My doc­toral pro­ject fo­cuses on home movies of German em­i­grants in Venezuela from the 1950s to the 1970s. The start­ing point of the re­search pro­ject is a family film col­lec­tion of my own. In par­tic­u­lar, the aspect of in­ter­na­tional com­mu­ni­ca­tion and the move­ment in which those films found them­selves will be ex­am­ined. Also of in­ter­est is the trans­formed mean­ing that the films that trav­elled across the At­lantic re­ceived in an­other so­ci­ety: post-war Ger­many. One of the ques­tions the pro­ject ex­plores is the dual func­tion of From Home to Home Movies (which I call them) be­cause they were sent to Europe like let­ters on film. In them, a di­a­logue with the Eu­ro­pean viewer has man­i­fested itself. On the one hand, they func­tion as car­rier ma­te­r­ial for one’s own family mem­o­ries and, si­mul­ta­ne­ously, as doc­u­men­ta­tion for others about a life in South Amer­ica. Other ob­jects of dis­cus­sion are the places shown and the space be­tween them, as well as the self-im­ages of the German em­i­grants. These films were part of a more ex­ten­sive net­work of transat­lantic import and export and a trans­fer of knowl­edge (Salazk­ina 2016), which will also be traced with ques­tions about other ob­jects re­lated to them. The antlers in the living room in re­la­tion to the hunt­ing shown in the film and the de­pic­tion of a ship on its voyage from Europe to Venezuela on the wall at my grand­par­ents’ home in Ham­burg, are also ob­jects re­lat­ing to the home movies. How did the images from the Caribbean get into the German living room? What is ac­tu­ally the va­ca­tion movie here? Where is the film? In this case, in suit­cases, plas­tic bags, a closet and at the moment in a desk in Frank­furt am Main.

Katha­rina Jost is a re­search as­sis­tant at the re­search col­lec­tive “Con­fig­u­ra­tions of Film” and a PhD can­di­date at the Goethe Uni­ver­sity, Frank­furt. She stud­ied the­atre, film, media stud­ies, and art his­tory at Goethe Uni­ver­sity, Frank­furt, and the Uni­ver­sity of Vienna. Since 2013, she has been free­lanc­ing for the DFF (Deutsches Filmin­sti­tut & Film­mu­seum). For the latter, she has, among other things, writ­ten texts for an online ex­hi­bi­tion, pre­sented ob­jects from the col­lec­tion in pod­casts and worked on ori­en­tal­ist motifs on lantern images of the museum. In ad­di­tion to her aca­d­e­mic career, she has been in­volved in artis­tic pro­jects. Her re­search topics in­clude Pro­jec­tions, (post-) colo­nial­ism, home movies, am­a­teur film, ex­pa­tri­ate iden­ti­ties, ex­oti­cism, and (vir­tual) travel.