Saragossa,
In the past 2021, Efrén Cuevas, Professor of Audiovisual Communication at the University of Navarra, launched the research project domestic cinema in Spain: preservation, dissemination and appropriation, to which Núria F. Rius would be added and even a fortnight of scholars and for which a good number of institutions of our country, collective and individuals have lent materials. His study of that cinema, if not interiors, yes of intimacy, is collected in an open sample in Caixaforum Zaragoza that both would commission and that raises the importance of such filming from a broad perspective: attending to history, sociology and aesthetics -sometimes they are the unique testimony of lost life forms. Also to emotion: in each of the next venues of this exhibition (in July he will travel to CaixaForum Valencia) materials linked to those territories will be incorporated, in order to establish sentimental connections with the spectators, another fundamental element in the analysis of domestic videos.
As old as the cinema without that home label -how many films of the Lumière were not dedicated to family moments -this film modality that collects fragments of our daily life can be reviewed, and this is what the commissioners propose, such as the visual archive of a collective memory, a file that gives us the opportunity to examine why we film smartphones) and to what extent we can all identify our ways of looking with those of so many anonymous individuals and families. Also to what extent we can consider an alternative chronicle in the history of the twentieth century.
So many times denied by common and spontaneous, these materials are seen in this exhibition claimed as living testimony of social changes, support of an easy memory to inherit for the majority and expression of a time in which the presentation in society of each individual has often gone very often due to its appearance before a camera. Structured in half a dozen thematic sections, the route collects recordings in 16 mm, super-8, VHS and mobile phones: reviews the most frequent issues and forms of expression in these pieces, analyze to what extent those modes of expression have jumped to professional cinema and other audiovisual practices of our time and ultimately relates those creations both to memory and their memory and art.
At first, it makes history: reviews how, at the beginning of the last century, professional operators began filming domestic events in 35 mm or 28 mm, but it would not be until the twenties, when the first small -format cameras could be acquired, when we can understand that the development of domestic cinema as such took its first steps. His explosion came from 1945, when the proliferation of these devices in the market was greater, and this trend was consolidated in the seventies, by the hand of the magnetic support, which had a professional job rather than homemade, and later of Betamax and the VHS. It would be in the last decades of the twentieth century when the small and light, digital cameras sprouted, which passed through almost all hands … in a brief temporal period: the smartphones soon broke into.
Certain aesthetic schemes and slogans typical of the resulting films clearly derived from the advertising of each period, which also disseminated the use of these cameras and projectors as if it were one more device, necessary at home, capable of collecting happy moments and fighting against oblivion. That domestic conception of these devices explains that the ads were normally addressed to women.
A central section of the sample offers two audiovisuals carried out for the occasion by the documentaryman Salvi Vivancos; They collect a selection of domestic films that are part of the funds of various Spanish film library and dated between 1900 and 2000. Their panoramic view will serve the public to detect their formal features and their most common themes; Among the former, attitudes to the camera, visual features and errors; Among the seconds, those who imagine: interiors, weddings, baptisms and communions, trips, games with the camera itself, the city, social events, vacations and excursions. Since these works are projected on three screens, we can simultaneously see captures of the same topic in different decades; We will appreciate more clearly, how we have changed in the cultural and technological. For greater proximity, as we said, they have also met, in this case, domestic films recovered from Aragonese citizens, mostly focused on their cities, popular festivals, vacations and excursions: they provide the opportunity to perceive urban trasiegos and also notable changes in social meeting events.
The examination of the reuse of domestic films today, both on the big screen and in the little I smelled your videosissued by several regional channels, or First videos (TVE); The most interested in experimental cinema will find examples of expression of the expressive potential of domestic recordings in films such as A moment in the life of others (2003), about the life of a Catalan bourgeois family from the perspective of its matriarch, Madronita Andreu, or The Family Album (1988), by Alan Berliner, a kind of universal biography of the human being drawn with domestic films and audio tapes without known origin.
The final chapters address the film fruits of smartphones: for the commissioners, they have led to an obvious paradigm change in terms of the use of cameras, but not in the essential principles of domestic cinema (issues, features and dissemination, even majority, between family or friendship circles). Yes, the production of these works has been multiplied, as well as their technical possibilities and their accessibility; Perhaps also its ultimate goal, and that would be a greater change: we may not film both to keep memory and to share it, and social networks may have transformed our ways of looking at us.
The end point to this exhibition is put by some challenges: to preserve these pieces, especially in time of technological obsolescence, but also in their previous formats and perhaps depositing some of them in Filmoteca and other institutional archives. Those who want to know more can take home a brochure that explains how to recover their domestic films.
“Memories. Life through domestic cinema”
CaixaForum Zaragoza
Avenida de Anselmo Clavé, 4
Madrid
From February 28 to June 8, 2025
