The Home Movie 4.0: (co)creative strategies for a tacit, embodied and affective reading of the Sicilian home movie archive

The home movie has always been a borderline film category that breaks with cinematic standards and occupies a liminal position between the artistic and non-artistic domain. The very nature of these films has rendered traditional analytical frames such as film analysis, ethnographic investigation and participatory practices not only hard to apply, but also ineffectual for opening their meaning to a public made of specialist and non-specialist audiences. Sicilian home movies in particular constitute an underexplored yet rich field of enquiry. In my project, I deal with Sicilian home movies and the way we can reimagine their role as social objects in an increasingly digital context.
The aim of the project is to find new methods and forms of expression that make these films more relatable. Bergson’s concept of actualization provides a suitable theoretical frame for conceptualizing new ways of looking at and engaging with these archives. Using this frame, I develop a practice-led approach that deploys creative interventions such as drawing, ethnographic interventions and participatory exercises, as tools materialising this broader vision. This gives rise to an iterative process that explores practice against theory and theory against practice and creates new constructs dealing with the tacit, sensuous and affective in these archives. These modalities challenge traditional methods by asking if and how we can produce a different and disembodied way of knowing the archive that is deeply rooted in lived experience. They also give rise to looser ways of investigation that render aesthetic experience more inclusive and participative.
The novel methodology with its associated reading modalities and the interactive documentary offering a different way of engaging with Sicilian archives, have been collated into the project website www.homemoviesicily.com. They can benefit both researchers, artists and communities of non-specialist audiences. Furthermore, the project opens up two future research directions. The first looks at how we could take tools like the interactive documentary into the mainstream. The second envisages how creative exercises can give rise to further interaction modalities. Both directions represent a modest but important step for the future of these archives.