The paucity of published discourse about Home Movies makes it difficult to rely on “literary warrant” for help in defining a Taxonomy. There is, however, potential benefit in mining amateur film publications from the hey-day of Home Movie making for vocabularies that were current at the time.
The most concrete examples likely to emerge are those used as categories for Amateur Film competitions – and therefore may be somewhat at cross-purposes to our effort to discern Home Movie genres as opposed to Amateur Film genres. Examples gleaned from a perusal of just a few issues of the magazine Home Movies yielded the following categories:
• Scenario Class
• Documentary Class
• Family Films Class
• Sound on Film
• Novelty Film
It would be useful to find somewhere the rubrics for inclusion in these classes, and the criteria, if any, for judging them. By employing generic terms in currency when many of these films were made, we would make it easier to connect Home Movies to the film discourse of their own day. In other words, to recognize a Home Movie as an instance of “that sort of thing they were talking about in 1951.”