Telling Stories: Home Movies in the Archive

Contributed by Kate Marsi, Spring 2023 Intern

Since the introduction of Kodak’s Cine-Kodak Model A camera in 1923 home movies have been an inseparable part of the human experience. With the advancement of technology and introduction of affordable and widely available film formats, filmmaking became accessible to the general public by the mid-twentieth century. Home movies have long captured the more intimate moments of life like birthdays, weddings, camping trips, travels, as well as life’s more fleeting and candid moments. Sadly these vignettes into everyday life have often been widely overlooked as valuable records, however that view has slowly started to change with their inclusion into archives.

ʻUluʻulu’s Hawaiʻi Home Movie collection is one of the few moving image archival collections that is composed entirely of homemade movies. This collection, made in part, of twelve different families spans approximately 50 years of Hawaiʻi’s history. Some of the oldest footage in the collection was gifted by the Yasui family, and dates back to as far as the 1930s. One can witness some of the earliest home movie footage to step back in time to pre-war Hawaiʻi with this collection, including family gatherings, beach trips, and busy street scenes of an older Honolulu. There are even moments of seeing children eating ice cream. To look a little closer to 2023, the Aragaki Family’s collection of home movies contains moments of family gatherings, holidays, and milestones up until the late 1970s. Familiar images of family beach trips and roasting marshmallows speak to both the past and present of Hawaiʻi.

As Hawaiʻi changes and grows, it can be a comfort to be able to look back and see the Islands of the past, and be comforted in some ways that even as technology and the landscape changes, the fundamentals of life and growing up remain inherently the same. The history of Hawai’i and its people is incredibly vast and complicated. This collection is nothing short of compelling in telling a more intimate story about the islands and the people who have come to call it home for generations.

Saving Memories: Home Movies. (n.d.). History Nebraska. Retrieved May 23, 2023, from https://history.nebraska.gov/collection_section/saving-memories-home-movie