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In attempting a narrative treatment of my family’s story, MY Home Video, building on the premises of “recounting” and “dialog,” takes the form of a documentary film, the main focus of which is the lengthy process of putting an extremely cluttered and disorganized house back in order. Family members, with the exception of my father, addressed me as the director/photographer on the other side of the camera to tell their stories during the process of cleaning. The film project comprised four phases: field research; principle photography; editing and post-production; screening and discussion. Each phase of the topic treatment had disparate impacts on those involved—family members, instructors, friends, strangers, and me.
This written treatment of the project borrows Gadamer’s hermeneutic concept of “dialogue with the text” to attempt a conversation with the MY Home Video documentary through the process of writing. This account also aims to facilitate what Gadamer denoted as a “fusion of horizons.” Concerning these hermeneutic approaches to viewing the film as a way of (1) extending the dialogic scope of Gadamer’s “text” in sketching out a territory for his notion of “play,” (2) examining my own “dialogic inability,” and (3) investigating the communicative difficulties I encountered in filming and screening the documentary, this report additionally comments on and critiques the limitations met by any scientific approach to the philosophy of mind.
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