In recent years media scholars have been showing renewed interest in the home movie as an object of serious study. A recent conference held at University College Cork attended by Richard Kilborn considered the significance of home movie and amateur film material not only in the context of the history of film but also the use made of home movies by notable avant-garde and experimental filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren and Peter Forgács.
The papers that were given at this conference have now appeared in a volume of collected essays under the title Amateur filmmaking: the home movie, the archive, the web published by Bloomsbury Academic. Amateur Filmmaking highlights the importance of amateur filmmaking as an object of critical interest across a number of different disciplines. It also includes essays that consider the significance of YouTube and the impact of the new technologies on amateur filmmaking. [For more on this publication see: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/amateur-filmmaking-9781441191496/]
Richard Kilborn’s contribution to this volume is an essay entitled “I am a time archaeologist” in which he explores the work of the Hungarian filmmaker Peter Forgács. The main aim of the essay is to reveal some of the structuring principles of Forgács’s approach, including the key cinematic devices that this director uses to encourage viewers to produce their own readings and responses. The home movie material that Forgács incorporates into his films is never solely intended to evoke nostalgic memories of a bygone era. It is, rather, always part of a wider project, one of showing the complex lives of individuals caught up in the traumas of a particularly turbulent period of European history.
Over the past few years Richard Kilborn has made a number of contributions to the study of documentary in all its many manifestations. His essay “Documentary Voices” exploring the British docu-soap phenomenon appeared in the recently published The BFI Documentary Companion.