Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

Vol. 24, No. 5, October 2010, 763775

Labours of love: Home movies, paracinema, and the modern work of

cinema spectatorship
Minette Hillyer*

Media Studies Programme, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

This article offers an expanded definition of paracinema, concentrating on the labour of

spectatorship performed by amateurs in the case of the home movie. In this expanded
definition, paracinema offers a way of theorizing marginal cinemas engagement with
social life through the active, engaged labour of their spectators. This labour responds
to the modern separation and rationalization of work and leisure, and to the central role
taken by the movies in our articulation of modern life.

Movies are a weekend occupation. Even today, when what Siegfried Kracauer described
as the institution of Sundays is no longer (1995, 331), we go to the movies after work, in
place of work, or very occasionally for those of us engaged in the labour of analysis or
evaluation in the practice of a kind of work largely available to a leisured class, and
virtually unrecognizable to our grandparents. That is, despite disruptions to the temporal
organization of week and weekend, movies still connote leisure, and as such must
produce a break . . . not only as far as work is concerned, but for day-to-day family life
(Lefebvre 2008, 33). Spectatorship, regardless of when it takes place, is theorized in this
schema as distraction: a compensation for the difficulties of everyday life, and a necessary
alternative to work.
In what follows, I wish to study the labour of movie spectatorship. I do not mean here
the unwilled labour of a movie-goer who simply seeks distraction and has to work to find
it, but the work of leisure as it is practised by amateurs and licensed by modes of
spectatorship marginal to the mainstream cinema. In particular, I am interested in
proposing a mode of spectatorship or reading protocol (Sconce 1995, 372) peculiar to
hard-working practitioner-spectators of the home movie, for which I draw on Jeffrey
Sconces model of paracinema. Paracinema is most often associated with the disreputable
and distasteful: Sconce gives as examples of this most elastic textual category:
entries from such seemingly disparate subgenres as badfilm, splatterpunk, mondo films,
sword and sandal epics, Elvis flicks, government hygiene films, Japanese monster movies,
beach-party musicals, and just about every other historical manifestation of exploitation
cinema from juvenile delinquency documentaries to soft-core pornography. (372)
Not surprisingly, given the tantalizing material in this list, discussions of paracinema tend
to focus on trash, on movies producing bodily affect (Hawkins 2000, 4), on particular
types of movie text. However, Sconces argument, while focused on cultural detritus
the trashy text is concerned with spectatorship over corpus: with paracinema defined as a

*Email: minette.hillyer@vuw.ac.nz

ISSN 1030-4312 print/ISSN 1469-3666 online

q 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2010.505330
http://www.informaworld.com
764 M. Hillyer

reading protocol, as opposed to a distinct group of films (Sconce 1995, 372). As such, it
offers a way to think about spectatorship as a kind of active labour, engaged specifically
with the essentially modern phenomenon of the movies.
Expanding paracinema beyond trash, or the variously trashy, provides the opportunity
to focus on the productive work of spectatorship, and thus to locate films in the everyday
practices of social life. Thus, my interest is not in the apparent worth of particular
categories or kinds of texts, but in the possibilities which marginal cinemas offer to engage
spectators in the work of making meaning. This is, of course, motivated work. Both the
home movie and the trash film can be described as failed texts, broadly characterized by
their failure to be entertaining, or complete in and of themselves. In particular, they
motivate with boredom. What they do not do, successfully, is distract viewers from their
material or social condition in the way of the classical feature film; nor do they
necessarily emancipate or improve the viewer, as it has been argued the amateur film
might (Zimmerman 1995, ix). In their failure they invite a kind of labour from their
viewers, which intervenes in the separation between work and leisure of which the feature
film is a significant engine and narrative. They are irritants at the margins of cinemas
engagement with social life.
The paracinematic work of spectatorship that I mean to describe here is also motivated
and framed by affection. Both the trashophile who seeks to rescue a once vibrant form
from the banal trappings of middlebrow respectability (Sconce 2007a, 2) and the home
movie-maker are amateurs: by definition, they work for love, as opposed to money.
According to Christian Metz, in our age cinemas engagement with the social takes the
form of a functional competition with the daydream: this, he argues, is one source of
cinephilia (1977, 136). In comparison to Metzs cinephile for whom love is a dream
paracinematic culture practises an active, engaged affection. Love, in this instance,
demands work. Amateurs and enthusiasts, creating and celebrating texts and classificatory
systems which are, according to the usual norms of taste and entertainment, incoherent,
which labour under the real-life conditions of their production and reception, demand a
more wakeful relationship with the social world.

