The selection of writings presented here are original pieces discussing amateur filmmaking in the inter-war period from a range of different national contexts (US, Canada, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, USSR, Japan, and Brazil) with introductions and commentaries by contemporary scholars immersed in the amateur cinema contexts from which they emerge. It is safe to assume that most of the original authors’ names will not be familiar to the readers from existing compilations of texts on classical film theory or scholarly works on this subject. Conventionally, they would at best be examples of criticism – or even trade journalism. The goal of this dossier, however, is to demonstrate that, especially when considered together within a transnational and comparative framework, these texts comprise not only an important aspect of the history of cinema but form unique instances of the ways in which the medium was theorized in the twentieth century. Their relevance to our scholarly understanding of this topic is still evident, whichever conception of film and media theory one adheres to: the codified discourse of “classical film theory,” canonical within the formation of the academic discipline of film studies (as distinguished from criticism); or the broader conceptualization of the medium that can take a wide range of discursive and aesthetic forms and arise from artistic, industrial, or vernacular practices (the argument that has been powerfully made in relation to feminist, queer and postcolonial theory – and could, and has begun, to be productively applied to our field at large).
In fact, several of the writings collected here deliberately reflect upon the co-constitutive relationship between formal theory and amateur film practice (the pieces emerging from the Spanish and Italian interwar amateur circles are the most explicit in taking up this topic). This is not accidental, as many of them emerge as a result of the growing networks and infrastructures, in particular (although not exclusively) those associated with various interwar avant-gardes.1 These range from informal associations to film clubs and societies, festivals and competitions; they encompass archival and preservation efforts as well as educational initiatives and political projects. Both formal and informal networks allowed for ideas and practices to circulate widely, transcending strictly national film cultures and creating a global discussion on the nature of (amateur) filmmaking. The growth of publications dedicated to cinema from this period, including those specifically focused on amateur filmmaking, is part of this this broader process, and was as crucial in the construction of “classical film theory” as a unified discourse, as it was to the formation of amateur cinema culture.
It should therefore not come as a surprise that many of the writings selected here directly engage with notions familiar to us from (classical) film theory, that was likewise in formation at the time – thus forming in a shared discourse with it. But perhaps more strikingly, what also emerges from theorizing cinema through the lens of the amateur during that period, are positions and approaches that resonate with the more recent theoretical concerns within film and media studies today, such as the more materialist-minded discussions of the film technology as rooted in economic and political development, and broader, more inclusive historiographies of cinema, its periodization and aesthetic norms.
Many of the writings collected here offer reflections on amateur film as mediating individual and collective practices, thus contributing to active theorization of the role of auteur vs. the organized collectivity of film apparatus (this discussion is most explicit in the case of Canadian amateur clubs, discussed by Tepperman here). While institutionally-affiliated film publications give a glimpse into the broader organized networks (both material and discursive) of amateur filmmaking, personal journals and memoirs afford an additional – and in many ways a divergent – perspective on amateur practices, how they could be conceptualized and the various functions they served. Thus the diaries of the one figure who will no doubt be familiar to the readers – that of Sergei Prokofiev, translated and discussed by Vinogradova here - attest to the ways in which highly established artists working in other media often took great pleasure in amateur filmmaking (Prokofiev’s account also references Nabokov and Meyerhold’s participation – and undoubtedly this proclivity extends beyond this particular Russian milieu), thus pointing to complex trans-medial practices at the core of both, amateur, but also ultimately all cinematic activities. As Prokofiev’s case demonstrates, amateur film practice for many artists of the interwar period emerges as a space of domestic performativity, at once a staging and a reinventing of different forms of sociability, creating interpersonal and affective ties which buttressed, complemented, and even transcended their main artmaking practices and offering a welcome contrast with the constraints of professional artmaking. These diaries thus represent nuanced historical reflection on “amateurism” and the social world of the amateur, to be analyzed not as mere recordings of private life but as artistic templates in their own right, existing in a complex relationship to a great composer’s public persona. At the same time, they draw attention to the way amateur filmmaking formed part of a highly intermedial artistic environment, bridging various art forms (something that is similarly central to Pelletier’s and Kawamoto’s essays in the dossier).
The sense of pleasure derived from the informality of making home movies that emerges from personal writings like Prokofiev’s, is contrasted with the pronounced push for greater centralization, institutionalization, and ultimately professionalization of amateur practices, epitomized in different ways by Boltianskii, Paolella’s and Stein’s tracts. Indeed, the majority of the writings collected here echo this desire to justify amateur film production through appeals to productivism, conceptualizing amateur cinema broadly as a didactic mode. This didacticism could operate under a number of different guises, none mutually exclusive. In these writings, amateur cinema is discussed as a vehicle for developing political and technological literacy. It is referred to as a means of providing mass “cultural enlightenment,” or as an exercise in the collective mobilization required for various forms of state-building. At times, it is also understood as an intermediary stage before full professionalization, whether within an explicitly commercial framework of film industry or the broader scientific-industrial media complex (as the Brazilian example here amply demonstrates).
