[Home Movie: Barbara's Little House of Flowers Collection, circa 1969, Christmas at home]

About

Synopsis

Christmas at home

Collection Description

This film (Kemp_8306) is part of the Barbara’s Little House of Flowers collection.

With an artist’s eye, Barbara Joan Reisner was keen to explore her family history in Europe as well as across the United States. She travelled often throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s, documenting the rural villages and town squares of her father’s youth that constituted the former territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; she toured pastoral regions of Southern Italy and the great cultural institutions of New York. Her images capture these vistas from the perspective of a young American woman forging a path for herself in the Arts. Ahead of her time, Barbara’s camera pays attentions to the intimate moments of life and the connections forged between people, animals, and nature.

Like her mother, and her mother’s mother, Barbara was a magpie when it came to memories. Barbara documented that which she adored, which included: music, animals, religion, plants, art — these were her passions, and she filled dozens of scrap books, photo albums and reels of film with these subjects.

As the daughter of a Polish immigrant, Barbara made two major trips to Europe in the 1950s and 60s, both of which are captured on film. After graduating college, Barbara worked for a spell as a fashion illustrator in the advertising department for The Broadway, a now historic (and defunct) department store in Los Angeles. Erstwhile her passion as a concert violinist began to flourish into opportunity. These activities are documented as part of this collection.

Perhaps most illustrious of this memorabilia is the presence of famed Prima Ballerina Madame Alexandra Danilova, whom Barbara had befriended as a teenager when she founded and ran the Alexandra Danilova “Choura” Fan Club. An extensive exchange of written correspondence between Barbara and Danilova accompanies this archive, with portraits of Danilova taken by Barbara in casual, candid mode.

Everything was shot by Barbara herself, in the amateur style of filmmaking. All filmic content was shot by Barbara over several decades. From Alexandra Danilova to cloistered nuns; coteries of stray cats to generations of opossums named Russel; from Northeast Los Angeles to Burbank to Hollywood; from London to Poland to Ohio, Barbara’s singular eye reigns over all she experienced, recorded, and preserved for us today.

This collection was conserved and digitally captured through the 2020 Al Larvick National Grant awarded to Emma Kemp by the Al Larvick Conservation Fund in partnership with its lab partner Pro8mm.

For more information about this collection, visit: https://www.allarvickfund.org/barbaras-little-house-of-flowers

The mission of the Al Larvick Conservation Fund is to preserve historical and cultural heritage through conservation, education, and the public accessibility of American analog home movie, amateur cinema, and community recording collections. For more information, visit allarvickfund.org.

Human-made No record of this work says a model made it. What this means.

Archive

Internet Archive, in Home movies

Licence or status

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, as the Internet Archive states it.

Credit

Barbara Joan Reisner

Who can watch

The archive gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Tweens profiles and older, judged from its collection and subjects. How films are placed