“Perhaps the most unique home movies held in the MoMA collections are the six short films featuring Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in their remarkable world travels and at home at Pickfair. Shot between 1929 and 1930 with cinematography by Henry Sharp these 35mm nitrate shorts have since been transferred to safety film with corresponding 16mm viewing prints. These home movies are neither amateur works nor are they glimpses into the domestic lives of these two silent film superstars. Could Fairbanks and Pickford ever cease being moviestars long enough to morph into just plain folks? If the audience (and it is clear these works were intended for some kind of audience) were asked to identify just two elements contained in the films which they could associate with the own lives, I wager the responses would be slow in coming. The works bear the descriptive titles Doug and Mary in Tokyo; Leaving for Europe; Spanish People at Pickfair; Trip Around the World; Angkor and India. These titles illustrate that the events contained within the aforementioned home movies are far from the recording of Thanksgiving Dinner at grandmother’s house. Fairbanks and Pickford were colossal moviestars; they lived their lives, both on and off screen (if living off screen was a possibility) according to the doctrine of the celebrity”.

(Anne Morra, Public and Private Notion of Domesticity, Cinegrafie, n. 12, 1998)