The Home Movie Look

The Home Movie Look is a practice-led research output developed as part of my doctoral project, Queering the Home Movie. Created during a RMIT/ACMI X residency and presented as a work-in-progress to ACMI X residents, the work functions as both creative artefact and analytical method. It is a short archival compilation drawn from my multi-generational blended Australian family archive and was designed for live narration within a research presentation context.The research investigates the “home movie look”: a constellation of visual and behavioural conventions that make amateur family films recognisable across time and technology. While home movies are frequently defined through their visual amateur markers—handheld framing, long takes, erratic zooms, uneven exposure—this work shifts focus to their behavioural dimension. Specifically, it examines the relational exchanges between camera and subject, foregrounding the recurring moment when subjects return the camera’s gaze. I argue that this returned gaze, along with gestures such as waving, posing, and verbal address, constitutes one of the most persistent and affectively charged features of the home movie form.By isolating and recontextualising these gestures through archival compilation, The Home Movie Look demonstrates how creative practice can operate as a mode of critical inquiry. The work reveals patterns within the archive that might remain less visible in textual analysis alone and contributes to home movie scholarship by proposing behavioural address as a defining structural principle of the home mode. More broadly, the project positions the family archive as a site of theoretical investigation, showing how amateur media can be reframed as both cultural evidence and critical method.