The complex materiality of amateur cinema research: texts, archives and digital methods Introduction

This dossier is concerned with new methods, approaches and conceptualizations in amateur film research. It explores in particular the challenges posed by the complex materiality of amateur film and some of the digital tools and techniques now being used by researchers. Over the past decade, amateur cinema has developed into a burgeoning area of research within cinema and media studies. No longer a marginal subject with a scattering of researchers working in isolation, amateur cinema is now the subject of many recent books and journal special issues, the focus of significant conferences and panels, and a designated Special Interest Group in the BAFTSS organization.¹ As a category it encompasses polished films made outside the commercial system and includes works that were intended for an audience of fellow amateurs and members of the public. Research into amateur cinema is aligned with the turn towards histories of non-theatrical, ‘useful’ and ‘orphan’ films, but is also crucially oriented towards histories of democratized media production and user-generated content.² Amateur film research contributes to a reconfigured history of who made motion pictures and how they were circulated.

With amateur cinema established as a legitimate area for study, this is a good time to reflect on the significant shifts in approach to this research and on where attention might productively be directed. If the first phase of amateur film research took place using fairly conventional archival and textual research methods, current practice is developing in new directions that raise important methodological and historiographic questions. All of the projects discussed in this dossier involve deep collaborations with and reliance upon archives, and are thus indebted to the archival turn in film history research. Indeed, working with archives is essential to addressing the challenging materiality of amateur media. Unlike commercial films, amateur works often exist only as individual copies and at the margins of recognized film formats and genres. Amateur film research consequently involves sustained reflection on the materiality of small-gauge films, their collection and preservation in archives, and the ways in which they are catalogued, categorized and contextualized.

In this dossier we explore some of the diverse approaches that scholars and archivists are taking in their research. In particular we focus on projects that engage with the challenging materiality of amateur films in the archive, and the digital tools that promise to drive our investigation in new ways and directions. While home-movie scholarship has often been explored primarily for its social function – as domestic media, memory aid, sociohistorical documentation – researchers in this dossier continue to subdivide and categorize amateur film history in different ways.³ Where precisely the categories of ‘amateur film’ and ‘home movie’ overlap and where they diverge continues to be both contextually specific and contentious. In general, ‘amateur film’ is understood to describe more polished works intended for public viewing, while ‘home movies’ includes unedited footage that documented domestic life. Should scholars of amateur film seek to clarify this distinction by focusing on individual works and developing a corpus of significant films, or should we seek out radical approaches that challenge canonization, and even the notion of the film itself? In other words, how can amateur film research sustain a productive tension between the creative production of individual filmmakers and the social role that amateur film presents as a potential media counter-public? The authors contributing to this dossier respond to these questions in varied ways and from different disciplinary perspectives. We believe that this multivocal approach – ranging from traditional film scholars to archivists and digital humanities scholars – has resulted in a rich and productive dialogue.

The emergence of amateur cinema research has also coincided with the development and acceptance of new digital research tools in the humanities.⁴ Several recent projects have embraced these tools as a means of extending knowledge about amateur film, and have thereby shifted the methodologies involved in amateur film research even further. A central aim of this dossier is thus to examine the historiographical interventions that current research in amateur cinema is making, and to articulate the methodological challenges and advances entailed in this work.

The materiality of amateur film is an important part of this challenge. Though often existing in single copies, amateur films collectively represent a large group of films. In her contribution to this dossier, Karan Sheldon uses the metaphor of the ‘sand pile’ to describe a film archive’s collections. Some amateur films, she suggests, lie close to the centre of this pile and are easily defined, while others are at the periphery and resist categorization and recognition. In her recent book, Katherine Groo makes a similar observation about early ethnographic films which, she argues, exist outside of traditional histories of fiction filmmaking and challenge some of the basic structures of historiographic understanding: incomplete texts, uncertain authorship, resistant to categorization.⁵ Amateur film histories pose related challenges to film historiography and this dossier constitutes a call to arms for more researchers to tackle these issues. By highlighting the ‘how’ of amateur film research, we hope to provoke new discussions about where amateur film research should move next. Are there ways that we can coordinate our efforts; conversely, are there emerging debates that will help to define the stakes of these investigations?

Taken together, the following essays present a set of related studies that explore and extend the historiographic and methodological contributions of amateur cinema to the field of film and media studies. While they certainly have themes in common – especially the problem of dealing with large numbers of films – they also propose quite distinct solutions and trajectories for investigation. Individually these essays might be seen as provocations, but collectively they provide constructive commentary on a film-historiographic shift in progress. Each of these pieces in its own way presents a vision of how investigating amateur cinema can help to reshape our understanding of film history, and how digital tools and archival collaborations are essential methods for conducting this work.

