Your home videos are also cinema

BarcelonaA daughter's first steps, the excitement of Three Kings' Day, a honeymoon in the Canary Islands, a family visit to Montserrat, or even a wild birth. For a century, the craze for recording memorable moments of everyday life has grown exponentially. The evolution of technology, from the first portable 16mm film cameras of 1923—the camera used by Mandronita Andreu, the daughter of Dr. Andreu—to the proliferation of smartphones with cameras in the late 2000s, along with changes in film format, has expanded the possibilities of home cinema. An exhibition at CaixaForum in Barcelona celebrates this entire non-professional audiovisual legacy, which for years has been overlooked, as a heritage with incalculable sociological, historical, and aesthetic value. Furthermore, it even encourages visitors to preserve their home movies and donate them to their local archives and museums, as valuable material not only for families but for society as a whole. History is being written today with the cameras on our mobile phones.

The tour through [RecordThe exhibition, which runs until June 7, will stir up nostalgia in viewers because it's easy to see oneself reflected in the home movies of any other family. "No one taught us how to film, but we all film the same things in the same way," says Núria F. Rius. Behind it all lies an audiovisual culture, practices, and an industry that has shaped our perspective, even without our conscious awareness. Home movies are defined by the fact that the person filming, what is filmed, and the audience are all the same, usually family or friends. It's a type of cinema with its own aesthetic, technically imperfect and full of mistakes, and the subjects typically interact with the camera. The exhibition aims to highlight this legacy, which until now has only held sentimental value. "It's history written from the ground up, from the everyday experiences of society, of individuals," say the curators.

Betas and films

[Rec]ords part of an academic study on Home cinema in SpainLed by Efrén Cuevas, professor at the University of Navarra, who, along with researcher Núria F. Rius, curated the exhibition, it showcases the most popular devices of recent decades. Visitors can view large-format images typical of home movies, depicting themes such as travel, celebrations, vacations, and the city, in three time jumps over the last century, revealing the evolution of customs, landscapes, and aesthetics. There is also an exploration of how television has used home movies, whether in the form of documentaries (Sensitive material(on TV3) or entertainment, like the legendary Betas and films (La Trinca, 1990) or Top-notch videos (TVE), a format that has evolved in theAPM?

Experimental cinema has also made use of home videos, whether to create autobiographical narratives or to find new ways of telling history through microhistory. The paradigmatic case is The MaelstromPéter Forgács's film chronicles the Holocaust through the joyful home movies of a well-to-do Dutch Jewish family, who recorded their life in the 1930s and how they were gradually marginalized until they were forced to film inside the ghetto. They even documented the day they were taken to what they believed would be a labor camp, but was in fact Auschwitz. The exhibition includes some short films and fragments, and a series dedicated to this cinema is available on the CaixaForum+ platform. Produced by the La Caixa Foundation and already shown in Zaragoza and Valencia, the exhibition adapts to each city with new footage from each location, sourced from film archives and personal collections. The final section of the exhibition questions whether home movies still exist, whether it's what we do with our phones. "The answer is intermediate; it's neither radically new nor is our understanding of home movies permanent and stable," says the curator. We continue to record the same songs and our videos still have testimonial value, but individual and social media use has changed the perspective: "We've gone from memento "In the moment. From preserving memories to the synchronous use of sharing a present moment," says Núria F. Rius. The hybridization of audiovisual language and the blurred boundary between public and private are changing the rules of the game.