According to the curator Ron Magliozzi, the museum knows little about Ginsburg, but of course that is the nature of an exhibition effectively culled from the institution’s own attic. On a tour of the show, Magliozzi suggested that amateur movies can constitute a “record of diversity and difference” that Hollywood films of the equivalent time periods often worked to obscure.

One of the highlights is a loop of nearly three hours of home movies by the Jarret family of Pittsburgh. There is nothing overtly special about much of what they depict — birthdays and other celebrations, family members dancing at home , an excursion to a beach or a ride on a roller coaster — but for the fact that these films (and probably not too many others) serve as a record of life in Pittsburgh’s historically African-American Hill District from 1958 to 1967.

Many of the movies in this exhibition were not stored carefully over the years, and the degradation of this particular film, shot on 8-millimeter, is in its own way poignant, an almost literal illustration of the concept of erasure. At times, the image dissolves into a Jackson Pollock-like abstraction. During a fall street festival, residents of the Hill District and the scenery of the neighborhood compete with the imperfections of the film stock.