Browse Objects

A silent home movie featuring children playing with their Christmas toys, a child’s third birthday party celebration, and families interacting outd...

A humorous Metro Movie Club film club short film. After a day of domestic squabbling, an imposing wife and bumbling husband have their furniture ap...

A domestic black comedy, MISTER E expresses some of the edgier mischief and discontent that women of mid-century America could rarely express openl...

In this amateur domestic comedy by Chicago’s Metro Movie Club, housewives use 16mm film to outwit their horny husbands.

The Switch won...

A comedic sales film for Campbell-Mithun, Inc.'s Ac'cent Flavor Enhancer product. The film begins with a husband and wife duo separately lounging a...

A man is performing a balancing act. A young girl points to her socks and explores a fireplace.

“Garden ‘82” studies what appears to be Elam’s Logan Square backyard, a locale frequently used in Elam’s work. The footage focuses on the space of ...

This footage follows two dogs and two cats around the house, with the camera sometimes zooming in on the animals’ eyes looking directly towards us ...

This footage by JoAnn Elam from around 1974 shows Elam’s home in Chicago, her dog, her books and cans of films, her garden through the window, natu...

“Moving” opens out of focus as the camera tentatively (and shakily) depicts green foliage covering the orange and white siding of a U-Haul truck. S...

This film's images consist of recreational types barbequing and loitering about a backyard superimposed on seemingly a spatial survey of the same b...

Shot around 1983, this footage first shows a man working on a farm and it exemplifies JoAnn Elam’s fascination for farm labor. The rest is rather d...

"Garden #2" documents JoAnn Elam, her second husband Joe Hendrix, and an unidentified man in the backyard garden of Elam's Logan Square apartment i...

This 8mm home movie from the JoAnn Elam Collection shows Elam gardening outside her home in Chicago around 1984 and captures Elam’s interest in gar...

"84 Garden 2" documents JoAnn Elam working in the garden of her Logan Square residence in Chicago. Based on her consistent outfit, the film appears...

“Back Porch” surveys a backyard, seemingly the same yard depicted in Elam’s “ jQuery(document).ready(function() { if($("#bSetsSelectMultipleButton").is(":visible")){ $(".bSetsSelectMultiple").show(); } });