Tom Slootweg | University of Groningen (original) (raw)
Over the last decades the scholarly interest for home movies took a flight. As the interest in homemade film material as a legitimate source of scholarly research found its way in academia, the archival world closely followed. With the proliferation of popular interest in the history of everyday life in the late 1990s, home movies became the exemplary source for an accessible visual experience of times slowly corroded in the course of history. The archives gradually acknowledged this and began to take an active role in the accumulation, preservation, and accessibility of amateur film material that hereby became institutionalized as traces of our visual cultural memory. Strangely, the successor of the home made film material, the magnetic VHS-recording technology, seems overlooked as a valuable part of our audio-visual cultural memory of everyday life.
This project aims to make an elaborate study of the VHS-era in amateur filmmaking. The proposed methodology of dispositif (a concept developed by Jean-Louis Baudry in the 1970s) is specifically salient since it allows one to cover three closely interrelated aspects which are pivotal in analyzing new media in our culture: (1) TECHNOLOGY/APPARATUS, (2) MEDIUM/TEXT, and (3) PERCEPTION/MEANING. This tripartite methodology implies a multi-disciplinary approach towards a generation of filmmaking that stands between two distinctly different phases of amateur representational aesthetics: the predominantly visual chemical era and the multimedial digital era. As the digital era is currently under scrutiny by the academic community, the in-between phase of VHS’s audio-visual representational aesthetics seems neglected and in dire need of analysis. One of the hypothesis of this project underlines that since the synchronous recording of sound and image was technically perfected, the variety of off and on-screen ‘voices’ in the family or peer group played a more prominent role in the representational aesthetics: a significant break with the previous era.
Besides a theoretical grounding of the VHS-era as an independent representational phase in our cultural history, a considerable effort has to be undertaken to gather empirical evidence to examine (1) the transitional and intermedial aspects of amateur VHS filmmaking in its infancy, and (2) its development as a distinct home mode video practice, based on its own rules, possibilities and restraints. The project therefore also relies heavily on archival research on VHS-material and an ethnographic study of the user generation. The project aims to strengthen its ties with audio-visual archives by convincing the importance of accumulating and preserving VHS. The collaboration with the AV-archives will enable me to study a larger body of home movies to test and discard my running hypotheses. Furthermore, the ethnographic aspect of this project will help to understand the status of VHS as a medium for users to store, shape and transmit experiences of their history and memories.
Supervisors: dr. Andreas Fickers, dr. Susan Aasman, dr. Jo Wachelder, and prof. dr. Doeko Bosscher
Phone: +31(0)50 363 6071
Address: University of Groningen
Faculty of Arts
Oude Boteringestraat 23
9712 GC Groningen
The Netherlands
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Papers by Tom Slootweg
An interesting issue in theorizing visuality and screen experience in relation to new media and t... more An interesting issue in theorizing visuality and screen experience in relation to new media and technologies is the notion of ‘cinematic scale’. As many media scholars now ponder upon the changing cinematic experience with the proliferation of screens with diverging sizes, and digital portable and static screen technologies, I would like to explore how the ‘old’ video media ecology also invoked changing notions of screens, screening, and scale.
My aim lies in giving an alternative perspective on this issue from the context of video technologies as they emerged as audio-visual consumer product from the late 1970s towards the 1990s. I will specifically explore how the video ecology changed the notions of screens, screening, and scale within an alternative screening tradition, namely the tradition of amateur film in its home mode context. With this specific focus I would like to contribute to the debate on scale from the perspective of the often-overlooked nontheatrical film practices home movies are part of.
One of the important components of video’s ecology is the television set. Before the availability of video technologies the screening of predominantly silent home movies on (Super)8- or 16mm, implied a ritualised procedure. By carefully placing the projector and projection screen, and tightly closing the curtains to sufficiently darken the room, watching home movies was planned and prepared to be a family event celebrating its mediated past on celluloid. The advent of video-based consumer technologies dramatically changed the ritual circumstances wherein home videos were screened and experienced. By watching home videos on a television set ‘with the lights on’, the screen experience became integrated with everyday media consumption in the living room.
scripties.let.eldoc.ub.rug.nl
An interesting issue in theorizing visuality and screen experience in relation to new media and t... more An interesting issue in theorizing visuality and screen experience in relation to new media and technologies is the notion of ‘cinematic scale’. As many media scholars now ponder upon the changing cinematic experience with the proliferation of screens with diverging sizes, and digital portable and static screen technologies, I would like to explore how the ‘old’ video media ecology also invoked changing notions of screens, screening, and scale.
My aim lies in giving an alternative perspective on this issue from the context of video technologies as they emerged as audio-visual consumer product from the late 1970s towards the 1990s. I will specifically explore how the video ecology changed the notions of screens, screening, and scale within an alternative screening tradition, namely the tradition of amateur film in its home mode context. With this specific focus I would like to contribute to the debate on scale from the perspective of the often-overlooked nontheatrical film practices home movies are part of.
One of the important components of video’s ecology is the television set. Before the availability of video technologies the screening of predominantly silent home movies on (Super)8- or 16mm, implied a ritualised procedure. By carefully placing the projector and projection screen, and tightly closing the curtains to sufficiently darken the room, watching home movies was planned and prepared to be a family event celebrating its mediated past on celluloid. The advent of video-based consumer technologies dramatically changed the ritual circumstances wherein home videos were screened and experienced. By watching home videos on a television set ‘with the lights on’, the screen experience became integrated with everyday media consumption in the living room.
scripties.let.eldoc.ub.rug.nl