Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures

Masha Salazkina, Enrique Fibla, Enrique Fibla-Gutiérrez

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780253052032
• eBook ISBN: 9780253052056
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Film et vidéo

For too long, the field of amateur cinema has focused on North America and Europe. In Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures, however, editors Masha Salazkina and Enrique Fibla-Gutiérrez fill the literature gap by extending that focus and increasing inclusivity.

Through carefully curated essays, Salazkina and Fibla-Gutiérrez bring wider meaning and significance to the discipline through their study of alternative cinema in new territories, fueled by different historical and political circumstances, innovative technologies, and ambitious practitioners. The essays in this volume work to realize the radical societal democratization that shows up in amateur cinema around the world. In particular, diverse contributors highlight the significance of amateur filmmaking, the exhibition of amateur films, the uses and availability of film technologies, and the inventive and creative approaches of filmmakers and advocates of amateur film.

Together, these essays shed new light on alternative cinema in a wide range of cities and countries where amateur films thrive in the shadow of commercial and conventional film industries.

PART I

MEDIUM SPECIFICITY AND EXPANDED MEDIA ECOLOGIES

1

UNDERSTANDING (AMATEUR) CINEMA

Epistemology and Technology

Benoît Turquety

TO WRITE THAT THE DISCIPLINE OF FILM STUDIES was built on the analysis of cinema might seem like a gross truism. However, this statement does contain an implicit assumption: that for a long time—and perhaps even today—the term cinema has referred primarily to a specific kind of cinema, namely, professional feature films with a commercial (and/or artistic) aim. Even other forms of professionally made films such as animation or documentaries have been relegated to the margins of what is thought to constitute the medium. The dominant analytical and historiographical methods of the discipline of film studies have concomitantly been elaborated mostly on the basis of this professional corpus. Such conflation also informs the idea that cinema has been organized around apparently stable frameworks like the distinction between spectator and producer. The spectator is defined here as a subject that views individually the cinematic work within the apparatus of the dark auditorium but whose aesthetic or cognitive engagement ends as soon as the subject exits the theater. Associated with this moment when the body is forced to sit still, the spectator is always essentially suspect of passivity.

As this essay argues, such a framework is greatly problematized when we think beyond the narrow definition of cinema as commercially exhibited films. Taking amateur cinema as an example, I contest the distinction between receiver and producer that has informed most scholarly production on cinema. Amateur filmmakers are spectators who cannot be labeled as passive; they are spectators who imagine themselves as producers and then become one, producers who are still spectators. Certainly, they still watch movies sitting in a dark auditorium, but once out of this space, the engagement with cinema continues in a very active way. For the amateur filmmaker, the theater is only a moment within a continuing cinematic process; it is but one of the nodes in a network of devices and procedures that constitute cinema as a wider and expansive apparatus. Before, after, and even during one’s state as a spectator, the amateur filmmaker is a user of machines—cameras, projectors, perhaps film splicers or editing software, and other postproduction applications. The theater itself may constitute one of these machines, an instrument for assessment and experiments, a place for a specific work integrated into a broader creative process. From spectator to user, the amateur is a figure that has the potential to reorganize film studies in a singular way, both in practical and theoretical terms. The epistemological assumptions of the discipline—what is thought to constitute “cinema”—are put in question, supported by an overview of the relationship between amateurs and filmmaking technologies. Then, a distinctive model to analyze the aesthetic and social characteristics of amateur films as artisanal products is posed, based on the concept of “ways of doing” from Michel de Certeau (1984) and the analysis of the film Le Taillandier (The Edge-Tool Maker), made in 1987 by Claude Bondier.

Technical Transition, Epistemological Crisis

The conflation of cinema and professional cinema has been an integral part of the paradigm on which film studies have been based—using the definition of paradigm that was proposed by Thomas S. Kuhn in 1962 in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (a transposed definition, one might say, as film studies are products of a sociology that is a little different from the hard sciences that constitute Kuhn’s model). According to Kuhn (1996, 10), paradigms are characterized by two essential features: “Their achievement was sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity. Simultaneously, it was sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve.”

