During the decade before the National Film Board was established (in 1939), Canada had a small and decentralized film industry, with a handful of companies and government agencies pursuing professional (mostly industrial) filmmaking in Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa. The film industry in Victoria also briefly flourished as an outpost of Hollywood in this period, with the major studios capitalizing on British Empire production quotas, though this would only last for a few years. While Canada was primarily a consumer of film commodities in the interwar period, its physical proximity to the United States and its historical and cultural ties to Britain allowed for the easy circulation of film equipment and new ideas about amateur filmmaking. This meant that when an amateur film culture emerged in Canada it was readily linked to distant global markets and networks.
Amateur filmmaking in Canada developed rapidly throughout the 1930s, with local groups founded in the major metropolises of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, as well as in smaller cities like Winnipeg, Halifax, and Thetford Mines (Quebec). By the start of the Second World War over a dozen clubs had blossomed across the country. Owing to a relatively small domestic film industry, the large distances between urban centres, and a decentralized population, local film cultures attained a uniquely important position in Canada. In the post-war period centralizing efforts would be made to connect disparate groups into national organizations participating in semi-annual competitions, but in the 1930s the amateur film movement was a largely local phenomenon. No major publications specifically for Canadian amateur filmmakers existed and most amateurs relied on information found in American and British amateur filmmaking magazines. The Toronto Amateur Movie Club published a monthly newsletter, called Shots and Angles, which circulated shortly after the club was founded in 1935.
The Toronto Amateur Movie Club was at least the third club for amateur filmmakers established in the city, and it grew rapidly in its membership and activity in the 1930s. The club reported nearly 100 members in 1938. Several extant issues of Shots and Angles from 1936-1939, along with reports about the club activities in Movie Makers, show that the group was building on both previous amateur film initiatives in the city as well as the advice and experiences of the Amateur Cinema League and the clubs around the world whose activities were detailed in the publication Movie Makers. Gradually, an editorial voice developed in the newsletter, attributable in part to its editor, Narcisse Pelletier.
The extant issues of Shots and Angles provide valuable insights on the salient concerns of the club and members. Taken as a whole, they provide not merely a record of club activities, but also a vantage from which to gauge the evolving understanding of the amateur community and its discourse. The bulletin included reports on the regular (twice-monthly) club meetings, along with descriptions of some of the films shown. Most of the films screened were by members - - either individual efforts, or films produced as a group activity. In this we can see an understanding of the amateur club as both an assembly place for individual filmmakers, and also a venue for developing and producing collective creative efforts. The balance between individual and collective goals was addressed specifically at times: it was understood that amateurs were responsible for developing their own skills as filmmakers, but that the club could provide support in the form of feedback, shared wisdom, and even some infrastructure and equipment.
The bulletin also shows how the Toronto club was connected to local, regional, and international amateur networks. At the local level, the club was in regular exchange with the representatives of both film manufacturers (like Kodak) and the broader film industry (General Films/William Redpath, and Canadian Moving Picture Digest). The club was also in contact with other photographic and movie clubs in Toronto, and regularly exchanged newsletter with clubs in nearby cities in Ontario (Hamilton) and those further afield (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Utah, Pennsylvania). Regular news was reported via amateur film publications from the USA (Movie Makers, American Cinematographer, Home Movies) and the UK (Home Movies). Though the circulation here was primarily textual, there is some evidence of films from other clubs and cities being shown, especially award-winning ones. Overall, there was a high degree of awareness of and participation in amateur activities beyond their own club.
Most of the content of the bulletin was informational, with little critical/theoretical writing (at least in the extant issues). The short article below, is therefore something of an anomaly: a brief, ruminating editorial that the editor of Shots and Angles, Narcisse Pelletier, wrote in 1937. Pelletier was a club member who also worked for Kodak Canada. He had previously studied at the Ontario College of Art under Group of Seven painters such as Arthur Lismer, J.E.H MacDonald, and Frederick Varley and produced paintings, drawings and photographic work. Given this background, it is perhaps not surprising that Pelletier’s editorial approach was consistently attentive to aesthetic matters: of composition, colour, and form (in addition to more technical questions like exposure, quality of film stock, use of tripod).
This particular article resonates with Pelletier’s background in painting and connection to the Group of Seven. Its subject is beauty, and particularly the beauty that is evident when mediated for us by colour film. Pelletier seems to be working through a variety of ideas about film and filmmaking that echo attitudes about art from the period. For example, there is the suggestion that film – especially colour film – can reveal something more to us than our naked eye might notice, perhaps akin to the ideas of photogénie that were circulating in French cinema discourse in the 1920s. Even more evidently, there is an argument here for a modern, urban aesthetic: that beauty need not be understood in the most traditional ways (ie. nature, landscape, etc.). Urban filmmaking was an important aspect of amateur movie culture in the 1930s; amateur film discourse encouraged the filming of documentary material, and many movie clubs engaged in projects of filming their urban surroundings. The city symphony film was perhaps the most common ‘experimental’ genre among amateurs, and Pelletier would likely have seen an amateur version of this kind of film in the form of Another Day produced a few years earlier by Toronto Amateur Movie Club member Leslie Thatcher.
But even as Pelletier reflects on how colour film can show us something new about the city, the article is deeply intermedial in its orientation. An illustration of what he means comes in the form of a poem by Lawren Harris. Harris published a volume of poetry about urban life and imagery in 1922, but he was better known as a painter, and a founding member of the Group of Seven. Though the Group would become known for their journeys outside of urban space and for depictions of Canadian landscapes that are primarily uninhabited, Pelletier is drawn to a different version of beauty here. “A Note of Colour” describes grim and gloomy urban settings, characterized in human-like qualities: a callous soul and dancing shutters, and a door painted bright red that seems to laugh at a viewer. It is tempting to read in Harris’s poem, and Pelletier’s response to it, an echo of pictorial qualities, and perhaps even an expressionist sensibility that would have been more in fashion in the 1910s and 20s (when the poem was written) than in the 1930s. In this respect we see amateur aesthetics revisiting and vernacularizing the trends of an earlier avant-garde.
The article is accompanied with a black and white engraving, also made by Pelletier. It shows a figure with an amateur movie camera on a tripod looking towards an urban scene: a jumble of houses, with a water tower visible beyond them. The engraving is stylized, but not so emphatically as those created by expressionist artists like Lionel Feininger. Though Pelletier was himself closely connected to the art worlds in Toronto during the 1920s, he does not appear to have been drawn to the avant-garde and abstraction. So his engraving here is consistent with other paintings and printwork, which show an awareness of modernist stylization, but of a fairly restrained type. Though the article is about colour, the engraving is black and white; it shows a stylization of the filmmaker, not an illustration of what Pelletier imagines them to see.
For the most part, Pelletier’s extant films tend towards fragments and records of life, often described in title cards as “clippings,” rather than fully articulated documentaries. There are glimpses of experimentation, but generally this is not sustained. Pelletier’s narrative films include period films, with several vignettes of earlier times among them. What we can conclude from this assemblage of written and visual materials is an understanding of amateur film aesthetics as reflective, but eclectic. There is indeed some attention to form, and awareness of modern sensibilities, but of a kind that seems to have been absorbed by culture more broadly. We are far from the avant-garde here, but still in a zone where the amateur thinks through both modern content (urban, social realism) and expression (colour film technology, form and expression).