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Description

A simple content analysis of HOME MOVIE will rightfully see the film as analyzing and celebrating being lesbian. Yet the form itself is significant and the title suggestive. Oxenberg uses home movies to underscore the role of the family and school as institutions that perpetuate patriarchal ideology. In the context of this film, home movies, usually a celebratory recording of family life, ironically become a condemnation of the very institutions filmed. Oxenberg celebrates not women's joining family or school but their release. Additionally, the 8mm and Super-8 footage depicting the past juxtaposed against the 16mm footage depicting the present suggests Oxenberg's historical approach to the material. The home movies' awkward child is found later playing football and marching in a political demonstration. Freed of false constraints or "false framing," this woman has expanded the parameters of her life: from mom and dad as "family" to the lesbian movement as "community," from the sideline onto the playing field. The film by its very form suggests: yes, there is socialization and, yes, there is isolation. But there is also potential for change, especially in the context of a social movement.

[Source: Michelle Citron "The Films of Jan Oxenberg Comic Critique," Jump Cut no. 24-25, March 1981]