On Being a Filmmaker Mother: ‘Home Movie/Proper Film’

by: Joanna Callaghan , October 5, 2023

A camera has often been present between my son and me. His father and I recorded hours of him, using the many different types of filming equipment to which we had access. I never consciously thought we were making a film while we were shooting. We were just capturing stuff. Our ‘proper films’ involved scripts and actors, sets and locations and were about philosophy, a serious academic subject. As our home movie archive grew, it did so alongside the shooting and producing of these other kinds of films.

It was ten years later, when I looked at these home movies with fresh eyes, that I discovered themes and threads that could be woven into a proper film, more like our philosophy films than I had expected. I got ‘home movie fever’, a version of Derrida’s Archive Fever, (1995) where I would mine my archive for themes that were marginalised, excluded, and disqualified from other kinds of films, including my own. I wanted to find out if I could re-see what was there, always already within the material.

I explored many themes in these home movies, producing several short films. They included rituals of care, performance and play, and the infant gaze. There were endless possibilities within the material to make observations about motherhood, the developing child, identity, and memory. However, I kept returning to the question of why this material existed in the first place. What was the motivation for gathering it? Was it only to document our son’s childhood? Or was there something else in this act of recording that spoke of deeper needs within us, within me as the main recorder of these movies? Why record everything and so much?

In the end, it was like a scene in the Edgar Allen Poe’s short story ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1884). I was the detective Dupin, looking everywhere only to find the answer was in plain sight. All and everything in this archive was me intertwined with my son, in a complex, messy, and joyous embrace. I was making a film about a mother trying to be a filmmaker and a filmmaker trying to be mother. It was impossible to disentangle it all. We were both the subjects of these home movies, and moments from them seeped into my ‘proper’ films, without me realising it. There was little separation between filmmaker and subject, mother and son and this amorphous border was where the material was most rich and revealing. It has made me question the limits of a public and private film practice and of what is acceptable as a ‘proper’ film, and what remains too home movieish to be accessible to others. I haven’t found the answer, but I am convinced the archive will deliver it up. I just have to be patient and keep on recording.