Doing boring and being at home: The home movie as reading protocol
Work is very much in evidence in Holiday at Home (B.W. Shir-Cliff, 1951), an American
film that in both theme and execution takes an industrious approach to leisure. It is, by
many measures, an ideal amateur film: beautifully executed, purposeful, self-contained,
and grounded in the rituals and norms of everyday life. It displays the logo of the Amateur
Cinema League (ACL), a society that aimed to encourage and support non-commercial
filmmakers as well as worldwide communication, and which rewarded technical
excellence through yearly competitions (Kattelle 2003, 238 41). It is, moreover,
decisively middlebrow and entirely tasteful. As a reference point for a discussion linking
paracinema and the home movie, it is perhaps an unlikely candidate. Surely, an aficionado
might protest, Ed Woods home movies (now available on DVD!) would have been a
better choice? However, my intention is to avoid the distraction offered by the celebrity
home movie, or even the satisfactions of a schlocky mistake, such as might be found in the
more anonymous, if archetypal, train-wrecks of the home movie world. Rather, my
interest is in the kind of anonymity offered by this films technical and narrative
sufficiency: the extent to which it is able to transcend the usual intimate limitations which
accompany the home movie text, and circulate in public by virtue of its ability to pass in
some ways as a real film, while remaining decisively marginal in others. It suggests ways
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 765

of defining the home movie which emphasize the reading strategies brought to a text by a
community of active participants; as with paracinema, I wish to suggest that the efforts of
this community of readers describe an ethos and therefore a definition for this kind of
text. Moreover, in its treatment of home as holiday, Holiday at Home thematizes the
problems of modern boredom and leisure that are central to my project. By doing boring
while working hard to entertain, this exemplary amateur text is in fact a much closer
relation to the films celebrated by the trashophile than those that are more obviously trashy
or failed.
The film, which is about 19 minutes long and shot on 16 mm silent colour film, tells the
story of Justines trip home for Christmas, from the letter under the door announcing her
imminent arrival, to her departure for the station. Justine is introduced in a glamour shot
after the titles, dressed in an off-the-shoulder gown and gazing serenely into the camera as
intertitles fade in, informing the viewer of her plans to come home. She is the only cast
member to whom were introduced, and her elegance and evident status as protagonist
cause her to resemble a movie star with whom we assume a first-name familiarity.
Nonetheless, her letter, addressed to Mamma and Pappa and read over Mammas
shoulder, sets a tone of unthreatening and routine domesticity, despite the special occasion
motivating her visit and the film. Thus, there is work to be done. Mamma makes the bed in
preparation for her arrival as Pappa chauffeurs her to the door. The women shop we see
them standing outside Bloomingdales and choose a Christmas tree. Back at home, in a
sequence entitled Mothers Hands Are Busy, presents are wrapped, the turkey stuffed
and placed in the oven, we see the Christmas decorations and Justine, a young man (her
brother?), and Pappa unwrap their presents: dressing gowns for everybody. Pappa
meticulously prepares whiskey sours and Mamma, with some fanfare, finally reappears to
drink one. The turkey is produced from the oven, and eaten; champagne is poured. In the
aftermath of the meal someone (perhaps Justine), peruses a music composition textbook,
and we watch her knitting and writing notes on a stave before she rewards the family with a
song, with Pappa accompanying her on the piano and the whole thing prominently
recorded on audio tape. In the films penultimate sequence, we see Justine in bed smoking
a cigarette, her shoes abandoned on the rug, her toiletries arrayed on the dresser, before she
is driven away in the morning.
From its first act in taking the Christmas holiday at home as its motivating event and
narrative, Holiday at Home is true to the home movies spirit and, moreover, its ethos,
which tends to privilege a great event theory of family life. Of course, it is rather more
complete than many home movies; in fact, it demonstrates one version of amateurisms
ideal. The film is a faithful rendering of advice repeated in reassuring, commonsensical
tones for amateurs in post-war books and magazine columns: it starts with an idea, tells a
story, shoots in sequences, uses a tripod, makes judicious use of titles and, above all,
apparently thinks of its audience as those harsh critics, with expectations of being
entertained, who come from outside the family circle (Grosset 1963, 7; Salkin 1958, 15;
Townsend 1964, 13). Moreover, its maker or photographer B.W. Shir-Cliff, displays
unusual technical skill in shooting the majority of scenes indoors. The story, however, is
shot from an outsiders perspective; we have no sense of an absent parent or family
member filming, but seem, in addition to Justine, to witness a complete family unit: Pappa
mixing drinks, Mamma in the kitchen, a son in uniform with his drink, even Grandma at
the table. Nonetheless, we are allowed an experience of familial intimacy, of which our
access to Justines bedroom to watch her smoke in bed before she turns out the light is the
most striking example. The film looks like a facsimile of being at home an
advertisement of what home might be which asserts the worth of being at home with the
766 M. Hillyer

