Small-Gauge Storytelling: Discovering the Amateur Fiction Film 9780748656356

Citation preview

small-­g auge storytelling

small-­­g auge storytelling Discovering the Amateur Fiction Film

Edited by Ryan Shand and Ian Craven

© the chapters their several authors, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10/12.5 pt Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 5634 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 5635 6 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 5637 0 (epub) The right of the contributors to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents



List of Illustrations Acknowledgements



Introduction: Ambitions and Arguments – Exploring Amateur Cinema through Fiction Ryan Shand



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Part I: Framing Fiction   1 Historical, Aesthetic, Cultural: The Problematical Value of Amateur Cine Fiction Guy Edmonds   2 Sewell, Rose and the Aesthetics of Amateur Cine Fiction Ian Craven   3 Crafting Life into Film: Analysing Family Fiction Films from the 1930s Martina Roepke   4 Framing the Welfare State: Swedish Amateur Fiction Film 1930 to 1965 Mats Jönsson

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Part II: Studio Sensibilities   5 Occupying a Distinguished but Lonely Place in the Amateur Movement: Ace Movies 1929 to 1964 Francis Dyson   6 ‘High Art’ Locally: The Screen Adaptations of IuG-­Film Maria Vinogradova

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  7 Brazilian Amateur Cinema and Fictional Films from Foto-­Cine Clube Gaúcho Lila Foster

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Part III: Single-­Minded Scenarios   8 ‘This is not Hollywood!’: Peter Watkins and the Challenge of Amateurism to the Professional John R. Cook

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  9 ‘Start as You Mean to Go On’: Ken Russell’s Early Amateur Films 201 Brian Hoyle 10 The Nocturnal Affairs of Mr Miletic: Authorship, Genre and Cine-­Amateurism in Yugoslavia Greg DeCuir, Jr

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Part IV: Genres and Genericity 11 The Aesthetic of the Possible: The Green Cockatoo as Bricolage of Heterogeneous Traditions Siegfried Mattl and Vrääth Öhner

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12 The Fragile Magic of the Home: Amateur Domestic Comedies and the Intimate Geography of Childhood Karen Lury

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13 The Spence Brothers: Amateur Sci-­Fi and Cine Culture in Northern Ireland 278 Ciara Chambers Notes on Contributors Index

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  I.1 Promotional image from Coming Shortly (Tony Rose and Christopher Barry, 1954), from Movie Maker Presents the Ten Best Amateur Films of 1976 competition programme (author’s collection).   I.2 Frame enlargement from Winner Takes All (Billy Rae, 1968) (Scottish Screen Archive).   I.3 Frame enlargement from Winner Takes All (Billy Rae, 1968) (Scottish Screen Archive).   I.4 Frame enlargement from Winner Takes All (Billy Rae, 1968) (Scottish Screen Archive).   1.1 Frame enlargement from Remember (Ray Papaia, 1977) (author’s collection).   1.2 Frame enlargement from Io Bacchoi (Oh, Bacchantes, Lennaert Nijgh, 1964) (EYE Film Institute, Netherlands).   1.3 Frame enlargement from Ze Komen (They are Coming, Gé Aarts, 1969) (EYE Film Institute, Netherlands).   1.4 Frame enlargement from Drama in de Wildernis (Drama in the Wildernis, A. G. Jurgens, 1930–1) (EYE Film Institute, Netherlands).   2.1 Advertisement for the Eumig C16 camera, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 1, No. 7, 1958, p. 182 (author’s collection).   2.2 Summary illustration from Tony Rose, ‘Three men and a camera’, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 1, No. 12, 1958, p. 467 (author’s collection).   2.3 Frame enlargement from Petrol (Enrico Cocozza, 1957) (Scottish Screen Archive).   2.4 Frame enlargement from Petrol (Enrico Cocozza, 1957) (Scottish Screen Archive).   3.1 Instructional illustration from Hermann Lummerzheim, Das Agfa-­Schmalfilm-­Handbuch (Harzburg: Dr Walter Heering Verlag, 1935), p. 14.

