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The Archival Life of Home Movies

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'? @A> >>> !,%BB8 4+7"&7!""7"!%!B 4+7"&7!""7"!%$8 *!!,78 THE ARCHIVAL LIFE OF HOME MOVIES Ashley Smith The Archival Life of Home Movies Regional Reflections and Negotiated Visions of a Shared Past Ashley Smith ©Ashley Smith, Stockholm University 2018 ISBN print 978-91-7797-101-6 ISBN PDF 978-91-7797-102-3 Cover image from the Thomas Collection (Special Collections, University of Mississippi Libraries) Printed in Sweden by Universitetsservice US-AB, Stockholm 2018 Distributor: Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University Contents Preface ............................................................................................................ 5 Introduction ..................................................................................................... 9 The Archival Home Movie: Definitions and Demarcations ........................................... 15 The University of Mississippi’s Home Movie Collection ............................................... 22 Regional Reflection: Key Concepts and Perspectives ................................................. 25 Recollecting “The South”: Memory and Heritage in Regional Historiography .............. 27 An Auto-ethnographic Inquiry ...................................................................................... 31 The Home Movie Collection as Research Material ...................................................... 32 A Geographical Plotting of the Home Movie Collection ............................................... 35 The Lytle Collection ............................................................................................... 37 The Thomas Collection .......................................................................................... 39 Notes on Material Access ........................................................................................... 39 Structure of Dissertation .............................................................................................. 41 1. Framing the Family Film: From Reel to Archive Memory ......................... 44 From Home Movies to Amateur Film and Back Again ................................................. 44 Thematic Strands in Predominant Work on the Home Movie As Film Culture, Representation, and Archival Object ........................................................................... 47 The Origins of the Home Movie Collection .................................................................. 55 A User in the University of Mississippi’s Archive ......................................................... 57 Archival Strategies for the Collecting, Preservation, and Access to Home Movies ...... 59 Spelling Out Difference: The Home Movie Collection Shot List ................................... 62 The Familial Gaze ....................................................................................................... 65 Strategies for the Scholarly Study of Archival Home Movies ....................................... 69 2. Home on the Plantation: Rural Delta Home Movies and Life Beyond the Family ............................................................................................................ 76 Building Narratives within Collections.......................................................................... 78 Cracks in the Facade: Seeing Through the Family Film .............................................. 80 A Conflation of House and Home ................................................................................ 84 Whose Home (Movie) Is It? ......................................................................................... 85 The Lytle Collection: At Home on the Plantation ......................................................... 87 Leisure and the Divine ................................................................................................ 91 The Delta in Home Movies: Alternative Perspectives .................................................. 94 3. Jim Crow from the Periphery: Southern Home Movies as Uneventful Witness.......................................................................................................... 97 Witnessing As Medium, Witnessing Through Media ................................................... 98 Media As Witness: Eyes on the Prize and the Thomas Collection ............................ 101 The Contours of Racialized Space During Jim Crow ................................................. 106 Desegregation in the School System: Impacts on African-American Cultural Commemoration ....................................................................................................... 110 Two Sides of Southern Memorialization: Breaking the Lenticular .............................. 111 Along the Parade Route: A Witness to Memorialization ............................................ 113 4. Re-working the Home Movie Collection: Documentary Reuse ............... 118 Content Description and Ad Hoc Digitization ............................................................. 120 Archival Home Movies as Found Footage ................................................................. 121 The Invisibility of Archival Home Movies ................................................................... 122 Intentional Disparity and the Construction of Regional Reflections: American Denial and Let Freedom Sing ............................................................................................... 123 Disguising Home Movies: No Longer Silent, the B. B. King Museum, and the Mississippi Blues Trail Videos ................................................................................... 128 Psychic Home Movies: Another Word for Family and Legacy: Cotton ....................... 133 Versions of a Shared Past: Voices of Perthshire ....................................................... 135 5. Activating the Regional Reflection Through Live Screenings ................. 139 Home Movie Day and the “The Home Movie Archive Live”: Critical Tensions ........... 139 Creating the Object of Study ..................................................................................... 141 When Not What: The Temporality of Archival Home Movie Engagement .................. 143 Home Movie Day: St. Francisville, Louisiana, October 24, 2015 ............................... 146 Home Movie Day: Delta State University, October 17, 2015 ..................................... 150 Home Movie Day Special Event: University of Mississippi, October 21, 2015 ........... 155 Final Discussion .......................................................................................... 158 Sources ....................................................................................................... 164 Acknowledgements My deepest gratitude and respect goes to my supervisor, Malin Wahlberg. She has consistently provided me with thoughtful and rigorous feedback that has challenged me to keep writing and rewriting. Additionally, she has been an unwavering source of encouragement and support throughout my years as a doctoral student and even during the time pursuing my master’s degree. I am so appreciative of the countless hours she has put into reading and com- menting on draft after draft, and I am in utter admiration of her ability to help me see the text anew when I am feeling stuck. This dissertation truly would not have been written without her. I also want to thank my second supervisor, Patrick Vonderau, whose razor-sharp insights helped me to strengthen every section of this dissertation. His quick and detailed respons- es to drafts have spoiled me for working with anyone else. I am grateful to Maaret Koskinen and Marina Dahlquist for their comments on an earlier draft of this dissertation. Additionally, Susan Aasman from the University of Groningen acted as the opponent at my final seminar and provided me with valuable feedback for improving the text. This project would not have been possible without the generosity and help from the staff at the University of Mississippi’s Department of Archives and Special Collections. I am indebted to Pamela Williamson and Jessica Lem- ing for their help with my research into the Home Movie Collection. Margie Compton and Ruta Abolins at the University of Georgia graciously invited me to explore the collections of home movies at the Brown Media Archives. I am especially grateful to Emily Jones at the Delta State University Ar- chives. In addition to being an invaluable source for my research into the Gibert-Knowlton-Lytle family papers, Emily took on the task of helping me organize Home Movie Day at Delta State University. Beyond this, she also took me to my very first college football game, and she and her family quite literally welcomed me into their home. Glenna Fallin, director of the West
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