DH 2026

Daejeon, July 27–31

Thu, July 3016:30–18:00S062105
Short Paper

Digital Structure of a Home Movie Archive: Case Study of the Polish Archive of Home Movies as a Repository of Cultural Memory

Przemysław Murawski
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland · przmur@amu.edu.pl
TopicsEnglishcultural analyticsdatabase creationmanagementand analysisdigital archivingmedia archaeologymetadata standardssystemsand methodsFilm and cinema arts studiesHistoryMedia studiesCentral/Eastern European Studies
Keywordshome movie archives; digital memory; media archaeology; cultural heritage; database structures

Home movies are one of the few examples of audiovisual phenomena that are intended to end up in private archives. These recordings of the most important moments in family life, film diaries, and travelogues, stored on analog and digital media, were meant to serve as personal mementos. Despite their original private nature, artistic, scientific, and archival circles did not remain indifferent to such a rich source of material that could be reused, researched, and collected. Home movie archives ceased to be collections vulnerable to the destructive passage of time – they were activated by numerous processes affecting the nature and status of home film materials. The digital age played a special role in this transformation, turning home movies into dynamic memories and making their archives more accessible. Home movies have become nomadic images, constantly moving between the private and public spheres.

A project that represents an interesting approach to the digital organization of home movie materials from a research perspective is The Polish Archive of Home Movies (PAHM), which aims to collect, digitize, and make available home movies created in post-war Poland in the context of everyday life. PAHM operates as an integrated repository hosted by MSN (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw) and it is available in open access (https://artmuseum.pl/en/the-polish-archive-of-home-movies). Today, it contains archives of over 50 Polish families. PAHM's archiving practice takes place on several active levels – through discovery and digitization, both physical materials and the personal or cultural memories encoded in them are activated. In addition, the online archive has a multimedia structure (descriptions, keywords, locations, lists of “actors”) and a database structure (search engine, filters). This approach also re-contextualizes family archives and individual materials – previously autonomous home movies and their collections are now part of a broader archive management system, enabling the search for common themes or aesthetic motifs. The digital nature of PAHM enables wide accessibility of content, influences the way the materials in the collection are perceived, and highlights the possible consequences of digitizing analog materials.

It is The Polish Archive of Home Movies that will be the subject of my presentation. To date, it has not been scientifically researched and properly described (even in Polish-language literature). The presentation will therefore initiate reflection on this extremely important audiovisual collection. I would like to present my preliminary research, which will be further developed in my doctoral dissertation project entitled “Active Home Movie Archives – Models, Practices, Strategies,” carried out at the Doctoral School of Language and Literature at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań.

The theoretical framework for this study relies on media archaeology, specifically Wolfgang Ernst’s concept of the ‘dynarchive’ (Ernst 2013), to analyze PAHM as a dynamic digital environment. By integrating this approach with Lev Manovich’s understanding of database logic (Manovich 2002), the research examines how digital structure re-contextualizes individual and cultural memory. Furthermore, the analysis is grounded in established media studies perspectives, treating home movies as spaces of communication (Odin 2022) and microhistorical objects (Aasman 2014).

The content of home movies in the family collections of The Polish Archive of Home Movies is diverse. However, it is not the interpretation of inherent meanings that is most important here. What is crucial are the insights gained from treating this collection as a whole. This brings us to the key issue for researching this archive, namely how Polish society recorded itself in the post-war period, during The Polish People's Republic, and during the political transformation at the end of the 20th century and the turn of the millennium. Noticing the patterns characteristic of amateur filmmaking is a valuable discovery in thinking about the class structure of Central and Central-Eastern European society at that time. The PAHM allows us to focus on the selectivity of memory that comes from audiovisual family recordings – to answer the question of whose memories are recorded and whose are forgotten, and to understand the consequences of such a state of affairs for thinking about the past.

The aim of my presentation is to analyze the role of The Polish Archive of Home Movies as a digital repository of cultural memory. The Polish case study should be treated as a model for conducting similar research on other digital archives. In my research, I refer to this model as the “institutional model for activating home movie archives” – its presentation at DH2026 will be a proposal for other archival researchers to consider.

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