5 8 10 11 41 47 48

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63 74 75

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  3.2 Leaflet advertisement for the Siemens-­Heimkinoprojektor, c. 1934.   3.3 Cover image for Alex Strasser, Mit Kind und Kegel vor der Kamera (Halle/Saale: Wilhelm Knapp, 1932).   3.4 Illustration from Alex Strasser, Mit Kind und Kegel vor der Kamera (Halle/Saale: Wilhelm Knapp, 1932), p. 107.   4.1 Newspaper illustration from Svenska Dagbladet, 11 February 1964, picturing Eskell with ‘The White Doe’ – a reward obtained for small-­gauge filmmaking in the early 1960s.   4.2 Advertisements, from the Swedish film journal FOTO, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1939), p. 10.   4.3 Magazine cover from the Swedish film journal FOTO, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1939).   4.4 Frame enlargement from Depressed (Mauno Eskell, 1960) (Grängesberg Film Archive, National Library of Sweden).   5.1 Awards ceremony illustration, Home Movies and Home Talkies, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1940), p. 3.   5.2 Club photograph of the Ace film Marionettes (1948) in production in their Wimbledon studio, c. 1939, Home Movies and Home Talkies, Vol. 8, No. 4 (1939), p. 154.   5.3 Club photograph of the Ace Movies studio in Barnes, London, in 1959, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 2, No. 7 (1959), pp. 344–5.   5.4 Club photograph of sets constructed for the Ace Movies production, The Miracle (1939), Amateur Cine World, Vol. 5, No. 5 (1938), p. 236.   6.1 Illustration of Grishin’s Cinematograph (author’s collection).   6.2 Frame enlargement from Tsvety Zapozdalye (Belated Flowers, 1968) (digital capture by Maria Vinogradova).   6.3 Frame enlargement from Polinka Saks (1972) (digital capture by Maria Vinogradova).   6.4 Frame enlargement from Mozart and Salieri (Mozart i Salieri, 1995) (digital capture by Maria Vinogradova).   7.1 Frame enlargement from Guerra e Paz (War and Peace, Nelson Furtado, 1959) (Cinemateca Capitólio, Porto Alegre).   7.2 Frame enlargement from Guerra e Paz (War and Peace, Nelson Furtado, 1959) (Cinemateca Capitólio, Porto Alegre).   7.3 Frame enlargement from O Caso da Joalheria (The Jewellery Store Robbery, João Carlos Caldasso, 1960) (Cinemateca Capitól, Porto Alegre).   7.4 Frame enlargement from O Padre Nu (The Naked Priest, João Carlos Caldasso, 1962) (Cinemateca Capitólio, Porto Alegre).   8.1 Production still from The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1965) (Peter Watkins Archive). ­viii

89 93 94

103 109 113 115 127

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139 148 152 153 154 173 174

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list of illustrations

  8.2 Production still from Dust Fever (Peter Watkins, 1962) (Peter Watkins Archive).   8.3 Production still from Diary of an Unkown Soldier (Peter Watkins, 1959) (Peter Watkins Archive).   8.4 Production still from The Forgotten Faces (Peter Watkins, 1961) (Peter Watkins Archive).   9.1 Front cover of Movie Maker featuring Russell’s The Boyfriend, Vol. 6, No. 4 (April 1972).   9.2 Advertisement for the Canon Super-­8 518 Camera, Movie Maker, Vol. 6, No. 8 (August 1972), p. 563.   9.3 Production still from Amelia and the Angel (Ken Russell, 1958) (British Film Institute Collections).   9.4 Production still from Amelia and the Angel (Ken Russell, 1958) (British Film Institute Collections). 10.1 Miletic pictured in 1948 (Croatian State Archives/Croatian Kinoteka). 10.2 Production still, with Miletic working for Zora Film in the 1935–40 era (Croatian State Archives/Croatian Kinoteka). 10.3 Miletic’s diploma from the Third International Amateur Film Competition held in Paris, 1933 (Croatian State Archives/ Croatian Kinoteka). 10.4 Miletic’s 1936 Venice Biennale diploma (Croatian State Archives/ Croatian Kinoteka). 11.1 Frame enlargement from Der grüne Kakadu (The Green Cockatoo, Franz Hohenberger, 1929) (Austrian Film Museum). 11.2 Frame enlargement from Der grüne Kakadu (The Green Cockatoo, Franz Hohenberger, 1929) (Austrian Film Museum). 11.3 Frame enlargement from Der grüne Kakadu (The Green Cockatoo, Franz Hohenberger, 1929) (Austrian Film Museum). 11.4 Frame enlargement from Der grüne Kakadu (The Green Cockatoo, Franz Hohenberger Franz Hohenberger, 1929) (Austrian Film Museum). 12.1 Frame enlargement from Early Birds (Frank Marshall, 1956) (Scottish Screen Archive). 12.2 Frame enlargement from What A Night! (Frank Marshall, 1939) (Scottish Screen Archive). 12.3 Frame enlargement from Early Birds (Frank Marshall, 1956) (Scottish Screen Archive). 12.4 Frame enlargement from What a Night! (Frank Marshall, 1939) (Scottish Screen Archive). 13.1 Contemporary image of Noel Spence’s ‘Tudor’ cinema, Comber, Co. Down (Kasandra O’Connell Collection). 13.2 Contemporary image of Roy Spence’s Excelsior Cinema, Comber, Co. Down (Kasandra O’Connell Collection).

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13.3 Production still from Homunculus (1977) (Roy and Noel Spence Collection). 13.4 Production still from Keep Watching the Skies (1975) (Roy and Noel Spence Collection).

