Cinematic hometactics: negotiating belonging in first-person documentary

Abstract

This article approaches first-person filmmaking as a potential home-making practice – a hometactic – that can actively negotiate reality to set forth new modes of belonging. With a focus on negotiating belonging in the context of migration, I turn to Four Journeys (Louis Hothothot, 2022) as a case study, a first-person documentary that explores the relationship between suppressed memories of violence and lived experience of in-betweenness by tracing four separate journeys between China, Hothothot’s country of origin, and the Netherlands, his country of residence. My analysis of Four Journeys’s home-making efforts as permeated by a praxis of care needed to enact a sustainable mode of belonging in the aftermath of migration is combined with insights from an interview between the filmmaker and the author. On the basis of the case study, the article proposes and elaborates on three forms of home-making practices in relation to cinema: hometactics in film (the documentation of home-making in the film), camera as a hometactic (the act of filmmaking as a home-making process), and cinematic hometactics (the cinematic enactments of home). While this three-part analytic differentiation serves to unpack the diverse forms of cinema and/as hometactics, the article also addresses their overlap.

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