propriety of a home-maker. By the same token, there is no sense that this is not the makers
home, or something close to it. While it maintains an eye on its audience, the film is too
careful, too lacking in gimmickry to be much other than a record of the real holiday at
home.
As is evident in this film, the ethos of the home movie is strongly tied to the publication
of the familiar, as well as the familial. Although, thanks to its emphasis on the great
event, it tends to present home as holiday this holiday is purposively banal, not
bacchanal. The home movie does boring by taking as its subject matter events which are
predictable and routine everyday even as they offer the promise of an alternative to
the everyday of work. Taking leisure as its subject, the film works at the non-everyday in
the everyday (Lefebvre 2008, 40). The relationship between boredom and the everyday is
itself quite routine; the publication of the everyday thus presents an experience of
boredom, if not of being bored, apparently as a matter of course. Hence, Maurice Blanchot
writes that [b]oredom is the everyday become manifest: as a consequence of having lost
its essential constitutive trait of being unperceived (1987, 16). The home movie is,
then, always intimate with boredom, in as much as it is always engaged with the
publication of familiar, everyday scenarios and events.
The ability to describe these events as everyday is, meanwhile, predicated on their
continued lack of offence, or even particularity. Unperceived here gives way to
unremarkable. Trash cinema comes, in the first instance, after taste as it leaves taste
behind: this is the after of surrender, enacted in each engagement with the irredeemably
trashy film. After taste applied to the home movie, on the other hand, suggests the
repeated exposure to an historically neutral ideal of tastefulness in each viewing
experience of individual films: the after of memorialization. Home movies tend to
describe significant social events, and suggest the function of affirming and asserting
social norms; if the tasteless excess celebrated by the bad film haunts the home movie
with the promise of what might be, it is in large part precisely because home movies are
generally so tasteful. The fragmentation of a common taste culture, which Sconce argues
enables paracinema (1995, 375), is met in the home movie with a rearguard action; part of
the home movies enduring appeal and value as an idea is the extent to which it appears to
persist, unchanging across history in terms both of its subjects and styles and the familiar
norms which regulate them. Home movies, in this light, are perpetual parades of birthday
parties and christenings, valuable not only for the events they depict, but in the defence of
a generalized and communal taste culture which they mount.
However, in its professionalism and propriety, its slight idealization of the lovely
Justine and her well-ordered family, Holiday at Home presents a dilemma. The film is
uniquely successful as a text because it is uniquely complete. In narrative and technical
terms, it knows how to behave in public. However, if the home movies ethos demands
recognition of the great events of family life, it also demands that these events be, in
more public terms, inconsequential or homely: both commonplace and private, unfit for
public display. A trip home for the holidays, or a birthday, or a christening is a significant
milestone in family life, but they are the kinds of milestones which a family passes
regularly: they are commonplace. Moreover, to render these events great in any public
sense risks perverting their purpose and the homely spirit in which they are memorialized.
A mistake, a tragedy, a grotesque or hilarious error might place these events into a more
public record (perhaps even of the trashy, paracinematic kind) but by doing so take them
away from home.
Even the narrativization of family life, such as we see in Holiday at Home, tends to
challenge the home movie ethos, in which the inconsequential nature of the great events
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 767

of family life can be one way of ensuring and asserting the familys privacy. Eric Kuyper
has described home movies as moving stills, reflecting their heritage in the family album,
but also the imperative to do something which animates home movie-makers (1995, 13).
Kuypers comparison to photos suggests that home movies are opportunistic, and
momentary, even when they are of extended duration; they are organized by principles of
being and going on rather than as completed stories. To do something in this case thus
often means to arrest narrative, to stand still. In this sense, inconsequential can be coded
in failures which are characteristic or even definitive of home movies as
incomplete or even incompetent. Holiday at Home is, then, too public a record of
home and holiday, too competent a narrative, to work convincingly as a home movie.
This film, busy in holiday mode, tells a story and tells it with unusual mastery of technique.
Here, the home movie ethos comes up against a more public ethos of amateurism.
Lest we mistake them for the same thing, discourses of amateur filmmaking have taken
pains to prove otherwise, pitting home movie against amateur film in an historically
located defence of the amateur. This particular film is contained quite literally within a
discourse of amateurism. It opens with Member of the Amateur Cinema League/World
Wide Association of Movie Makers displayed over a spinning globe, and closes with the
Amateur Cinema League logo. The ACL titles assert an ethos of amateurism: the
filmmakers credentials and place in a worldwide community of amateur auteurs constitute
a statement of belonging, and of quality, which suggests that amateurism is a code, with
rules of conduct and rituals determining membership. Alan Kattelle uses the ACL as a test
case to mount a spirited defence of amateurism, arguing that the conflation of amateur
films with home movies, in scholarship as well as casual observation, fails to recognize the
range and scope of amateurs achievements. Kattelles concern is the extent to which
amateurs were and are able to produce work of professional quality, by which he appears
to mean both technical competence and thematic range, yet their films still carry the
stigma of home movies (2003, 243). In a similar vein, Patricia Zimmermans landmark
study of home movies presents as its thesis the idea that the amateur film was gradually
squeezed into the nuclear family, hijacking its democraticizing potential and derailing
its cultural construction into a privatized, almost silly, hobby (1995, 157). Clearly,
Zimmermans motives differ from Kattelles. In fact, she claims that the professionalism
which Kattelle champions (along with the increase in leisure time and income available to
American consumers in the 1950s) deactivated the definition of amateur film and forced
it into the home (Zimmerman 1995, ix, xii, 132, 157). The public quality of the amateur
film for Kattelle depends on its technical and narrative prowess; for Zimmerman, on its
engagement with apparently public issues, outside the family and home, and thus its
emancipatory potential (ix). However, both treat the home movie primarily as a failure of
amateur potential, and both take pains to distinguish an ethos proper to the amateur and in
contradistinction to the familial.
More sympathetic readers have argued for a vision of the home movie in which it is not
simply a signifier of failure. Typically, the home movie has been rescued for cinema by
placing it into a discourse of art. This suggests the most obvious historical and familial
affinities between home movies and the kinds of films that might be described as bad,
coalescing in the practice of the underground provocateurs, like the Kuchar brothers,
whose midnight movies offered the first consistent focus for the community that Sconce
describes as trashophiles (2007a, 2). However, this particular union can repeat the error
of conflating amateur with home movie, and requiring that the home movie succeed in
terms that are, by and large, outside its defining norms and ethos.
768 M. Hillyer