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The present volume emerged from a range of sources, and the editors would like to express their thanks to the many individuals and organisations offering advice, guidance and support during its assembly. An initial stimulus was provided by papers presented at a day event entitled ‘Small-­Gauge Storytelling: The Amateur Fiction Film’, held in the School of Architecture at the University of Liverpool, during summer 2010. This first gathering of scholars was made possible through the generosity of the College of Arts Research Committee of the University of Glasgow, and the ‘Mapping the City in Film: A Geohistorical Analysis’ project, then based at the University of Liverpool. In particular, we would like to express our appreciation to the project’s managers, Julia Hallam and Les Roberts, for their support for what may have seemed an unusual initiative at that time; we hope that the appearance of Small-­Gauge Storytelling: Discovering the Amateur Fiction Film will justify their faith in our enterprise. Material explored during that event forms the basis for four chapters included here, which are joined by specially commissioned contributions, and chapters developed from the editors’ teaching and research activities at the University of Glasgow. In this context, particular thanks are due to Michael McCann, who provided guidance in the preparation of illustrations and assistance with file transfer and text layout; at the Scottish Screen Archive, Ruth Washbrook and Kay Foubister guided us through complex copyright issues and arranged for the production of high-­quality images, whilst staff of the General Humanities section, at the Glasgow Mitchell Library, located rare newspaper and journal materials for several contributors. Individual images are reproduced courtesy of the individuals, institutions and organisations listed as sources. We are especially pleased to acknowledge the assistance received from members of today’s highly active amateur cine community; Linda Gough, of the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers, and Grahame Newnham, of the 9.5 Association, as usual answered our various questions with enthusiasm and precision, and members of the Edinburgh Cine and Video Society shared their long years of expertise in every aspect of amateur cine production. We are grateful to the amateur enthusiasts who gave permission, directly or indirectly, to reproduce xi

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items from their remarkable personal collections; every effort has been made to trace relevant copyright holders where appropriate. The process of turning our initial ideas into a viable publication project was eased considerably by the expertise and understanding of Vicki Donald, Rebecca Mackenzie, Gillian Leslie and their colleagues at Edinburgh University Press, to whom the editors wish to offer special thanks.

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INTRODUCTION: AMBITIONS AND ARGUMENTS – EXPLORING AMATEUR CINEMA THROUGH FICTION RYAN SHAND

Storytelling has never been the sole province of the professional filmmaker. Throughout the years, many amateur ‘lone workers’, collectives and clubs have attempted to construct their own fictional worlds through film, with varying degrees of success. While some examples, such as It Happened Here (1964), eventually managed to find an audience amongst paying cinemagoers, countless fictional films, made for love rather than profit, have delighted and entertained spectators both domestically and internationally. These titles, often made for entry in the numerous amateur film contests and festivals that once proliferated around the globe, were often well known amongst the participants, attendees, organisers and critics of this parallel film culture. Even in the years before the consolidation of national and regional film archives, prints of these small-­gauge narrative works were circulated between connoisseurs, both via formalised networks and in friendly exchange. In order to distinguish between the excellent and the embarrassing amongst an avalanche of amateur fiction films, awards provided a useful way of assigning value and creating canons.1 Even though certain titles were once instantly recognisable and cherished by many amateurs involved in the organised cine movement, for a number of reasons these films have unfortunately fallen off the cultural radar and are rarely recognised in conventional film histories of any kind.2 The significance of these amateur fiction films, and the light they can potentially shed on a once-­dynamic leisure culture, are therefore difficult to appreciate fully at this distance. However, the increasing public visibility these works are currently enjoying, thanks to the efforts of film archivists and a small group of scholars, is slowly starting to change our sense of the cinematic past, both amateur and professional. This edited collection of essays aims to contribute to this process, and attempts to resurrect some of the forgotten ways and means of creating 1

