ABSTRACT
Video cameras are increasingly inexpensive and easy to use, which has encouraged untrained people everywhere to become videographers and document their own lives. Most filmmakers are now shooting in digital video, a medium that has become so professional that it emulates the quality of film. In essence, what filmmakers and videographers choose to record in both professional films and home movies or amateur videos often presents a vision of the self by documenting the central aspects of life, such as rites of passage (birthdays, bar mitzvahs, sweet sixteens, graduations, weddings); calendrical and religious holidays (Christmas, Passover, Mardi Gras); and performance events (from children’s sports to ethnic festivals). Folklife films also create biographies of individual folk artists, documenting the traditional processes in which they are engaged (such as play activity, folk singing, and craft creation). These subjects form the key narratives of the folkloristic film and the folkloristic video, which explain how these events and processes function in our lives.