In his work on the screening of home movies, Roger Odin proposes a way of defining
the mode that allows more room for it to operate on its own terms. Rather than
concentrating on the subject matter or technical competency of its makers, Odin describes
the home movie and distinguishes it from the amateur film, the student film, or the
activist film on the basis of its axis of communication: he argues that as a text made
within the family, it finds its final expression and fulfilment in its screening within the
family as a way of re-constructing relationships and histories through an act of shared
narration (1995, 27, 32 7). Odins theory, moreover, suggests a way of accounting for the
particular interiority of the home movie that also accounts for its propensity to wander
from the physical space of the home. The particular value of Odins model for this study is
that it emphasizes the extent to which the home movie, like Sconces paracinema, can be
defined as less a distinct group of films than a particular reading protocol (Sconce 1995,
372), not only after taste but after text. Each mode pulls texts into their orbit by virtue of
a retrospective reading protocol or mode of appreciation, rather than, for instance, the
films production protocols, or distinctive style, or institutional affiliation. The pleasure in
defining the badfilm is that of making a calculatedly disruptive and scandalous choice
(Sconce 2007a, 7; emphasis mine), which choice places the burden of canon generation
and genre definition in this particular mode of appreciation on the retrospective work of a
community of aficionados. Odins argument, that home movies be defined primarily as
communicative acts situated in a community of viewers, performs a similar function,
suggesting an active and engaged social existence for the otherwise stigmatized home
movie text.
Thus, although the home movie may seem to describe a more prescribed range of texts
than paracinema, in many ways it also comes into generic being independent of the
individual film, by way of engagement with a community of viewer-participants. This
community, like that of the trashophiles, does work generally through acts of
remembrance and recognition to realize texts which are often partial incomplete,
inadequate, unrecognizable in and of themselves. In fact, Odin takes this quality of
being incomplete as a virtue in the home movie text: the less complete the home movie, the
more scope it offers for the communal acts of memory and memorialization the
retrospective acts of reading which he argues define the mode (1995, 34). By the same
token, he argues that because of their characteristically homely failures, home movies
demand a burden of care; he suggests that screening home movies out of context can
perform a kind of violence that is not only textual but also social. Kuyper is more forceful
still, arguing that the exposure of intimate home movie material out of context is an
obscenity (1995, 17). Watching Justine smoke in bed, her intimate possessions scattered
about her at the end of Holiday at Home, it is easy to slip into a reading protocol which, in
contrast to that suggested by the rest of the film, lurches towards the obscene. Having
performed dutifully in the holiday spirit shopping, smiling, eating, drinking, singing
and in support of the holiday film, Justine is now apparently exposed by her text. In fact,
it is the tastefulness of the rest of the film which enables this kind of reading from a viewer
who has herself been exposed to the reading strategies associated with paracinema, in
which inoffensive domesticity would function not as the main event but as a kind of
foreplay to a shocking and tasteless reward. The obscenity, then, is not in the film, but in
the reading protocol which it encounters.
The particular reading protocols associated with badfilm and home movie obviously
differ. However, Odins and Kuypers stance strongly suggests that home movies, like
paracinema, are classifiable in terms of a reading protocol, rather than as a collection of
sovereign, self-sufficient texts. In this sense, although home movies traffic in technical and
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 769

narrative insufficiency, or failure, the failed film is ultimately consequent on the

imposition of inappropriate reading strategies, which define the mode as a group of texts
with the primary purpose of circulating independently. In a different regime for
determining value based on the degree to which the text engages with everyday life
through its community of viewers the home movies failures, like those of the badfilm,
are its strengths. Although there are certain qualities or characteristics associated with the
home movie as text its domestic subject and amateur makers the most obvious the
fraught distinction between home movie and amateur film, the adoption of its low-
gauge/pro-am technologies by practitioners of avant-garde art or (today) wedding
videography, the movement of home movies and videos into the public sphere, and the
widespread failure of home movies at the time of their making to depict the material and
situated home, all suggest that it is a mode more appropriately defined retrospectively,
via acts of spectatorship and appreciation, than by its subject matter or exemplary texts.

