Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web

by Laura Rascaroli (Editor), Gwenda Young (Editor), Barry Monahan (Editor)

Overview

With the advent of digital filmmaking and critical recognition of the relevance of self expression, first-person narratives, and personal practices of memorialization, interest in the amateur moving image has never been stronger. Bringing together key scholars in the field, and revealing the rich variety of amateur filmmaking-from home movies of Imperial India and film diaries of life in contemporary China, to the work of leading auteurs such as Joseph Morder and Péter Forgács-Amateur Filmmaking highlights the importance of amateur cinema as a core object of critical interest across an array of disciplines. With contributions on the role of the archive, on YouTube, and on the impact of new technologies on amateur filmmaking, these essays offer the first comprehensive examination of this growing field.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781441106810
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	02/27/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	392
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Laura Rascaroli is Toyota Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at University College Cork, Ireland. She lectures on Italian film and television in the Department of Italian and on European cinema in the School of Languages and Literature. She is co-Chair of the Board of Film Studies and coordinates the MA in Film Studies.

Gwenda Young is Lecturer in Film Studies at University College Cork, Ireland. Her work has appeared in a variety of national and international journals, including Sight and Sound; Popular Culture Review; Film/Film Culture; Film Ireland; Journal of Irish Association for American Studies. She has also contributed to radio programmes on the national broadcaster, Radio Telefís Éireann, and local radio.

Barry Monahan is Lecturer in Film Studies at University College, Cork, Ireland. He has written on, and researched, the relationship between the Abbey Theatre and cinema from the beginning of the sound period until the 1960s, something he explores in his monograph Ireland's Theatre on Film: Style, Stories and the National Stage on Screen (2009).
Laura Rascaroli is Senior Lecturer and Co-director, Film and Screen Media, University College Cork, Ireland. She is the author of The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film (2009) and, with Ewa Mazierska, of From Moscow to Madrid: European Cities, Postmodern Cinema (2003), The Cinema of Nanni Moretti: Dreams and Diaries (2004) and Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (2006). She has edited the volumes The Cause of Cosmopolitanism: Dispositions, Models, Transformations (2010), with Patrick O'Donovan, and Antonioni: Centenary Essays (2011), with John David Rhodes.
Gwenda Young is Lecturer in Film Studies and Co-director of Film and Screen Media at University College Cork, Ireland. Her work has appeared in a variety of national and international journals, including Sight and Sound; Popular Culture Review; Film/Film Culture; Film Ireland; Journal of Irish Association for American Studies and in edited collections on American cinema of the 1920s and Irish American cinema. She has also contributed to radio programmes on the national broadcaster, Raidió Teilifís Éireann, on local radio, and on Irish national television. Her monograph on American director Clarence Brown will be published in 2014.
Barry Monahan is Lecturer in Film Studies at University College Cork, Ireland. He has written on, and researched, the relationship between the Abbey Theatre and cinema from the beginning of the sound period until the 1960s, something he explores in his monograph Ireland's Theatre on Film: Style, Stories and the National Stage on Screen (2009).

Table of Contents

Contributors

Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young, Barry Monahan: Introduction. Amateur Filmmaking: New Developments and Directions

SECTION ONE: REFRAMING THE HOME MOVIE
1. Roger Odin: The Home Movie and Space of Communication
2. Liz Czach: Home Movies and Amateur Film as National Cinema
3. Maija Howe: The Photographic Hangover: Reconsidering the Aesthetics of the Postwar 8mm Home Movie
4. Mark Neumann: Amateur Film, Automobility and the Cinematic Aesthetics of Leisure

SECTION TWO: PRIVATE REELS, HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONCERNS
5. Heather Norris Nicholson: Cinemas of Catastrophe and Continuity: Mapping Out Twentieth-Century Amateur Practices of Intentional History-Making in Northern England
6. Gwenda Young: Glimpses of a Hidden History: Exploring Irish Amateur Collections, 1930–1970
7. Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes: Uncensored British Imperial Politics in Late Colonial Home Movies: Memsahibs, Indian Bearers and Chinese Communist Insurgents
8. Karen Lury: The Amateur Film: From Artifact to Anecdote
9. Janna Jones: Starring Sally Peshlakai: Rewriting the Script for Tad Nichols's 1939 Navajo Rug Weaving

SECTION THREE: NONFICTIONAL RECONTEXTUALISATIONS
10. Efrén Cuevas: Change of Scale: Home Movies as Microhistory in Documentary Films
11. Barry Monahan: Creating Historiography: Alan Gilsenan's Formal Reframing of Amateur Archival Footage in Home Movie Nights
12. Stefano Odorico: “That Would Be Wrong”: Errol Morris and His Use of Home Movies (As Metalanguages) in Feature Documentaries

SECTION FOUR: AMATEUR AUTEUR
13. Richard Kilborn: “I am a Time Archaeologist”: Some Reflections on the Filmmaking Practice of Péter Forgács
14. Ruth Balint: Representing the Past and the Meaning of Home in Péter Forgács's Private Hungary
15. Dominique Bluher: Necessity Is the Mother of Invention, or Morder's Amateur Toolkit
16. Dominique Bluher: Joseph Morder, the “Filmateur”: An Interview with Joseph Morder
17. Laura Rascaroli: Working at Home: Tarnation, Amateur Authorship, and Self-inscription in the Digital Age

SECTION FIVE: NEW DIRECTIONS: THE DIGITAL AGE
18. Susan Aasman: Saving Private Reels: Archival Practices and Digital Memories (Formerly Known as Home Movies) in the Digital Age

19. Patricia R. Zimmerman: The Home Movie Archive Live
20. Tianqi Yu: An Inward Gaze at Home: Amateur First Person DV Documentary Filmmaking in Twenty-First Century China
21. Lauren S. Berliner: Shooting for Profit: The Monetary Logic of the YouTube Home Movie
22. Abigail Keating: Home Movies in the Age of Web 2.0: The Case of “Star Wars Kid”
23. Max Schleser: Towards Mobile Filmmaking 2.0: Amateur Filmmaking as an Alternative Cultural Practice

Bibliography

Further Resources

Index

Editorial Reviews

Amateur Filmmaking is certainly a widely varied and eclectic collection of articles, but also delightful in its discovery of a territory largely ignored by scholars until very recently.
Synoptique

Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web reinvigorates the ongoing discussion about domestic filmmaking in the light of recent shifts in technologies, socio-economic circumstances and ideas of personal space. With the rise of a new wave of practitioners and pro-sumers utilising digital technology and a new generation of intellectuals, this collection dynamises the home movie discourse, with the web mobilising the archive, articulating an intriguing relationship between current scholarship on personal filmmaking and this most quotidian and intimate form.

Hats off to Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young, and Barry Monahan for assembling fascinating highlights from their ground-breaking 2010 conference on amateur film, Saving Private Reels. Amateur Film: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web features 23 essays that explore the diversity of the 'home movie' which span nations, genres, eras, aesthetics, and critical frames. This collection includes studies of some unlikely film figures like Errol Morris as well as largely unknown auteurs; it maps diverse visions of the past and future by examining pioneering 16mm and 8mm amateur films from Ireland, England, India, and China, to name a few; new archival practices; the latest YouTube viral videos as well as multiplatform experiments for Web 2.0. Writers are diverse in their origins, interest areas, and intellectual approaches. Some highlights include Richard Kilborn and Ruth Balint each writing on Hungarian archivist-filmmaker Péter Forgács and Dominique Bluher on the prolific French filmmaker Joseph Morder. This collection leaves one hungry for more. As Marker might have asked, 'Will there be another collection?!'

From the Publisher