Found footage as a cinema of renewal: the significance of home movies in the films A Song of Air and Sea in the Blood. Paulina Haratyk, Gabriela Sitek

Screened for the first time in Poland during the review and discussion series ‘Found footage: bringing archives to life’, A Song of Air by Merilee Bennett (Australia,1988) and Sea in the Blood by Richard Fung (USA, 2000) were edited from family footage found in the archives of their makers. What the two films have in common is an autobiographical perspective and the act of (re)construction of the finished material which takes place during the editing process. Both the film by Richard Fung and the movie by Merilee Bennett are documentary in nature. The re-evaluations of the meaning of home movies that the makers of these works propose are acts of interference with socially imposed roles and patterns of functioning within the family. The creative processing of ‘found’ film and photographic material allows the authors of these found footage films to tell the stories of their childhood anew and, in this re-evaluated form, to incorporate them into projects of identity.

Merilee Bennett’s film makes use of a home archive of family films shot by her father, Arnold Lucas Bennett, which were intended to present a picture of a ‘typical’ Australian family. The (re)construction of home movies shot on 16mm film between 1956 and 1983, accomplished through a process of editing, allows the author to tell the story of entering adulthood and offer a counter-narrative to the history imposed by her father, a pastor and Methodist minister. Arnold Lucas Bennett instilled in his children a religious worldview and a Puritan lifestyle. Based on footage shot by the father, the images and narratives used are also critiqued in terms of visual and audio-visual forms of representation of first the child and soon the young woman. The filmmaker constructs meanings in opposition to their original enunciation, juxtaposing them with her own contemporary commentary spoken from behind the frame.

Sea in the Blood is a personal documentary that reveals two very important relationships in the life of Richard Fung, the director. The first is the bond with his sister affected by thalassaemia. The second is the relationship with his partner who is struggling with AIDS. The filmmaker uses family photographs from the 1960s, as well as photographs documenting his journey from Europe to India, on which he set off with his partner in 1977. He tells the story of his relationship with those closest to him, influenced first by his sister’s illness as a child and then by his partner’s illness as an adult. The footage used by Fung in Sea in the Blood was shot by his mother, who was a third-generation Chinese immigrant in Trinidad, using a Bell and Howell camera. She gave him the films, recorded on 8mm film, when he was living in Toronto, where he moved to study in 1971.

This article aims to identify the potential of found footage cinema, understood as a specific method of creative work in the (re)construction of identity narratives. The text attempts to illustrate these films as catalysts for social change – first by disassembling, deconstructing the established forms of narrative belonging to home movies as a genre of amateur cinema, and then by creatively reconstructing them, transforming them into a new form and giving them a new meaning.

Found footage as cinema of renewed meaning

Of relevance to the present discussion is the classification presented by William C. Wees in his work constitutive for the study of found footage cinema: Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films. In this work, Wees distinguished between compilation, collage and appropriation films. The researcher’s findings are relevant here, as they point to the role of montage/collage as the most critical, creative form of archival material used. There are other valid strategies for recycling found footage, of course, but montage/ collage seems to me the most effective means of exposing the social and political implications of found footage while, at the same time, adapting it to the demands of the “quintessential twentieth century art form,” namely, collage., writes the theorist.

Jamie Baron’s relatively recent and important work on found footage cinema, The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History, proposes a re-evaluation of Wees’s classification and a reactivation of the notion of appropriation, pointing out that the act of recontextualising found footage always implies the possibility of a critical approach. Jamie Baron’s work is devoted to found footage films and the concept of the ‘archive effect’. The researcher points out that whether a photograph used in a film is perceived as archival is to a large extent shaped by the juxtaposition of different time orders. This recognition allows her to conclude that nowadays we are dealing with a re-evaluation of the notion of archive, which does not have to be backed up by authority. Material from the past included in found footage films is perceived as ‘archival’ regardless of whether it was found in an official archive, a family basement or the space of the Internet. Jamie Baron points out that in found footage films we are always dealing with at least three temporal orders: ‘the ‘then’ of the appropriated images, the ‘now’ of the production of the found footage film, when they are reused, and the ‘now’ in which the film is viewed by the viewer.

The nature of the editing procedures applied in A Song of Air and Sea in the Blood may shed light on the identification of the model of autobiographical statements used in these films. Magdalena Podsiadło, proposing a classification of film autobiography, distinguishes between the empirical self, which will strive to preserve the identity between the author, narrator and protagonist (mainly due to the introduction of the director’s character into the film diegesis), the porte-parole, which withdraws from the diegesis, placing its representative in it, and the sylleptic self, which will try to introduce the author’s persona into the story, while denying its identity with the creator. Both A Song of Air, and Sea In The Blood are closest to the model of the ‘empirical self,’ in which identity is maintained between author, narrator and protagonist. Magdalena Podsiadło points out that this type is closest to the realisation of the autobiographical pact according to Philipe Lejeune’s earlier, more restrictive definition.