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fictional worlds, once standardised and shared by those active within the cine sector. Perspectives are offered on such amateur cinemas of fiction from a range of vantage points, and in this context, ‘forgetting’ refers not only to the films that were made, but also to the culture that surrounded their production, and a cluster of related practices traceable via amateur filmmaking manuals, magazines, contests and awards. Given the wealth of the material available for scrutiny, it is curious that, over the past fifteen years or so, the study of amateur film has almost always focused on documentaries, at the expense of the fictional genres favoured by so many amateur filmmakers.3 Some of the variety of reasons for such neglect are touched upon by the contributors to this volume; undoubtedly, this overemphasis on amateur documentaries is symptomatic of early attempts at justifying amateur cinema as a legitimate object of study in the face of sceptical reactions from fellow faculty, scholarly peers, potential publishers and, of course, students. This sometimes-­difficult process has benefited from alignment with debates and practices that concern themselves with relatively established interests in documentary, and issues of clear socio-­cultural importance. Yet when the focus is moved to works that seemingly do not fit this research paradigm, the theoretical consideration of amateur cinema fractures and opens up in many potentially fascinating and productive directions. Theorising Fiction: Making Sense of Make-­Believe A lack of appreciation of fictional genres is not just confined to scholars of amateur film, and is perhaps symptomatic of broader semantic instabilities around the term ‘fiction’ itself. Within general discourse, especially as used in journalistic reporting, the word ‘fiction’ is often rendered synonymous with ‘lying’, while ‘fact’ is often conflated with senses of ‘truth’. This slippage of terminology perhaps obscures more than it illuminates about the nature of fiction, and proves unhelpful in attempts to understand the mode’s inherent cultural value. Fortunately, however, fiction is a vast topic that has many devotees in arts scholarship more generally, whose methods and approaches, developed in neighbouring disciplines, can potentially be extremely useful in initial attempts to account for the meaning and value of amateur fiction films. One of the main problems with the study of fiction is that while it seems a commonsense concept, taken for granted by many, it proves remarkably difficult to explain and define when attempting to account for fiction in more scholarly terms of reference. In this regard, the work of philosopher Gregory Currie proves useful in framing much of what follows, since it extends from issues raised by decidedly everyday encounters with the mode. One of the central questions of his 1990 study The Nature of Fiction is simply, ‘What, if any, are the characteristics that distinguish a work of fiction from a work of nonfiction?’4 This is also a question that spectators of amateur films often find themselves asking, and in most cases it is possible to speculate confidently one ­2

introduction: ambitions and arguments

way or another. Cutting through many potential ambiguities, Currie asserts that, ‘Fictional status is acquired by a work, not in the process of its reception but in the process of its making.’5 From this perspective, Currie is pointing out that authors of fiction (and, by implication, filmmakers as well) mostly cue their audiences into knowing one way or the other that they are reading (or watching) either a fiction or a non-­fiction work. In the case of film, if it is not obvious from the title card and opening credits, then it usually becomes ­apparent fairly soon after the film begins. Placing such attention on the author’s intentions has not been fashionable in the Humanities in recent years, partly due to the popularity of post-­ structuralist methodologies that seek to resist or subvert such ‘intentional fallacies’, although for the purposes of this volume such an approach seems wholly appropriate.6 This interest in speculating on the authorial intentions of the filmmaker(s) is discernible in many of the following contributions, as their chapters often focus more on issues of production and creativity than many previous studies of amateur cinema, which have tended to privilege extra-­textual discourse in magazines and manuals.7 However, Currie’s most important observations relate to what he sees as the key feature of fiction: namely, its quality of ‘make-­believe’.8 The intangible and abstract nature of the make-­believe envisaged here may seem problematic, but is usefully simplified when Currie states, ‘I think of make-­believe as itself an attitude we take to propositions’.9 Interest in authorial intentions is thereby qualified to encompass the reader/spectator with the additional dimension of this ‘attitude’, taken towards the material that is crafted and shaped to construct fictional worlds. Ultimately for Currie, ‘What distinguishes the reading of fiction from the reading of nonfiction is not the activity of the imagination but the attitude we adopt toward the content of what we read: make-­belief in the one case, belief in the other.’10 In this way, both author and audience work together in order to create an imaginative ‘fictional’ space sustained by agreed suspension of their disbelief. Whilst the author or filmmaker can toy with this implicit contract, in general the conventional appreciation of fiction that dictates a collaborative approach is most common and pleasurable. As Currie puts it, such an authorial tactic has the tendency to invite ‘us to pretend, or rather, to make-­believe something. For to read a work as fiction is to play a kind of internalized game of make-­believe.’11 While this may seem a somewhat commonsense way of understanding a phenomenon that we often just take for granted, the idea of fiction as a game, or at least a playful endeavour, is usefully consonant with senses of amateur filmmaking as a leisure activity. Amateur filmmakers often appeared to approach their film practice in a playful manner, and perhaps being non-­ professionals shapes participation more specifically in this regard. However, most intriguingly, while the positions detailed above may be useful in clarifying many established concerns, Currie’s analysis could open the debate up still further; when he writes that if ‘fictionality does not reside in the text itself, 3

