Even before the technology was available for a widespread amateur film culture, American critics had identified the need for one. In 1921, two years before the 16mm film format made filmmaking a more accessible hobby for some segments of the population, Ralph Block wrote about the place of the amateur in the development of film art. Block was a journalist and critic who went on to work in the film industry, first as an editor and producer during the 1920s, later as a screenwriter in the 1930s. Despite that Block’s future work would largely take place within the commercial film industry, in this article he places his faith in amateur filmmaking as a vehicle for cinematic progress. In proposing this, Block looked to the theater as an example, noting that amateur theater circles had produced vital experiments that significantly advanced the artform. In contrast, commercial arts tended to avoid experimentation and pander to paying audiences. For the art of motion pictures to develop, Block suggested, it would need both the freedom to experiment, as well as an audience that had developed more refined and varied tastes. The solution to both of these challenges was amateur cinema. Here, more than five years before the Amateur Cinema League was founded, Block stresses the need for a “nation-wide amateur organization” to nurture the art of cinema.
The Amateur Cinema League was established in 1926 and started publishing their monthly magazine, Amateur Movie Makers (later just Movie Makers), in December of that year. Over the course of nearly three decades, the ACL would play a central role in organized amateur cinema in the USA and internationally, until it ceased its operations in 1954.1 During the interwar period, though, the ACL could be seen as one of the most prominent institutions in the amateur cinema movement, as they promoted and supported the establishment of movie clubs, the networking and circulation of films among these clubs, and the recognition of the increasingly high-quality of amateur film production.
The Amateur Cinema League provided a variety of services to members to encourage their development of better filmmaking. Movie Makers was the ACL’s most public expression of how they conceptualized amateur filmmaking as a public and creative artform. The articles and editorials published in that magazine provide a variety of perspectives on how and why one might engage in amateur filmmaking – from creative experimentation, to reviews of contemporary artistic and popular films, to the social dimensions of the pastime.
The editorial selected here, “A Free Art,” was published in May 1934, and offers the league’s perspective on the connection between the amateur film movement and democracy. The author is not specified, but as an official editorial, we can infer that it is the work of Arthur Gale, editor of the magazine at that time and author of a great number of articles and columns in the publication throughout the 1920s and 30s. But it is less important to understand this text as embodying the ideas of an individual author and more valuable to see it as an organizational statement on the league’s vision – an overtly American vision – for amateur cinema as a social and artistic force. The editorial lauding the free expression of amateur filmmaking – “a field of human activity in which there is either expression or nothing” – came at a moment when international networks of amateur filmmaking were becoming more and more established.
This network included the UK-based IAC’s world tour of amateur films, as well as the nascent annual International Congresses of Amateur film that had emerged in Europe and would eventually lead to the establishment of the Union International de Cinema Amateur (UNICA). But along with these international developments came increasingly direct awareness of how amateur filmmaking was conceptualized as a social activity in different political contexts, including in the increasingly regimented amateur spheres of Italy, Germany, and Japan. The editorial makes a case for the intrinsic freedom of amateur filmmaking, a case premised on its photographic reproducibility: “Films are incorrigible gossips and whatever they see they report. They may, themselves, be locked up and silenced, but they cannot operate to silence anything else.”
Ultimately, the editorial makes a lofty claim for the ethos of amateur filmmakers as “trusted guardians of one of the world’s great social values, the right of free, individual self-expression.” Certainly, other interpretations of amateur film practice were circulating during this decade of heightened political tumult and rapid expansion of amateur media of all sorts. So perhaps we should understand this editorial as an effort to articulate an ethos of amateurism that was aligned with certain values of citizenship (not without their chauvinistic undertones) that were ascendant in the USA at this time and which were entering into increasing tension with conceptualizations of the amateur sphere in other parts of the world.
From Block’s article to “A Free Art” we see two different but related conceptualizations of the amateur’s role: one based on the aesthetic development of the medium; the other on its social function. Both attest to the emerging significance of amateur filmmaking as a new medium for creative expression in the interwar public sphere.
1. For an in-depth study of the history of amateur cinema in the USA, and the Amateur Cinema League in particular, see Charles Tepperman, Amateur Cinema: The Rise of North American Moviemaking, 1923-1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).
↩