This dossier consists of two articles from the journal Cinema Amateur, published in Barcelona from 1932 to 1936 by the Film Section of the Catalan Excursionist Centre, the institution that spearheaded the impressive amateur film movement in Spain during this period.1 The journal included reflections on amateur cinema theory, reviews of films, news from local and international clubs and contests, as well as a section devoted to technical questions. Some of the most renowned Catalan film critics of the time contributed to the journal. One of them was Josep Palau, whose article “Elemental Phonógenie” is emblematic of 1930s amateur cinema culture in many ways. Palau’s contribution exists in constructive dialogue with the article, “Is cinema dying?”, written by film director Delmiro de Caralt, who along with his wife Pilar de Quadras created one of the first film libraries in the world in 1924.
Both texts reflect on the diverging paths that professional and amateur cinema took in the late 1920s and early 1930s, after the widespread adoption of synchronized sound by the film industry and before manufacturers were able to develop an affordable and reliable system of synchronous sound recording for the nonprofessional market. Indeed, at the time of the publication of these articles, amateur cinema meant films without spoken dialogue, despite the fact that amateur films of the period often would be screened with specially curated musical accompaniment. Amateur filmmakers at this time remained reliant on the mute image as essence of cinema, making them, somewhat paradoxically, the guarantors of what many early modernist film theorists (especially those coming from the avant-garde) considered pure cinema, which, in its more politicized interpretation, retained the medium’s ability to provide unique visual documentation of social and political reality.2
René Clair, for instance, famously stated in 1929 that “cinema must remain visual at all costs,” a mandate that amateur filmmakers, willingly or unwillingly, carried for decades, relying on visual tropes, montage, intertitles, and symbolist figuration to express aesthetic and political intentionality. This process was certainly asymmetric and developed at different tempos depending on geographical context and on the availability of sound-on-film technologies. But, in most parts of the world, amateur cinema stayed silent well into the 1950s. Some amateur filmmakers in Spain, as Caralt’s article clearly conveys with its manifesto-like rhetoric, even welcomed this technical limitation, which guaranteed that amateur cinema would not follow in the steps, and repeat the mistakes, of professional cinema. Other critics, such as Josep Palau, viewed the prospect of sound in amateur films with expectancy, although in this article Palau acknowledges that this was still a discussion solely in the realm of the hypothetical in 1935.
A clear influence on Palau and Caralt is Jean Epstein, who was read in French by many filmmakers and critics in Catalonia via books and international film journals (many of which were made available to the public by Caralt and Quadras’s library). Epstein’s concepts of photogénie and phonogénie were especially influential among those, like Caralt, who “welcome the newborn art that arrives” (sound film) but also urged to “save the mother” (silent cinema).
The theoretical discussion about the ontological effect of sound on the medium of cinema happened at a time when amateur filmmaking techniques were still attuned to the tropes of classic silent cinema. This valence is not only explicable by the technological limitations faced by amateur filmmakers; it was also deeply connected with the creation of home viewing collections of 9.5mm films, which had become commonplace by the mid to late 1920s and influenced the widespread consolidation of cinephilia and the archival impulse to safeguard the heritage of the medium for posterity. As scholar Alexandra Schneider has shown, both the 9.5mm Pathé Baby Filmathéque and the 16mm Kodak Cinegraph catalogue enabled the democratization of home viewing decades before the arrival of video, contributing significantly to the development of modern film culture.3 Together with the educational film market, these initiatives were hugely impactful in safeguarding both the aesthetic and material heritage of silent film, which first and foremost survived in the hearts, minds, and domestic spaces of amateur filmmakers and collectors.
Amateur cinema can be seen, then, as a displaced, even liminal, mode, one which occupies a paradoxical place in film history. It arose at a critical moment of transition for the film industry and it neither belonged entirely to the silent nor to the sound eras. For this reason, perhaps, it has been largely overlooked in film historiography; but it has been incredibly important for thousands of cinema lovers around the world. One might say that it is an archive without a history, or at least one that has not been fully written yet. Silent film scholar and archivist Paolo Cherchi Usai maintains that “in purely empirical terms, it is arbitrary to divide the history of cinema into a “silent” and a “sound” era.”4 He prefers to speak of a historical identity of silent films, which include a series of narrative, aesthetic, and industrial conventions (such as the predominance of visuality, special type of acting, use of intertitles, film lecturers, live music, etc.), that are specific to the period that spans from the invention of cinema in the last years of the 19th century to the late 1920s, when sound cinema became the driving force of the film industry.
Given this insight, how do we account for the countless silent films made by amateur filmmakers that carried on the historical identity of silent film, decades after its commercial relevance? These practices cannot exactly be conflated with those of commercially produced and distributed silent films from the first few decades of cinema, yet they clearly remained closer to the idiosyncrasies of silent cinema than to the talkies that their authors would have watched in movie theaters as viewers whilst engaging in wholly different practices as practitioners. What amateur film enabled, then, was a hybrid space of creativity driven by the need to find aesthetic solutions within prescribed technological limitations. As Josep Palau and Delmiro de Caralt’s articles demonstrate, looking at film history through the lens of interwar amateur cinema disturbs conventional film historiography of the 1930s, which so overwhelmingly focuses on the triumph of the talkies and the transformation of the film industry. This account fails to pay due attention to key spaces of and temporalities within film culture, where one can intuit the persistence of silent film practices thriving in unexpected, and perhaps still largely unknown, ways.
1. For more on this history see Enrique Fibla-Gutierrez, “A Vernacular National Cinema: Amateur Filmmaking in Catalonia (1932–1936),” Film History 30, no. 1 (2018): 1–29.↩
2. For more on these debates regarding the arrival of sound film in the late 1920s see “The Debate after Sound,” in Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2000), 58-64.↩
3. Alexandra Schneider, “Time Travel with Pathé Baby: The Small-Gauge Film Collection as Historical Archive,” Film History 19, no. 4 (2007): 353–60.↩
4. Paolo Cherchi Usai, Silent Cinema: A Guide to Study, Research and Exhibition, Third edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 3.↩