Homes, Archives, and Archons
The turn toward intimate terrains and private life is a major trend in contemporary documentary. Materials, styles, and themes germane to the photo album and the home movie increasingly migrate to the documentary screen and into the public sphere. As this chapter discusses, this move does not represent a retreat from the social and the historical in favor of atomistic or narcissistic self-involvement but rather a changing approach to the sociohistoric, which is rendered through the self-conscious and refracting lens of personal experience and located in the microcosm of interpersonal relationships. Engaging with the history and theory of familial image-making, this chapter explores the reworking of the home mode in Consuelo Lins’s Babás (2010), Gabriel Mascaro’s Doméstica (2012), and João Moreira Salles’s Santiago (2007)—three films that deal with relationships of power, labor, and servitude in private life and the home.