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Amateur film: Meaning and practice 1927–77 traces the development of non-professional interests in making and showing film. It explores how amateur cinematography gained a following among the wealthy, following the launch of lightweight portable cine equipment by Kodak and Pathé in Britain during the early 1920s. As social access to the new hobby widened, enthusiasts began to use cine equipment at home, work, on holiday and elsewhere. Some amateurs made films only for themselves while others became cine club members, contributors to the hobby literature and participated in film competitions from local to international level.
The stories of individual filmmakers, clubs and the emergence of an independent hobby press, as well as the non-fiction films made by groups and individuals, provide a unique lens through which contemporary responses to daily experience may be understood over fifty years of profound social, cultural and economic change. Using regional film archive collections, oral testimony and textual sources, this book explores aspects of family life, working experience, locality and social issues, leisure time and overseas travel as captured by filmmakers from northern and northwest England. This study of visual memory, identity and status sets cine camera use within a wider trajectory of personal record making, and discusses the implications of footage moving from private to public spaces as digitisation widens access and transforms contemporary archive practice.
earliest amateur films still in existence. 2 Within a decade, other amateur filmmakers moved through this region as well as other parts of Maine and New England. The numbers of amateur filmmakers increased after Eastman Kodak’s introduction of direct reversal 16mm safety film in 1923. 3 The newly formed Amateur Cinema League published the Amateur Movie Makers magazine in
amateur filmmaking in Britain. Directors, critics, actors and other film professionals praised how the amateur film movement had contributed to the development of national cinema. ‘Amateur filmmakers are a stimulus to the professional film industry, and provide a growing audience for whatever we endeavour to do that is mature, imaginative and experimental’, enthused John and Roy Boulting, the prolific twin-brother director
Linking up with like-minded people was the next step for some new cine enthusiasts, once family and friends had been tried out as both subject and audience. Many converts trace their own discovery of amateur filmmaking to attending a meeting where amateur films were being shown and talked about. The impetus varied: a local advertisement spotted by chance, an invitation to accompany someone else to a club or
) issued the first British serial publication aimed at amateur filmmakers. George H. Sewell, founding editor of Amateur Films ( AF ), sought readers and contributors for a specialist magazine on technical and topical aspects of taking, making and showing motion pictures. AF grew from a twelve-page newsletter into a well-illustrated thirty-six-page monthly by 1934 when it was replaced by Amateur Cine World ( ACW ). Written
, demonstrators’ banners, empty wharves during a strike or scenes of unemployed people, point to the sensibilities of time and place captured in personal footage. Alongside films concerned with public rather than private concerns, this chapter links imagery to contemporary opinion and public mood evidenced by the hobby press. Listed amateur film shows to raise funds or entertain in prisons, hospitals, care homes and other needy settings
later.’ Further on, quotations from Macaulay, General Gordon and ‘Ramsay Macdonald, the first socialist prime minister’ construct a self-assured overview of British imperial endeavour. The historically sensitive nature of colonial film material – for both the colonised and the colonisers – has led to its relative neglect until recent years within the study of amateur films. 52 Yet these private records
amateur film in the London-based arts magazine The Era , linked cine activity with nationhood: ‘I believe the amateur cine movement is helping English people to love England; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the movement is becoming a medium through which English men and women can express their love of England.’ 2 Prevailing hopes that amateurs might help to revitalise Britain’s film industry are apparent. Like others, she
ramifications, methods and processes’ and can give ‘your own angle on your personal affairs’. 13 Reprinting a Daily Express article in Amateur Films enabled Sewell to stress how screening promotional films could ‘hit straight between the eyes’ during a business visit. 14 If casting 16mm film gauge as ‘the most useful assistant (the salesman) has ever had’ 15 seemed unduly utilitarian, creative use could
threats, independence movements and Cold War politics. Repeatedly, amateur film’s often comfortable memory-shaping and portrayals of families at leisure intermesh recreational and lifestyle trends with the intricacies of unevenly paced regional change. Equally, cine footage reminds us that the imperatives of ordinariness become means to negotiate living as well as a lens through which, retrospectively, to understand larger historical