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There's No Place Like Home Documentary Analysis

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How these films deploy visual archives reflects the epochal shift in subject formation that I have just described. While classic documentary filmmakers of the “Third Cinema” moment (e.g. Fernando E. Solanas [1936-] and Patricio Guzmán [1941-]) constructed their films using material from the sociohistorical archive, today’s filmmakers construct their documentaries using intimate, everyday archives, particularly those of the family. Specifically in the case of Argentine documentaries, directors often use techniques like dissociation and fragmentation to pose an aesthetic challenge to the totalizing, humanitarian narrative of their parents’ generation.
What, then, can these children of the disappeared salvage of their parents and their times? …show more content…

In his book There’s No Place Like Home Video (2002), James M. Moran ascribes five basic functions to the domestic mode in film and video production: to represent the everyday, to construct a liminal space in which to explore and negotiate one’s identity in both personal and collective terms, to offer a material vehicle for articulating generational continuities, to construct an image of home that situates us in the world, and to offer a narrative format for communicating personal stories that cover the whole life cycle and its major rituals. We observe all of these characteristics in the documentaries I have mentioned, even though in the vast majority they do not manifest fully. For example, as I have already explained, articulating intergenerational structural continuities proves impossible. Furthermore, narratives take on hybrid formats marked by irony and fragmented intertextuality, and identity can never be integrally restored. The functions of the domestic that Moran mentions, then, act as narrative impulses in these films, yet never find adequate resolution: the narratives are instead best characterized by suspicion, anger, and …show more content…

In the final assessment, then, what happens to the representation of daily life? I contend that these films recover the familiar and the domestic to make them quotidian.
The historical processes of the last forty years have torn lives asunder and introduced profound existential crises into people’s lives. Despite all that has happened, the quotidian is the only sphere that remains intact, that has not been displaced. The everyday persists in spite of all. The question, then, is how to restore to the everyday a familiarity that puts subjects at ease. This is the dynamic, the motivation at work in these films.
A phenomenological approach might hold that the quotidian—the everyday—is the most immediate and spontaneous space in which people exist. The quotidian is the realm in which being manifests as ontic reality, the space in which human beings recognize their existence as real. From this perspective, it becomes clear that what happens in the “world” does not destroy the realm of the everyday. The less “world” a subject possesses, the more he or she will cling to that which is immutable: the

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