Mothers hands are busy: The modern work of cinema spectatorship

The work of spectatorship and appreciation performed by home movie-makers and trash
cinema aficionados identifies them as amateurs, and is therefore understood to offer an
alternative to the more public world of (real) work and professional life. It is nonetheless
work: it falls under the category of what Andrew Ross describes as the labour of leisure
(1989, 155), a kind of surplus labour. The work which the trashophile and the home movie-
maker do therefore also identifies them with a form of social organization which
encompasses and supersedes the amateur: they are modern subjects. If we define
paracinema first as a reading protocol, rather than as a text or corpus of texts, their surplus
is not simply labour performed in the service of another, but (as Ross claims of camp) the
recreation of surplus value from forgotten forms of labour (151). The unperceived and
laborious everyday, the stuff of home movies, here makes an unlikely pair with the
disreputable and discarded object of the trashophiles affection: each is re-valued and
brought into the public eye through acts of spectatorship which fail to respect the modern
prohibition on mixing work and leisure. Thus, more precisely than modern subjects, their
work defines these amateurs as subjects labouring after the experience of modern life, an
experience in which going to the movies is emblematic of the separation and
commodification of leisure- and work-time and space. The amateur, as a category, is both
enabled and provoked by the peculiarly modern separation of work and leisure; the
particular work performed by these amateurs which engages with cinematic texts after
the fact of their creation to re-create or realize new forms of value can be seen as a
response to ways of being modern.
Thus, in his efforts to define everyday life, Henri Lefebvre distinguished cinema going
(passive) from amateur filmmaking (active); he described the latter as an example of
cultivated or cultural leisure. Both are a consequence of the fragmentation of labour,
and therefore in the service of social organization; however, Lefebvre argues that amateur
film offers the possibility to rediscover nature, an immediate, sensory life, through what
is sometimes a highly developed technical expertise (2008, 32). Only a decade later,
around the same time that Pauline Kael mounted her defence of trash, Lefebvre, however,
dismissed this belief in mans self-realization through productive and creative activities
as dated; in the meantime, a surfeit of attention from a rationalizing, modernizing state had
transformed everyday life a subject rich in potential subjectivity, into the
everyday, an object of social organization (1968, 32, 58). He does, however, leave a
way out, recognizing the possibility for another kind of amateur who he describes as the
770 M. Hillyer

active interpreter of signs, engaged in the activity of making meaning amidst the
spectacular culture of the modern everyday (25). While it is perhaps more typical to think
of home movies and their makers in terms of the production of texts, Lefebvres emphasis
on the work of making meaning suggests the worth of considering the labour which occurs
after the fact of material production.
In Lefebvres earlier discussion of the cultivated leisure of amateur film he can seem,
in his attention to technique, to be valuing busy work, without much consideration of the
mass-mediated culture in which that work might take place. However, the idea that it could
be possible to rediscover nature through the cultivated leisure of home movie-making is
a tantalizing one, particularly when one considers it to be an activity marginal to
mainstream cinema, with one foot in the everyday. Rediscovery here is, then, perhaps
less a question of technique than it is of a re-conception of the relationship between
maker and viewer of signs. By doing the work of spectatorship, the labourers
in marginal cinemas discussed here offer a challenge to the passivity and loss of
presence which is apparently the lot of the person who simply goes to the movies to be
entertained.
It is appropriate that this work take place at the movies. Much of what has been
written on the subject of going to the movies, even in recent scholarship which seeks to
situate spectatorship in an historical, social world, has assumed the general prohibition on
associating cinema spectatorship with work expressed in Metzs claim that film, in our
age, rivals daydream (1977, 136). The promise of spectatorship, in this sense, is precisely
the absence of labour. Nonetheless, our age is also one in which cinema takes on a central
role in the articulation and propagation of social norms, and in which the classical
cinema could be imagined as a cultural practice on a par with the experience of
modernity, as an industrially-produced, mass-based, vernacular modernism (Hansen
1999, 65). As one goes to the movies to escape the (modern) working world, the movies do
(modern) work.
Paracinema, in the form of trash, responds with aesthetic and cultural confrontation.
The trashophiles nostalgic response to cinema as a once vibrant form sullied by the
middlebrow culture of the mid-century onwards is a symptom of the waning influence or
authority of classical cinemas particular mass-culture version of modern life, and of a
more general fragmentation of taste cultures and experiences (Sconce 1995, 375). The
home movie, on the other hand, tends to favour material continuity over confrontation.
While each mode of appreciation engages with everyday life by labouring at the space
between work and leisure, the home movie is more engaged than its trashy counterparts
with the production of material artefacts of the everyday, and although all three modes of
appreciation are primarily available to a privileged class, the home movie-makers
privilege is seen more in their access to resources than in their attitudes to taste and
cultural value. This can mean that work, when it appears in the home movie, is more
readily identifiable as such. Ross describes camp as an exercise in taste-making available
to urban intellectuals . . . for whom the line between work and leisure time is
occupationally indistinct (1989, 156). In a similar vein, Sconces theory of paracinema
takes as its paradigmatic figure the contemporary graduate student engaged in canonical
turf wars, who champions low-brow culture through the engines of the elite (1995, 377).
The home movie depends on privileged access to time and materials, but traffics in
products and values that are commonly understood to be middlebrow, and generally
conservative, a reminder that taste is not historically neutral but determined in
negotiation with our social neighbours. In the case of the home movie, interactions with
the neighbours can seem to take place entirely at the level of resources here is our house,
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 771

