Monday 23 February 2009

The Small Time: Make Film not Fame!

Home Video is a free-style genre, a hybrid form of film that is generally not acknowledged in Film Studies or the history of Film with a capital 'F' because it is not 'official'. It is made by people who are not experts in their field. It is an amateur's game. So let us make of it what we want, and let us call for the recognition and acknowledgement of our small time productions.

Popular film and television conventions have certainly influenced the way Home Video is made by YOU the general public, but to what extent is questionable. (What usually happens when someone you know picks up a camera?) Bringing a video camera into an everyday context, a personal context, changes the way people behave, and witnessing the overcoming of that 'camera-freeze' is part of the beauty of home video. Building confidence is part of it.


My mission with the Home Video Series is to document family life in an unconventional way, a poetic way, a brave way. I focus on my relationship with my parents because it is the most important relationship in my life. I owe them my life and now I try to make sense of it. I strive to be playful and varied, to allow duration and repetition to reveal the similarities and differences, connections and idiosyncrasies that exist within and between us family members. I consider the work to be a form of art, of documentary operating outside of traditional documentary conventions, involving sequences of performed actions in the context of 'real-life' relationships.

Influences include filmmakers such as Kieslowski, Jean-Luc Godard, Tarkovsky, Terence Davies and Duane Hopkins.

© Kate Rowles. 2009