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This is the third and final part of the long post on the questionnaire that the Institute Parri and Home Movies are sent to a group of historians to argue about movies and family history.
Question
Often there is the propensity to use the film as a family
document which confirms already established historiographical argument.
We believe that this can be a serious limitation. You can contact these sources
asking new questions, criticize, and thinking of more uses
? It would be very exciting to compare the data and information collected through
from different sources.
Eg. it seems interesting to analyze and evaluate representations of families of spheres of political, cultural and social backgrounds to highlight the similarities and differences in lifestyles. Or use the film and photographs as documents that have the most often inadvertently recorded glimpses of urban space and landscape, and how they perceive their surroundings and lepersone you move. In this regard, it is useful to stress the effectiveness of a film to document these issues than other types of sources.
Answer
The application refers to a more general problem of the use of visual sources in history even though - according to my point of view - more for the telling of the story that the research itself. And, from this point of view, it is desirable use of visual sources not only as a mere instrument of representation of events, but also as the subject of new questions.
family films are no exception. They are often used (for example in documentaries of the cycle we are history) as a lightening of the narrative, or as visual support in the narratives that involve the family. But their use may highlight new angles of the subjects already known, and a particularly effective: think for example the films of Péter Forgács.
It is thus clear that, like any source of history, the ability of film to tell us something new family depends on the historian has to ask him leading questions. I agree with the examples made in the application, but other questions may be thought to be the films of family and imagined other processes shows that the family film so effective: for example, home movies of the sixties could easily be used to show the different "speed" of the "economic miracle" in Italy.
I think very exciting research hypothesis might arise from the comparison between the performance (eg through the media of a certain age) el'autorappresentazione of an Italian family in this case the film could be (probably together with photography and private documents) a privileged source, capable of showing the gap, the distance, but also the gradual rapprochement between the two types of representation.
Question
The film is a private individual look to the world, generally
the eye of one person, spontaneous, free from constraints and controls
direct, unlike the official film, such as current events.
You can certainly say that the family movie is not subject to a body
censorship. If anything, the complaints relate to the individual sphere, the taboos
dell'autorappresentazione, mentality and personality of those films. For these reasons, the
amateur cinema could prove, beyond a supposed
authenticity, an important type of source, in some cases to document public events from a new point of view (unofficial) and in general to determine the perception that individuals or small groups of people whether in relation to historical context. One can conceive a story as dell'autorappresentazione sum of many different subjectivity, in this case a thousand eyes on the world, from which to draw reflections on reference models, recurring items and specificity?
Answer As I said in my previous answer I believe that self-representation is one of the strengths of family films. However I would not be so sure that the representation of self that shines through the film the family is always "spontaneous" and "free from constraints." Indeed, it probably "revealed" some "constraints", or at least some conditions.
There are two elements that I think should always be kept in mind:
1) the eye of a camera (and more generally any lens) produces two often reflected in who is taken: the immobility, the "pose" , or the wildness, the attempt to stir the rice, "show off". Of course, the two reactions relate to the individual psychological sphere, but I believe we can reasonably assume that there is also a social conditioning and "technology" (eg, Family films shot in Abruzzo in the late forties and fifties, who often gets framed is "posing" as in front of a photographer, and this type of reaction is particularly common in the poorest social classes, which are less comfortable with the technology of recovery). Still remained the question of the influence "technology", as images of the most educated cineamatori is "spontaneous" and what is instead the result of an attempt - more or less consciously - to mimic a "style" of recovery?
2) the cameraman tries to represent the world according to their point of view, pouring in shot - so more or less consciously - all its baggage of social conditioning, or, said another way, their "worldview". Thus, for example, the films of the family of a farmer in a small town in the province of Teramo - Mr. Renzi - dwell on the beauty of nature and the pleasures of country life: in his shots - accompanied by a narrative voice - the country life resembles a small Arcadia, despite the images portray a reality far removed from what is told. In those movies there is much interesting for the historian, from my point of view: the material conditions of life, of course, the gap between what is shown and the way it is said, but also the fact that the comment was not written by Mr. Renzi, but the priest of the small country (the Arcadian tone of the commentary is obviously the work of the parish - as evidenced by the choice of terms - but it is shared by at least cineamatore, although when it stops being written texts continue to follow the same narrative style).
Question
Keep everything? Selection criteria for an archive.
there is already the risk of a glut of audiovisual material for historical research
. The film joins a private to a wide range of sources. He added that the assets
of family films and immense, even if
hidden, inaccessible and for the total loss, if you do not
involved with archiving. However, the Archive of Home Movies and the network of archives that preserve
format movies are reduced in the face of limits
space and resources. In those circumstances, especially in perspective, it all but impossible to collect
will need to select the material.
with the knowledge that a selection can be made only with valid criteria
today, with the limitations that result from the tendency of the National Film
Family is priority funds filmic older, collecting
without discrimination all the material before 1950, and setting limits for
material post 1950, with the strategy to raise substantial funds filmic
that can, for example to document the evolution and changes in a family
or more unrelated families in over the years and decades.
What can be the role of the historian to determine the choices of
storage?
Answer
The issue of selection criteria for an archive of family films is extremely complex and can hardly be exhausted in a response. In principle, I think I already said that historians and archivists should work closely together to be able to better define not only the general criteria for acquisition of materials in an archive, but also the techniques of cataloging.
But more than answers, in this case I have questions about the selection criteria set out in the brief questionnaire.
The first question concerns the date discriminating: why the 1950? It seems to me that this would risk losing all of the assets relating to the release of amateur cameras in a relatively massive, and therefore to draw on eyes and imagined in the popular media and the petty bourgeoisie that was previously difficult to access cameras, etc. . as a matter of cost. It is also clear that stopping to 1950 does not allow to draw on family memories the economic boom, a period of particularly intense transformation of Italy: the contribution of the family film for those years would be particularly interesting, since it would - in my view - to look into the transformation of the country in the making, comparing the new costumes , the different habits and different mentality to be defined by the persistence of an Italy more traditional.
The second question concerns the organization of the collection: I understand that preference to substantial funds that allow a family to follow the events in a period of time as long as possible. I understand those who preside over this choice, but I wonder what can not be interesting but also those groups of films less consistent, both from the standpoint of the producer in terms of time.
It seems to me that the focus of the household may be a poor choice from the standpoint of historical research. I try to explain with an example. We take a "common place" of the film family, marriage: what's more interesting watching all the marriages of a family over a period of time, or watch and compare the long period of time the marriages of many families of different geographical and socio-economic conditions different? In the first case we would know much about that particular family in the second, Instead, we would have a "split" of how the marriage had been living in different social strata and in different geographical areas.
I therefore believe that the breadth of the collection is to be preferred as much as possible, of course subject to limits imposed by resources.
AS
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