Patty Zimmermann

Hollywood films are the home movies of global capital. — Patricia Zimmermann.
        An apt epigraph, which in fact it was for Paul Cullum’s report on the second Orphan Film Symposium, “Orphanistas!” L.A. Weekly, April 18, 2004. 

To give an example of Patty Zimmermann’s work, her passions, political advocacy, and indeed her personal presence, below is a video excerpt of her talk at last year’s Orphan Film Symposium.  

Since the unexpected passing of Patty Zimmermann on August 18th at age 68, we’ve seen an outpouring of lengthy testimonials from the many people whose lives she touched, whose work she championed. Certainly she was an important part of the Orphan Film Project, participating in the symposiums (starting more than twenty years ago), writing about kindred efforts, and ever encouraging and praising the people who labored in the field. By coincidence, two days prior, archivist and historian of amateur film Dwight Swanson reminded us to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the first Home Movie Day (8/16). So Patty was on our minds, not knowing her death was so near.

She supported, among other entities, the Flaherty Seminar, Visible Evidence (documentary community of scholars and practitioners), Northeast Historic Film (archive and its summer symposium), the Association of Moving Image Archivists (its journal’s editorial board), Home Movie Day, as well as the Orphan Film Symposium (more on that below). Professor Zimmerman (Patty!) founded Ithaca’s Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival and, most recently, The Edge, an online topical publication of her college’s Park Center for Independent Media, designed to counter mainstream journalism. 

The curatorial project We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media is another of her impactful legacy projects — a touring exhibition of forty works, organized into six thematic programs, curated with Louis Massiah (Scribe Video Center) and support from XFR Collective. 

Here’s how the final session of the 2022 Orphan Film Symposium — Counter-Archives — was listed. A recording of the full discussion (54 min.) is online, but here’s a sampling of Patty in action. 

June 18, 2022, Concordia University
Community: Media, Archiving, Dialogue
Patricia R. Zimmermann (Ithaca College), Louis Massiah (Scribe Video Center), & Carmel Curtis (XFR Collective) We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media 

Screening: 47 min., from the We Tell program “States of Violence”
• Ain’t Nobody’s Business (YWCA Battered Women’s Program, NOVAC, 1978) 22 min.
• Inside Women Inside (Christine Choy & Cynthia Maurizio, TWN, 1978) 21 min.
• Why Archive? (Activist Archivists, 2012) 1 min. _{archive.org/details/actarc_whyarchive_v1}

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The preservation, screening, and study of home movies and the broader category of amateur films has become rather well established by 2023. But they were mostly long neglected.  Zimmermann’s scholarship opened pathways for others. Anyone studying these subjects necessarily cites these vanguard books.

• Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana University Press, 1995; revised edition 2003) by Patricia Rodden Zimmermann.

• Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories. Edited by Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann (University of California Press, 2008).

Here’s a version of my review for Film Quarterly (Spring 2011).  

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Which of the following is an accurate characterization?

Home movies are _______ .
     (1) documents of the everyday,
     (2) not documents of the everyday,
     (3) counter-documents,
     (4) films without an interest in profit,
     (5) colonized by Hollywood,
     (6) lost histories of a frequently invisible working class,
     (7) feminine; professional films, masculine,
     (8) a stimulant for nostalgia,
     (9) a medium of joy,
     (10) boring,
     (11) the greatest record of our culture,
     (12) deceptive documentaries,
     (13) hidden histories of the world,
     (14) a festival of Oedipal relations.*

