HOME MOVIES

The history of home moviemaking can be traced back to 1923 and Eastman Kodak's introduction of the 16mm Ciné-Kodak system. Though the production of home movies had been technically possible for several decades prior to the 1920s, this new equipment and the narrow-gauge, direct-reversal film it utilized was more affordable, safer, and less cumbersome than previous apparatus. The introduction of 8mm film in 1932 again cut the cost of home moviemaking, opening up this activity to those on even modest budgets. In 1935, the Eastman Kodak Company further revolutionized amateur moviemaking with the development of Kodachrome film, thereby allowing full-color movies to be taken.

The year 1965 saw two major, though divergent, developments in home moviemaking technology. While Kodak marketed its new Super 8 format, offering substantial improvements on standard 8mm film, Sony announced what can be considered the first amateur-use videotape recorder. The displacement of traditional film by video in the 1980s was rapid—by 1981, sales of Super 8 cameras had dropped to 200,000 units per year, from 600,000 just four years earlier. Meanwhile, video camera sales rose from 200,000 in 1981 to over 1 million by the mid-1980s. As the average price of a camcorder plummeted from $1,534 in 1985 to $401 in 2002, so the percentage of households owning such an item grew swiftly, from 1 percent in 1985 to 43 percent in 2002. Those figures included digital units, which continued to supplant what had become the dominant video format, VHS (see Table 1).

Beyond the tremendous technological advances demonstrated by the development of home moviemaking equipment, home movies also serve a vital role as historical social documents. These audiovisual recordings of events and people range from the most mundane and

intimate happenings of family life, to family events and vacations, to one of the most infamous amateur movies ever, Abraham Zapruder's footage of the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The examination of home movies as cultural artifacts, of their representation of everyday life and their reflection of contemporaneous leisure patterns, is gaining increasing popularity among anthropologists and film historians. Patricia Zimmermann provides a useful history of amateur film from a Foucaultian perspective, in which the home movie is viewed as a socially and politically constructed discourse, embedded in specific economic, social, and political processes. From the glorification of family togetherness and the ideal of the nuclear family unit in the 1950s, to more recent use of amateur film technology to portray marginalized elements of society including AIDS sufferers and victims of police brutality, home movies continue to offer a relatively accessible means of communication and personal expression.

As with most amateur pastimes, home moviemaking has spawned a variety of related activities, from books and periodicals to clubs, contests, and festivals. The success of ABC's primetime show America's Funniest Home Videos indicates the continuing popularity of home moviemaking and watching. First aired in 1990, the show was one of several reality-based offerings to debut in that era, precursors to the nation's obsession with this genre in the 2000s.

See also: Media, Technology, and Leisure, Movies' Impact on Popular Leisure

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chalfen, Richard. "Cinéma Naïveté: A Study of Home Moviemaking as Visual Communication." Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 2 (1975): 87–103.

Goldsmith, Arthur. "Photons and Electrons." Popular Photography 91, no. 9 (September 1984): 47.

Kattelle, Alan D. Home Movies: A History of the American Industry, 1897–1979. Nashua, N.H.: Transition Publishing, 2000.

Zimmermann, Patricia R. Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Sarah Nicholls