Somewhat surprisingly, rather than emphasizing the forces of spontaneity and voluntarism that we might associate with amateur filmmaking (the drive to “capture life unawares,” as it were), most of the writings assembled in this collection draw attention to questions of developing technical and aesthetic skills, be these in the form of staging, selection of the material, or editing. They also emphasize the discipline demanded in fixing the camera on what is most socially relevant and in developing an artistry of technique involved in producing clear economy of meaning – concerns which emerge in nearly all the texts. It is the disciplining of raw cinematic material drawn from an unruly world that is presented again and again as the major hurdle that the amateur must surmount. This process of disciplining even extends to “the human material” referenced in Paolella’s writings, translated and evocatively discussed by Mariani and Schneider here. Alongside the constant focus on technologies is an abundance of biological metaphors (“save the mother”, “vaccination” in de Caralt; “chicken” in Giovanni), suggesting fusion of mechanistic and biological views of the world, a common trope of classical film theory and of the “culture of modernity” generally from which cinema originated.
Part of the discourse on cinema as a distinctly modern medium likewise manifests in the persistent conceptualization of amateur filmmaking as a collective activity that characterizes virtually all the writings represented here. But beyond the more general discussions of collectivity, the emphasis on the need to support the formation of amateur communities, organizations, and networks (including international festivals and contests, as explored, for example, in the case of the UK) suggests the understanding of amateur filmmaking as belonging to (and ultimately shaping) the kind of social sphere that lies in-between “mass” and “individual” modes of production and consumption. The exact shape of such a social space differs from context to context. Thus, the articulation of amateur filmmaking as directly constitutive of civic life is perhaps rendered most explicit in the chronologically earliest piece of writing presented here – O. Th. Stein’s article from 1913. The ideas of what constitutes the public sphere often differs dramatically: as Cowan explains in his introduction, public life in the specific context of Austria and Germany is imagined as part of the associational culture of the educated social echelons of society. In the writings of Prokino in Japan, echoing Leon Moussinac’s well known projects of the 1920s,2 the public sphere as constituted by amateur practices is instead envisioned as engaging the proletariat. In fascist Italy and the socialist Soviet Union, public life – and amateur cinema - is subsumed under the model of a nation-wide state-controlled popular mobilization. But in all these contexts, amateur filmmaking was theorized as a unique and ascendant social force at the vanguard of the modern experience.
Nowhere is this as evident as in the writings on the amateur film movement in fascist Italy, in the theory of cinema sperimentale. As Mariani and Schneider explore at length, the very improvisational, experimental nature of non-professional filmmaking was seen as enabling forms of artistic, cultural and social innovation; a radical departure from amateur cinema’s liberal “dilettantist” antecedents and from commercial filmmaking alike. “Experimental” in this context connotes adaptability and the instrumentalization of cinema as a mode of shaping the world and its penetration into all aspects of social and cultural life, far beyond the goals and contours of commercial entertainment industry and its technological demands. This vanguardist stance is not limited to an aesthetic rejection of cinematic formulae developed by the commercial film industry; rather, Paolella assigns cinema sperimentale a privileged position in the advancement of cinema as an epistemological, ideological and practical mode capable of transforming material reality and spectator psyche, unlike the fickle commercial industry whose ambition is limited by the profit motive.
However much an outlier the Italian case study may appear to be, the approbation of amateur filmmaking as a laboratory for experimentation that is at once, cinematic and social prevails across national contexts and ideologies. One can discern how the category of the amateur filmmaker reflects a dynamic, shifting, volatile social order as much as it (quite self-consciously) seeks to transcend and reshape it. In the US case amateur activity is recognized both as an exercise in individual self-expression (“A Free Art”) - an extension of liberal democracy and a new tool for its continued development –as well as acquisition of expertise needed to earn entry into the entertainment industry. On the other hand, by emphasizing the link between amateur filmmaking and the travelogue (or “geographic documentary”) as a genre in the UK context, amateur filmmaking foregrounds a type of colonial, ethnographic gaze. Like other types of cultural, scientific, and leisure pursuits of the age, it emerges as one way to capture the excitement of the exotic (“an attempt to bring home the thrills of a journey,” in How I Made It).
It is worth noting that many of these discussions posit amateur cinema’s participation in the development of the public sphere as tendentious and anticipatory. Like so many authors of classical film theory, these theorists of amateur cinema discuss it not so much as it presently is or has been, but what it can and ought to be; it is the future of cinema yet to come. At the same time, the repeated warnings of “the death of cinema” as its ontological status shifts throughout this early period is reminiscent of claims made within more temporally proximate theory focusing on the switch from celluloid to digital film. It should not be a surprise then, that such a major industrial reorganization as that which took place in the late 1920s and early 1930s introduced a series of conceptual problems for thinking about cinema as a medium and that these concerns infiltrate the writings on amateur cinema from the period (most explicitly discussed in de Caralt’s writings from Spain). For non-professional filmmakers, the costs of conversion to sound film were of course more prohibitive than for commercial studios. These economic barriers necessitated a definitive shift in considerations of film aesthetics.
