Lesbian Home Movie Project

Representation and Ethics in the Film Archive: A Study of the Lesbian Home Movie Project

By Chloe Deschamps
Submitted for Film 321 with Andrew Watts 

“Queer histories of every sort have been assembled out of remnants, the torn letters, the yellowed journals, the audio tapes, the police records, of those who lived before us.”
​Sharon Thompson: “Reading Lips, Keeping Secrets”

In “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”, Jacques Derrida traces the etymology of the word “archive” itself – and claims that “the meaning of "archive," its only meaning, comes to it from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded.” (9). In the very marrow of the syntax, archives allude to power and authority. However, in practice, the act of archiving holds onto the potential to rupture notions of archival authority and become sites of transformation, heterogeneity, and deterritorialization. Through an analysis of the digital Lesbian Home Movie Archive (referred to hereafter as LHMP), a digital film archive of home videos and amateur films by lesbians, and by exploring the theoretical works of various scholars I will trace the metamorphosis of the film archive from archaic notions of authority towards a critically ethical act of life-preservation and cultural activism.

I will begin by interrogating the purpose of the film archive – to preserve knowledge? To curate a collection of intellectual importance? To track the development of film history? Many scholars would list reasons such as these. However, upon my initial exploration into the LHMP digital archives, the most striking film was merely a 15-second clip of a shadblow tree, gently rustling in the wind. The film is speckled with dots and other imperfections and is tinted in shades of soft green-grey. The film is a part of their earliest collection, the very reason the archive was created in the first place. A collection of films mostly dated around the 1950s, captured by schoolteacher (and amateur/home filmmaker) Ruth Storm, mostly depicting those closest to her.

​Another standout was a 2-minute clip of a woman with close-cropped hair and jaunty, gentlemanly attire, playing with a young girl. It then cuts to a clip of another boyish woman in a white sweater and rolled-up pants wiping down a van. This casual representation of lesbian women – visibly masculine women – is all but erased from “canonical” films pre-1990s. It is imperative to preserve such histories which have been represented on film, and to recover the works of these women. The films in the LHMP archives range from simple depictions of daily life to a fully realised, twenty-minute memoir on film. The digital archive is heterogeneous, prioritising not the intellectual significance of the films but instead foregrounds an ethical and personal interest in lesbian histories. The archive’s creator, Sharon Thompson, even mentions in a blog post seeing herself in one of the LHMP’s recovered films: “I do think it’s me though. And I think I was in costume: tee shirt, jeans, baseball cap, backpack: ur lesbian-feminist garb” (2018). Here, then, is an archive which is not merely an attempt to totalize a linear history, but it is instead a perpetual process of discovery and creation.

Thompson relies on brief, transient memory and loosely connected narratives collected on the grassroots level through Facebook to collect information on the films. Stuart Hall, quoting Foucault, in “Constituting an Archive” describes the field of an archive as “a series full of gaps, intertwined with one another, interplays of differences, distances, substitutions, transformations” (3). Thompson’s preservation of lesbian film is not an attempt to preserve an inert history in perpetuity; the LHMP is a series of transformations of memory, of history, of film. Thompson recounts her attempt to recover information about a film series, and the seemingly endless proliferation of connections and memories which constituted it: “If Hillary knew Janet when they were 19, Hillary may not be positive that she’s watching the Janet of age 55, and she may not know anything about Janet’s life between 19 and 55. Similarly if Suzanne knew Hillary at age 55, she may not be sure that’s the 19-year-old Hillary bounding around in that field of bluets.” (2018). In short, the LHMP relies on ephemeral memory, brief connections between friends and lovers, endlessly proliferating connections, to constitute their archives. Memories are loosely tethered, severing the desire to completely encapsulate lesbian history in its entirety, and thus reimagining the very purpose of film archiving. If film archives in the traditional sense hinge on the hunger to finally reach an “end,” to fulfil a desire, the LHMP defies that. Hall writes that “The trick [of an archive] seems to be not to try to describe it as if it were the oeuvre of a mythical collective subject, but in terms of what sense or regularity we can discover in its very dispersion” (3). The LHMP is only dispersion, with each discovery seemingly leading to another, every film with a connection to each other. It defies confinement, both because of its grassroots nature and of its existence in a sprawling, digital space, accessible to anyone willing to do enough web searching.

