Transcripts of interviews with home movie donors

Series

Péter Forgács and his team conducted and recorded oral history interviews with Hungarian amateur filmmakers or with their family members. These interviews were originally recorded on 216 analogue audio cassettes as part of Forgács’ research project in order to gain background knowledge about the events and people appearing in home movie footage. He used these interviews both for his own documentary films or other art projects as well as for scientific research that was conducted in the framework of the Private Photo and Film Foundation. These sound recordings were later transcribed, thus textual records were produced. The transcribers used Microsoft Word. The total number of these born-digital WORD documents is 152. Out of these 91 are unique, the rest are duplicates or non-interview files. The Catalog contains the unique records only. The non-interview files will be arranged and processed in a separate archival series. Forgács handed over the transcripts to the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) for research and cataloguing in year 2012. The digital files were processed at OSA in 2021. As a result, the entire collection is accessible digitally for the general public as of May 2021.

Parallel with collecting several hundreds of hours of home movies (see archival series HU OSA 320-1-2), Privát Fotó és Film Alapítvány started a research project. Péter Forgács, Judit Scherter and Edit Kozma conducted interviews with the home movie makers, donors or their family members. The originally audio recordings were later transcribed. This archival series contains the interview transcriptions in the form of digital files. There are 91 transcripts (in Microsoft Word), but some have neither a matching audio recording nor a home movie.

The series contains the 91 Word format transcripts of interviews made in conjunction with Hungarian home movies (see archival series HU OSA 320-1-2).Generally, the interviews were made with the interviewee and the interviewer watching the given home movie or leafing through family photo albums to refresh memories. The reality recorded on moving image was supplemented by interviewees with stories about the family and other additional private and background information. The interviews help explore the origins and background of a family, what lands they owned, how they made their living, the rise and fall of enterprises, building up and losing wealth, marriages, lives of children as well as how cities, towns or neighborhoods changed over time. These oral histories help see how big history – nationalization, forced relocation, persecution of Jews, world wars – influence the lives of people at the family or personal level. The original sound recordings are in the series HU OSA 320-1-3. Some of the files in the series containing the transcripts have no audio pair: of the 91 interview transcripts 55 have their recorded pair (see HU OSA 320-1-3) while 36 do not. Presumably, these 36 audio recordings had been lost over time and were never deposited at OSA. Furthermore, no home movies (HU OSA 320-1-2) belong to most of the 36 transcripts. In addition, some audio recordings are fragmented, yet their transcribed version is a full text, covering what is missing from the audio recording. The main benefit of textual transcription is that they are easier to search for data and information than sound recordings. The texts are faithful transcriptions of the interviews, yet they are not easy to read because of the mistakes and mistyping. Occasional inaccurate information (misunderstood or misspelled surnames, places, dates) were corrected by the processing archivist. In cataloging the series, special attention was devoted to connect related documents. In the Contents Summary field of the individual records the call numbers of original sound recordings and the home movies are given as well as, if traceable, that of Péter Forgács’ documentary films. Connecting items in three, or in certain cases four, different archival series are meant to facilitate research.

Not Expected

Not Restricted

Third party rights are to be cleared.

Processed and catalogued by Judit Krausz. Described by Judit Krausz and Zsuzsanna Zádori.