Haunted Home Movies — Dialectical Image and the Archive Fever in Contemporary Found Footage Films

“Haunted Home Movies — Dialectical Image and the Archive Fever in Contemporary Found Footage Films” has been published in RCL – Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens / Journal of Communication and Languages, issue 62 (2025), edited by Catarina Laranjeiro and Inês Sapete Dias.

In this scientific article, I examine how two films made entirely from home movies — Happy End (1996), by Peter Tscherkassky, and Private Footage (2022), by Janaína Nagata — revisit personal archives to engage critically with historical memory, colonialism, and fascism. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image and Derrida’s “archive fever,” I explore how montage can unearth repressed pasts and open space for a “pro-memory” practice in contemporary found footage cinema.

This work was developed as part of the GHOST Project (2022.08396.PTDC) and ICNOVA (UIDB/05021/2020), funded by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P.

Published in an open access, blind peer-reviewed journal indexed in Scopus.

 Full article available here: https://revistas.fcsh.unl.pt/rcl/issue/view/96

More about the project: www.ghostprojecto.com

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