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it must be a relational property: something possessed in virtue of the text’s relations to other things,’ he acknowledges that fiction is an imaginative space in between, not cut off from, outside references and determinations.12 Work on fiction cannot therefore ignore wider social, cultural and political factors, but instead needs to be developed in dynamic relation to them. These ‘other things’ are what scholars seek to discover and explain in their explorations of context, strategies ­illustrated in several of the chapters included in the present volume. In this respect, seeing fiction from the particular perspective of the amateur filmmaker has the potential to open up traditional aesthetic debates concerning fictionality in exciting new directions. Perhaps what these perspectives also suggest is that it is possible to introduce alternative methodologies into the established debates surrounding amateur cinema, which need not limit themselves to exploring the significance of amateur documentaries, valued via particularly insistent attitudes of ‘belief’. While very little scholarly work has been done on amateur fictional filmmaking, provisional studies have emerged in recent years.13 By contrast, the study of fiction within commercial filmmaking has long proved central to Film Studies; indeed, as Fred Camper has commented with much justification, ‘Virtually every general history of cinema awards hegemony to the commercial narrative feature film,’14 or as Roger Odin puts it: one thing is certain: in our Western societies and in the field of the audio-­visual, the space of the fictional communication is the dominant space of communication. It is so dominant that, in the social imaginary, we often have the tendency to simply assimilate cinema and fiction film. Furthermore, the productions that do not conform with the constraints of this space find it very difficult to function correctly.15 Odin goes on to outline what he sees as a total of five operations key to understanding ‘the fictionalising regime’ preoccupying adherents to what has elsewhere become known as ‘Screen theory’:16 1. Construction of a diegesis: production of a world 2. Narrativization: production of a story, of a narrative 3. ‘Mise en phase’: alignment of the filmic relations to the diegetic relations in such a way that the spectator is made to ‘resonate’ to the rhythm of the events told 4. Construction of an absent Enunciator 5. Fictivization: the (absent) Enunciator functions as a fictive origin.17 Although this is a fairly standard set of considerations within well-­ institutionalised approaches to the fiction film in general, the term ‘mise en phase’ seems especially useful and telling within considerations of amateur cinema in particular. The term’s resonance is defined by Odin succinctly: ­4

introduction: ambitions and arguments

By ‘mise en phase’, we mean the following: at every major stage in the story being told, the film produces a relationship between itself and the spectator (an affective positioning of the latter) which is homologous with the relationships occurring in the diegesis.18 This describes the way fiction films can seem to involve or ‘draw in’ the spectator almost magically as their events unfold, involving an effect that Murray Smith has elsewhere termed ‘alignment’ with the characters.19 The approach developed in this introduction therefore evolves to some extent around this concept of the ‘mise en phase’, an effect often regarded as a particular challenge for the amateur filmmaker, but clearly deemed crucial to the reputation of the sector and its participants. Numerous commentaries within cine’s hobby literature warn that the film viewer may be unengaged and alienated from non-­ fiction material such as home movies, due to the lack of personal connections and formal consistency at more textual levels. By contrast, amateur fiction films are often deemed more amenable to expectations of spectatorship that have evolved in film culture more generally, using as they do filmic techniques such as point-­of-­view figures and ‘focalisation’ that encourage spectator alignment with the fictional characters depicted, as we shall see in the following case study. Satirising their Social World: Self-­Reflexive Fictions Filmmakers, both professional and amateur, have long been interested in turning the camera back on themselves, drawing upon their experience of the film medium as the basis for fictional narratives. Amateur films about the commercial sector, for example, exist in various guises; some could be bitingly satirical, as two Ten Best winners demonstrate perfectly; Coming Shortly (1954) burlesques trailers advertising that fabulous film that is always . . . ‘Coming Shortly’, whilst The Bottom of the Barrel (1958) pastiches various

I.1  Megan Jones parodies the screen sirens of cinema trailers in Coming Shortly (1954).

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styles of professional filmmaking.20 The impulse to turn their cameras back towards their own filmmaking environment has also always gripped the cine enthusiast, as is demonstrated by The End (1960), which directed its satire towards the characteristic foibles of amateur cinematographers.21 The Scottish Screen Archive, for instance, retains a number of cine club productions that satirise the social world of amateur filmmaking, via humorous fictional scenarios.22 The Dalziel Cine Club, based in Motherwell to the south east of Glasgow, made a number of these types of films.23 One example that illustrates recurrent themes emerging in the chapters to follow is Winner Takes All (1968).24 The storyline concerns an ambitious filmmaker who attends an amateur film competition, at which he is determined to win first prize at any cost. To this end, he sizes up his various rivals around the hall and kills each one of them off, continuing until he believes that he is certain to receive the top award. The film opens on a static shot of a nondescript building. Over this image the voiceover quickly sets the scene, establishing both the main character and his goal in the narrative that follows: ‘It was Tuesday evening, and I followed my usual route to the cine club, as I had done for the last three years. But I knew within myself that something was different. Then I read the notice and realised why. This was the one competition I had to win.’ A close-­up of the sign reads: ‘Film of the Year Competition, Tonight 7.30pm’. We have therefore learned much about the main character before actually seeing him, when he walks into the community hall and is greeted by the club president, Willie Black. As the pair walk, we get a good look at the main character, a middle-­aged man who is dressed formally in a grey suit, and the people who populate this social world, most of whom seem to be slightly older, perhaps retired or approaching retirement. Significantly, for what follows, there appears to be a fairly equal divide between men and women. The main character looks around at his rivals who populate the hall, observing that, ‘The club was certainly full, everyone knew it was going to be a close-­run thing, so I had to come up with some good ideas to swing it in my favour, but what? With the competition about to start, time was running out.’ While he contemplates how to win the prize this evening, he continues to size up the potential competition, and it is clear that, despite the mix of genders, the men in the room are shown to dominate the event. A small circle of them stand talking as the protagonist comments dismissively, ‘just listen to them with their 1.2 lenses and double overlay sound systems’, perhaps an indication of his feelings of insecurity in the presence of more experienced filmmakers with the money to spend on elaborate equipment. Clearly, these men are examples of cine participants who invest much time and many resources in their leisure activity, and correspond closely to Castel and Schnapper’s description of those still camera club members who are ‘deviants in terms of this primary function. Their first act is to break the ties that bound photography to the family institution,’ thus operating beyond the more common desires animating many non-­professional filmmakers: namely, ­6