here is yours insisting on a culture of material continuity in the studied absence of

(diegetic) aesthetic or cultural conflict.
In Holiday at Home, material continuity is depicted quite literally. Perhaps in an effort
to achieve verisimilitude and realistic detail, the film includes many close-ups of working
hands: mixing drinks, stuffing turkeys, making beds, and so on. As a consequence, the
viewer is at once reminded of the labour in this leisure and forced into a kind of work
managing the inherent banality of the tasks depicted, despite the aesthetic pleasures they
offer. In the middle, and longest, section of the film Mothers Hands Are Busy
considerable time and attention is devoted to the preparation and consumption of a pre-
dinner drink. In an extended close-up, we see Pappas hands busy with slicing lemons,
crushing ice, and pouring liquor; once the drinks are made and handed around Mamma
takes her place in an easy chair (having been busy in the kitchen), to participate in a series
of toasts, ritualized acts of appreciation of the pleasure which awaits her. Poor Mamma is
so occupied with toasting that we barely witness her sip before the film at last moves on;
the homage to the labour of preparation on the part of film and filmmaking family is
extended almost beyond the point of endurance. The material depicted here could not be
more grounded in the material stuff of everyday life: in the labour of home-making.
Presumably, these preparations are signals of a shared family pleasure, not just to come in
the drinking, but realized in anticipatory acts. As this example illustrates, however, what
we are called on to appreciate in the home movie is often boring. This, at least, can be the
experience of a casual viewer, unaware or unappreciative of the shared histories and
narratives that animate the viewing of home movies in the family group (Pappas habitual
delight in his ice-crusher, Mammas off-colour Christmas toast). Certainly, they depict
activity which, despite being tied to festivity, privileges routine domestic work, and is in
this sense banal.
This may be what is at stake in the strategies of containment which charge home
movies shown out of context with obscenity or other kinds of violence: namely, the risk
they pose of being boring in public. Boredom in the movie (or home) theatre constitutes an
apparent failure because it returns the viewer from the dreamy embrace of the text to his or
her self. It is therefore felt, as is characteristic of boredom, as intensely personal and
subjective: here I am, in this place and time, feeling bored. This, of course, is one function
of the home movie, which when screened in its axis of communication offers a
viewer the opportunity narratively, technologically, and ontologically to be returned
to his or her self.
There is, however, an extensive literature which describes boredom as a peculiarly
modern experience (Petro 2002, 58), and thus as a shared, public and historical response
to changes in the social and material world. Again, the accepted function of the
entertainment media and the pursuit of leisure in which it features is to stave off boredom;
leisure in contemporary industrial society has distraction as its primary object, most often
found in the form of the moving image (Lefebvre 2008, 33 4). Often, it fails at that task:
the appreciation of trash cinema relies on the idea that cinema (in its current middlebrow
form) is inherently boring, redeemed only by the few good moments and the tiny shocks
of recognition (Kael 1969, 83). Thus, entertainment is available as a mark of distinction,
or taste, for the active reader equipped to seek out shocking, redemptive moments in the
otherwise boring film. By the same token, such readers seek out the apparently
irredeemably boring text as a gesture of refusal, not only of that same middlebrow taste
culture but also of the logic of commodity capitalism which drives it (Jameson 1997, 72;
Fujiwara 2007, 241). This embrace of boredom, or the boring, follows Kracauer, who
wrote that for the modern subject who would rather be present than at the movies,
772 M. Hillyer

