Change of Scale: Home Movies as Microhistory in Documentary Films

In the last two decades, a significant number of documentary filmmakers have used home movies to create films that can be termed ―historical,‖ insofar as they use domestic footage to provide portrayals of past times and societies. These documentaries are not built around grand historical events, but around the quotidian episodes of the different families portrayed, and thus suggest a way of looking at the social fabric that is close to the sociological studies of everyday life and analogous to the historiographical approaches of studying ―history from below,‖ used by the Italian microstoria or the German Alltagsgeschichte. In this chapter, I intend to analyze those links, first by examining why home movies are a valuable source for a sociological study of everyday life and/or a history from below. Then, I will focus on how documentaries made out of home movies enter into dialogue with those approaches, and examine to what extent they can be understood as the filmic equivalent of the microhistorical studies written by professional historians. In order to achieve this, I will analyze the two basic types of structures of these films: the collective chronicles composed from a wide collection of domestic footage; and the films that focus on a single family, whether autobiographical or not.