Bibliography

During the past decade, the international study of non-theatrical cinematic forms has seen a strong expansion - with amateur film as a central area of research. Changing collection policies in film archives and museums and new forms of digital access are not the only reasons for this interest. However, the major impulse to current debates comes from contributions based on an analysis of archival holdings.

Abenteuer Alltag : Zur Archäologie des Amateurfilms is the first german-language publication to give an overview of amateur film research in Europe, presenting essays on topics such as the politics and history, the technology and aesthetics, as well as the bodies and spaces of amateur film. In addition, several European and American film archives provide information about their collection strategies.

From the very beginning of cinema, there have been amateur filmmakers at work. It wasn’t until Kodak introduced 16mm film in 1923, however, that amateur moviemaking became a widespread reality, and by the 1950s, over a million Americans had amateur movie cameras. In Amateur Cinema, Charles Tepperman explores the meaning of the “amateur” in film history and modern visual culture.

In the middle decades of the twentieth century—the period that saw Hollywood’s rise to dominance in the global film industry—a movement of amateur filmmakers created an alternative world of small-scale movie production and circulation. Organized amateur moviemaking was a significant phenomenon that gave rise to dozens of clubs and thousands of participants producing experimental, nonfiction, or short-subject narratives. Rooted in an examination of surviving films, this book traces the contexts of “advanced” amateur cinema and articulates the broad aesthetic and stylistic tendencies of amateur films.

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.

Iluminace is a peer-reviewed journal, published by the National Film Archive in Czech Republique (NFA) and the Czech Society for Film Studies (CEFS). Four issues are published each year.

In 2016, the second issue is dedicated to amateur films in the Eastern Bloc, and one can read articles from scholars involved in the INEDITS annual meeting held in Prague.

Four articles to read :

• Socialist Movie Making vs. Gosplan. Establishing an Infrastructure for the Soviet Amateur Cinema, by Maria Vinogradova,
• Excavating Amateur Films from the Socialist Romania. Making Sense of Cine-amateur History Through Oral Histories and Educational Handbooks, par Melinda Blos-Jáni,
• A Semi-professional or a "Professional Amateur"? Filmmaking between Amateurism and Professionalism, by Veronika Jančová,
• (Non)professional Experiments with a Family. Family Films (of Jaroslav Kučera) as an Example of Artistic Practice, by Kateřina Svatoňová.

The list of articles is here. The journal is indexed and abstracted by the database Scopus. You can buy the issue on the website of the NFA.

Contents

• Prehistory : projection, animation, photography
• Birth of the cinéma : from chronophotography to cinématographe
• Pionners, 1893-1924
• 35 mm
• 16 mm
• 9,5 mm
• 8 mm
• Sound, colour, 3D
• From present to futur
• References
• Index

In 1997, INEDITS published an anthology of english and french texts about the study, the preservation and the promotion of amateur films. This book is still available. You can order it : just write to our organization.

Contents

• Introduction, par Jean-Philippe Art
• Approche de l'univers des inédits, par André Huet
• Preserve the image ? Preserve the film ! par David Cleveland
• Moving memories : image and identity in home movies, par Heather Norris Nicholson
• The home movies : a veil of poetry, par Karen L. Ishizuka
• Vingt ans de travail pour une cinémathèque régionale, par André Colleu
• Saving local history at Danmarks Radio, par Ole Brage
• Democracy and cinema : a history of amateur film, par Patricia R. Zimmermann
• History, memory and commemoration : amateur film-makers look back at the resistance, par Susan Aasman et Klaas Gert Lugtenborg
• La "mise en spectacle" des films d'amateurs, par Jean-Claude Guézennec
• And the winner is... a brief history of the Scottish Amateur Film Festival (1933-1986), par Janet McBain
• In pursuit of happiness ? A search for the definition of amateur film, par Bert Hogenkamp and Mieke Lauwers
• L'inédit et le droit : ébauche d'un contrat, par Suzanne Capiau
• Remembering and re-inventing one's past : the use of home movies in recent Canadian avant-garde film, par Gerald Saul
• Amateur aesthetics and practises in films of the British Co-operative Movement in the 1930s, par Alan Burton

During the nineties, Roger Odin has edited two significant books on amateur cinema : Le film de famille : usages privés, usages publics (1995), then this volume of the review Communications entitled "Cinéma en amateur" (1999) with contributions from fifteen scholars.

These essays could be read online.

Contents

• Le film de famille, composante nécessaire de la mémoire collective, by Jean Puissant
• Jeux de l'image et du temps : construction de la mémoire familiale et adoption internationale, by Martin Pâquet
• Les films de famille : de "merveilleux documents" ? Approche sémio-pragmatique, by Roger Odin
• Films de famille et films sur la famille, by Colette Piault
• Film de famille et mémoire ouvrière, by Florence Loriaux
• Propos d'un passeur d'images, by André Huet
• Le film de famille : cadre structurant et lieu de mémoire, by Nathalie Tousignant

The first international anthology to explore the historical significance of amateur film, Mining the Home Movie makes visible, through image and analysis, the hidden yet ubiquitous world of home moviemaking. These essays boldly combine primary research, archival collections, critical analyses, filmmakers' own stories, and new theoretical approaches regarding the meaning and value of amateur and archival films. Editors Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann have fashioned a groundbreaking volume that identifies home movies as vital methods of visually preserving history. The essays cover an enormous range of subject matter, defining an important genre of film studies and establishing the home movie as an invaluable tool for extracting historical and social insights.

Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema offers a critical response to the still under-explored mode of amateur cinema, as a particular sphere of British film practice. Concentrating upon a roughly fifty-year period (1930–1980), during which such filmmaking grew rapidly as a significant leisure activity in Britain, the volume shows how popular ‘cine’ assumed distinctive institutional and ideological forms, and some remarkable aesthetic emphases, grounded in consistent technical and critical apparatuses.

Although an outline history of such filmmaking is certainly implicit, the priority of Movies On Home Ground is to offer a series of overlapping perspectives on amateur movie-making, with a view to locating such filmmaking as a component of the broader shape of British film culture. Emphasis is thus given to institutional contexts, technical determinants, and the social formations of practising filmmakers, as well as to concerns with the construction of amateur outlooks, understandings of amateur aesthetics, and the remarkable diversity of amateur genericity. The anthology thus supplies a text offering support to study courses dealing with the many varieties of non-professional participation best understood as truly ‘amateur’, rather than as ‘independent’ or ‘alternative’ filmmaking. By granting the amateur a place within the acknowledged range of significant interventions, the recognised canon of British filmmaking is widened in fascinating new directions.

From the thirties, thousands of 16 mm and 8 mm cameras and projectors have been sold by Paillard-Bolex around the world.

With a lot of illustrations, this book deals with :

• manufactured production of the most famous cinema equipments, by Thomas Perret,
• public and private films made by Jacques Boolsky (1895-1932), by Roland Cosandey.

In addition, four films made by Jacques Boolsky and four commercials, advertising Paillard-Bolex, are available on DVD.

Amateur photographs and films are being increasingly used by television and documentary filmmakers to illustrate and authenticate their work. Artists pursue their own ways to enter into dialogue with personal images of memories. There is also an increasing interest in private images to be found among social scientists (cultural anthropologists, historians, media theorists) and also among psychotherapists.

To bring these different ways of dealing with amateur images together, the Centre national de l'audiovisuel and the University of Luxembourg organised in 2008 an international colloquium entitled The Manipulation and Valorisation of Amateur Images. Thirteen researchers, artists and media specialists, among them Patricia Zimmermann and Heather Norris Nicholson, were invited to give a paper and present their theoretical framework, empirical analyses, ethical reflections and concrete creative usages in this book.

Amateur film has been seen as the junkheap of private culture. Yet music videos recycle home movies as authenticity; commercials copy its style to sell intimacy; documentaries use it to recount history "from below."

Reel Families is the first historical study of amateur film, the most pervasive of media. Patricia Zimmerman charts the history of this medium from 1897 to the present, examining how ideological, technical, and social constraints have stunted amateur film's potential for extending media production beyond corporate monopolies and into the hands of everyday people. She draws on an array of sources—camera manufacturers, patents, early film and photography technology journals, amateur filmmaking magazines, professional magazines, and family-oriented popular magazines—to investigate how the concept of amateur film was transformed within evolving contexts of technology, aesthetics, social relations, and politics.

What do you understand by the term 'home movie'? Do you imagine images of babies-on-the lawn, sandcastles on the beach, or travels with the family? Did you know that amateur filmmakers have also explored fictional genres as diverse and fascinating as their professional counterparts, that specific amateur film studios have risen and fallen, or that household-name directors owe their origins and inspirations to the amateur film movement?

Across a range of settings, this book offers an introduction to the amateur maker of film comedies, thrillers, adaptations and sci-fi. It records the ambitions and achievements of enthusiasts struggling to emulate the mainstream and tell their own stories, armed with limited resources and endless initiative.

Tim van der Heijden and Mirco Santi, Thinkering with the Pathé Baby: Materiality, histories and (re)use of 9.5mm film, in: NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies. #Materiality, Jg. 11 (2022), Nr. 2, S. 94– 125.

This contribution explores the materiality and histories of use of 9.5mm film and the Pathé Baby projector and camera. In December 1922, the French film production company Pathé Frères released the 9.5mm film format, which together with Kodak’s 16mm small-gauge, released the following year, would ‘bring cinema into the home’ and effectively popularise the screening, distribution, and production of home cinema and amateur films. This article aims to highlight the significance of 9.5mm film within the history of amateur film and to demonstrate the heuristic value of performing historical re-enactments with obsolete media technologies, such as 9.5mm film and the Pathé Baby, so as to better understand how they worked, how they were used at the time, and how their historical, material, and performative dimensions can be preserved for the future. It draws on a series of media archaeological experiments with the Pathé Baby projector and camera, as well as on the hands-on reconstruction of a 9.5mm film from 1929, made by the Italian artist, composer, and amateur filmmaker Pippo Barzizza (1902-1994). Utilising experimental media archaeology as a practice-based and sensorial approach to media historiography, the article investigates the materiality, functionality, and practices of (re)use of 9.5mm film as a remarkable early twentieth-century home cinema technology.

This thesis in three volumes is the result of an exploration of a press corpus which is destined for amateur film makers.

In order to understand the evolution of this specific area of press better and to analyse the presupposition in process in the amateur films, it became necessary to study an institution which is never obvious even if it had influenced its making either technically, thematically, rhetorically or ideologically speaking. In our study, we favoured three different fields. The first volume (421 p.) sets the discursive strategies in process in this press, from 1950 to 1990. Then, in the same volume, we tried to define the classic reader of this kind of press. The second volume (125 p.) offers an idea of the amateur film makers within the same period, inside the cinematographic institution and during the french "Nouvelle Vague". The third volume (208 p.) is an historical outline of these magazines editorial choices, from 1850 to the beginning of the video press (1990). In a second part, this volume presents a chronological bibliography of this press (1850-1990).