In the analysis and interpretation of the films A Song of Air and Sea in the Blood , we also refer to the concept of constructed identity, the basic factor of which is thinking (self-understanding) developing over time. Katarzyna Rosner, in her work Narracja, tożsamość i czas [Narration, Identity and Time], points out that the concept of such identity is related to a broader phenomenon consisting in a departure from understanding a human being in terms of the ontological structure of an object, i.e. an entity equipped with specific properties. The concept of such an identity is connected with a broader phenomenon of departing from the understanding of man in terms of the ontological structure of an object, i.e. an entity endowed with specific properties, and replacing it with the category of an entity developing in time and at the same time finite, i.e. one whose existence begins at birth and ends with death. (…) This also means that both the identity of this being and its ontological structure remain an open problem that demands to be defined. For the analysis and interpretation of films of an autobiographical character whose subject matter is past time constructions of identity, such as the films of Bennett and Funga, relevant are the observations of David Carr, who, following Wilhelmen Dilthey and Vladimir Propp, assumes that the narrative structure is characterised by a backward reference, i.e., that the unfolding phases of a series obtain a backward reference. The unfolding phases of a series derive their description and meaning from what comes after them, and ultimately from the closing phase of the narrative. Catherine Rosner points out that in this concept the category of the author, who organises a sequence of events into a structure of meaning, is important.

Home movies – amateur films constituting the image of the family

Home movies were undoubtedly the most popular type of amateur audio-visual material from the beginning of cinematography until the digital breakthrough and the spread of modern technologies enabling unrestricted creation and sharing of films. This type of material most often documents family life: ceremonies and most important moments, such as weddings, birth of children, family meetings; as well as everyday life depicted in images of children growing up and playing and prancing around the house or its immediate surroundings, spending time together on holiday trips. Such films are an important document of everyday life, micro-histories and patterns of behaviour. They are a kind of audio-visual diary in which, in addition to events and people, changing social norms, fashions and landscapes of the environment have been recorded.

Home movies became more widespread in the first two decades of the 20th century, especially in the United States, as a result of the introduction of several technological improvements to amateur film equipment: in 1923, Eastman Kodak, the most important film equipment manufacturer in the US next to Bell and Howell, introduced the Cine-Kodak, the first amateur camera operating on 16mm film, and its success codified the non-professional film gauge. This standardisation enabled both companies to gain near-monopolistic control of the non-professional film equipment market and to significantly reduce its cost. This development was preceded by the creation of the so-called safety film on a triacetyl cellulose substrate, which replaced the extremely flammable nitrocelluloid film used for professional production and made it possible to store films at home, as well as the invention of the reversal system, whereby instead of producing two tapes – a negative and a positive – the same tape that was exposed in the camera could be projected post-development in a projector.

These improvements made amateur film equipment accessible to the average American, but at the same time, these innovations fundamentally limited the use of amateur film. By the fact that there was only one original film stock, and that it was extremely complicated and expensive to produce a copy, the distribution possibilities of these films were severely limited, almost exclusively to their functioning in the private circulation of the home. The 16mm amateur gauge formed a filmmaking caste system: 35mm for professionals and 16mm for families, concludes Patricia R. Zimmermann.

Particularly in the post-World War II period, the home movie became almost synonymous with the amateur film and became embedded in the model of the American family. In 1954, Ben Williams wrote in ‘House and Garden’ magazine that owning an amateur film camera or projector was the ambition of many families and one of the symbols of modern leisure activities, like a barbecue, a game of Scrabble or a ping-pong table.

Thus, home movies became a tool for introducing and perpetuating togetherness and familialism as a lifestyle, and a guarantee of happiness and fulfilment. As can be inferred from a 1961 report by Bell and Howell, home movies effectively supported the patriarchal, nuclear family model. The main motivation for buying amateur film equipment was having children and the ambition to record them growing up. In doing so, filmmaking was mainly carried out by fathers, actively directing images of their families. Power over the camera established men as individuals in control – both of their surroundings and of their own lives. This was happening at a time when they had largely lost it in the workplace – the US economy was consolidating a model of corporate capitalism in which work was becoming increasingly mechanical, monotonous and alienating.

As Roger Odin points out, home movies are based on very different principles from other amateur film genres. This is primarily due to the fact that they are made by one family member for the other members, capturing important events in their lives. At the same time, it is not the film – finished and viewable – that is most important in the filming process, but the moment of its creation, which is an opportunity to bring the family together and share only happy moments with them. Thus, the purpose of making a home movie is achieved before the film is screened.

