 Home movies: a new technology, a new duty, a new cultural practice by Susan Aasman It’s 1941 and somewhere in Amsterdam a little girl is learning to walk. And while she is practicing her frst steps, her father holds a flm camera to record this event. Frame after frame, second after second, the camera has been rolling for some three minutes. The meaning of these images is more than obvious. There is nothing mysterious about them. This is a major event in life, important enough to be kept forever. From its invention at the end of the nineteenth century, the flm camera has enabled parents to become do-it-yourself historians, who chronicle their lives and that of their children in order to produce their own family history. With a flm camera it was possible to record important family moments. During the 20 th century, home movie making became a widely practiced hobby and thousands of meters of flm were devoted to intimate moments of private lives. Although initially produced for the domestic domain, many of these previously hidden images now food the flm archives. The question arises if and how far frst steps deserve serious attention by professional historians. Do they really need to undertake the task “to decipher the hidden meaning in the apparent meaning, in unfolding the levels of meaning implied in the literal meaning” as Paul Ricour described the task of cultural historians. 1 What do we learn when we reconstruct the social and historical context of home movie making and explore the rules and conventions, strategies or methods that were practiced? Is there a method at all? Home movies are hard to theorize, as Patricia Zimmermann warned us: “they are in a constant state of redefnition.” 2 The anthropologist Clifford Geertz taught us that it could be rewarding to use the method of “thick description” as a tool to interpret and give meaning to human acts. In this essay we will consider home movie making as a ritual we can access by description, albeit in a critical and analytical manner. Rather than giving a ‘thin’ description by discovering general patterns or rules, I will extensively explore the scene of the little girl learning how to walk. Only then, it will become possible to understand the richness of this new type of source material that began as a new technology but quickly turned into a new duty and new cultural practice. 1 Paul Ricoeur, The Confict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics (London, 2004), 13. 2 Patricia Zimmermann, “Democracy and cinema: history of amateur flm,” in: Essays on Amateur Film/ Recontres autour des inedits, ed. N. Kapstein (Charleroi: Association Européenne Inédits, 1997), 73–81.