American Families

Berliner is an award-winning experimental documentary filmmaker whose work includes Nobody’s Business (1996), which combines interview footage and archival material to create a complex portrait of his relationship with his irascible and reclusive father; and The Sweetest Sound (2001), in which he meditates on the nature of identity and the power of one’s name by finding other men named Alan Berliner and inviting them to discuss what it means to be “Alan Berliner” over dinner at his house. Berliner’s work focuses on things we take for granted—names, parents, and family, for instance—and turns them on their head by interrogating them in highly original ways: a kaleidoscope of multiple Alan Berliners; a documentary about a father who doesn’t want to talk; a family album composed not of one but of several (anonymous) families of different faiths and backgrounds.

In a 1989 interview on POV, Berliner describes himself as a collector, and a “bit of an archivist” who likes making things with the items he’s gathered. He rightly calls The Family Album “a celebration of editing.” Unlike Nobody’s Business and The Sweetest Sound, which include segments that have been filmed specifically for those works, in The Family Album Berliner only uses the materials he has at hand. It’s like constructing a novel entirely from newspaper clippings. The storytelling emerges from the connections and juxtapositions Berliner chooses to make—the way one image flows to the next, the way the soundtrack interacts with the images and vice versa. Berliner likens his method on The Family Album to working “atomically,” and growing the film from “inside out.” He joins two images to create a molecule, builds the molecules into compounds, and then the compounds form larger structures, and at the end, he says, “if I’m lucky, I have a movie.”

I originally watched The Family Album as a graduate student, and it may have been the first found-footage film I’d ever seen. I was blown away both by its emotional punch and by Berliner’s command over his material, his ability to sustain what feels like a high-wire editing act for an hour. I couldn’t believe how smoothly the film moves between all the disparate audio and film clips, and how my attention never snagged on any of the hundreds of transitions. I felt that all the different families and voices blended together to create one universal “American family album.” Watching the film today, I experienced the same awe at the skill and creativity that went into making the film, but something new struck me for the first time: The Family Album consists almost entirely of families and individuals who are white. There are a few clips of Black people—a couple posing by their car, a man playing the piano, another man dancing at what seems to be a baseball game, for instance—and apart from this, as far as I could tell, no other non-white families are represented.

My first instinct was to assume that that’s because footage from non-white families is rare—perhaps because access to cameras and equipment was limited. But it turns out I was mistaken. A 2014 article in the Moving Image Archive News about the work of the archivist Jasmyn R. Castro addresses this common error. “Many people think that [Black home movies] are rare or nonexistent,” Castro says, “or that only famous and well known African American figures . . . could afford to partake in amateur filmmaking. I believe the one thing that feeds this misconception is that these types of collections are not often talked about.”

When Castro started her search for Black home movies, she discovered that the films did exist, it was just that others hadn’t bothered to look for them. “Once I started talking with people in the field of moving-image archiving, and directly emailing museums, libraries, and archives that I believed might have this type of material,” she says, “that’s when I started finding out about collections I was unaware of.” The African American Home Movie Archive’s Black Home Movie Index lists collections of films in various formats including 16 mm and Super 8, held at institutions such as the Smithsonian and UCLA Libraries. The South Side Home Movie Project has created an online archive to preserve the moving-image material shot by Chicago’s diverse South Side residents. The website notes that “although home movies are often dismissed as ‘amateur’ photography, these and other community films contain a wealth of information about the ways in which people have represented themselves and their views of the world. They show us how people dress and pose, work and play, travel and learn, celebrate and organize, raise their children . . . and incite conversations about people, practices, locations, and events that are not always captured in official histories.” This observation pertains to Black as well as other non-white and minority communities whose daily experiences are overlooked in so many histories of America.

Our understanding of this country’s past has changed dramatically since The Family Album was made in the 1980s. We are learning to find and incorporate the stories of overlooked groups into our narrative of American history—this is a project that is only beginning and still has a long way to go. The Family Album stands out for its technical sophistication, and for the spellbinding manner in which it shows how home movies aim to capture a joyous past when the truth may be more complicated and troubling. But it also raises important questions about how we have imagined American family life looked during the crucial 1920s–1960s period, the baseline against which subsequent diversity is often measured. If we think of the “American family” as having always been white—white people playing, laughing, celebrating, albeit with an undercurrent of melancholy—we are missing the full picture.