Home movies rarely present linear stories, rely on a coherent narrative or cause-and-effect relationships. Rather, they are a kind of catalogue containing individual scenes and sequences that refer back to specific events in the life of the family and are, therefore, only comprehensible and interesting for the family members.

Finally, these materials do not often present an objective picture of family life. As Roger Odin aptly observes, in no other type of film are there as many scenes of laughter, joy and greetings as in home movies. On the other hand, there is hardly any footage of the illnesses and suffering, family quarrels and bigger and smaller tragedies that are part and parcel of family life. Following Bert Hogenkamp and Mieke Lauwers, it can be argued that such films do not so much present an image of the family as they protect the ideal family image from the reality that could distort it. 

Sea in the Blood – gender and hierarchy in amateur cinema

Richard Fung grew up in a Catholic Chinese family in the suburbs of Port-of-Spain – the capital of Trinidad and Tobago – in the 1960s, during a period when the country was transforming from a colony of Britain into an independent republic. At the time of his home movies, Trinidad and Tobago was undergoing Americanisation – in addition to products and pop culture from the United States, the ideology promoting the nuclear family model was also seeping in. As Richard Fung recalls, for many years his mother would read the American magazine that she subscribed, ‘Good Housekeeping’, drawing from it role models and advice on how to manage a family and be a model housewife – which is how she proudly described herself, even though she worked professionally in the family shop six days a week.

While the implementation of a particular pattern of family life, which included compulsory home movies, was indicative of a modern citizen in the United States, in a developing country such as Trinidad and Tobago, the adoption of patterns coming from the USA after the Second World War was indicative of the prestige and higher material status of the family. What was at stake was not only the knowledge of how to construct its image and fill its leisure time, but also the material means to achieve these goals – as amateur film equipment was beyond the financial reach of the average citizen of this country.

Another extremely important difference between the home movies made in the United States and those made in Port-of-Spain by Richard Fung’s family, was that in the case of the latter, filming was almost exclusively carried out by the mother, while the father considered the activity not serious enough for the ever-busy shop owner. According to the division of social roles operating in Western societies and in the Catholic Funga home, the private sphere, related to the home and family, was associated with the woman. This area also included the care and cultivation of family history and memory. As Patricia R. Zimmermann notes, an analogous division into private and public spheres and the assignment of these to the respective genders also functions in cinema; according to this, professional film was the domain of men, while amateur film was the domain of women.

It was mainly women who were targeted by advertisements for amateur film equipment placed in the American press before the Second World War. One of the most popular images appearing in such magazines were photographs or drawings depicting a woman filming her children. It carried an ambiguous message – by referring to the cultivation of the memory of the family’s past as women’s duty, and thus their control over the shape of that history, it could be emancipatory. At the same time, however, it reinforced the stereotype of women as being weak and incapable of mastering modern technology – for her presence in the ad was meant to demonstrate the lightness and ease of use of the camera being promoted.

The fact that filming in the Fung home was done by the mother, not the father, may be due to the difference between the ways in which the family functioned in the two cultures. For, as bell hooks writes, for many white Western women, the family is an oppressive institution, reflecting the dualistic nature of hierarchical relationships between both parents and children and husband and wife. However, for many women from other races and cultural backgrounds, the space of the family and the relationship between man and woman within it is less hierarchical. Consequently, the power derived from filming one’s family, taken away from women by men as a result of changes in American society, remained in the woman’s hand in the perhaps less oppressive and hierarchical Fung family.

The creation of family memories versus the completion of a picture of the past through the editing process in Sea in the Blood

The technique of telling a family story anew in a found footage project through the appropriation of home movies enables Fung to ‘unfold’ the meanings encoded there. A new sense of these images is created through the editing process considered by William Wees to be constitutive of found footage. In Sea in the Blood, it is the editing that activates the context of the original purpose of the family films used.

Richard Fung writes about the unreal image of family life that emerges from the amateur films of his childhood in an essay entitled Remaking Home Movies. Watching them for the first time as an adult, although he was able to recognise the characters appearing on the screen and the time and place where the films were shot, the image of the family that was captured on the films was quite different from the one that Fung retained in his memory. Instead of a humble life – wearing mended clothes and eating dinners made up of leftovers from previous meals – in these films, everyone is dressed in their finest clothes and always eating festive, celebratory dinners in the dining room.

The specific manipulation of family memories that takes place in these materials is not just about the Fungs’ social status, but about the complete erasure of the tragedy that the family lived through for decades, namely the illness and death of Richard’s two siblings, Ian and Nan, the main character in his film.

Fung says from the off in Sea in the Blood: Nan’s eventual death was a fact I was born into, like mangoes in July or Carnival before lent. I saw it in detail, me by her side, her soul taken to heaven by angels.  At the same time, in almost all the frames taken from the few home movies used in the film, both the entire Fung family seem carefree and happy, and Nan herself is shown as a laughing girl and later a grown woman, fooling around and waving at the camera, riding her new bicycle or throwing snowballs with her brother.

