Paper short abstract:

In my contribution I suggest, through a specific case, that the codes of the family film- expected norms, subjects and locations- drawing on specific aesthetics of relatedness, can constitute a becoming-minor of a historicized filmic gaze that questions authorative narratives and authoriality.

Paper long abstract:

Through the analysis of the films and the words of an elderly Italian amateur filmmaker and the reference to the Italian national family film archive, I wish to propose an ethno-anthropological approach to home movies as a specific archive characterized by the dimensions of repetitiveness, self-referentiality, fragmentation and fractality. A marginal genre almost by definition, family films as minor, private and unpretentious productions are defined by negation: not commercial, not professional, not documentary. If in the last decade home movies have shifted from representing a marginal field to a special area of reflection, this shift has mainly occurred within history of cinema and media studies. Nonetheless novel anthropological approaches and ethnographic sensibilities represent the chance to give a new sense to this specific archive. The specificity of home movies brings them significantly closer to the unedited work of field diaries, to experimental ethnographic practices, in their "excess of detail" - flash, intimate, deep and so on. I suggest that the codes of the family film, by the attention to naturalistic detail and the production of personal narratives, draw on specific aesthetics of relatedness and constitute a space for reflection on the becoming-minor of a historicized and specific filmic gaze. Referring to the everyday and the “already known”, home movies are testimony of a view in which the personal (often paradoxically minor and at the same time masculine and naturalized in its genealogical role) presented itself as co-aesthetic to the small format itself, the instrument through which they were produced.