PB2 pt 2 // Memory and Media are directly linked.

https://vimeo.com/210536025

This video intertwines three different elements. The first being a video taken when in or around the summer of 1997 in Glen Arbor, Michigan. The video is being filmed by my cousin Taylor and features him asking his siblings as well as mine who our current crushes are on. The second part is a reaction shot of myself watching this video. The final part being the poem/mini-story placed throughout.  The purpose of these three parts is to explore and show the different ways home movies are viewed and how they affect the memory of the viewer.

Home Films are made to be an archive for the family who filmed viewed them. As I am a subject of this movie my viewing experience will be completely different to a person who has no connection to the people in it. Wilson states that

“These filmic glimpses often evoke connections between the past and the present that ultimately claims ground between identity and memory. (5) ”

This statement rings nothing but true for me. Watching this video brought up feelings of love, sadness, and some desire for the past. Wilson also states

“film can take on evolving interpretative qualities which change in time the emotive conditions of our memories in relation to witnessing the subject” (11) .

Watching this film now after my parents have divorced and my cousin’s father has passed away my memories and emotions during viewing are completely different to how it would have been viewed at the time it was filmed. I tried to illustrate this contrast through the poem. I feel the video of my reactions is similar to how a person with no connection to the people in the film reaction would be i.e. seeing it as a simple, cute and funny film of children playing and fighting each other. Though this was not my intent I think the fact that it was staged and it was not my first time viewing the footage affected the result.

One other concept I pondered on in relation to how Home Films and our memories are interlinked is how the medium or environment in which we watch them affects our viewing. Specifically when considering the advent of sites like Youtube and Vimeo.  I personally watched this film on Youtube as before my Uncle passed he replaced many of his VHS copies with their digital counterpart. Captanio highlights the main difference in viewing a video online versus through a home copy:

“its distribution through YouTube, which has enabled the public circulation of private moving imagery to an unprecedented degree. Never before, not even on the popular television show America’s Funniest Home Videos, has private video footage had such a presence in the public mediascape.” (12)

As this video and many other home movies are now featured publicly online this allows them to be used to archive memories in a broader context of record keeping and anthropological study, as well as the collective memory of a generation and their particular trends and technologies (Uhrich 340).In conclusion,  Our personal and collective memories are directly linked to the records of our past as well as the media we recorded them on.

References

Capitanio, Adam, McCallum, Ellen, Hoppenstand, Gary, and Schoonover, Karl. The Electrical Transformation of the Public Sphere: Home Video, the Family, and the Limits of Privacy in the Digital Age (2012): ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Web.

Uhrich, Andy. “More than Memories: Studying Home Movies and the Families Who Made Them.” Journal of Family Social Work 11.3 (2008): 339-43. Web.

Wilson, S. “Remixing Memory through Home Movies.” (2011). Web.