Alan Berliner’s The Family Album (1988), now available for rent at Facets Multimedia along with the rest of Berliner’s documentaries, is a reminder of how much a filmmaker can do within the nonfiction form. Berliner created this hour-long work from scores of home movies and audio recordings—some of them taken from his own family archives, many of them not—and his collage aesthetic suggests the exhumation of a collective memory. Much of the footage is of New York families in the 30s, 40s and 50s, with an emphasis on banal activities generally overlooked by fictional period pieces: exercise in the backyard, family get-togethers, nightly dinners, corporal punishment.