Home Movie Day: Personal Archives Lost and Found
UChicago Humanities Day keynote address by Jacqueline Stewart, SSHMP director and professor of Cinema and Media Studies

In our digital age, we generate and share a tremendous volume of still and moving images. But how long will we have access to these proliferating, born-digital pictures of our intimate and social lives? This year’s Humanities Day coincides with Home Movie Day 2019, an international effort to preserve amateur films. What can analog personal archives, like mid-20th century home movies, teach us about how we create, and lose, cultural memory?

Humanities Day, an annual tradition at the University of Chicago since 1980, celebrates the humanities with free discussions, tours, performances, and lectures featuring the latest research of our award-winning faculty in the Division of the Humanities.

The keynote address will be followed at 1pm by “The Visual Record: An Introduction to the South Side Home Movie Project,” in the Logan Center for Arts, room 201. Join the South Side Home Movie Project for an introduction to this unique initiative to collect, preserve, digitize and exhibit amateur films from Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods. Featuring film clips from the 1920s-1980s, this session invites attendees to imagine new ways of activating and preserving community knowledge through home movies. Families who have donated their films to the SSHMP will be on hand to narrate their films and share the experience of preserving their home movies and seeing them on screen for the first time in decades.