Glenn D’Cruz argues in Hauntological Dramaturgy: Affects, Archives, Ethics that an archival practice is one that is haunted. He states that “I summon the ghost, I address the ghost, but I also cannot help but produce a version of the ghost that serves my purposes no matter how hard I might try to act ethically” (32). Whilst I agree that there is a spectral quality to the practice of archiving, particularly in working with home video, I believe that it is possible to approach and form an ethical imperative in regard to the film archive. Hall uses the term “living archive” to describe an archival practice which is responsible and ethical. As opposed to a spectrality which invokes an inert past, a living archive “means present, on-going, continuing, unfinished, open-ended. The new work which will come to constitute significant additions to the archive will not be the same as that which was produced earlier” (2). Rather than a process of calling forth spirits, the archival practice of the LHMP calls for a futurity-focused preservation, ethically approaching filmmaking subjects who have passed by honouring their memory, and still acknowledging that a totalizing image of the past is impossible.

In “Death Comes to the Archive” Thompson notes that “The hallmarks of amateur films — the jiggle, the jerky pan, the grain, the blur, the hues, the grays, the fogs, the static — seem to replicate the effect that the passage of time has on memory and scam the mind into the sense that the other is part of the one’s own world and the moving image that captured the imaginary cinematic world a record of one’s own history and experience.” (2018). Thompson foregrounds primarily the personal link the archivist has to the dead, one which D’Cruz posits as “unethical.” I argue instead that in the preservation of one’s own history – that of the lesbian community at large – it is a critical act that necessarily involves the invoking of a spectral presence. The ghosts within the digital space of the LHMP are given voice and representation in a living sense, they “scam the mind” into a sense of kinship with the film’s subject, a kinship, I argue, that is absent from more traditional academic forms of archiveship. The LHMP acknowledges both the limits of film to completely authentically capture a “moment,” and relies on a widely dispersed and heterogenic queer history which has no authoritative origins. It consists of personal collections, acquired through organically reaching out to friends and community members to form connections to lesbian ancestors through time.

The digitisation of the archive is a precipitous event in the formulation of an ethical practice: with its radical accessibility, viewing the work of marginalised filmmakers is easier than ever, and so is connecting with their spectral presence. The very archive itself is dispersed, becoming ghostly in its ability to traverse through the digital space. A digital archive is not a space of command (save, for example, hiding contents behind a paywall) but a space which is not really a “space” at all. One may argue that digital preservation is lesser than the actual preservation of physical film (and the LHMP does preserve the physical reels of film they recover), because it is not the lived experiences of these moments which are of importance, but the object of film. The digital film archive is the suggestion of, or in other words, the spectre of the object. The digitization of film is critical when much of the neglected, recently recovered home movies are in a state of degradation, or are at risk of destruction/loss. I argue that a mixed approach to archiveship – working to preserve or transfer physical film as well as offering a digital space to work with and view films – is the most ethical approach. Home videos shot on film are embodied ghosts of both their makers and subjects, preserving an image of their bodies and actions. Maintaining the integrity of these embodiments is of importance, but so is ensuring some version of the image can live on, particularly when they are neglected by film history at large.

The process and practice of archiving film is one which has rapidly changed in the last several decades, and will continue to change in the decades to come. The Lesbian Home Movie Project (est. 2007) epitomises the ways in which the rapidly-expanding field of digitally archiving film can be employed in ways which foreground ethical and empathetic practices, a consideration of the films origins and historical importance, as well as a care for the medium of film itself. The film archive is no longer a solely authoritative force intent on shaping the film canon, but has the potential to be an anarchic and community-focused practice which focuses on the dispersion of marginalised histories to form connections with those who existed before and with us.

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. John Hopkins University Press, 1995.
 
D’Cruz, Glenn. Hauntological Dramaturgy: Affects, Archives, Ethics. Routledge, 2022.
 
Hall, Stuart. “Constituting an Archive.” Third Text, vol. 15, no. 54, 2001, pp. 89–92.
 
Storm, Ruth. “The Shadblow Tree.” Reel 13, Ruth Storm Collection. Lesbian Home Movie Project. https://vimeo.com/showcase/5245461. Accessed 29 November 2023.
 
Storm, Ruth. Reel 18, Ruth Storm Collection. Lesbian Home Movie Project. https://vimeo.com/showcase/5245461/video/314991943. Accessed 29 November 2023.
 
Thompson, Sharon. “The Archival Gets Personal.” Lesbian Home Movie Project. 13 April 2018. https://www.lesbianhomemovieproject.org/2018/04/13/the-archival-gets-personal/. Accessed 30 November 2023.
 
Thompson, Sharon. “Death Comes to the Archive.” Lesbian Home Movie Project. 21 January 2018. https://www.lesbianhomemovieproject.org/2018/01/21/death-comes-to-the-archive/. Accessed 30 November 2023.
 
Thompson, Sharon. “Reading Lips, Keeping Secrets.” Lesbian Home Movie Project. 25 August 2017. https://www.lesbianhomemovieproject.org/2017/08/25/reading-lips-keeping-secrets/. Accessed 30 November 2023.