Undoubtedly, the home movies used in Sea in the Blood do not present a full, objective picture of the filmmaker’s family home, but rather protect the memory of the family from the pain that was, after all, a constant part of her life. Nonetheless, this seems to be how they fulfil their essential purpose of uniting the family and reminding its members of the good times they had, apart from suffering and illness.

By incorporating contemporary commentary into the narrative of a film constructed from archival footage, Richard Fung adds another element to the picture of the family created by the mother. It is a story that was not told in the time to which the family footage refers. Richard Fung, remembering his beloved sister Nan, gives new meaning to the images evoked with these words: She would talk about politics and sometimes, she would talk about how she could never lead a normal life, never have a boyfriend. I couldn’t tell her I wanted a boyfriend. At sixteen, I left home to go to school. She was the first person I came out to. I wrote to her when I met Tim. She wrote back, “You will always be my brother.” The author of Sea in the Blood could not share his idea of adult life with his sister. He could not bring himself to make such a confession in the face of a family subordinated to dreams shaped by the American model of heteronormative patterns of behaviour. He does so only years later, writing his intimate story into the account of his relationships with his parents and siblings. This evocative statement (text of the commentary), compiled with archival footage, allows for a deeper understanding of family relationships and changes the meaning of appropriated images.

The author of Sea in the Blood also confronts another stereotype ingrained in American culture. By choosing the phrase ‘sea in the blood’ for the film’s title, Richard Fung builds analogies between Nan’s disease thalassaemia (thalassa – ‘sea’, haima – ‘blood’; from Greek: ‘from around the sea’, English. ‘sea in the blood“) and the AIDS suffered by his partner. Susan Sontag, in her book Illness as Metaphor. AIDS and its Metaphors, points out that blood in the social imagination is explicitly linked to the fear of the disease. Cancerophobia taught us the fear of polluting people that AIDS anxiety inevitably communicates. Fear of Communion cup, fear of surgery; fear of contaminated blood, whether Christ’s blood or your neighbor’s. Life-blood, sexual fluids – is itself the bearer of contamination , writes Susan Sontag.

The motif of water tinged red on archival film opens Richard Fung’s film. We see the director and his partner, Tim, immersed in the water during a joy-filled party. The films and slides recalled are an intimate memento. Images of diving into the rusty water are filled with intimacy. These shots interweave the retrospective story of Nan. The water, depicted in such a way as to evoke associations with blood, can be interpreted as a symbol of illness – first of her sister, then of her partner. The familial closeness, the emotional relationships that are the subject of the film, are the reverse of the anxious social perception of the disease. From the film, we also learn about the social commitment of Richard Fung and his partner to movements to raise awareness about AIDS and ensure that patients have access to appropriate care. In archival footage, we see Tim and other activists taking control of the 5th International AIDS Conference in 1989.

Supplementing the family story with an individual narrative allows the narrator to build continuity between images of the past and the present. In Fung’s film there is a kind of coming to terms with the disease and accepting it as a kind of existential challenge experienced by the individual. The director recalls that he failed to say goodbye to Nan, even though his sister was expecting his return from a trip in Europe. The boy arrived at the family home a few hours after her death. Now, during the narrative of Sea in the Blood, he accompanies his partner in his struggle with AIDS. The reference to the past allows him to question his mother about what Nan’s death was like and to complete the hitherto fragmented picture. In this way, he is able to say goodbye to his sister, incorporating her story into an autobiographical tale.

Richard Fung’s film can be read as an identity project. It is a record of defining one’s place in the present by referring backwards through memory work and constructing a coherent story. The experience of Tim’s illness enables the narrator to look at growing up with the premonition of his sister’s imminent death from a new perspective. In this way, there is an attribution of meaning to a series of past experiences and a description of them in the context of the events that followed – in line with the process described by David Carr, cited by Catherine Rosner in her book Narrative, Identities and Time.

The relationship of home movies to classic Hollywood cinema

Similarly to Richard Fung in Sea in the Blood, Merilee Bennett in A Song of Air ‘breaks down’ the meanings encoded in home movies and reveals the persuasive nature of this footage.

Like Sea in the Blood, A Song of Air also builds on the discordance between the image of idyllic relationships, carefree and loving that emerges from the Bennett family’s home movies and Merilee Bennett’s memories of domestic relations. A common element between the two films is also the commentary conducted from off camera. Benett, like Fung, elaborates and reworks the meanings of the amateur images recorded in the family to match the images with her own memory. Here, the commentary by the creator of Sea in the Blood is addressed directly to the audience, with Fung explaining his family history and his own choices. In contrast, the words of the creator of A Song of Air are composed in the form of a letter to her father. In this way, Bennett’s film refers in its construction to the very idea of home movies, for as Roger Odin noted, in this kind of material the communication between the filmmaker and the viewer remains in the space of the family, to which both those filming and the filmed belong.

