Black Film Archive is a living register of Black films from 1898 to 1989. Happy Thanksgiving! I remain thankful for you all.
“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board,” opens Zora Neale Hurston’s seminal work, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” The book — about a woman’s search for herself — is a refusal to see the world through the bitterness and fear Black lives are often translated to. The world Hurston built in “Their Eyes Were Watching God” is also the domain Black home (and amateur) movies reside in— a world where every untranslated vision for Black living, loving, and joy is on board.
Home movies all begin with a similar impulse: interest in preserving, exploring, and celebrating the subject with the intent of arranging visions of the subject’s life without misrepresenting. To complete the arduous task, the camera becomes an extension of the director’s eye, often showcasing their love for the subject from the moment they press play and let the light in.
Home movies are fragmented, kaleidoscopic reflections of our desires to be understood; cinematic interludes of Black recognition and being. The recorded video imagery of birthdays, weddings, the mundane, and the exceptional is a preserved record that we exist; our lives have value and remain worth sharing, viewing, and celebrating. By recording the intimacies of those dearly departed and dearly beloved, they are given eternal life and limitless passageways to our hearts. The result of the director’s recording is a portal of possibility and a visual realm of home.
In home videos’ unduplicable records of time is a reminder that memories are a work of endless imagination, enduring stories that we invent and reinvent to color our worlds. Home, then, must be a place where you can imagine without apology… where the possibilities of life’s pleasures are free to be celebrated. When viewing a Black home movie—if even for a second— that feeling of home can be with us wherever we are.1 I hope you find a vision of home today and feel compelled enough to record it. The future of home movies is in your line of vision.
In my home, Thanksgiving day is a moment to reflect on deep gratitude. I want you to all know I am thankful for your support.
I am slowly adding home videos to Black Film Archive. The collection will always be available to watch here.
When I think of home, I think of a place wheres theres love overflowing. I wish I was home, I wish I was back there with the things I’ve been knowing. — “Home,” The Wiz (1978)2
Plus: All Black Film Archive merch is now 20% off through mid December with code 20OFF applied at checkout.
If you’re not going to be a place you consider to be home this Thanksgiving, I am thinking of you. This newsletter is for you.
I of course will be watching “The Wiz” this holiday weekend. If you’re looking for other narrative films, check out my updated curator’s picks.
Lovely post. Thank you!
The concept of home movies has always been interesting to me because I remember them mostly being recorded at places that weren't the home I grew up in but rather the homes of my grandparents on both sides. My Dad would narrate who each family member was as he panned over all the attendees of whatever the family gathering was. I've seen him go from an old school big/chunky Sony camera to a digital camera to his phone doing this and it's pretty cool to see how far we've come in that aspect as well as family members getting older too.