boredom becomes the only proper occupation, since it provides a kind of guarantee that
one is, so to speak, still in control of ones own existence. Nonetheless, as Kracauer also
notes, boredom takes root in the essentially modern negotiation between leisure time and
work time (1995, 333 4).
It is not, then, sufficient to consider boredom as a mode of refusal without crediting the
extent to which it is also a form of engagement: an occupation. This, in fact, is the value of
the film which does boring as a mode of engagement with the modern conditions under
which it labours. This function, while commonly associated with the trashy or avant-garde
(or trashy avant-garde) (Jameson 1997, 72; Petro 2002, 60, 67 8), is also performed by the
inoffensive home movie, which takes the boring everyday, without irony, as both its
subject and its practice. The issue, therefore, is not so much that being bored is a
consequence of (a failed) work, as that by doing boring the home movie works to engage
with everyday life.
As Patrice Petro has observed, the experience of boredom offers us the possibility to
refuse the ceaseless repetition of the new as the always-the-same that orders most of our
encounters with cinema as an exemplary distraction machine (2002, 66). Boredom, in this
sense, is an act of liberation, a state of freedom (Fujiwara 2007, 243), amongst the
distractions of everyday life. In modern society, distraction and boredom are an intimate
pair. The distracting newness and fullness of modern sensory and social life can only be
understood in relation to its failure: the lack of sensation which we experience as boredom.
By the phase of late modernity, post-Second World War, which is the concern of this
essay, the shocks and stimulations of modern, industrial life had become commonplace,
everyday life conducted amongst swarms of signs . . . from television and radio sets, from
films and newspapers (Lefebvre 1968, 25), television realizing the sudden violent
intrusion of the whole world into family and private life (Lefebvre 2008, 41). Petro
describes this as the era after shock, when leisure as well as labour time becomes
routinized, fetishized, commodified, and when the extraordinary, the unusual, and the
unfamiliar are inextricably linked to the boring, the prosaic, and the everyday. Thus,
boredom . . . helps to describe a post-shock economy (2002, 67). By seeking out, and
celebrating the boring/shocking lapses of taste in cinema, the love of trash locates itself as
an historically situated mode of appreciation, a way of being modern.
However, the trashophiles characteristic mode of appreciation is also a retrospective
one, not only in as much as it comes to texts primarily after taste, and after text, but in its
nostalgia for a fullness of cinematic experience. By insisting on the redemptive value of
their labour, trashophiles perform the melancholy of those who can no longer be
exploited (Sconce 2007b, 289 90). In seeking out shock upping the ante in terms of
indecency, narrative failure, the various un-pleasures of its kind the reading protocol of
trash cinema may be more nostalgic than the reading protocol associated with the home
movie, which is apparently content to rest in the boring everyday, after shock. The home
movie does, however, thematize the same pressures as attend the counter-cultural text or
subject in modern times: we see in Justines silent recital for the family and post-
festivity cigarette alone the weight of ennui, the individuals coerced relationship to
commodity capitalism, the performance of propriety (and the public self) which modern
life demands of us, as well as some blissful moments of shock.
By situating itself so firmly in a post-shock economy, the home movie can,
nonetheless, seem to be stuck in the banal, weighed down by tedious productivity. The
embrace of boredom in itself performs a kind of redemption, in as much as it offers a return
to the self, not simply literally as the experience of discomfort, and duration but
because it suggests a kind of self-determination, or agency. Thus, following Kracauer and
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 773

Walter Benjamin, Petro writes that . . . hidden in the innovation of distraction and shock
is a despair that nothing further will happen. Hidden in the negativity of boredom and
waiting, however, is the anticipation that something (different) might occur (2002, 66).
Paracinema, as a reading protocol, is very much engaged with the idea that something
different might occur. However, the charm as well as the frustration of the archetypal
home movie is that, while something is always happening Kuypers do something
principle (1995, 13) we anticipate that nothing different might occur. The movie-
making family, even when home for the holidays, may simply be working too hard doing
boring to be bored, the cinema they create neither full, nor redemptive.
In this sense, of the pair, the trashophile displays more, or more rarefied cultural
capital. Trash cinema provides evidence of its distinction from the banal middlebrow, and
offers an exalted experience of being, as a contemporary campophile might put it,
shocked and bored. This is a mode of refusal available to a relatively privileged few, and
illustrates some uses to which boredom has been put more generally in the rhetoric of
modern experience. In her discussion of boredom and modernity, Elizabeth Goodstein
writes that our experience and understanding of boredom today is influenced by a
rhetorical split in modern discourse between (mundane) boredom and (existential) ennui,
which supports the notion that the boredom of the factory worker is different in kind from
the poets (2005, 23). The distinction which attaches to the tasteless taste culture of trash,
despite its often emphatic materiality, is largely existential. It rejects the banal,
domesticated, materialized tastefulness of the home movie the ice-crusher and crystal
glasses, the turkey in the oven and the easy chair in the living room in much the same
way that the poet might feel him or herself to be suffering, while bored, from an experience
which is uniquely personal, and therefore somehow improving, while the factory worker
simply goes to work. The evidence of work, that is, is important. The home movie-maker
displays little of the ironic distance to their labour which can protect even the most
passionate trashophile from the gawky intimacy found in home movies, the awkward
reckoning with real-life stuff (and lives) with which they engage, the banality of life lived
over the ennui of poetic experience. In Holiday at Home, home begins and ends with the
motivating event of the holiday. However, the film also creates a portrait of a homely
holiday in which presents are bought, as well as opened, and turkeys cooked, as well as
eaten. Its emphasis on the work performed at home, in the service of leisure, intervenes
without confrontation in a separation of spheres that is generally fundamental to modern
experience, and is in this sense fundamentally disruptive.
By engaging in their leisure time with the problem of self-presence in and through the
movies, the amateur maker or trash enthusiast plays a demonstrably modern role,
intervening in the obstruction that the mainstream cinema poses to the human beings
legitimate claim to being reproduced (Benjamin 2003, 262) by finding a place for
themselves in the cinema. In this sense, it is not object choice but labour which
distinguishes home movie-makers and trashophiles from modern movie spectators in
general, who in Kracauers words go to the movies to be banished from their
emptiness, to forget [themselves] in the process of gawking (1995, 332). Home movies,
when screened in their axis of communication, offer the opportunity for their participant-
makers to remember themselves: amateurs, more generally, labour to engage with a once
unperceived everyday. Their leisure-as-labour sets them apart from a modern mass
generally defined by its propensity to consume, of which the gawking movie-goer is
taken as exemplary.
In their engagement with the great cultural engine of the movies, amateurs and
enthusiasts stage an attempt to change the passive relationship which, according to many
774 M. Hillyer

