While this is a special Home Movie Day episode, Home Movie Day is every day and Patricia’s work with CAAM and elsewhere illustrates the powerful archiving future that we have to look forward to!
Home movies are not simple nor are they just about nostalgia. Many times they are incredibly challenging and they can produce great discomfort in the viewer. This is one of the very important aspects of this moving image genre.
When home movies are shown, class, culture and representation are key elements and should always be part of the presentation. Yet this is rarely done. Home movie texts can always be enjoyed on the basis of narrative or nostalgic pleasure- they are so much fun and so pleasurable to watch– but it does them a disservice to deny their complex historicism and social meaning. Patricia’s work as an intern with CAAM and her own archival scholarship stand out in this manner as she introduces powerful ways of examining these critical moving image works, especially vis-a-vis Asian American communities.
Finally, as we touch on the importance of hiring people of color during our discussion, Patricia wanted to add to our recorded conversation that we should highlight black, indigenous, queer and disabled archivists in our community, especially as we remember the cultural significance of Home Movie Day.
The bio for this episode’s guest is here:
PATRICIA LEDESMA VILLON is an archivist based in Oakland, California. A Bay Area native, she has worked for several Asian media nonprofits in the area. Patricia most recently interned at the Philippine Film Archive (formerly known as the National Film Archive of the Philippines) where she digitally restored a short film submitted to the 2017 Short Film Festival of Switzerland. She is currently interning at the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) where she works on Memories to Light, a project preserving the home movies of Asian American families on Super 8, 8mm and 16mm formats. She received her B.A. in media from the University of California, Berkeley and is a member of Low Light Darkroom and Black Hole Collective Film Lab, a DIY member-run analog still image and motion film collective.
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Archivist’s Alley is a safe conversational podcast space designed for casual and lively discussions about how to preserve our work and identities in the professional landscapes and media that we work and create in. It is an open and dynamic arena to talk about archival ideas, new projects and to celebrate the power of each guest’s voice as a critical part of this community and our world at large.
Archivist’s Alley is a collection of voices gathered from the world of the lesser represented or marginalized populations in media or media preservation. These voices are women’s voices, queer voices, trans voices, non-binary voices and voices of color. These are indigenous voices and the voices of the differently abled.
Website: Archivist’s Alley
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Originally published on Archivist’s Alley reprinted with permission of the author.
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