Dissolving the dog: the home made video

Drawing on an ethnographic study of home-movie makers through a series of cuts between ‘clips’, this article inquires into what it is to produce videos of a companion animal, in fact, a really big dog, in and around the home. The final clip examines Richard Sennett’s misplaced critique of Hannah Ardent’s discussion of animal laborens and homo faber. Arendt’s two figures of human work are related to the production and purpose of home-movies of pets. The other series of clips provide a description of how an amateur editing technique is put to use and the modest aesthetic at work in doing so. The home-movie itself is examined through its site of production and the idea of craft (so important to both Sennett and Arendt), only gradually bringing the figure of the animal into focus. The article’s form plays off the disjunctures that we find across edit points in home-movies by having 4 distinct sections that do not correspond with the flow of conventional journal articles.