The author of A Song of Air reveals how her father placed himself at the centre of family pictures, and required her and her siblings to play the roles of obedient, loving children. Every night of my childhood I said my prayers, and ended with: ‘God bless Mommy and Daddy, and God bless Rue, Rose, Don, Doug, Gail, Paul, Susan and me’. This list represented order in a world dominated by my father. He was our provider. His word was law. His power was absolute. Like an omnipotent God all things came from him. The referenced comment completely changes the meaning of the photographs it accompanies. Merilee Bennett, talking about the role of the father as demiurge, the creator of these performances, interferes with the appropriated image – she slows down the pace of the projection of a home movie showing a bunch of children taking their places one by one next to their father, casually sitting on the lawn of a backyard. This technique and the words of the commentary help to deconstruct the pattern of depicting the harmony of family life in home movies.

Roger Odin in his text Reflection on the Family Home Movie as a Document: A Semio-Pragmatic Approach quotes a letter from the director of A Song of Air, who attests that the immortalisation of family members can involve a compulsion, the capture of an image that is subordinated to social roles and the desire to fit into their patterns. The shot of him [my father] talking directly into the camera with a tree and blue sky behind him was shot by me when I was 12 years old and he is actually telling me to stop, that it was enough now. I remember holding my finger on that button knowing that he couldn’t get really mad at me because I would have it on film, so he had to keep smiling even though he was getting cross,’ reads the content of the referenced statement.

This situation of recording the film image can be further clarified by Roland Barthes’s observations on the situation of photographic portraiture. The classic of contemporary French humanities notes that we are dealing with a closed field of forces.Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. Merilee Bennett thus describes, according to the classification cited above, a process in which it is important for the photographed subject to capture the image of who he or she would like to be taken for. At the same time, the daughter replicates the situation of appropriation of the image of those closest to her that the father employs, abusing the role of the photographer, making the subjects in front of the camera the objects of a shared private life, the subjects of a vision of family representation. On holidays he would gather us together to be in his movies. We’d stage departures so he could film the farewells and the car pulling away. We acted out our own lives for the sake of his movies – we hear Bennett’s voice in the commentary to A Song of Air.

One of the differences between Sea in the Blood and A Song of Air lies in the method of filming in the home movies used. The amateur footage appearing in Fung’s painting seems much more free, spontaneous and – to refer to photographic terminology – ‘snapshot’ than the films made by Arnold Lucas Bennett. This is because Richard Fung’s mother, when filming, concentrated on capturing specific moments and individuals, paying little attention to the language of cinema. In contrast, Bennett’s home movies are recorded using a tripod and carefully composed, the scenes are pre-planned and the family members who appear in them are directed. In fact, even when Arnold Lucas Bennett appears in the frame, we can tell from his gaze and movements that he is in complete control of reality.

This kind of attention to the manner of filming was a promoted aesthetic for home movies. As Zimmermann writes, it was based on reproducing the rules of professional cinema. And this was true both at the level of the language of the film and the zero-sum style of classic Hollywood cinema. For example, a number of magazines for amateur filmmakers emphasised the need to film in such a way that the camera does not shake, to set it up on a tripod, or to move it with smooth movements, reminiscent of panning. In the same magazines, it was recommended that the work on the set should be divided among the family members, analogous to the division that functions in professional acting. In this way, home movies, instead of building a model in opposition to professional cinema, were caught up in the mission of disseminating the ideologies promoted by Hollywood.

Roger Odin assesses that the most important aim of home movies is not to create a film, but to create a space of communication between family members. He also points out that the images recorded by Arnold Lucas Bennett are fearful because they are too well constructed, they are the realisation of a directed spectacle. The techniques applied by Merilee Bennett expose the symbolic violence that the father used to impose the representation of family members in home movies. Roland Barthes recalls a situation where a portrait taken of him was initially perceived as an auspicious representation of who he thought he was. However, the use of the photograph in one of his publications disrupted this feeling. The “private life” is nothing but that zone of space, of time, where I am not an image, an object. It is my political right to be a subject which I must protect.,’ the philosopher points out, commenting on the cited situation of the misuse of his portrait. The hurtful aspect of Arnold Lucas Bennett’s portrayal of the family in the light of these considerations would be to deny the people depicted in family films, rooted in ‘private life’, subjectivity.