Put another way, calls to adhere to an earlier, silent-era cinematic language, could expect a better hearing amongst amateurs. This included the familiar recourse to the notion of photogénie and to Rudolf Arnheim’s polemics from the 1930s, as Fibla, Mariani and Schneider detail in different contexts. This seeming anachronism, as the authors point out, facilitated the understanding of amateur filmmaking as further divergent from – and a clear alternative to – mainstream commercial filmmaking, as is evident in Palau’s reference to “counterpoint,” with its vivid echoes of Pudovkin and Eisenstein on sound. At the same time, this continuous divergence from the industrial production norms further disrupts the common deterministic periodization of film history into “silent” and “sound” eras. Amateur cinema theory thus looks forwards and back at once, invoking a discursive temporality that the contemporary scholar will find both familiar and original. This body of writing allows for historiography that accommodates theoretical ruptures and dead ends; its position within media history challenges certain received, teleological views of history to which surely most of the writers of these pieces undoubtedly subscribed.
While these innovative conceptions of history – and historiographic temporalities emerging from them – resonate with our scholarly understanding of the institutional establishment of the European avant-gardes,3 the relationship between these two cultural (and institutional) spheres of avantgarde and amateur filmmaking, as we can see from the dossier, was both complex and dynamic. In some contexts, we can see how the existing infrastructures of avantgarde arts contributed to the amateur movements; in others, it is their absence that allowed for amateur film cultures to occupy a more visible space, offering greater aesthetical and political urgency to their development. Similarly, the discursive constructions that emerge from them are sometimes in continuity, and other times in direct competition with each other. By extension, the conceptions of history and the development of the medium, as much as they do not coincide with the standard historiographic accounts rooted in commercial studio filmmaking, are not so easy to map onto each other.
And yet, on another level these texts are not so hard to situate vis-à-vis their contemporary discourses and practices. The figure that emerges most prominently from them is all too familiar to students of classical film theory: the theorist-filmmaker. Some authors are referred to as such (as is the case with Sasa Genjū). Others were active participants in amateur circles who in their published writings reflected on their practices and made recommendations to their contemporaries in order to organize and educate their fellow amateurs in matters of aesthetics and technique. The emphasis on theory as inseparable from practice is not mere happenstance: as explicitly demonstrated in Prokino’s writings, in the body of work on amateurism we see some of the earliest incarnations of a distinctly materialist analysis of film production and circulation, and of a politics and ideology of cinema. This is the very theoretical approach that is otherwise under-articulated in the classical film theory fixated on ontology and form. Instead, this kind of an approach re-emerged with considerable force in the Third Cinema and Imperfect Cinema discourses of the 1960s-1970s, with their emphasis on the technology and style as both an extension of the material conditions of production and circulation.
Such framework is perhaps to be expected from an overtly political film movement like Prokino. But a distinctly materialist approach to amateur cinema emerges across other amateur contexts. Discussions of the film gauges, technological affordances, and acute technical limitations of amateur cinema throughout these writings are not merely pragmatic. More often than not they provide a way of seeing cinema’s formats as ideological entry points into the apparatus itself, what media scholars refer to as film’s dispositifs.4 Thinking amateur cinema historically thus allows for an exciting exploration of the “scaled down” film format (small-gauge safety film, characterized by its relative affordability and portability) as nothing less than a mode of production itself. This can be understood in relation to amateur cinema’s interstitial socio-economic coordinates: it emerges in the interwar period as at once, a medium of state-building and institutionalization, while continuing to occupy private and domestic spaces at the same time. This media history therefore inherently challenges liberal notions of the clear distinction between public and private spheres, between domestic and institutional spaces, between the state and the market.
For all these reasons and many more besides, we argue that the amateur cinema corpus – the one presented here and elsewhere – should be integrated within the ongoing reconsideration of theorizing the medium. As a growing area of research, it affords a unique historical perspective on film theory and an expansive understanding of cinema in general – its development, and its numerous aesthetic, cultural, social, political, technological, and economic functions in the world. We hope that the resources presented here – as well as those yet to be uncovered, collated, translated and made available to interested publics – will soon take their well-deserved place in courses and programs that shape the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of our discipline.
1. For useful broader context concerning this phenomenon, see: Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-Garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919-1939 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), and see: Michael Cowan, Film Societies in Germany and Austria 1910-1933: Tracing the Social Life of Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023).↩
2. Moussinac, Léon, Léon Moussinac, eds. Valérie Vignaux and François Albera (Paris: Afrhc, Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma, 2014).↩
3. This is discussed at length in Hagener’s Looking Forward, Moving Back, 2007.↩
4. See: Format Matters: Standards, Practices, and Politics in Media Cultures, eds. Marek Jancovic, Axel Volmar and Alexandra Schneider (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2020).↩