Critical Archives of Ordinariness: Vernacular Moving Image Practices and Migrant Identity in Polish Chicago

Project Information

Not-So-Ordinary

Grant agreement ID: 101109803

DOI

10.3030/101109803

EC signature date 7 April 2023

Start date 1 October 2023

End date 30 June 2027

Funded under

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 290 444,16

Coordinated by

KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Not-So-Ordinary (Critical Archives of Ordinariness: Vernacular Moving Image Practices and Migrant Identity in Polish Chicago)

Reporting period: 2023-10-01 to 2026-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Migrant and diaspora communities are often poorly represented in official archives. Many records of their everyday lives remain in private homes, where they are difficult to access, insufficiently described, and vulnerable to deterioration or technological obsolescence. Home movies are an important example. They document family life, work, travel, celebrations, community events, and encounters with places of origin from the perspective of the people who experienced them. Yet they remain underused in migration and diaspora research, and without contextual knowledge it is often difficult to establish who and what is shown, why a film was made, how it circulated, or what it meant to those involved.

Not-So-Ordinary addresses this gap through a study of home movies created and preserved by the Polish diaspora in Chicago. Its overall objective is to determine what unique insights home movies can offer migration and diaspora studies. The project examines how historical home movies can be contextualized through oral history; how moving-image practices changed with the transition from film to video; how films, tapes, equipment, and audiovisual messages circulated between the United States and Poland; how amateur filmmaking contributed to migrant identities; and how home movies can be conceptualized as a source for migration and diaspora research.

The project combines cultural anthropology, migration and diaspora studies, transnational history, film and media studies, oral history, archival studies, and qualitative research. Its central methodological principle is to study recordings together with the knowledge of the people who made, preserved, watched, or inherited them.

The pathway to impact combines research, preservation, and access. Fragile audiovisual materials are identified and digitized; their histories are reconstructed with filmmakers and families; films, interviews, and contextual information are analyzed together; and materials cleared for dissemination become part of an expanding online research collection. This creates new knowledge while preserving cultural heritage that might otherwise disappear and offers a model transferable to other migrant and minority archives.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The first phase focused on assembling and contextualizing the research collection and beginning systematic qualitative analysis. Home movies were located in private, family, community, and institutional collections in the United States, with additional material identified in Poland. Films and tapes were reviewed, selected, digitized, documented, and prepared for research use using specialist archival infrastructure and external providers.

The scale of the corpus exceeds the original plan. The project anticipated approximately 150 home movies or excerpts; 544 home movies have already been digitized, around 3.6 times the planned number. Oral-history interviews were completed with 65 participants, compared with a planned minimum of 60. The sample retained the intended gender balance and included substantial representation of working-class filmmakers, bringing into the research perspectives often less visible in histories of amateur filmmaking.

The interviews also generated a richer body of evidence than expected. Instead of the projected 1.5–2.5 hours, interviews lasted more than three hours on average, with some conducted across several sessions. Many were supplemented by film- and video-elicitation: digitized recordings were watched together with filmmakers or family members. These sessions helped identify people, places, dates, and events and generated information about production, viewing, circulation, preservation, and family memory that could not be derived from the images alone.

The collection contains substantial bodies of both film and video, including filmmakers who used more than one technology. It provides a basis for tracing changes from small-gauge film to analog video in recording, editing, viewing, and circulation. The corpus also contains extensive evidence of transnational exchange: films made during visits from the United States to Poland, recordings intended for relatives across the Atlantic, histories of cameras and tapes moving between the two countries, and recorded audio letters.

The films, interviews, and contextual data are being systematically coded and analyzed across themes including technology, gender, class, generation, transnational circulation, community archiving, and migrant identity. The publication program is ahead of plan: four research papers were initially envisaged, while at least six scholarly texts are now underway—one published, one accepted for publication, two submitted and under review, and two in preparation.

A major achievement was the rediscovery of Góralskie wesele (Highlanders Wedding, 1961), an 88-minute color 16 mm amateur film with optical sound made by Polish Highlander immigrants in Chicago. Previously considered lost and unknown to film scholarship, it has been professionally preserved and digitized in 4K, with new preservation elements produced. Its recovery provides an exceptional source for studying migration, community performance, cultural continuity, and vernacular filmmaking.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project advances the state of the art by treating original, unedited home movies as a major source for migration and diaspora research. Existing scholarship has often focused either on professional representations of migration or on home movies as objects of film history. Not-So-Ordinary instead asks what migration history looks like when reconstructed from audiovisual records created for families and communities themselves. It also addresses a persistent archival problem: home movies are frequently preserved without the contextual knowledge needed to interpret them.

The project’s “movie–interview” approach responds directly to this limitation. Combining films with oral histories and elicitation makes it possible to move from looking at images to looking through them as historical and anthropological evidence. The research shows that home movies must be interpreted in relation to their production, intended audiences, later circulation, and the archival processes through which recordings survive. Archiving itself therefore becomes part of the research method.

A second contribution concerns the visual expression of diaspora. The research challenges the expectation that migrant or ethnic identity should always be visibly recognizable on screen. Much footage records ordinary family life and contains few obvious signs of ethnicity. The project develops the concept of “diasporic (in)visibility” to describe a continuum in which diasporic experience may be highly visible, partly discernible, or visually absent. Such absence can be meaningful: it may reflect assimilation, but it may also show that diasporic identity is only one among several affiliations shaping everyday life. The related concept of “multiple exposure” captures how ethnic, regional, religious, generational, and socio-economic identities can overlap within the same visual record.

A third contribution is a genre-based framework for diasporic amateur filmmaking. The research identifies three recurring forms: “homeland travelogues,” documenting return visits to places of origin; “video letters,” produced to circulate between relatives across borders; and “recontextualized reenactments,” in which customs and rituals associated with the homeland are recreated in a new setting. These genres illuminate different forms of transnational movement—of people, media, memories, and cultural practices—and provide concepts that can be tested in other diasporic contexts.

The project further contributes to critical archival studies by showing how community audiovisual archives shape collective identity through decisions about what is preserved, in which medium, and under what conditions it can be accessed. It highlights informal recordings and consumer video, often undervalued in heritage collections, and develops the idea of “archival diaspora” to understand records dispersed among families and institutions and later reassembled through archival work.

Further uptake will depend on continued digitization, contextual metadata, rights and consent management, long-term preservation, and comparative research involving other migrant and minority communities. The project’s digital collection and methodological and conceptual results can support research, teaching, archival practice, and more inclusive approaches to audiovisual cultural heritage.