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Home movies provide a unique visual record that enriches our understanding of culture, history, and aesthetics. Through our research practices and educational partnerships, we hope to study, describe and share this unique resource with new audiences and new generations. Ideas include adding feedback options, where viewers can share their knowledge about films; visualization tools like maps or timelines; and showcases for visitors to upload projects that creatively reuse the films, in the vein of Spinning Home Movies. The South Side Home Movie Project documents everyday life, celebrations and historical moments in the community from the 1920s through the 2010s.
Find complete details, artist info, featured collections and more for each episode at the link below. Amanda Williams is a visual artist whose practice blurs the distinction between art and architecture. Her projects use color as a lens to highlight the complexities of the politics of race, place, and value in cities.
Around UChicago
When film historian Jacqueline Stewart founded the South Side Home Movie Project 15 years ago, her goal was to preserve, digitize and showcase these films. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the project found a creative new way to present the films to a broad audience. We designed the identity and website of the South Side Home Movie Project in direct collaboration with their team of cultural and artistic advisors. Founder Jacqueline Stewart played the foundation, Archivist Justin D. Williams lead the project, and artist Amanda Williams gave us her signature color palette. Together we co-created an important cultural tool and asset for the film-making disciplines, the South Side community, our city, and far beyond — as Chicago’s South Side has had major impacts on the world. Through the five actions of collecting, preserving, digitizing, researching and presenting, the South Side Home Movie Project advances the stories, culture, and impact of South Side residents, ensuring its history is not lost.
By showcasing original artwork inspired by our collection, we will invite dialogue that connects the scenes depicted in home movies to our current cultural moment. Now a daily facet of modern life, filming ourselves and sharing our recordings has its roots in home moviemaking, a tradition of self-representation that started nearly 100 years ago. First introduced in 1923, small-gauge film gave millions of consumers the ability to create and share moving-image documentation of their lives and pastimes.
Memories in Motion: An Introduction to the South Side Home Movie Project
Activating archival films brings them back into the public sphere and to their original intent, as memories captured to be viewed, shared, cherished and re-interpreted. Tracye A. Matthews is a historian, curator, and filmmaker working within and between the realms of academia, public history, museums, and documentary film. Currently executive director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture at the University of Chicago, Matthews previously served as public historian at the Chicago History Museum and assistant professor in Africana Studies at the University of Massachusetts–Boston. She cofounded the Intersectional Black Panther Party History Project, an online platform and public programming collective.
The South Side Home Movie Project is dedicated to preserving and circulating the stories told in moving pictures shot by Chicago’s diverse South Side residents. The South Side Home Movie Project seeks to bring materials typically kept in private collections into public light and discussion. By gathering and exhibiting these films, and collecting related oral histories, this project seeks to document and to make more widely accessible the many kinds of stories South Siders have to tell.
UChicago project archives decades of South Side home movies
“We’re actively trying to subvert a common quality of research institutions and archives — which is that they’re inaccessible,” project manager Justin Williams said. The efforts are supported by a $60,000 grant from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, which funds regional collections, land conservation efforts and artistic programs in Chicagoland and the South Carolina Lowcountry. “I would say that we have the largest collection mid-century African-American home movies in the country,” said Candace Ming, project manager and archivist for the South Side Home Movie Project. “The South Side Home Movie Project is an effort to build an alternative visual archive of the South Side,” said Stewart, a professor at the University of Chicago Department of Cinema and Media Studies.
The South Side Home Movie Project is a five-part initiative to collect, preserve, digitize, exhibit, and research home movies made by residents of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods. The SSHMP seeks to increase understanding of the many histories and cultures comprising Chicago’s South Side, and of amateur filmmaking practices, by asking owners of home movies to share their footage and describe it from their personal perspectives. The project brings materials that are typically kept in private collections into public light and discussion.
The Archive
"Now that you're at home more than we usually are, take some time to go into that basement, that attic, that storage place and just see if you have any of these films because they are important," Williams said. Parrtnering with UChicago's art incubator, Arts + Public Life, the archive started a new series called Spinning Home Movies. The Home Movie Project will also refine and share its curriculum, which is now in its pilot stage. High schoolers with the University of Chicago’s Teen Arts Council have tested the curriculum since January.
He holds a BA in Africana studies from Brown University and is a Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellow. The free online archive contains film from Chicago neighborhoods ranging from Chatham to Bridgeport to Chicago’s East Side. Oral histories recorded by family members describing their home movies are available as companion works to the films. The digital archive is fully browseable and also allows visitors to add tags and comments to help identify places, people and events as part of the collective historical project. "We are frequently approached by documentary filmmakers who have difficulty finding footage of family life in Chicago, particularly among African Americans, during this time period," says Stewart.
These qualities position the South Side Home Movie Project as a work of social, spatial, and racial justice — areas our world needs far more investment in, and that Span and its designers are dedicated to. A screening of South Side home movies, featuring newly preserved films of Bronzeville nightlife in the 1950s, including footage from the Parkway Ballroom, followed by conversation with families who have donated their home movies to South Side Home Movie Project. Jeanette Foreman, niece of Jean Patton, one of the most prolific home movie makers included in the Archive, is an attorney, community activist, and lifelong resident of the Chatham and Hyde Park neighborhoods. She serves as a liaison between the SSHMP and the many community organizations in which she is involved. She also provides information and anecdotes about the over 100 films in the SSHMP’s Patton Family Collection. The project is actively seeking participants to contribute their films and stories to the archive.
Students analyze the movies as records of residents’ intimate moments and for their historical value, Williams said. By studying Spinning Home Movies episodes, students also learn how to add new life to old film with video montage and collaging techniques. HYDE PARK — The archivists behind a collection of hundreds of home movies filmed by South Side residents are making their website more interactive and developing an arts curriculum that incorporates decades’ worth of footage.
In them, families celebrated Easter with a backyard barbecue, played on a swing set at a picnic for Howard University alumni at Waterfall Glen Forest Preserve, rode bikes in Jackson Park, and waded into Lake Michigan wearing swimsuits. Some footage felt momentous, like one family’s visit to the monuments in Washington, D.C. Other footage—of men standing around outside, fumbling with cigarette lighters—offered few scenes of note but captivated with time-transcending ordinariness. New donors join a community of families who have entrusted us with their historic records, and who actively participate in the life of the archive. We honor and celebrate their stories, ensuring that donors' voices continue to shape our understanding of the histories we hold. South Side women and girls come together for a unique public program exploring the resilience and complexity of familial bonds through screening home movies. At a moment when media representations of the South Side depict violence and disruption, let’s look at how women and girls—behind and in front of the camera—use moving images to navigate relationships with their families, peers, and communities.
While also art pieces, home movies from the South Side during the twentieth century are always historical documents, and can play a role in understanding racial, cultural, and socioeconomic divides that have persisted for centuries. The Project collects film from South Siders of all ethnic backgrounds, with an emphasis on stories less commonly told. For example, one of the home movies in the Patton family collection shows footage of the aftermath of riots on the city’s West Side in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, a scene heavily photographed but not as widely filmed.
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