Family communication and the socialisation process of girls in A Song of Air

Merilee Bennett points out that watching films together was also part of the system of family oppression: (…) Almost every Sunday evening after afternoon tea we watched movies. We saw ourselves growing up, laughing at fashion changes and private jokes. And above all had dad’s  image of the family life reinforced. The importance of watching family films together is highlighted by Roger Odin in his text The Home Movie and Space of Communication, emphasising that in a properly functioning model of the use of home movies, this process should enable an unhindered exchange of memories between family members. Viewing images from the past is about enabling the filling in of gaps in the fragmented past depicted in family films, sharing narratives attributed by family members to the projected images. The projection of home movies can be, according to Roger Odin, an opening up of a space of communication, enabling the reconciliation of individual and communal memory. Imposing one interpretation or not allowing family members to speak is an act of aggression aimed at subjugating family members.

Merilee Bennett evokes memories of her emotions accompanying her father’s behaviour implementing the patriarchal process of socialising girls. If I had been a boy, I would have gone on boy’s only excursions and found out what they talked about there in the bush. Did they plan heroic adventures? Did they wonder about love? And what the future would hold? – comments on the home movies depicting the excursions organised by her father for her brothers. The system of values and behaviour instilled was also to shape the future choices of his daughters. (…) your women could be educated, we could develop skills then get married, have babies and. And then get married and have children. And that’s when our real lives begin. This pattern of truncated  development insidiously wormed its way to my psyche. It infected my confidence and enraged me with frustration, unfinished  sentences, jobs and love affairs – an off camera commentary. The director of A Song of Air, through the use of the commentary on the referenced scenes, exposes the family as a primary form of gendered ideological institutions, producing female and male subjects.

A Song of Air not only exposes the violent nature of family relationships and shows the images constructed by the father as part of a system of patriarchal instilling of social roles, but is also an attempt to establish Merilee Bennett’s story about herself, a narrative that had no place to be spoken as a child. The (re)construction of family images allows the director to define her identity in opposition to the system of duties and rights instilled by Arnold Lucas Bennett. I made up stories, talked to myself with an accent. I acted out scenes in my mind in which I was in control. I was you, father. I gave myself the power I felt you had. But I was a woman– she comments on the images in which, as a little girl, she tries on her father’s lawyer’s clothes. Referring backwards and giving the home movies a sense that takes into account the intimate mode of viewing them according to the classification proposed by Roger Odin gives the director the opportunity to present a coherent narrative of identity. It allows her to incorporate this space-time into a narrative about herself and regain subjectivity by organising the structure of meaning. The interventions recalled allow her to say the words she did not have the courage to say, as an adult, during one of her visits to her father: I had travelled to places, felt and done things you had never told me about.  But you were seeing only your daughter. A nice little woman came home at last. You were talking to some other self of mine,  some alternative over my shoulder. So I sat down to afternoon tea with you and told you some things about my life. ‘I have loved women ,’ I told you. ‘I have taken drugs.’ (…) I didn’t tell you that I once bit a hunk of man’s  tongue in a fight to stop him raping me. (…) I couldn’t speak to you of these things as it because I was too far away already.

A similar technique of supplementing the family story with individual, intimate memories is used by Richard Fung, reading out a letter to Nan in which he confides in his sister about his sexual orientation.

In A Song of Air, the conflict with the father can become legitimised through the portrayal of its background. The denunciation of her repressed desires for self-determination of her fate, for the shape of her life, allows the director later in the film to utter words that are a confession of love for her father – however, no longer from the level of subordination, but as an adult, integral person. The process of re-editing home movies and giving them new meanings becomes almost therapeutic in A Song of Air, where gaining independence is combined with understanding the father. The importance of this is underlined by the film’s introductory scene, in which we see the author bent over an editing table. She is accompanied by the words spoken from off-screen: Dear father, how do I begin? I am faced with the illusions of memory, and there is no dialogue with the dead. The editing of the footage shot by the father turns out to be the only possible form of communication. At the same time, the scene can be read as a reference to the masterpiece of cinematography, for which editing is constitutive – Man with a Movie Camera (1929). In Dziga Vertov’s piece, we see the director’s wife, Yelizaveta Svilova, editing the film. In this way, the director emphasises the creative nature of the documentary emerging before our eyes, realised through editing.

Both A Song of Air and Sea in the Blood can be read as stories about coming to terms with loss – the death of family members – and experiencing the conflicting emotions this entails. Jamie Baron points out that in found footage films, due to the temporal discrepancy between the appropriated footage and the ‘now’ in which the film story is constructed in the editing process, we are often confronted not only with the ‘archive effect’, but also with the ‘archive affect’. When we are confronted by these images of time’s inscription on human bodies and places, there is not only an epistemological effect but also an emotional one based in the revelation of temporal disparity. In other words, not only do we invest archival documents with the authority of the “real” past, but also with the feeling of loss.

