Familial Pursuits, Editorial Acts

: Documentaries after the Age of Home Video. Orgeron, Marsha,& Orgeron, Devin. (2007). The Velvet Light Trap, 60, 47-62.

The authors observed that a significant number of documentaries created since the 1990s took a form of autobiography, relying upon primary footage taken from home videos. Home movies in the post World War II were promoted primarily by equipment makers for documenting family life and children targeting the baby boom generation (Zimmerman). Reading Zimmerman and Chalfen, the authors summarized that those movies were focused on family togetherness and unity. Yet, with the advent of video, its affordability and simplicity, now home movies become home videography and its influence on a documentary production stream, observed the authors. They stated:

"By the 1980s and 1990s the skills—indeed, even the resources—needed to film and edit no longer appeared the exclusive province of adults, the former gatekeepers of the family iconography. Even kids could use a video camera, and a new generation of videographers was able to move outside of the parentally controlled patterns that dominated the home movie age" (p. 48).

This technology change changed ways in which a new generation of videographers describe their family portraits, the authors argued. They stated:

"homevvvideography lends itself to capturing the family in ways that are not consonant with earlier conventions of home filmmaking, earlier conventions, in fact, that occasionally appear, often by way of contrast, in these recent documentary films." (pp. 48-49)

the allure of these films partly hinges on their promise of a glimpse (p. 50) beyond the surface, an invitation to see the unlovely elements typically concealed by the curtain drawn on private lives, and that these elements are made visible especially through the documentary director’s use of primary home video footage.(p. 51)