Keyword – auto-etnography

Müllner, András:

The other in ourselves

Starting from Lajos Császi’s essay about an early English participatory movement called Mass Observation, and taking a Hungarian experimental short film titled Private history as a particular example, this study explores how one can understand the appropriation of a private film archive as a sort of participatory research, or as a sort of “science of ourselves”. In the case of the Private history made by Gábor Bódy and Péter Tímár in 1978, there is a construction of a particular relationship: the professional filmmakers “organised” a participatory research, the protagonist of which is a private filmmaker who had shot his footages long before the final cut of his material. He and his family represented themselves by their home movies, and the abovementioned professional filmmakers used these family footages as a visual study of private lives before and under Worl War II in Hungary. Through the exploration of the archive materials they tried to reveal the origins and actual chances of the contemporary civil society in the 1970s. This study suggests that one of the elementary questions raised by Private history is that of which were the ways of visual representation for a Jewish family before and under Worl War II in Hungary, and beyond that and more widely, and of what could the private image mean in an illiberal, antidemocratic and dictatorial society.

Keywords: archive footages, auto-etnography, counter-culture, everyday life, experimental film, halfie anthropology, hegemonic culture, Lambeth Walk, Mass Observation-movement, othering/constructing the Other, participatory research, popular culture, private film, Private history, “science of ourselves”