Home Movies & Other Necessary Fictions: Notes

Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions by Michelle Citron

Notes:

CONTENT

-Editing home video similar to content of Past Matters – lens, content, frame, etc. (11)

-Relationship of camera man to subject similar to interviewee and interviewer (13)

-Staged family photos not necessarily truthful (17)

-Paradox of fiction: ‘spontaneous and directed, authentic and constructed, documentary and fiction’ (19)

-Ethics of autobiography as related to family (20. 30) About mother (54)

-Pay homage to Grandmother (106)

-Challenge idyllic family life; traumatic events leave an invisible unconscious mark

(22, 33) Implicit memory = truer when fragmented like Kampf family history (36) blocked memories (50)

FORMAT

-Regarding watching home movies relating image and object as a link from past to present - ‘The past tense of the images mingled with the pretense of the storytelling. For this brief space of timelessness I felt a part of something larger than myself; I was safe.’ (12)

-Image truth vs. memory truth (14)
-Photograph: part of larger life ‘..momento from a life being lived’ (21)

-Narrator as agent to tell a fragmented story (42)

-‘Talking Head’ as displacement of emotion and story as in Past Matters II and Citron’s What you Take for Granted (48)