The anthology Mining the Home Movie argues all of the above, each phrase proffered by one of its contributors.
          Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmermann’s collection of 27 essays by 27 authors is a compendium whose time has come. As the sampling of definitions and descriptions suggests, the scholarly analysis of home movies has established a foothold in media studies. While the amateur mode of filmmaking has yet to be integrated into comprehensive histories of cinema (especially in textbooks), a new literature has emerged focusing on this twentieth-century phenomenon.
        Writing about home movies is not entirely new. Scholars have sporadically published essays for at least a generation. No sustained wave of publication immediately followed the English-language breakthrough work on the subject, Zimmermann’s oft-cited Reel Families (1995). The book’s serious treatment of home movies was original, but also tendentious. It remained for amateurs and archivists to advance the literature. Collector Alan Kattelle self-published his authoritative tome Home Movies (2000), which became an essential reference source. Moving image archives began to give small-gauge films higher priority. Curators and archivists gave amateur films greater visibility and made them accessible for researchers.
          This coalescence of archival, academic, and artistic interests is manifest in the roster of contributors to Mining the Home Movie. Most, like co-editor Ishizuka, have hybrid identities – archivist-scholar, filmmaker-historian, curator-researcher. But assigning a single identity to each, the fifteen archivists outnumber the seven scholars and five media artists. This archival bent reflects how the study of home movies has recently unfolded. Small-gauge and amateur film enthusiasts are a strong constituency among moving-image archivists. They have shared their interest with evangelical zeal, with worldwide Home Movie Day screenings being their most notable achievement.
          Half of the essays profile single archives at which the respective authors work. For readers not familiar with the archival world, these deliver a valuable, succinct introduction. Alongside the major established film archives (the Library of Congress, Academy Film Archive, UCLA, Netherlands Filmmuseum) are important regional institutions that have keyed interest in home movies. Northeast Historic Film (US) and North West Film Archive (UK), for example, have established collecting, access, and outreach policies for amateur films that generate scholarship – and of a magnitude that surpasses our expectations of regional archives. Karan Sheldon and Dwight Swanson write about NHF’s rediscovery of a series of 16mm shorts, each entitled The Movie Queen, made by itinerant filmmaker Margaret Cram in the 1930s. Each re-enacts the same script in a different small town in the Northeast, with casts of local amateurs. An essay by the late Maryann Gomes analyzes images of working-class people of the North West found at NWFA (where amateur films outnumber professionals two to one). Nearly all of the home movies were made by middle-class families, so she gives the only two working-class cineastes represented in the archive (one of whom made 93 films) special notice for their rare recordings of daily life in 1950s Britain.
          The book grants material from the Japanese American National Museum (Los Angeles) more attention than any other set of films. As the editors say in their introduction, the depth of interest in the home movies of Dave Tatsuno has been exceptional. Most were shot clandestinely between 1942 and 1945, while he and his California family were interned at the Topaz “relocation” camp in Utah. Four essays analyze the significance of this silent 8mm color footage. Ishizuka and Robert Nakamura detail their use of the Topaz films in their documentary Something Strong Within (1994). Robert Rosen then discusses “memory workers” who transform these events and recordings into historical memory: the documentarians, home moviemakers, and spectators. After a profile of the museum, Ishizuka and Zimmermann argue that the addition of Topaz to the National Film Registry in 1996 helped validate the larger enterprise of studying home movies. While the rare and atypical films from Topaz concentration camp receive disproportionate coverage, the essays make a convincing case for the impact its canonization has had. Certainly, the creative, academic, and archival afterlife of Tatsuno’s home movies has had a more salutary effect on our understanding of the phenomenon than that only famous home movie, the Zapruder film. [Note: In 1999, at the first Orphan Film Symposium, Karen Ishizuka presented the first 16mm screening of the newly preserved 8mm Topaz compilation.]           In its synergistic research, the book reaches wide. The term home movies is not defined, but shifts in meaning. Too often it is used interchangeably with amateur film, a broader category. As authors detail the content of specific works, the diversity of home movie subjects and styles emerges. At times the collection digresses into exploring films of other genres (itinerant productions, local newsreels, documentary outtakes, et al.), which are worthy of study, but which mine territory distinct from home movies.
          Additional assets of Mining the Home Movie include a translation of French film theorist Roger Odin’s provocative work on “family films” (see “festival of Oedipal relations).* Odin’s essay reminds us that an “amateur film movement” has been apparent in European scholarship since the 1980s and remains strong. Liz Czach’s select filmography and bibliography will prove valuable to readers interested in teaching or writing about this subject. Her annotated list of 72 works that make significant use of home movies – and which are actually in distribution – is well selected and her bibliography smartly supplemented with relevant works of critical theory and historiography.

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* Roger Odin passed away four days after Patty. Media scholar Vinzenz Hediger wrote on August 23: “Odin was the de-facto founder of film studies in France, a visionary scholar of global stature who anticipated the current shape of the field by four decades.” Just last year, the University of Amsterdam Press published Odin’s book Spaces of Communication, with an introduction by Hediger, who notes Odin was himself a “consummate amateur filmmaker.” (The book is free to download.)

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In their book’s introduction, Ishizuka and Zimmernann discuss the many forces that had generated interest in amateur films, noting the Orphan Film Symposiums “have functioned to generate new research and curatorial activities and have lent increased visibility to the orphan film cause” (12–13).

