Struggle over control: Sound in home video

This article investigates sound practices in home video. Home video manuals and magazines recommended specific strategies for dealing with sound, often with the goal of gaining control over the openness and unpredictability of the situation being filmed. The subject of home video discourse (addressed in handbooks primarily as white, male, and the father of a family) was ideally the one that has image and sound well under control. But while manuals promised the possibility of (re)gaining control over home video, examples of recordings show the ultimate failure in realizing such a possibility. The article argues that listening to home videos can give insight on how media practices inscribe themselves into everyday life and are, therefore, linked to power relations, attempts to control, and scopes of action within the domestic sphere.