Clip of a film I re-worked.

Cheryl Garner, Short Clip - Wedding, 2011 [Found Footage re-worked]

- In postmodern philosophy, a metanarrative is an untold story that unifies and totalizes the world, and justifies a culture's power structures.

- An abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge.

- A metanarrative is a story about a story, encompassing and explaining other "little stories" within totalizing schemes.

- Metanarrative - a narrative about a narrative or narratives, any story told to justify another story, esp. involving artifice; a story about oneself that provides a view of one's experiences.

Construction / Abstraction

"No one, [Freud] announced, lives in the real world. We occupy a space of our own creation - a collage compounded of bits and pieces of actuality arranged into a design determined by our internal perceptions, our hopes, our fears, our memories, and our anticipations."

-W Galin, Feelings, 1979

On discussing "common things," Georges Perec contended the difficulty is "to free these images from the straitjacket in which they are trapped, to make them produce meaning and speak about what they are and what we are." Home movies are precisely "common things

"It would be so simple to look at this film and say, "There, look. They're enjoying themselves...They don't look like they are suffering at all." Truth is, there are no scripted scenes of misery, no one caught sobbing in uncontrolled grief. These are home movies...taken under normal circumstances, there is an underlying poignancy that transcends the innocent, naive faces on the screen...The true power of home movies is the fact that they don't apologize showing scenes of children playing, people laughing. There is no apology needed."

-Joy Yamauchi

In their recordings of private lives and private perspectives on the public, home movies are invaluable documents of everyday lived experiences. Home movies reveal much about time and the society in which they were made. The family's desire to inscribe themselves into the conventions of the technology, and all that this was associated with, means that the films are not always what they seem; their familiarity can be deceptive.

Home movies footage evokes nuclear family life, particularly in the suburbs. It suggests the commonplace, the ordinary. Yet reworking these films into my own projects, I have to manipulate their context and their surface to reveal these meanings other than as nostalgic or quaint.

When you think about it, they allow the forever-outsider, the spectator, to be seen and to recognise themselves.

Artists often flee ordinariness, the danger of exposing it

We watch them, their own ordinariness, marriage, babies, frolicking in the snow. The ordinary can be an embarrassment for those who notice it because to do so is an acknowledgment, maybe even a confession, of one's own banality.

That ordinary being the place where "you first encounter yourself"

further questions -

They are old movies, home movies, which were taken for no good reason: just to mark occasions, to create a record; to remember daily life and the bodies we used to have and the people we used to be ????

The running joke of home movies is that you want to flee from the one that inflicts their home movies of wedding, the children, the last vacation on you. And yet they are oblivious of the boredom, they have no reason to be bored, after all it's about them.

How can home movies of other people hold any interest for us?
Why should we care about them?