CaixaForum Zaragoza celebrates a century of home movies in an exhibition

CaixaForum Zaragoza opens the exhibition [Rec]ollections: Life through Home Movies, which looks back at over a century of home moviemaking, from its early days to the present. The show is a celebration of this type of film as audiovisual heritage of incalculable sociological, historical and aesthetic value.

This Thursday, the Director of CaixaForum Zaragoza, Ricardo Alfós, and the exhibition curators and researchers Efrén Cuevas and Núria F. Rius presented [Rec]ollections: Life through Home Movies, a new exhibition that will open first in the Aragonese capital before moving on to CaixaForum València, where it will open in July, to be followed thereafter by other CaixaForum centres. 

Promoted and produced by the Fundación ”la Caixa”, the exhibition has grown out of the research project Home Movies in Spain: Preservation, Dissemination and Appropriation, headed by Professor Efrén Cuevas from the University of Navarra as the lead researcher and with Núria F. Rius as the project researcher. In addition, it has benefited from the generous support of the Destiladera. Lanzarote Revealed and Celluloid Memories projects, as well as the Filmoteca Española, the Fototeca de la Diputación de Huesca, the Filmoteca de Catalunya, the Filmoteca Valenciana, Girona City Council and the Filmoteca de Castilla y León, among other institutions, who have collaborated by lending material given to them by dozens of private individuals. 

In every centre where the exhibition will be shown, images specific to that region will be screened precisely to establish an emotional connection with the public, which is one of the goals of the show.

For more than a century, home movies have captured moments of everyday life and have become a visual archive that is the repository of our collective memory. The exhibition [Rec]ollections: Life through Home Movies analyses the reasons why we film ourselves and the technological advances from the early cine cameras to the mobile phones of today.

In this exhibition, we resurrect stories and film footage never shown in public before that offer an alternative account of this century as seen through the eyes of ordinary families with whom we can all identify. The itinerary takes us on an in-depth exploration of the connections between the image, reality and memory, and it offers a fresh look at our relationship with the camera, presenting a rich and diverse view of our audiovisual heritage.

Honouring our shared everyday lives and ordinary scenes

The exhibition honours our shared everyday lives and family audiovisual materials by showing ordinary and celebratory scenes captured using supports that have evolved over the years, scenes that become memories future generations will be able to enjoy. This impressive testimony of social changes and an expression of the times reveals recurring themes and interests that help us to understand the way people used and still use the camera, and the way they presented themselves before it and still do today.

In addition, the exhibition looks back at a hundred years of technological evolution, from 16 mm and Super 8 cine cameras to VHS and mobile phones. It offers a new consideration of the most frequent themes and approaches, as well as related forms of expression. It also explores the reuse of home movies in contemporary audiovisual practices and their appropriation by filmmakers working today. Lastly, it analyses how home movies are connected with the communicative practices of social media and the web. In short, it is an exhibition that enables us to grasp how the image, reality, memory and art are interrelated.

A dynamic exhibition with six themed sections

The exhibition, which contains a wide range of content and has a dynamic mise-en-scène, is divided into six different themed sections.

When they arrive, visitors will encounter the exhibition title and the living room of a home with the city of Zaragoza in the background as a means to establish the idea of the domestic environment as a space where home movies are born. In addition, a montage featuring home movies from different eras will be screened so that visitors can immerse themselves completely in the universe of this kind of film.

Following the introduction, the exhibition will look back at the constant technological innovation in this genre over the course of the twentieth century and its adaptation to new ways of life, from the 16 mm and Super 8 formats to VHS and digital video. In the early days, at the start of the twentieth century, professional users themselves began to film domestic events on 35 or 28 mm film. With the launch of the first small-format cameras in the early 1920s, the practice of making home movies took off. After the Second World War, there was a boom in home moviemaking due to the enormous variety of filming devices that appeared on the market. In the 1970s, magnetic tape was introduced, initially in the professional sphere but by the end of the decade for home use, with Betamax and VHS videocassettes. Magnetic video gave way to digital video made using small cameras, though these were swiftly superseded by the advent of smartphones in 2007.

In addition to displaying a range of film and video cameras, along with the necessary playback equipment, this second section looks at the evolution of advertising, with its particular slogans and aesthetic conventions. In fact, cameras and projectors were promoted as ordinary household items for recording what took place inside the home. Much of the advertising, which touted capturing and treasuring the happy moments in life, was aimed at women because they were often the people in the home environment.