In one scene of A Song of Air, the director evokes a photograph of her father from her youth in a gesture similar to Roland Barthes’ finding an image of his beloved mother in Camera Lucida. Also, Merilee Bennett’s photograph of her father, taken when he was 29 years old, long before she was born, leads her to an essential identity of this performance, that is, to the genius of the beloved. Finding the image of her father from her youth and evoking it in the film allows the director to visualise a view of Arnold Lucas Bennett as a person not reduced to the role of father. A Song of Air, by virtue of its form of a letter to an absent father, can be read as creating a previously impossible space for dialogue, a form of compensatory joint viewing of family films, an agreement on the form of the story in which the daughter comes to speak.

The communal dimension of the evoked home movies, which Roger Odin identifies as constitutive of this film form, can thus be carried out.

* * *

A Song of Air and Sea in the Blood are examples of the use of the found footage technique as a creative strategy to show the connection between private stories and broader social processes – socially constructed models of family functioning, but also the emancipation of women and sexual minorities represented by the film’s protagonists. Patricia R. Zimmermann draws attention to the process of interpenetration of private and public space in found footage films, in which home movies were used. The (re)construction of ready-made material makes it possible to show the mechanisms of subordination of the family to the patterns of standardised models of functioning of this collectivity. Merilee Bennett and Richard Fung’s films both expose the patterns of family relations and are a subversive reworking of them, allowing for the recounting of individual experiences and the creation of a story of self-understanding over time. Conducting identity narratives allows the makers of Sea in the Blood and A Song of Air to incorporate the experience of communing with loved ones into identity stories, thereby reconstructing relationships with them.

Paulina Haratyk, Gabriela Sitek

The text was written as a result of research carried out as part of the project: Between memory and archive. The amateur film in 1956-1981 Poland in the light of the accounts of amateur filmmakers and the policy of archives, funded by the National Science Centre (2015/19/N/HS2/03430) and conducted at the Jagiellonian University in 2016-2019.

¹ “Found Footage: Revitalizing Archives” – a series of screenings, discussions, and workshops took place from October 14 to 22, 2017, in Warsaw. The project was organized by the Okonakino Foundation, with partners including the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Faculty of Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Against Gravity, Home Movie Day, and Kinoteka. As part of the project, in addition to A Song of Air and Sea in the Blood, the following films were also presented: Majka from the Movie by Zuzanna Janin (Poland, 2012), Kodachrome and Mojave by Wilhelm Sasnal (Poland, 2006), Something Strong Within by Robert A. Nakamura (USA, 1995), as well as films from the Enthusiasts project by Marysia Lewandowska and Neil Cummings: Before Dusk by Leszek Boguszewski (Poland, 1976), The Birth of a Man by Ryszard Wawrynowicz (Poland, 1963), A Contemporary Symphony by Maciej Korus and Jerzy Ridan (Poland, 1971), The Miners’ Hymns by Bill Morrison (UK, 2010), and One Day in the People’s Republic of Poland by Maciej Drygas (Poland, 2005). Participants in the discussions included Jakub Mikurda, Paweł Mościcki, Małgorzata Radkiewicz, Dagmara Rode, and Łukasz Ronduda. This text was inspired by the discussions held during the event and the insights that emerged from them.

² This disease is one of the severe forms of anemia (editor’s note).

³ See: Fung, R. (2008). Remaking home movies. In K. I. Ishizuka & P. R. Zimmermann (Eds.), Mining the Home Movie. Excavations in Histories and Memories (pp. 29-40). Berkley, Los Angeles. London: University of California Press.

⁴ Wees, W. C. (1993). Recycled Images. The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films. New York: Anthology Film Archives,  4.

⁵ Baron, J. (2014) The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History. London, New York: Routledge, 9.

⁶ Ibidem, 17.

⁷ See: Ibidem, 7.

⁸ Ibidem, 22.

⁹ Podsiadło, M. (2013). Autobiografizm filmowy jako ślad podmiotowej egzystencji. Kraków: Towarzystwo Autorów i Wydawców Prac Naukowych UNIVERSITAS, 108.

¹⁰ See: Ibidem, 108-109.

¹¹ See. Rosner, K. (2016). Narracja, tożsamość i czas. Kraków: UNIVERSITAS, 6-7.

¹² Ibidem, 6.

¹³ See: Ibidem, 47.

¹⁴ See: Odin, R. (2008). Reflection on the Family Home Movie as Document. A Semio-Pragmatic Approach. In K. I. Ishizuka & P. R. Zimmermann (Eds.), Mining the Home Movie (p. 261), op. cit.

¹⁵ See: Kattelle, A. (2000). Home Movies. A History of the American Industry, 1897-1979. Nashua: Transition Publishing, 52-70.

¹⁶ Zimmermann, P. R. (1995). Reel Families. A Social History of Amateur Film, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 27.

¹⁷ Ibidem, 133-135.

¹⁸ Ibidem, 123.