Undoubtedly, the precision and breadth of the conclusions and questions posed within the classical discipline of film studies, whether using aesthetic, historical, sociological, cultural, pragmatic, psychological, or other approaches, have been and still are stimulating and inform the work of a large number of researchers. In certain frameworks, though, one can sense that the paradigm has entered into a period of crisis following the massive emergence of digital media.

Today most devices that can play moving pictures and sounds (such as computers, phones, tablets, etc.) can also make and distribute them. Images are made to be shared, each one calling for a response, their circulation constituting the very foundation of social networks such as Instagram, Snapchat, or Flickr. This irruption of digital culture into film studies seems to have upset the discipline, blurring its contours and cracking its foundation,¹ precisely because the concept of the “spectator” has become inappropriate to describe the diversity of contemporary relationships to moving images. The paradigm has been exposed and in the same gesture put under critical pressure. Other models, and other objects on which to build these new problems, are needed. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (2009) have, for instance, proposed to turn to corporate films, a “genre” that similarly stands outside of professional cinema in the classically defined sense. In this context, as they claim in the introduction of their seminal volume Films That Work, “industrial film research might best be understood as part of an epistemology of media in a broader sense” (12).

Everything seems to indicate that digital culture has finally completed a movement that Walter Benjamin (2008) already perceived and associated with film in “The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction,” even if there he was characterizing more largely a property of modernity that was born with the extension of the press and the appearance of letters to the editor columns. “Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character. . . . At any moment the reader is ready to become a writer. . . . All this can readily be applied to film, where shifts that in literature took place over centuries have occurred in a decade” (33–34).

The generalization of the division of labor in society brought about a redistribution of expertise, according to Benjamin (2008), and film technics is exemplary in that it allows the amateur to become a producer. In fact, it blurs any essential distinction between amateur and expert, passerby and actor, filmmaker and spectator. Cinema is technically accessible, not requiring the long learning curve required by other mediums; thus, “any person today can lay claim to being filmed” (33; emphasis in the original)—or to filming. The medium is not reserved for a rigorously trained and specialized elite but is open to the whole body politic without distinction. The importance of Benjamin’s essay could have been to establish the amateur as the paradigm of film. But it required the emergence of digital culture not so as to accomplish his prophecy but rather to illuminate, retrospectively, the historical record testifying to this epistemological gesture.

Today what we understand as “traditional” cinema (projected in a dark auditorium) is clearly perceived as a minor phenomenon compared to other forms of reception of moving images (watching the same film on a digital tablet, a television, a computer, a home cinema screen, in an art gallery or a shopping arcade, etc.). What has been eroded, primarily, is a model in which this reception is entirely isolated from production. Watching films in the conventional apparatus, spectators were nothing more than that; and leaving the theater they became, once again, something completely different (citizens, subjects, individuals). But in the digital environment every received image calls for an image in return, every display comes with a camera, and every spectator is also indissociably a producer of moving images. A reading of Benjamin (2008) suggests that this environment was already in place in 1937, even if the status of cinema in the culture and its association with professional art films rendered the phenomenon invisible, to the extent that it was largely ignored by theorists. It has only been with recent work on the digital episteme that questions or doubts in regard to the old paradigm have been raised. What if the domination of “professional” film in our understanding of cinema has been an epistemological illusion? What if, finally, professional film has always been in the minority?

If we do not, from the outset, restrict the cinematic landscape to films produced by Hollywood, European and non-Western studios, but instead include within the study of cinema all objects produced with motion picture cameras in all domains, it suddenly appears that professional movies constitute a relatively small part of the wide range of film productions that exist. People have always made, alone or in groups (including clubs, associations, unions, political parties, laboratories, etc.), more family films, educational films, scientific and technical films, colonial or religious propaganda films, newsreels, militant films, corporate films, and so forth, than feature films. At the same time, outside large urban zones, “going to the movies” would not necessarily mean watching dominant genre films such as westerns or musicals in commercial movie theaters. Whether in the countryside, in the colonies, or in so-called developing countries, films were most frequently seen in associative, parochial, or governmental meetings, in social spaces modified for the occasion (municipal halls, classrooms, or the town square fitted with a mobile film unit).² These sessions were sometimes free, the programs devoid of fiction and composed solely of this “other” cinema that greatly problematizes our epistemological understanding of what constitutes the medium. The projectionists were amateurs, and the films were made by part-time directors. For a large part of the world’s population, which classical film theory has cast out to the “periphery,” this was the model that framed their concrete apprehension of cinema.³

