On a psychological level, much use of film has come about to overcome the basic existential conundrum of life - why are we here, and if life is so transitory, how can we make a mark to let the future know we have passed by? One prominent strand of fine art – the portrait - had developed to ensure the immortality of those rich enough to commission their likeness. Photography in the nineteenth century democratised that process to the petit bourgeoisie, and set in motion a technology that has ensured everyone now has the ability to record and leave a still or moving image of themselves, be it on celluloid, video, DVD, computer or even mobile phone. From the naive, bemused, suspicious stares of turn of the century factory workers and holiday-makers caught by the early film-makers, to the later familiar, gleeful mugging for the home movie or video camera, we all love/hate the egotistical boost of being filmed by someone. It offers the primal satisfaction of having your image – whether still or moving - captured for posterity. Why else do so many holiday snaps and movies end up saying no more than "Look at me - who I am, where I am and who I'm with". It is a basic existential statement to validate your identity and experience, or boost your status to friends and the world at large - no different, in effect from the portrait-seated ancient king or medieval prince. When the home movies of older generation celebrities are included in TV profiles, it is generally a privileged middle or upper class world of mansions, lawns and swimming pools we see before us. With the camcorder age and the era of reality TV, it is anyone's world that we (and posterity) now have access to. How to deal with the sheer weight of visual information will be one of the main problems for future generations of archivists and historians to solve!

An extension of this personal use of film has been its social/cultural use, where whole communities have used film to record and validate their existence. It may be in the form of immigrant groups using film or video to preserve their culture or fight back in the face of economic and social discrimination, or town or village projects to record a perhaps vanishing way of life. Whatever the collective project, it has become a valuable way of using film to say "We are here!" And again this process has become gradually more democratised with advances in technology. In the early days, the assistance of sympathetic professionals was needed, as when pioneering photographers went in to the slums to photograph the miserable conditions of the nineteenth century working classes. Their 1930s cinema equivalents, the Grierson documentarists, did the same, with films like "Housing Problems" giving slum dwellers a voice to highlight their conditions in the first filmed 'vox pops'. Less campaigning and more anthropological was the photographic work of Humphrey Spender - who from 1937-38 documented the life and habits of the 'natives' of Worktown (Bolton) - and the films of Humphrey Jennings - who put the workers' popular culture hobbies on the screen in 1939's "Spare Time" - as part of their 'Mass Observation' social documentation activities. Now such well-meaning, liberal assistance is redundant. The availability of equipment is wide enough, and the skills needed basic enough for any group to document themselves, in whatever way they want.

  < previous   next > Page 2 of 3

Comments