An archival documentary series in six episodes
2024
A century ago, the introduction of amateur film cameras radically changed the way families could capture and preserve intimate moments. Ever since, people have been able to make home films, creating archives of memories that capture laughter, hopes and unique moments.
The gaze of amateur filmmaking has long been the point of view of very few people, for film cameras were initially very expensive and only few wealthy people could afford them. Women long appeared mainly as subjects of the male gaze, as only men were holding the camera and defining the point of view on the world.
Technological and social changes gradually transformed this gaze. Amateur cinema has thus been composing a mosaic of stories and faces that captures the cycle of life, interweaving private and collective history.
Thousands of film reels are left today, an emotional and historical legacy of the short twentieth century and of the profound social transformations that characterized it.
A cinema of generations that follow one another in an eternal return, captured in a ritual that is both the same and different: the life that gets filmed, trapped in the glances on camera.
Promoted and curated by Home Movies, produced by Kiné together with I Wonder with the contribution of the Emilia Romagna Region, the archival documentary series Sguardi in camera (Glances into the camera) was conceived as an attempt to bring into the form of audiovisual narrative the materials archived, selected and categorized by HomeMovies100, the project dedicated to the (never told) history of private cinema in Italy. A story – or rather many stories – that intersects with the History of our country throughout the 20th century, between the early 1920s and the late 1980s. The series, a montage of private film archives (family, amateur, and experimental ones) in six parts, is thought and realized to be distributed on multiple channels, from online platforms to television channels, from movie theaters to museum spaces. Archivio Aperto dedicates to this upcoming series a panel with authors, producers and artistic collaborators, as well as a preview screening of some excerpts.