and video functionality, the opportunity for anyone to capture or create their own mini-home movies has become almost universal. This may not be without social concerns, with Gye (2007) noting (of still photography, but by inference applicable to moving images) that this easy availability has raised two conflicting discourses in the public arena: the first being concern over privacy and the improper use of such technologies, and the other welcoming these technologies as invaluable tools for documenting life and presenting the results to a worldwide audience. Whatever view is taken, it is likely that the amount of amateur footage now being created on a daily basis is probably greater by orders of magnitude than all the home movies ever shot on film: YouTube (2013) reports that over 100,000 hours of video are uploaded every day.

The audio-visual (AV) media generally has long been seen as providing a rich resource documenting society over the last 100 years or so, with IFLA (2004) guidelines emphasising that the ‘[a]udiovisual media are part of our cultural heritage, carrying a huge amount of information that needs to be preserved for future use’, going on to recommend that locally created materials should be a focus for collecting. Edmondson (2004), in his wide-ranging overview of the practice of audio-visual archiving points out the increasing importance of audio-visual productions as part of the world's memory and goes on to outline the challenges faced in preserving such material and the benefits that can come from establishing regional or local collections. Finally, UNESCO (2012), in recognition of the importance of the audio-visual heritage in maintaining the cultural identity of societies, inaugurated the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage in order to help build public awareness, promote the acquisition and preservation of AV materials, and gather financial, technical and political support to safeguard this heritage.

Traditionally, the acquisition and management of AV collections has been undertaken by major organisations with appropriate infrastructure and the resources deemed necessary to effectively manage and preserve such collections for the long term. In Australia, the key body is the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, although many other major institutions also hold significant audio-visual collections. However, it will never be possible for such national institutions to focus more than fleetingly upon specific neighbourhoods, locales or activities, or indeed on amateur or home-movie productions generally. Which is where the local-studies collections, or local-history departments of the public library, can play a key role. With their neighbourhood focus, they are in a good position to take the lead in building, managing and preserving collections of locally produced film, video and now digital objects relevant to their locale and the people who live there.

Chowdhury et al. (2006) talk about the value of local-community knowledge, including recollections and memories, emphasising the new role for the public-library user as not only a consumer but also now as a creator of knowledge, important for understanding a community. They conclude that one of the aims of the twenty-first-century public library is to become a platform to enable its community to build a repository of local knowledge, in order to build a valuable local resource that can then link in with broader national and international endeavours. While their focus is on the use of Web 2.0 tools, this approach can be broadened to include user-created film, video or digital productions more broadly.

Thus this paper will consider the importance of home movies more broadly and report on a brief investigation into the existing holdings of public libraries in New South Wales. It will suggest strategies that the library, in supporting their local community, could implement to ensure this potentially rich resource evidencing local life over the last 100 years can be preserved and made accessible for future generations.

The role of amateur productions

Recognition of the potential role that such amateur movies may play as another tool in better understanding our past and our cultural heritage has grown in recent years. Activities such as the 2003 SBS-commissioned series of short productions Homemade History, billed as offering ‘colourful, intimate, and occasionally out of focus stories […] that fill a gap in our formal history’ (Ronin Films) and the establishment in 2004 of Home Movie Day (http://www.homemovieday.com/index.html), supported by the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), have helped raise their profile within the more formal film-archiving community. Successful documentaries utilising home-movie footage have been used to help tell a bigger story (for example, The Second World War in Colour), getting the medium into the public arena with high levels of commercial success. The producer of this particular series noted the richness that home movies could bring to such documentaries and a reviewer of the series noted that it was the ‘home movies rather than the official footage that is the freshest’ (Gilbert 1999). Such comments have been echoed elsewhere, with Boyle (2009, 223) noting they add ‘an often poignant and personal touch to an otherwise glossy production’. Similarly, Renov (n.d.), in reviewing Forgacs' film The Maelstrom, which uses a range of amateur-film footage, talks of these ‘rescued images imbued with uncanny historical resonances’.

Nicholson (1997, 199), described amateur movies as ‘windows on past geographies and memories’, noting their power to ‘redeem neglected voices, experiences from the past’ by complementing formal, official visions of the past. In later work, she emphasises the potential of these movies to illustrate lost or only vaguely remembered traditions, the incidental details of daily life, and attitudes and values in an unselfconscious but meaningful manner (Nicholson 2003). Using a specific example, Nicholson (2001, 134) describes how this particular footage serves to provide a ‘detailed and intimate’ picture of a locality in a 20-year process of fundamental social and physical change. Edmonds (2007), too, notes this focus on locality and refers to curator Paolo Simoni, responsible for a regional film collection in Italy, saying that home movies are rich in information about the lives and backgrounds of ordinary people.