Patty participated in the 2001 and 2004 gatherings at the University of South Carolina. She had mentored filmmaker, USC professor, and OFS co-organizer Laura Kissel during the latter’s undergraduate studies at Ithaca College, so we had an in. A roundtable — “Less than 16mm? The Value of Home Movies?” — featured filmmaker-archivist Carolyn Faber (another Patty protege), NARA veterans William T. Murphy and Alan Lewis, filmmaker Susan Korda, archivist Dwight Swanson, and media scholars Eric Schaefer and one Patricia Zimmermann.  

My strongest memory of this session was the after moment. Colorlab VP and film preservation advocate Russ Suniewick was attending the event for the first time. He liked what he heard from Patty. Afterward he approached me in the lobby and asked “How much do I have to contribute to be part of this?” (Possibly the nicest thing anyone ever said to me.) Turns out some in the private sector not only wanted to do preservation out of devotion, they also were glad to hear social critique and debate at a film preservation event. For the next decade plus, Colorlab became the most generous sponsor of Orphans. It remains part of the mix. 

That fourth symposium in 2004, On Location: Place and Region in Forgotten Films, included a session listed as “The Archive On-Line: Practice & Theory.” We invited a set of speakers to talk about their ongoing work, but (as I recall it) every one spoke about something different than what we were expecting. Each in an unconventional way.  

• John Homiak (National Anthropological Archives) & Jim Wehmeyer (Smithsonian Institution), “Digitizing ‘Others’: Putting the Human Studies Film Archive On-line”
• Patricia Zimmermann & Simon Tarr (Ithaca College), “The InVisible Histories Project”
• Howard Besser (New York University), “Materiality: Where Digital Images Are”
• James Lindner (Media Matters LLC), “Ubiquity: The ‘Media-less’ Archive”
• Karl Heider (USC Anthropology), moderator

Patty and her Ithaca faculty colleague, media artist Simon Tarr, did an especially unanticipated turn. Simon had, unbeknownst to us, been making video recordings of the screen throughout the symposium. As Patty spoke he did a live mix of fragments of archival films shown in other presentations. Patty recruited archivist Chris Horak and host Laura Kissel to help her read from a script. A chant of sorts, with the refrain “The Archive is always open.” All of this cued by a lone shirtless drummer who unexpectedly entered from the back of the theater and laid down the beat for the remainder of the performance. (I learned from Dorian Bowen’s 2005 symposium report in The Moving Image journal that his name was David Lail.) 

I had nothing to do with any of this. The surprises and discontinuities came just before the final night’s wrap party at the revolving restaurant atop USC’s Capstone Building. An eccentricity enjoyed by symposiasts since the OFS origins in 1999. Some New Yorkers present disbelieved that the revolving structure originated at the 1964 New York World’s Fair and was permanently installed on the Columbia campus in 1966. The “turntable” originated at the “Festival of Gas” pavilion, which used it as a glass-walled “carousel” enabling fairgoers to see the entire pavilion in a twelve-minute 360-degree spin. 

An illustrative moment: At the 2001 symposium we were setting up for salon-like screenings that followed the closing dinner. I recall sitting on the floor, trying to get an 8mm projector ready. I must have looked stressed, because Patty (and Jacqueline Stewart) came over and asked if I was OK. And how could they help. All went well and two rooms ran small-gauge films and videos the rest of the evening. 

So it was a pleasure to have Patty again presenting at the 2022 symposium. She was in robust form, attending everything, stirring the pot. She will indeed be irreplaceable. But she taught a couple of generations how to stir the pot, so her presence will remain among us. 

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p.s.

Looking now at the “About the speakers . . . ” bio sheets from both 2001 and 2004, I see something I’d forgotten.  Something Patty must have written herself. 

As a curator and programmer she is guided by Patrushka’s maxim: “Hollywood films are the home movies of global capital.”

Patrushka? Perhaps a mock-Russianization of her Irish name, or mock-Sovietization for the fun-loving Marxist. The mantra circulated in scholarly discourse even before she published it herself. See Caroline Frick, Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation (Oxford U Press, 2011), 155.

The maxim became #1 of 20 published as “Home Movie Axioms,” a chapter in Patricia R. Zimmermann’s book Documentary Across Platforms: Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics (Indiana U Press, 2019). The short chapter includes a long footnote, which ends this way.