There are several deaths in House of Bones, Victoria Campbell’s raw, personal documentary about a final summer at her grand family home, tucked snugly into the old Bostonian world of West Chop.

There’s the house itself, the grand dame, with its nine bedrooms, five clawfoot bathtubs and wide veranda from which pre-lunch sherries were sipped in the West Chop Club heyday.

In the film’s final frames it is shown gutted to its skeleton by new owners, its garden stamped out in favor of the beginnings of a garage.

Two literal deaths were catalysts for the film: The fatal stroke of Ms. Campbell’s grandmother, Elizabeth Howland prompted the family to finally sell up. And, off camera, the unexpected death of a university friend to whom the film is dedicated inspired the Vineyard-raised actress to go behind the camera.

The film is also a portrait of the slow demise of the close-knit, mannered, cocktail-fueled, white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant world of Ms. Campbell’s ancestors.

But the hero, Ms. Campbell’s mother, Dolly, comes out alive.

In 2006 Ms. Campbell left Los Angeles to come to the Vineyard for the summer intending to document in some way the house of her youth, knowing that a sale was imminent.

“I didn’t know what I going to do,” said Ms. Campbell, 34, sipping a lemonade on the porch of Slice of Life cafe in Oak Bluffs this week. “But my best friend from college, a filmmaker, cool dude, who introduced me to all the films that I love, he was part of our summers and close to my grandmother. He said you’ve got to grab your camera and film this house and somehow capture it. Do it cinema verité style, and put it out there. But I was waiting for him, I was like, ‘Jonathan, you do it, you be in charge, I don’t how to work a damn camera.’”

But he died unexpectedly, followed six weeks later by Ms. Campbell’s grandmother, matriarch of the West Chop summer house.

“She just sat down to take a nap and died. And that pushed me. I thought I’m going to buy a camera. I’m going to figure this out.”

She shot early summer footage on a handheld before investing in a $3,000 high definition camera.

“I didn’t know what I was doing, overshot — I had 100 hours of footage to sift through and cull the main points that would tell a story,” she said.

Initially Ms. Campbell handed over the film to an editor friend in Los Angeles who delivered something she felt was designed to shock.

“He meant well, but it wasn’t the story I wanted to tell,” she said.

She ended up editing it herself on basic equipment.

“I’m a terrible technical person, but I worked on my own and mastered the software,” she said.

Ms. Campbell spliced together 60 years of footage of the house and neighborhood shot on super 8mm camera by friends and family. In the grainy photographs, vacationers play tennis in their whites at the West Chop Club, splash about in snorkel gear and tee off at Mink Meadows golf club.

It’s a way of life Ms. Campbell glimpsed herself as a child, waitressing at her mother’s cocktail parties.

“There’s a sense that that’s a dying world, that the WASPs are gone. And I think that’s a good thing because it’s a really hard world. There are things I also admired. Some of the old characters are just really lovely and gracious . . . I thought it was important to try and capture a portrait of it. ”

The Campbell home is filled with references to this old way of life: the camera lingers on a beaten up copy of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in Rye, old political biographies line the walls, fine china is packed in boxes, a group of women sit in the parlor discussing how the late comedian Art Buchwald was refused entry to the West Chop Club.

But life that summer in 2006 at the Big House, as it is also known, is a counterpoint to that cloistered society.

Ms. Campbell’s father, Bruce, regularly roars at the dinner table as he rails against the then-President Bush, and provides light relief as he drifts in and out of many shots clad only in ever-more arresting underwear.

“My parents were completely uninhibited, they are so theatrical,” said Ms. Campbell.

“It was such a crazy summer for them with the grief, they didn’t even care that the camera was there. And from the getgo, they were really supportive, because they felt it was part of their story. We’re all — myself included — pretty nutty. I certainly couldn’t have done it if they weren’t so uninhibited; it wouldn’t be very interesting. There is without a doubt a level of anxiety because they know they’re going to be exposed, but I think it’s sort of important to have their storm when their world was shifting in front of them.”

Consumed by grief at the opening of the film, Mrs. Campbell sobs and grimaces as she tells the camera how she misses her mother. Her sense of loss is tied up in the family house, which was presided over by her mother until her death.

“I love that house,” Mrs. Campbell says at one point, “I know every bone in it.”

Struggling with alcohol as she negotiates her grief, Mrs. Campbell becomes inconsolable as the end of summer draws near, and tells her daughter that she doesn’t think she can make it.

But two years on she is much happier, said Ms. Campbell.

“The fact that she did stop drinking and let go of the house and my grandmother — it was really so heroic,” she said.

“She came to the place where it was, ‘This house that I was so attached to, and my mother, they’re gone, they’re dead, and I’m either going to die too and continue drinking, or I’m going to make a change and welcome life.’ And ultimately I hope that’s what people are left with. You think life’s over when you lose something that’s so dear to you but life goes on it’s just a house. Just stuff,’ said Ms. Campbell, laughing as she added:

“But I mean, quite a lot of drama that summer.”

House of Bones screens at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, August 4, at the Tabernacle in Oak Bluffs. Victoria Campbell will attend and take questions after the film. Admission is $8 or $5 for Martha’s Vineyard Film Society members.