The Family Album

1988 • Directed by

Alan Berliner

Documentary

THE FAMILY ALBUM is a one-hour experimental documentary film utilizing a vast collection of rare 16mm home movies from the 1920s through the 1950s. These home movies are exciting authentic documents of American folk history and culture, taken from the personal vantage point of the amateur photographic eye. Subjects span the entire spectrum of the traditional home movie idiom, including mixed racial, ethnic, economic and geographic sources. Structured from birth to death, THE FAMILY ALBUM is a collage film that weaves its elements into a composite lifetime, passing through the celebrations and struggles from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to experience. It is a universal yet intimate portrait of the American family, not scripted, not rehearsed, not immune to the conflicts and contradictions underlying family life and its rituals.