Filmed Spaces: Heritage Through the Lens of Amateur Cinema

Filming tourist trips is one of the most popular subjects in family and amateur film archives. In addition to documenting leisure activities in recreational areas and facilities, the lenses of amateur filmmakers also captured sites of multicultural historical heritage. A neglected Jewish cemetery, the silent fortifications of a cave city, the ruins of a princely castle, the colourful Hutsul market and the coastline of an ancient city — these often serve as locations that attract the eye with their unexplored nature or novelty, or as a background against which families and friends pose for the camera.

What makes it into the frame of travellers' footage when they find themselves in unfamiliar surroundings? What cultural markers, experiences and practices, situated at the intersection of nostalgia and appropriation, does their camera capture and reveal? How does amateur filmmaking transform the spaces being filmed and combine memory, visualisation and a sense of belonging? What do framing choices reveal about the person looking at landmarks through the viewfinder?

We invite you to a film screening that will take place within "Weaving the Heritage" public program of the project REHERIT 2.0: Shared Responsibility for Common Heritage, during which, together with archivist Oksana Avramenko, we will watch amateur films from the collections of the Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History.

The project "REHERIT 2.0" is being jointly developed by the teams of the Center for Urban History and the Center for Regional Development of the PPV Economic Development Agency and is funded by the European Union.

This publication was produced with the financial support of the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of the partners of the REHERIT 2.0 project and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

Credits

Cover Image: in the Basilica of Chersonesus, a still from the film "With Grandpa. Sevastopol. Uncle Vanya. Alupka", 1989, collection of Tetyana Dorodnitsyna / Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History