theorists of modern life, characterizes our relationship to visual media, and announce
themselves as active interpreter[s] of signs (Lefebvre 1968, 25). The fact that these
particular amateurs home movie-makers and trashophiles do so at the level of the
everyday is particularly significant in historical terms; they offer a cinematic means of
engaging with modern life, without resorting to that characteristically modernist fiefdom
of the sovereign text. Both, by celebrating failed texts, insist on the active role of
spectatorship in cinematic world-making, and promote an experience of cinema which
demands work. Both are stubborn irritants in our dreamy relationship with mainstream
cinema; both are historically determined. Both finally suggest some kind of return to
presence in the experience of cinema; a celebration of home coming which, as home tends
to be, is as wonderful and as intimate as it is banal.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Department of Rhetoric, and the
Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley, who funded this research in its initial
stages, including travel to the Northeast Historic Film Archive where Holiday at Home is housed.

Notes on contributor
Minette Hillyer is Lecturer in Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She
received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, with a study of the home-made, mid-
century movie. Her article about the bad porn/home-movie made by Pamela Anderson and Tommy
Lee appeared in Porn Studies (Duke University Press).

References
Benjamin, W. 2003. The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility: Third version. In
Walter Benjamin: Selected writings. Vol. 4, 1938 1940, ed. and trans. H. Eiland and M.W.
Jennings, 251 83. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Blanchot, M. 1987. Everyday speech. Trans. S. Hanson. Everyday life. Special issue. Yale French
Studies, no. 73: 12 20.
Fujiwara, C. 2007. Boredom, Spasmo, and the Italian system. In Sconce 2007b, 240-58.
Goodstein, E. 2005. Experience without qualities: Boredom and modernity. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Grosset, P. 1963. Planning and scripting amateur movies. London: Fountain Press.
Hansen, M.B. 1999. The mass production of the senses: Classical cinema as vernacular modernism.
Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 2(April): 59 77.
Hawkins, J. 2000. Cutting edge: Art-horror and the horrific avant-garde. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Jameson, F. 1997. Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Kael, P. 1969. Trash, art, and the movies. Harpers Magazine, February. http://www.harpers.org/
archive/1969/02/0015651 (accessed 23 April 2010).
Kattelle, A. 2003. The amateur cinema league and its films. Small gauge and amateur film. Special
issue. Film History 15, no. 2: 23851.
Kracauer, S. 1995. Boredom. In The mass ornament: Weimar essays, ed. and trans. T.Y. Levin,
331 4. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Kuyper, E. 1995. Aux origines du cinema. Le film de famille. In Odin 1995: 11 26.
Lefebvre, H. 1968. Everyday life in the modern world. Trans. S. Rabinovitch. London: Penguin.
. 2008. Critique of everyday life. Vol. 1. Trans. J. Moore London and New York: Verso.
Metz, C. 1977. The imaginary signifier: Psychoanalysis and the cinema. Trans. Celia Britton,
Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Odin, R. 1995. Le film de famille dans linstitution familiale. In Odin 1995b, 27 41.
 Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 775

Petro, P. 2002. Aftershocks of the new: Feminism and film history. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press.
Ross, A. 1989. No respect: Intellectuals and popular culture. New York and London: Routledge.
Salkin, L. 1958. Story telling home movies: How to make them. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Sconce, J. 1995. Trashing the academy: Taste, excess, and an emerging politics of cinematic style.
Screen 36, no. 4: 371 93.
. 2007a. Introduction. In Sconce 2007b : 1 18.
, ed. 2007b. Sleaze artists: Cinema at the margins of taste, style, and politics. Durham, NC
and London: Duke University Press.
Townsend, D. 1964. The practical guide to holiday and family movies. London: Stanley Paul.
Zimmerman, P.R. 1995. Reel families: A social history of amateur film. Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Copyright of Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may
not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written
permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.