creativity/machine

Found this buried in an old draft entry: it comes from Historiographic Axioms of Home Movies by Patricia R. Zimmermann and Karen I. Ishizuka. It’s good stuff: Patricia Zimmerman is the most right-on writer on home movies I’ve encountered so far.

“1. Hollywood films are the home movies of global capital.
2. Home movies provide a site to perform exorcisms on the international crisis for public memory. They motor a return to the real, the referent, the body.
3. Home movies present facts which are fictions and fictions which are facts
4. Home movies are not empirical evidence. Rather, they stage psychic tracings, disturbances, dreamscapes, pantasm, colliding registers, contiguities.
5. Home movies are neither images nor representations. Instead, they are mediations of fragmentary, incomplete symptoms of the breakage of the psyche and the breakage of the text. They are inscribed by and in conversation with historical trauma(s).
6. Home movies constitute microhistories of intersections between local, regional, national, global movements and fluidities. They narrate the nation differently and in difference(s)
7. Home movies exceed linear causal historical explanation. They necessitate the continual formation of an archive of contiguities and collage that opens to the future. They require multilinearities and multispatialities.
8. To work with home movies is to mine and excavate to reclaim visual artifacts from the quotidian in its specificity. These disparate and incomplete objects necessitate a retheorization of film history into a more polyvocal and contrapuntal model.
9. Home movies are an unseen cinema of public memories and historical traumas, visual artifacts that define the fixities of object status. Public memory is that which moves beyond the private to the collective. It speaks beyond the self in compound knowledge with others in a dialectic between the past and the future.
10. Home movies require a shift from time to spaces. They engage a historiographic mapping process of the incomplete and fragementary archives of an imagined past.
11. Home movies are psychic vectors, texts and histories without closure, overflowing with dynamic contradictions.
12. Home movies are not fixed objects. They are condensations, imaginaries, dreamscapes that are fluid and changing as they interact in other spatial formations.
13. Home movies speak through their gaps, fissures, silences, vacancies, elisions.
14. To understand the signification system of home movies and their historiographic meaning, it is necessary to move from the causal and the linear to the multilinear, continguous, and polyphonic.
15. All home movies and amateur films are acts of death, loss, trauma, decay and mourning. Their ghosts call out to us to be made real, remembered and named.”