U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (DFL-MN) has been posting home videos of his trip to Afghanistan on his YouTube channel.

Source: Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune

ABC News story is here.

The Université du Luxembourg, Centre national de l’Audiovisuel Luxembourg, Dudelange will host the conference “Tourists and Nomads. Amateur Images of Migration,” from April 22 to 24, 2010.

“Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s distinction between two types of deterritorialisation, lived by “tourists” (moving out of choice) or by “nomads” (migrating out of economic necessity), this conference seeks to examine how experiences of spatial displacement are being represented and communicated by self-made photographs or films.”

Source: T2m.org

Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema, edited by Ian Craven of the University of Glasgow and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, is the latest contribution to the academic study of home movies and amateur film.

“Concentrating upon a roughly fifty-year period (1930-1980), during which such filmmaking grew rapidly as a significant leisure activity in Britain, the volume shows how popular ‘cine’ assumed distinctive institutional and ideological forms, and some remarkable aesthetic emphases, grounded in consistent technical and critical apparatuses.”

Description and ordering info

Table of contents and Excerpt [PDF]

Trash Humpers is a new movie by Harmony Korine, shot on VHS tape and copied onto other VHS tapes for that familiar tape re-use and re-copied home movie experience. He says of the film:

“I remember when I was a child there was a small group of elderly people who would hang out in the back alleys and under bridges by my house. They always seemed to be getting drunk and dancing. One night I looked out my bedroom window and saw a group of them humping trash cans and laughing. It sounded like they were speaking a strange invented language. This is a movie about them.”

indieWIRE has a clip of the movie here and Harmony Korine’s main fansite is here.

America’s adoration of filmmaker Robbins Barstow continues, with a feature article about him and his filmmaking career, in a feature article in the Waterbury Connecticut Republican-American.

Cornell’s Dance Department features the class Hip-Hop, Hollywood, and Home Movies: Exploring Movement and Media, incorporating home video production.

This course is a laboratory for generating and exploring contemporary dance forms. Monday sessions are devoted to viewing media and discussion. We will be looking at early B-boy films, recent dance-battle documentaries, classic dance clips from Hollywood films, and other related pieces (Black Dance, Show Dance, Art Dance). Wednesday is a laboratory for trying out movements and creating simple dance/music videos (home-movies). This course will be of special value for choreographers using popular dance forms and those interested in the history of popular culture. Everyone must be willing and able to improvise dance moves, teach classmates and exchange movement ideas.

Source: Cornell

The Hagley Library and Archives blog currently has a post about their collection of early amateur filmmaking booklets and catalogs. The post includes links to scanned material.  Read more here.

The Hagley Museum and Library is in Greenville, Delaware and their site is here.

Glass Ghost made this video for their song “Like A Diamond”  with clips of VHS home movies appearing throughout.

Variety has an article on youth & student film festivals.

“When students make films, it;s less to reach a wide audience, as may be expected at some of the more established film festivals,” he says. “They’re not trying to please anybody, they’re just trying to find their own voices.”