Abstract
In recent years, home movies have attracted enhanced public as well as academic interest (for example Elsaesser 2020; Ishizuka and Zimmerman 2008; Rascaroli, Young and Monahan 2014). Despite their personal and allegedly marginal nature, they have become recognized as a valuable source of socially and historically relevant visual material.
This paper wants to explore the role and impact of home movies in the framework of cultural memory. It touches on the practices of preservation, presentation and recontextualization of private amateur films in the Czech Republic, both in the case of the (state-sponsored) National Film Archive and in private archive. Besides the effort to collect and preserve home movies, how can they be given a meaningful second life? How are they made accessible, (re)contextualised and presented to public? The paper thus addresses the concept of care in two ways. First, how do archives care for amateur home movies, and second, why should we care about home movies, in what ways they can contribute to the formation of cultural memory.
I will specifically look at incorporating home movies in nonfictional films, for example Jan Šikl's Soukromé století (A Private Century, 2006) and especially Rekonstrukce okupace (Reconstruction of the Occupation, 2021), which contains footage showing the Warsaw pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Within these films, the private footage gains new status and meaning. From private, personal images of particular people and places, it becomes a public representation of wider historical situations. Through focusing on the transformation and framing of fragments of home movies in these works, I would like to address also some more general questions, concerning the ethical and artistic challenges of presenting home movies and found footage in nonfictional films but also the benefits of blending the established historical images and narratives with "microhistories" (Cuevas 2014).