The banal image re-envisioned. Appropriating home movies

In today’s world, saturated with self-produced imagery, people become their own ethnographers. Home movies can be seen at the roots of this notion of self-vision. The workshop explores home movies as a form of experimental autoethnography, focusing on their philosophical, sociological and anthropological potential to express something different apart from already preconceived concepts of history / archive / document. Something that deals with, what Roland Barthes terms as, obtuse meanings, the poetry of banality, gestures, collective memory, and the personal.

Through a series of exercises in ritualistic viewing using found super8 home movies of unknown origin, we will question the ontology of the image itself: how we see and what we see. That is, what makes a home movie? What are their characteristics? How can they be used for experimental or artistic purposes? Where do they intersect with found footage filmmaking, diary films, ethnographic films, or travelogues? How does our perception open up when we detach home movies from narrative to become a purely banal image? Can this detachment display a collective memory more profound than history? 

The aim of the workshop is to create a collaborative film assembled from fragments, in which each participant projects their personal memories onto found images of the collective. This process utilizes analogue editing of super8 film material using projectors, viewers, and splicers.

The workshop is based on my Master thesis and my article in the Italian academic journal Imago.Studi di cinema e media (special edition about found footage): Home movies in the context of art - The artist as (auto)ethnographer. 

https://fractofilm.com/LaborBerlin-Workshop-1