Curated by Paolo Simoni.
Twentieth-century home movies are documents steeped in History: they contain information and, above all, “clues, hints, and traces,” starting from the very material they are made of—the film stock itself—which is examined at the moment an amateur film enters the archive. The medium and the format connect us to cultural, technological, and social aspects. Subsequent investigations reveal and open a window onto the world from which the images originate. The questioning to which we subject them draws, on the one hand, on fragile and emotional oral memories—stimulated and conveyed by the images themselves—and, on the other, serves to deepen, verify, and formulate hypotheses. The lesson of microhistory teaches us to take these obsolete objects in hand and to construct around them a discourse and a narrative starting from our own point of view, from our position in the world, and from the contemporary questions we address to the past—so that we are not left with the past alone.
This section aims to activate a historical narrative through the heritage of private cinema preserved by the National Home Movie Archive, a goal that the Home Movies Foundation has pursued since its beginnings, constantly renewing its methods and through a multidisciplinary approach.
A wedding film from 1933, shot in Rome within the high society of the time, opens a breach into the complexities and ambiguities of Fascist Italy, holding surprises and perhaps twists: what interest did Mussolini have in this marriage? In the 35mm film and in archival documents we may perhaps find some answers.
We will also discover the 9.5mm films of a Ligurian family, the Lavellos, shot one hundred years ago, between the spring and summer of 1925. Most of the footage across the 27 reels in this archival collection can be attributed to sixteen-year-old Nena Lavello, daughter of Arturo, among the first in Italy to purchase a hand-cranked Pathé Baby camera. In the images, we will search for traces of these lives that traversed the twentieth century, representing it in some way, and, once again, seek to restore the historical, cultural, and aesthetic value of amateur cinema.