Two major audiovisual montages at the heart of the exhibition

The third section is presented in a central open space in the exhibition where we will be screening two audiovisuals produced especially for the occasion by the documentalist Salvi Vivancos, also a member of the research group on recovering home movies. Both these audiovisuals feature an extensive selection of home movies from the 1920s to the year 2000 chosen from the collections of Spanish film archives. 

The first audiovisual focuses on recreating the expressive traits characteristic of home movies, notably:

The second audiovisual, projected on a large panoramic screen, reflects the recurring themes of home movies:

This screen will present these seven themes divided across three panels that will simultaneously show the same theme in different decades. The first will feature clips from stories from the 1920s to the 1940s; in the middle from the 1940s to the 1970s; and on the right from the 1970s to the 1990s. Thanks to this panoramic view across the display, it will be possible to appreciate the technological and cultural changes that have taken place over the years.

Home movies from citizens of Aragon

The last three themes – the filming of the city, social events and holidays and outings – will be supplied primarily by home movies provided by Aragonese citizens and recovered thanks to the Fototeca de la Diputación de Huesca, as well as the Filmoteca Valenciana, the Filmoteca Española, the CRDI of Girona, the Filmoteca de Catalunya and the Celluloid Memories project. These clips will vary throughout the tour of the exhibition to include content specific to each region.

The aim is to establish an emotional connection with visitors to the exhibition, who will be able to see how ordinary citizens have captured the landscape of cities, with their urban transformations, architectural configuration and civic fabric, their social events, such as carnival and saints’ days, and their holidays and outings, far from their jobs and daily duties.

Television formats for entertainment purposes and the leap onto the big screen

In the fourth section, the exhibition looks at the increasing reuse of home movies today on television and in cinema. Television programmes based on home movies are created for entertainment or ethnographic purposes, as exemplified by the 1990s programmes Olé tus vídeos,broadcast by various autonomous community channels in Spain, and Vídeos de primera, shown on TVE, in both cases for entertainment purposes.

In addition, in recent decades there has a been a growing interest in reusing home movie footage in documentary and experimental films, which explore the potential of home movies by demonstrating the many layers of meaning they contain. By way of examples, a large screen will show clips from films such as Un instante en la vida ajena (2003), which documents the life of a Catalan bourgeois family filmed by the matriarch, Madronita Andreu, from the 1920s to the 1970s. In addition, in The Family Album (1986), Alan Berliner creates a kind of universal life story of human beings from their birth to old age using home movies and ‘orphaned’ audio tapes of unknown origin.

The advent of smartphones: a paradigm shift

The fifth section looks at the paradigm shift brought about by the advent of smartphones in the opening decade of the twenty-first century and the way this technological change has influenced home movies today. The exhibition argues that the new technology has not fundamentally altered the basic principles of home movies, as the subjects filmed (weddings, travel, birthdays, etc.) remain the same and most videos are still shared among friends and relatives.

Nevertheless, smartphones have introduced some significant innovations in this practice, one result being the exponential rise in home video production due to the technical possibilities and ease of access to them. The curators highlight a change in the aim of these recordings: whereas before events were filmed to preserve a memory, today recordings have become an experience intended more to be shared than saved for posterity.

The exhibition places current home movie practices in the context of the debate on the extent to which technology eclipses human relations. It also highlights the change in the way in which people watch these videos, which no longer takes place with the family or friends gathered around the projector but is instead individual, with videos shared among family groups on WhatsApp or similar apps. Similarly, it also explores the way that home videos can cross the line from the private to the public sphere via social media, as well as the influence of social media on the expressive dynamics of home videos today (dances, editing effects, etc.).

In this section, visitors are invited by means of a number of reflective questions to consider how and why we make recordings today. The questions posited include: what is the main motivation that prompts us to capture moments on video and do social media influence the way we make recordings?

Goal: To preserve this audiovisual heritage

The final section shines a spotlight on the preservation of home movies, one of the largest and most diverse bodies of audiovisual heritage in recent history and which continues to expand thanks to current practices. However, it also warns that this heritage has not always been properly preserved due to less than adequate conditions and technological obsolescence that prevents content from being viewed on subsequent occasions. 

In light of this, the exhibition highlights the importance of preserving our home movies, be it at our own initiative or by depositing them with film libraries and other institutional archives.

How can home movies be safeguarded at home?

The exhibition looks at the preservation of home movies recorded on photochemical supports such as Super 8 and VHS, as well as digital videos. At the end, visitors can take a leaflet containing basic information on how to restore these movies at home, the aim being to encourage individuals to safeguard all this personal, family and communal heritage.