introduction: ambitions and arguments

merely to record family moments for posterity.25 Such figures plainly represent serious competition. The drama is developed through brief exchanges; a fellow amateur filmmaker attempts to involve the protagonist in small talk, asking (in a higher-­ pitched comedy voice), ‘Do you think you stand any chance of winning?’ The main character begins to answer but manages only ‘Well . . .’, for it is obvious that his thoughts are elsewhere, as he catches sight of something across the room. The voiceover elaborates, ‘Then my eye caught the first glimpse of our prize. The much-­coveted Rose Bowl. Look at it, shining like a beacon; it just had to be mine. I had to find a way.’ In this moment, the film re-­emphasises the importance that the main character assigns to this award, and pictures him as a recognisable cine ‘type’, whose fate will prove instructive.26 At stake here are more than simply personal quirks or failings, however, given the importance of awards within the amateur film movement, as we will see in several of the case studies that follow; it is no coincidence that many of the films and filmmakers examined in the present volume were prize-­winners at national and international contests. In a wider cultural sense, James F. English examines the significance of prizes and writes that, ‘In the wild proliferation of prizes since about 1900, this book sees a key to transformations in the cultural field as a whole.’27 His argument, influenced by the work of Pierre Bourdieu, is that such prizes are a form of ‘symbolic capital’ that is cherished both by artists and by wider society.28 In the context of amateur cinema, this is especially important, given that prize-­winning filmmakers are unlikely ever to see any financial returns for their efforts, yet still seek confirmation of their work’s cultural value. This attitude toward achievement-­orientated activity is acknowledged and critiqued in Winner Takes All, not only in the voiceover transcribed above, but also in its more specifically cinematic expression. As this reverie about the cup unfolds, we see the main character looking away from the person he is conversing with and focusing intently on the trophy in the distance. Both to highlight and to ironise the importance he is attaching to this prize, the film then cuts to a point-­of-­view shot of the Rose Bowl, before the camera slowly zooms into a closer view of this object of desire, which emphasises concentration. While a small moment in this film, this otherwise subtle device encourages the spectator’s alignment with its central character, whilst it could also be argued that these techniques are of central importance to the construction of a convincing fictional diegesis. Indeed, philosophers such as Graham Currie who have examined the operation of commercial cinema note that, ‘Writers on cinema speak enthusiastically of the capacity of film to draw the audience in, to make them observers of the action from the space of the action itself.’29 Currie goes on to contrast the ‘extrinsic perspective’ offered to the theatrical spectator with the ‘intrinsic perspective’ developed by professional filmmakers during the silent era.30 In fact, his fuller explanation of this filmic tendency echoes the shot-­reverse-­shot sequence from Winner Takes All just described: 7

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I.2  Conversation amongst competitors forgotten at the sight of the Rose Bowl in Winner Takes All (1968).

That perspective is defined by a position (actually the position of the camera), relative to the actors and the set, and the viewer may be called upon to make-­believe certain things concerning that position: that it belongs to the space in which the action takes place, that a certain character looks in the direction of that position, that one of the characters comes to occupy it in a later shot.31 This description of the relationship between characters is just as applicable to the comic relationship established between the main character and the Rose Bowl. It suggests one of the central pleasures offered by watching fictional film, whether amateur or professional: namely, what Noël Carroll has posited as the mutually compatible tendency of fiction films to provoke ‘widespread engagement and intense engagement’ in the spectator.32 This process is greatly aided by ‘characteristic devices’ that enable the filmmaker to focus the spectator’s attention on specific pieces of information in order to move the narrative forward.33 These include ‘variable framing’, which is ‘achieved by moving the camera closer or farther away from the objects being filmed’, and also ‘reframing’, which can ‘be achieved optically through devices such as zooming-­in and changing lenses’.34 Not only do these filmic techniques have the ability to draw the viewer into the world of the story, but also they have become one of the defining features of what the critical guardians of the sector see as good practice.35 The constant recurrence of devices of the sort discussed by Carroll, in the close analyses of the contributors to Small-­Gauge Storytelling, is worth stressing at this point, as it demonstrates the practical techniques that amateur filmmakers have learned from the example of professional practice, and incorporated into their own self-­generated narratives. Indeed, the use of voiceover in amateur fiction films is another example of this recurring strategy, aimed ­8