Thus, it is a question of reexamining the whole phenomenon of film not only by including these new objects (the vast and complex domain of noncommercial and amateur productions) into the canon of the discipline but also by asking if this does not ultimately lead to rethinking “cinema” in itself. Opening our understanding to the contributions of amateur directors, actors, projectionists, individually or in families, in clubs, or in festivals, implies not so much the appearance of new facts that can confirm or dispute the old but instead the emergence of new problems in our conception of film, its history, and its technology. If the distinction between spectator and producer is blurred, if the user now emerges as the main figure of the filmmaking apparatus, then the noncommercial uses of technology appear as a valid starting point for a new history and sociology of cinema, based on the epistemological crisis of what has constituted the cinematic apparatus.

Amateur Filmmakers and Technics: Beginning with Kodak

This crisis impacts historians of filmmaking technics on several levels because the issues that amateur filmmakers raise most often involve technological questions. The amateur filmmaker is a user and as such interacts with commercial devices—such as cameras, tape recorders, splicers, and mobile phones. These machines have been designed for a certain purpose, with specific uses in mind. They are inscribed at the same time in their own history, in current amateur practices—real ones, or such as were imagined by their manufacturers—and in the technical network in which they had to integrate themselves.

For example, when Kodak announced that they wanted to make a Super 8 camera again in 2016, they insisted on keeping the specificities of analog film for the connoisseur, but to also integrate the product into the digital universe in the most user-friendly manner possible (connectivity, processing, easy editing, etc.). Kodak then had to take into account the scarcity of photochemical laboratories in the world and organize an efficient network of such laboratories without raising the cost of its Super 8 products prohibitively. On its website, Kodak associated its project with an “Analog Renaissance,”⁴ referring to a number of important film professionals who, in the past few years, have been using film again. Amateurs who will buy this new Kodak Super 8 are thus simultaneously spectators and demanding cinephiles, dreaming of having the same tools as the artists they admire—imagining themselves, perhaps, as artisans working within the rules of art, making films that meet the most discerning aesthetic requirements. Of course, the retro feel of this project aims implicitly at transposing to cinema the success of vinyl records and other vintage media forms in the music industry but in reference to a market whose magnitude—or even existence—remains basically unknown.

Amateur technologies—from the Cinématographe Lumière to the Pathé Baby camera, from Kodachrome to Super 8, from the iPhone to the Bolex—trace throughout their functions and histories a coherent and diverse economic and industrial cartography of film, as well as a sociology of spectator-filmmakers. These devices have common features: they adopt the so-called substandard formats (inferior to the 35 mm standard: 16 mm, Super 8, 8 mm, 9.5 mm, 17.5 mm, and also VHS for video, MPEG for digital, etc.), and they are distributed on a sale-based model rather than the rental model of professional equipment. From the technological point of view, they are mainly “closed” machines, using Gilbert Simondon’s terminology (2014, 60–69): the simplicity of use and the standardization allowing for repair are prioritized by manufacturers over the adaptability to the operator (although amateur cinema magazines show an affinity for more open machines, which can be dissected, compared, and explained to fellow experts). But beyond these common traits, the different cameras present a remarkable diversity of functions, uses, and cost.

The Bolex H16 was a relatively complex and expensive 16 mm film camera but considered reliable, durable, and versatile; its manufacturer, the Swiss brand Paillard, marketed it to “the professional amateur.” By contrast, Kodak B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures
• Part I: Medium Specificity and Expanded Media Ecologies
• Part II: Institutions, Industry, and the State
• Part III: Politics of Legitimization and Subversion
• Part IV: Transnational Networks: Amateur Cinema Travels
• Index