¹⁹ See: Reisman, D. (1958). Leisure and Work in a Post-Industrial Society. In E. Larrabee, R. Meyerson (Eds.), Mass Leisure. Glencoe: Free Press, pp. 368-379.

²⁰ See: Odin, R. (2008). Reflection on the Family Home Movie as Document. A Semio-Pragmatic Approach.In K. I. Ishizuka & P. R. Zimmermann (Eds.), Mining the Home Movie (pp. 256-258), op. cit.

²¹ See: Ibidem.

²² Hogenkamp, B., Lauwers, M. (1997). In pursuit of happiness? A search for the definition of amateur film. In Rencontres Autour Des Inedits (Eds.), Essays on Amateur Film. Jubilee Book, Charleroi: European Association Inedits, p. 113.

²³ See: Fung, R. (2008). Remaking home movies. In K. I. Ishizuka & P. R. Zimmermann (Eds.), Mining the Home Movie. Excavations in Histories and Memories (pp. 33-34), op. cit.

²⁴ See: Ibidem, 39.

²⁵ See: Zimmermann, P. R. (1997). Democracy and cinema: A history of amateur film. In Rencontres Autour Des Inedits (Eds.), Essays on Amateur Film. Jubilee Book (p. 74), op. cit. 

²⁶ See: Zimmermann, P. R. (1995). Reel Families. A Social History of Amateur Film, op. cit., 61-62.

²⁷ bell hooks (1984). Feminist Theory. From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press, 28-30.

²⁸ See: Wees, W. C. (1993). Recycled Images. The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films, op. cit., 29-33.

²⁹ Remaking home movies. R. Fung, (2008). In K. I. Ishizuka & P. R. Zimmermann (Eds.), Mining the Home Movie. Excavations in Histories and Memories (pp. 29-33), op. cit.

³⁰ Quote from the movie. 

³¹ Ibidem.

³² Sontag, S. (1989). Illness as Metaphor. AIDS and its Metaphors. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 73.

³³ Rosner, K. (2016). Narracja, tożsamość i czas, op. cit., 47.

³⁴ Quote from the movie.

³⁵ Odin, R. (2008). Reflection on the Family Home Movie as Document. A Semio-Pragmatic Approach.In K. I. Ishizuka & P. R. Zimmermann (Eds.), Mining the Home Movie (p. 257), op. cit. 

³⁶ Barthes, R. (2014) Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, trans. by R. Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 13.

³⁷ Quote from the movie.

³⁸ Zimmermann, P. R. (1995). Reel Families. A Social History of Amateur Film, op. cit., 65-66.

³⁹ See: Ibidem, 57.

⁴⁰ Odin, R. (2008). Reflection on the Family Home Movie as Document. A Semio-Pragmatic Approach. In K. I. Ishizuka & P. R. Zimmermann (Eds.), Mining the Home Movie (pp. 256-257), op. cit.

⁴¹ See: Ibidem, 258.

⁴² Barthes, R. (2014) Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, trans. by R. Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 15.

⁴³ Quote from the movie.

⁴⁴ See. Odin, R. (2014). The Home Movie and Space of Communication. In L. Rascaroli, B. Monahan, G. Young (Eds.), Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web (p. 26), New York, London: Bloomsbury Publishing,

⁴⁵ Quote from the movie.

⁴⁶ See: Hyży, E. (2012), Kobieta, ciało, tożsamość. Teorie podmiotu w filozofii feministycznej końca XX w., Kraków: UNIVERSITAS, 86.

⁴⁷ Quote from the movie.

⁴⁸ Odin, R. (2014). The Home Movie and Space of Communication. In L. Rascaroli, B. Monahan, G. Young (Eds.), Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web (p. 15-26), op. cit.

⁴⁹ Quote from the movie.

⁵⁰ Rosner, K. (2016). Narracja, tożsamość i czas, op. cit., 47.

⁵¹ Quote from the movie.

⁵² Baron, J. (2014) The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History. op. cit., 21.

⁵³ Barthes, R. (2014) Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, trans. by R. Howard, op. cit., 66. 

⁵⁴ Roland Barthes says: […] how opposed I am to that scientific way of treating the family as if it were uniquely a fabric of constrains and rites: either we code it as a group of immediate allegiances or else we make it into a knot of conflicts and repressions. As if our experts cannot conceive that there are families “whose members love one another”. And no more that I would reduce my family to the Family, would I reduce my mother to the Mother. Barthes, R. (2014) Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, trans. by R. Howard, op. cit., 74.

⁵⁵ See: Odin, R. (2014). The Home Movie and Space of Communication. In L. Rascaroli, B. Monahan, G. Young (Eds.), Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web (pp. 15-26),  op. cit.

⁵⁶ Zimmermann, P. R. (1995). Reel Families. A Social History of Amateur Film, op. cit., 1-28.