This focus on home movies providing insights into day-to-day life echoes an increasing interest in histories reflecting the lives of ordinary people, with researchers looking beyond the traditional materials of archives and official papers in order to better understand the nature and the milieu of everyday life. It is this power to ‘negotiate between private memories and social histories’ (Zimmerman 2008, 4) that makes home movies such a rich primary source, offering perspectives and insights which until recently, have been largely overlooked. They also on occasion provide information that just is not available elsewhere, noted by Glynn (2008), for instance, in her study of mule racing in the American South, where she comments that a series of home movies taken of the racing provides valuable visual evidence to help better understand the different racial perspectives associated with the events. Similarly, Jones (2003, 199) discusses the impact of an amateur film recording the Maine timber industry in the early 1930s at a critical juncture when traditional practices were making way for more modern, mechanised approaches. She describes it ‘as a primary document for a way of life that does not exist any more’, while Simon (2006, 197) notes that home movies provide insights into the social and political as well as the personal, and considers the potential of digitisation for ‘recuperating and re-archiving older media forms’.

As was noted in the introduction, much of what has been researched and written has focused exclusively on film-based productions, not video or digital. However, it is reasonable to conclude that while the formats are different – which affects the content, length and spontaneity of what is captured – similar values can be found in both amateur video and the new digital productions that make them equally valuable as cultural artefacts, providing insights into contemporary society to a depth no other medium can offer.

Building home-movie collections at the local level

Given this increasing awareness of the potential relevance of home movies in telling the story of a locality, providing insights into a lost way of life or documenting local events in a candid, unedited manner, it would seem that these can become valuable resources for researchers of all kinds and thus worthy of a place in local-studies collections, with their focus on community memory. However, there appears to have been little written about such material in these collections, with anecdotal evidence suggesting that, while major collections of photographs abound, it was rare for local-studies librarians to focus in on film, video or digital productions.

In order to better understand the local situation, a basic email enquiry was placed on an ALIA Listserv (aliaLocalStudiesNSW) asking whether anyone was targeting home movie-type collecting and whether anyone held substantial collections. This was not a formal survey, but a question simply seeking a free written response by return email. A similar question was also asked of the ACT Heritage Library. Only five responses were received, none reporting any significant holdings, with only the odd reel of film being held and some uncertainty as to what to do with it. However, there was also an acknowledgement that perhaps more should be done in this area, with a willingness to consider how this might be accomplished. While these survey results can only be considered as indicative, it does suggest that, for those list subscribers at least, home-movie footage was something of a neglected area.

In planning to develop such a collection, the usual collection-development activities are applicable, but with one exception – the aim is for material to be donated, not purchased. There is really no way a monetary value can be placed on these items apart from maybe valuing the raw stock – the film or videotape. For the family they may be priceless recordings, but for the broader public, while they hopefully have intrinsic interest and relevance, converting this to a monetary value is virtually impossible. However, money is likely to be involved when considering preservation and digitising for access, which is discussed shortly.

Most people would not see their home movies, videos or digital recordings as being of any value to an institution. After all, they were created for the family, usually with no thought of placing them into the broader public sphere. As Simoni comments (cited in Edmonds 2007, 427), ‘they have never thought their film could be important to someone else, or to society in general’. In addition, there may be feelings of concern over privacy, the personal nature of these private memories which may make people reluctant to open them up to public scrutiny, but for digital productions, such as a YouTube clip, this is unlikely to be a concern. Overcoming these obstacles is the first step to gaining access to material. Thus some form of awareness or promotional campaign may be tied in with History Week or Home Movie Day, or linked in with Unlock the Past activities, to provide the platform for getting the message out to the local community.

Once the message has been received and offers of material start to be made, there needs to be a set of selection criteria against which to assess the suitability of material for the collection. These will differ depending upon the aims and objectives of the organisation, but should cover content (and what is already held), condition and format (important for film and video, less so for digital), and the supporting documentation. The best footage, without information on where it was shot (when, who and so on), is of very little use. Finally the question of rights and ownership need to be clarified at the time of acquisition. Some form of licensing agreement is necessary to ensure that everyone understands the nature of the donation and what is being offered – both the physical and intellectual property. Dealing with these issues requires time and commitment on behalf of the organisation. Potential donors may need reassurance that such personal recordings are relevant more widely than just to their family, conditions of donation need to be carefully explained and understood, information gathered and any concerns addressed. It can be time-consuming – but also rewarding.