introduction: ambitions and arguments

at granting the spectator access to the worldview of leading characters. While these techniques resonate strongly with Odin’s concept of mise en phase, it is also worth stressing that throughout Winner Takes All this process is constantly undercut by its dominant comic tone; such tactics keep us at a certain emotional distance from the character in order to laugh at his foibles and mistakes, which become all the more glaring as the story progresses. The central phases of the action are now introduced, beginning with the main character’s summary of Willie Black’s opening speech, ‘Right, lads, may the best man win. Best man was right, for, being a male-­dominated club, we had easily ousted all the entries from the ladies. It was quite easy really; we had the power when it came to voting.’ Such male domination of amateur film’s social world has often been acknowledged, and commented upon in magazine columns and oral history interviews, but this satirical jibe would clearly resonate amongst those with personal experience of the gender divide and also sets up a plot point that will pay off towards the conclusion.36 After this speech, the main character decides, since there is no way for him to win fairly, that the only route to success left open to him is a criminal one, ‘As all these would-­be Cecil B. De Milles sprang into action, the first inkling of an idea came to me. . . .’37 Specifically recalling the serial killings of novels and plays by Agatha Christie, the main character of Winner Takes All now embarks on a number of his own murders, in order to increase his chances of securing victory in the competition. His first victim is Brian, a former SSEB (South of Scotland Electricity Board) safety officer, who is attempting to fix a cine-­projector. He pauses while observing Brian, before walking over to begin unleashing the darker side of his competitive instincts. Before long, we witness the technician being electrocuted as the main character turns on the power supply, with his victim still working on the machine. This gruesome event is underscored by a blackly comic one-­liner: ‘what amazed me was that everyone was so engrossed in their own little world that no one noticed Brian’s electrifying exit.’ Then, as he moves away from the scene of the crime, he merely notes ‘one down, three to go,’ before proceeding to observe Jack, the projectionist, from a distance, a sinister smile breaking out on his face. While watching Jack struggle with a web of film around him, he announces, ‘I think I’ll just stroll over and give him a helping hand.’ He then does just that, literally by pulling the film around Jack’s throat and strangling him to death. Next on his list is Ken, the editor, who is (quite improbably) making final cuts before the evening’s showcase. The main character comments that Ken ‘always had a problem with knowing how to make good cuts in his film. Maybe I should show him how it’s done.’ He then strides over, puts Ken’s arm under the machine and cuts it off. The actor playing Ken stands there, apparently dumbfounded, with an obviously fake missing arm, as a female club member comes up to him and shakes his stump, the main character deadpanning that ‘Molly just has to congratulate him on making his first decent cut.’ Her character shows an incongruous reaction to Ken’s condition, and is more 9

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I.3  Jack the projectionist receives a ‘helping hand’ with his acetate yarn in Winner Takes All (1968).

concerned about cleaning up the mess than with his health, evidence of an off-­ beat sense of humour with a tendency towards in-­jokes. The killer’s last target is John MacPherson, of whom he comments, ‘still, he has one weakness; he likes his cup of tea.’ Therefore he decides to poison John’s tea: ‘while he’s talking about how good his film really is, a few drops of sleeping draught should close his eyes and mouth in a very short time.’ Almost instantly we see him fall over, out cold but perhaps not dead. The importance of tea breaks, offering a pause in club proceedings and a chance to chat with fellow members, has long been a feature of the social gatherings of amateur filmmakers. Those in the know, the sector’s insiders, might therefore find this sequence particularly funny. For the killer, the ritual is exploited for murderous ends: ‘That’s it. Nothing and no one can come between me and the prize, that’s really mine,’ he claims, before walking over to hold the cup in his hands for the first time. Exhilaration is short-­lived, however, as he unexpectedly grimaces and falls over, and it is revealed that the women have wired up the trophy to electrocute the main character. With their own victim lying on the floor of the hall, the female club members celebrate; one of them holds the cup aloft before parading it down the aisle, as all the women standby clapping. The main character complains bitterly that ‘I really didn’t think that women could stoop so low as to use dirty tricks in order to gain the upper hand . . . but then, they always were the winners’. While unlikely from a strictly ‘realistic’ point of view, this turn of events ‘twists’ the expected ending for comic purposes.38 It is satisfying from a narrative perspective, as it refers back to the comments made by Willie Black at the beginning of the film about women’s assigned roles in the amateur film movement. In this way, the device answers a question raised at the beginning of the film, illustrating what Noël Carroll has termed an ‘erotetic model of narrative’ ­10

introduction: ambitions and arguments

I.4  Women cine club members celebrate their victory in the twist ending of Winner Takes All (1968).