The starting point for this dossier was a workshop at the 2017 SCMS conference in Chicago, organized around the launch of the Amateur Movie Database Project (AMDB). My own contribution consequently introduces the AMDB in more detail, focusing in particular on how it has been conceptualized as a digital tool for amateur film research, and what we have learned so far. The main goal of this particular project has been to learn more about the nature and extent of amateur filmmaking in North America. While the project has resulted in some exciting discoveries, it has also produced a number of methodological challenges, especially around definitions and criteria for inclusion.

In the second essay, Paul Frith and Keith M. Johnston propose a recalibration of the scholarly attention on amateur films. While British amateur film preservation and digitization projects have tended to be coordinated by regional archives and to emphasize the locales reflected in the films, Frith and Johnston discuss two projects that stress the technical and aesthetic developments of ‘serious amateurs’. The first of these is focused on women amateur filmmakers, and employs intensive research and film digitization in order to shed light on the overlooked role of women in the amateur field. In a slightly different way, the Eastman Color Revolution of British Cinema project identifies and digitizes significant amateur filmmakers and works that employ colour in novel and evocative ways. Both projects share the goal of overcoming the strictly delimited cataloguing metadata on amateur films and replacing it with robust research and digitization of the unique film prints.

Two of the other contributors to this dossier (Dwight Swanson and Karan Sheldon) are also collaborators on the AMDB project, and their contributions suggest different – perhaps even divergent – ways of thinking about the challenges of amateur film research: Swanson points out ways in which the AMDB can facilitate new insights into familiar texts, while Sheldon notes that the database model requires further development and refinement. In response to this call for more robust information about specific films, Swanson uses digital sources – especially the Media History Digital Library and other digitized publications – to help trace the context of production and circulation of a single film. His case study is James Watson Jr and Melville Weber’s 1928 version of The Fall of the House of Usher, which had previously been aligned with American histories of the avant garde. Swanson draws on newly available and searchable digitized sources in order to trouble this history. Some of these sources have provided data for the AMDB map of the film’s circulation in the years immediately following its release. As a result of these findings, Swanson is able to propose amateur film-club culture as a key context for understanding the significance of this film and also for re-evaluating the terrain of the American avant garde in the 1930s. Moreover, while larger projects and databases might tend to privilege analysis at the level of big data, his case study reminds us that there are still important discoveries to be made by examining individual films in their textual and contextual significance.

If Frith and Johnston point to a key challenge of research about amateur film, it is characterized by the large quantity of films in archives and the simultaneous scarcity of associated documentation and scholarship, at least relative to commercial films. Sheldon’s essay explores this problem from the vantage point of the film archive. Because amateur cinema has only been included in the scholarly account of film history over the past two decades, we are still faced with the challenge of sifting through the ‘sand pile’ of amateur works in archives. From an initial claim that ‘amateur films – as a category – are significant’, scholars are now attempting to nuance our account of the category by identifying key amateur figures, texts, techniques and films. However, as Sheldon points out, there are fundamental challenges facing this work, including issues of basic categorization and definition. While scholarly projects like the AMDB might tend towards a clarification (or even an over-simplification) of categories, Sheldon urges us towards conceptual and representational inclusivity, and encourages us to question a settled definition of amateur films as titled, polished works.

We find similar provocative suggestions in the final contribution to the dossier, in which Susan Aasman outlines research that expands to include home movies and contemporary video practices. At the centre of this research is a set of approaches for seeing non-professional films as cultural data. While the research might involve a step further away from the accomplished amateur film, it simultaneously proposes valuable new tools for conducting visual analysis of amateur works. This research moreover prompts us to explore the longer trajectory of non-commercial filmmaking that spans the period from its earliest manifestations in the 1910s right up to current digital forms. It continues to grapple with the problem of quantity, and proposes novel digital solutions for analysing proliferating motion-picture culture.

In sum, this dossier provides multivalent examples of digital approaches to the history of amateur media production and culture; rather than closing down discussion of the subject, the authors propose a number of provocative new avenues for exploration. These research projects not only expand our understanding of the production and circulation of non-commercial films, they simultaneously challenge our definition of the amateur category itself, and in so doing call for further refinement of the debates in this increasingly significant area of film history.

Footnotes