One challenge, particularly in dealing with video collections, is the sheer volume of material that may be made available. Selecting some and rejecting others – or not selecting anything at all – has to be done in a careful and tactful manner. By implication, you are telling the donors that their memories are not relevant to the collection and this can cause difficulties. However, practical limitations on the proper management of the collection means that, for any organisation, there are limited resources and usually selection has to be made. If based on clear criteria, decisions can be easily defensible.

While acquiring film or tape will probably rely more heavily on serendipity – that is, what is offered – for digital recordings, a different approach can be taken. Sites such as YouTube can be regularly trawled using keywords relevant to your locality and interests and clips identified that would add value to the collection. Owners of the clip can then be approached regarding donating copies in an appropriate format (aiming for as high a quality as possible) that the organisation can handle. At the same time, additional information and rights arrangements have to be negotiated.

Auditioning film and video will obviously require appropriate equipment. However, for the two most common formats likely to be offered – 8 mm film and VHS video – projectors and video players are still relatively common and easy to set up (and it is quite likely that helpful videos are available on YouTube if unsure about threading projectors). For other formats which may be offered, requiring auditioning equipment not readily available, decisions need to be made as to the importance of the material based on the documentary evidence available. If it is thought to be highly desirable, then auditioning facilities can be arranged with a local business, at a cost, or with an organisation (for example, a university library) which may still hold obsolete but working equipment such as a three-quarter-inch U-matic player. It may be that the owners of the material can be encouraged to have it digitised for their own family use and the library can acquire a copy of the digitised version.

Digitising the older formats is a key approach in making material available to a wider audience. It also creates a preservation format that, if properly managed over time, will ensure longevity and protection from technological obsolescence. Copying, digitising and making available online is likely to require outside professional assistance and consequently can be costly. Again, it may be that the original owner will be keen for this to be done and will help with the costs but otherwise, like everything, priorities will need to be determined. For most local-history collections, it is the content of the item – not the physical item itself – that is of worth. Of course, this will depend upon the organisation's understanding of its role and the desire (in the ideal world at least) to ensure preservation of the original material and its playback technology, but for videotape in particular, playback technology for all but the popular VHS format has become obsolete very quickly and for other formats specialist storage environments and handling may be beyond the abilities of a small local library. For material considered to be of significance, it may be appropriate that once digitised, the original carrier (the film or videotape carrying the content) be offered to a state or national institution with the facilities for ensuring its long-term survival. In the end, not everything can be kept for ever and pragmatic decisions do have to be made.

For born-digital items, the issue of original copies is not really a consideration, with the aim being to acquire a copy at the best possible resolution in a format that can be stored and made accessible via the organisation's collection-management or digital-object-management systems. Viewing copies may be created at lower quality and may or may not have watermarks superimposed to prevent piracy. Some form of digital-preservation policy needs to be in place to ensure the ongoing accessibility of the files created and the usual back-up procedures need to be followed.

Finally, access to the home-movie collection will be ideally online, but it may well be that digitising all material acquired will be a slow, long-term process. In which case, decisions have to be made about access to the original copies held, which may or may not be appropriate depending upon the condition of the material and its perceived value. Generally, access to originals should only be allowed in very controlled conditions and after serious consideration of alternative approaches.

Conclusion

Documenting the history of a locality is one of the key responsibilities of the local public library; one that can be exploited to strengthen links with their local community. Part of that documentation includes the visual record captured by both still- and moving-image cameras of whatever type. While photographs have long figured in local-history collections, there appears to have been limited resources devoted to the acquisition of the moving image. Yet this is potentially a rich resource, with such productions providing information at the local level: the streetscape 50 years ago; a typical beach-side holiday of the 1960s; a family wedding during war time; or the action at the Boxing Day sales from last Christmas. And they provide the information in an often engaging and creative manner that draws us in – making the viewers think back to their own past, their own activities, picturing themselves as they once were, in a world which now seems nostalgically attractive.

While home movies, video or digital, may on the surface appear personal and of little relevance to anyone outside the family and friends involved, generally this is to undervalue their potential as a medium for capturing time and place in a powerfully evocative manner. For those involved with local studies and local-history collections, building a representative collection of moving-image material that documents the people, places and activities of their locale would add significantly to their role as the source of local-community history and knowledge.

Notes

^1. This paper has been double-blind peer reviewed to meet the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR) HERDC requirements.