The Most Personal Filmmakers

Kids doing cannonballs into swimming pools. Awkward birthday parties. Family festivities best left forgotten. No one can say that the humble home movie form has the most illustrious of pedigrees. But that is starting to change.

“Homemade Movies” is the deceptively simple title for an intriguing, provocative program screening Thursday night at the UCLA Film and Television Archives. It’s a fresh examination of the home movie form--and those who think of these efforts as primitive and devoid of interest will have their heads turned in a major way.

“There’s an authenticity in the naivete of the images,” says Karen L. Ishizuka, senior curator at L.A.’s Japanese American National Museum, who put together UCLA’s program. She describes home movies as “history from the ground up.”

While attention to these films is just beginning in this country (New York’s Museum of Modern Art has run an amateur films program and the Getty Research Institute is about to host an international symposium), it’s a different story overseas.

Noted Ishizuka: “Europe has been paying a lot more attention for a longer period of time.” A five-hour TV series called “An Unknown War” that looked at the World War II home front through home movies played all across the continent, Belgian TV has a regular program devoted to the genre, and the Netherlands has a wonderfully named Small Film Museum that has nothing but home movies in it.

Looking at the UCLA program, it’s easy to see why everyone is so interested in the form. Precisely because they were made with no thought for eventual public exhibition, these movies (shot in 16mm and 8mm in this country and 9.5mm in Europe) offer us privileged glimpses into the way things were.

While conventional documentaries can be manipulated and even staged, these films, unedited and captured on the fly, have a time-machine like ability to take us back to the past.

Thursday night’s UCLA program looks at homemade films from a number of points of view, starting with shorts made by a camera manufacturer and a hobbyist club to encourage consumers to start filming. These include a circa 1930 silent commercial called “See Yourself as Others See You” in which a sophisticated young woman pooh-poohs a friend’s photo album with a breezy, “It’s so much more fun to make your pictures come to life.”

The program also has a section called “Behind the Icons” that offers humanizing glimpses of some very famous names. Sigmund Freud is shown playing with his dog, Marilyn Monroe comes off as both beautiful and vulnerable in home movie footage shot in 1956 on the set of “Bus Stop,” and Adolf Hitler serves as a charming host to British Prime Minister David Lloyd George in a 1936 clip taken by the prime minister’s private secretary.

(Though it’s not included in the program, one of the most intriguing use of home movies comes in the 1973 Philippe Mora-directed documentary “Swastika.” It includes Eva Braun’s home movies of Hitler, with the dialogue between the participants reproduced in subtitles courtesy of German lip readers.)

Because minority communities were rarely filmed by mainstream outlets, home movie glimpses of these people and places are especially rare. The UCLA program includes footage of a river baptism in the South, shots of Black Muslim life and a peek at “The Last Great Gathering of the Sioux Nation,” held in Crawford, Neb., in 1934.

The two most involving parts of “Homemade Movies” are current films that make use of vintage home movies. “Something Strong Within” is an excellent 1994 documentary directed by Robert A. Nakamura and written and produced by curator Ishizuka for the Japanese American National Museum.

Focusing on the detention camps Japanese Americans were forced into at the start of World War II, “Something Strong Within” includes the celebrated Topaz footage, the second home movie (after the Zapruder footage of the Kennedy assassination) to be inducted to the National Film Registry.

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These scenes were clandestinely shot at the Topaz camp in Millard County, Utah, by amateur photographer Dave Tatsumo, using a camera that had to be smuggled in. Glimpses include hauntingly beautiful snowfalls, dust storms and a sequence of a young woman methodically ice skating on what looks to be a large frozen puddle that is heartbreaking.

The heart of the UCLA evening, and in many ways the most complex and evocative use of home movies in the program, is an hourlong work called “The Maelstrom” by Hungarian filmmaker Peter Forgacs.

“The Maelstrom” makes extraordinarily artful use of a considerable cache of home movies shot in the Netherlands before and during World War II and dealing with the extended Peereboom family. Information is conveyed through subtitles and instead of voice-over, the soundtrack consists of period sound, usually from radio broadcasts, and a brooding, disturbing jazz score by Tibor Szemzo.

What we see is a Jewish family first living unknowingly in the shadow of the Holocaust and then trying to cope with it still unaware of what it will finally mean. A shot of the film’s photographer, Max Peereboom, and his family, a family we’ve come to know, cheerfully sewing and doing general preparation for a trip to a “work camp” when their destination was in reality the nightmare of Auschwitz adds a devastating dimension to our understanding of the Final Solution that nothing else, no Hollywood movie, no documentary, has been able to provide.

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* “Homemade Movies” will be screened Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at the James Bridges Theater, located on the northeast side of the UCLA campus, near the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Hilgard Avenue. Tickets are $6 for general admission, $4 for children, students and seniors; (310) 206-FILM.