Home Truths

EACH programme is `one' person's story, explains director Alan Gilsenan of his new series Home Movie Nights, based on a treasure trove of family archives dating back over 70 years.

"We have a fairly good cross section of Irish society. While it's true that home movies were most often a hobby of the middle classes, it strikes me that there was always a hard core of home movie makers down through the years. It was perceived as a slightly weird thing to do until the 1960s, but there were committed enthusiasts throughout Irish society."

The 13 week series offers a wide span of perspectives on domestic and public events in the lives of Irish people living here and overseas from the 1920s to the 1980s. "Rather than looking at the official history of the State, you're looking at more social, intimate stories, with historical events sometimes cropping up in the back ground says Gilsenan.

The programme subjects range from a family growing up in prosperous Glenageary in the 1950s to a priest's life in Co Carlow in the 1930s band 1940s and an Aer Rianta employee who worked at Shannon Airport for 40 years. In the latter programme famous faces, from Jackie Kennedy to Haile Selassie, crop up, but these are the exceptions. The real strength of the series lies in its depiction of the quiet minutiae of family life.

Some of the footage came through word of mouth, some through the Irish Film Archive. "We also did an appeal through the Gay Byrne Show, which yielded a lot of material," says Gilsenan. "The whole process has proved to be technically more complex than I thought it would be. We received footage on Super 8, 9.5 millimetre and 16 millimetre. I was surprised at how much 16 mm footage was out there, and also at how much was in colour about 80 per cent."

Gilsenan has used home movie footage before, in documentaries such as Between Heaven and Woolworths and Prophet Songs. "I have a fascination with archive material and Super 8.1 often think it's because I'm short sighted. Home movie footage has a kind of bizarre hypnotic power I suppose because it's very true and it's never planned to be shown outside the family."

Of course, there's an added poignancy in the fact that home movie making is now a dead form, killed off by the advent of the cam corder. "There's a real cut off point in the 1980s," agrees Gilsenan. "A lot of the enthusiasts would have been given a state of the art video camera for their wedding anniversary, for example, but what's interesting is that many of them would then have lost interest. I think it's largely because video is so instant. With film, you always had to be careful what you, shot, because stock is expensive, then you sent it off to be processed and had to wait for two weeks, so there was a sense of occasion when the projector was set up and the curtains were drawn."

It's not just nostalgia, though the images reproduced in Home Movie Nights have an achingly beautiful, hallucinatory quality miles removed from the banal ugliness of video. The protagonists stare out at us from another, lost world, whose aura of simplicity and innocence is added to by the hesitant camera movements and grainy textures. It's a look which has been exploited to the point of cliche by advertisers and pop video makers over the last 10 years, but this is the real thing.

"One of the things that's quite striking about the footage is the prominence of religion. Everyone has their communions, confirmations and weddings recorded, along with novenas, processions and other important ceremonies. There are ironies caused by hindsight Bishop Casey pops up a couple of times, which obviously has different resonances now but there's a real sense of a world which maybe has been ignored in the rush to modernisation of the last few years."

Although each programme employs the same framing structure of an interview with a family member featured in the movies, Gilsenan is reluctant to identify a thematic strand to the series. The programmes are very different some are personal family stories, some have wider political implications, some take place overseas each story is generated and, dictated by the footage that exists. These precious moments do add up to something very powerful. They're not wildly dramatic stories, they're simple and intimate, and that's where their power lies."