in which, ‘as is suggested by the writings of Pudovkin, the core narrative structures of Hollywood-­type films – the movies discussed in this paper – involve generating questions that ensuring scenes answer.’39 Thus, in the narrative of Winner Takes All, the female club members are denigrated at the start of the film, only to be celebrated by its conclusion. The progression from what the main character terms the ‘fairer sex’ to a ‘dirty sex’ describes, in some ways, the conventional symbolic pattern dramatising the return of the repressed, in which the female victory functions as a fantasy or compensation, which belies the real history of male domination of the sector. However, perhaps the most revealing aspect of Winner Takes All concerns the importance of prizes in amateur cine culture. In this film, the Rose Bowl is described as a ‘beacon’, suggesting not only its function as a means to motivate and give direction to the participating filmmakers, but also its publicity value, shining its light on the best of the films and hence informing the outside world of their existence. In many ways, a cup or trophy can be seen as a defining symbol of the sector, illustrating the promises and rewards that serious dedication to amateur ­filmmaking can bring. Historically, in the United Kingdom, considerable overlap has been apparent between still photography clubs and cine clubs; in the post-­war decades, the latter often grew out of the former, as there were strong continuities between those interested in the two recording technologies. Such trends are equally apparent in a range of other national settings, as contributions to the present volume stress. The sociological study of still photography club culture in France quoted earlier, for example, helps to place amateur cine practices within longer traditions of ‘serious’ leisure participation. Castel and Schnapper postulate that the photographic practices of camera club members are ­motivated by a desire to transcend more general norms: 11

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The members of a camera club have in common not only their valorization of the photographic act, but, more particularly, their desire to take photographs in a different way. Having lost the primary justification of the photographic act within the primary group, the family, they are in search of a secondary legitimation.40 As might be expected, this description suggests overlap with the activities of cine club members, for whom significant ‘secondary legitimisation’ is ratified through success in competitions. As a stimulus to recognition, contests encouraged the production of many amateur films, and provided a platform from which to promote the winning entries as ideal candidates for screenings and, ultimately, long-­term preservation. The decision to make a film about the central role that competitions held in amateur cine culture, such as Winner Takes All, is therefore telling and significant. Not only does it illustrate the importance of these events in the social calendar, but also, even more pertinently, the film provokes critical speculation on the symbolic value of competitions, through its adoption of a fictional mode. While there may be many non-­fiction filmed records of amateur film contests in archives around the world, Winner Takes All helps us to begin to understand the psyche of the filmmaker who enters his or her films into these events. In effect, this film provides imaginative insight into ‘amateur subjectivity’, rendered through a comedy based around the main character’s feelings of inferiority, in comparison with his rivals.41 As Currie notes, ‘Imagination might be a source of knowledge; in imagining things, we might thereby come to know (possibly other) things. And if fictions are aids to imagination, they may lead indirectly to knowledge.’42 In this respect, this fiction film suggests (comically) that there are inevitably negative aspects to entering competitions that are revealing of the psychic unconscious of the amateur filmmaker. The situations and punch lines described above rely on real-­life reference points in order to function as a comedy, but in this process they are also suggestive of underlying motivations and tensions experienced by participants within the social world of amateur film. This point is confirmed again by Currie, who explains that, ‘it might be that works of literary fiction, with their descriptions of fictional characters and their activities, are capable of calling forth from us imaginative responses that are similar to those called forth by our encounters with real people.’43 In this case, the use of fictional devices therefore frees the filmmakers to explore the thematic tensions between egotism and community, or selfishness and collaboration, which would be difficult to acknowledge within the non-­fiction format. The value of fiction continues to be elusive and hard to pin down, yet a wider point, about the pleasure narratives provide readers/spectators with, is worth stressing, before moving towards an introduction of the work of our contributors to this volume. As we follow the choices made by the protagonists of fictional worlds, we inevitably begin to reflect on their decisions and to consider how we would act in similar situations. The distance between our real life ­12

introduction: ambitions and arguments

and the fictional world allows us the opportunity to enjoy experiences outside of our own. Currie describes this process in the following fashion: Fictions can act as aids to the imagination – holding our attention, making a situation vivid for us, and generally drawing us along in the wake of the narrative. If they help us to enter empathically into the lives of the characters, we can come to feel what it is like to be those characters, make their choices, pursue their goals, and reap the rewards and costs of their actions. And by doing all this in imagination rather than by simply trying out values in the real world we avoid the costs of bad choices.44 In just this way, Winner Takes All enables us to ‘play’ with moral values different from our own, in that, while we might say we ‘would do anything’ to achieve a desired outcome, in practice most people stay well within the boundaries of the law. The fact that the main character in the film has no such ethical qualms means we can watch his fictional downfall with pleasure, safe in the knowledge that this experience has no effect on real life and real people. Most importantly, this means that fiction is not a purposeless deviation or distraction from reality, but an opportunity for reflection and perhaps even imaginative renewal. Currie writes that this activity of ‘projecting myself into the life of another has, potentially, the double function of telling me about his mental life and about my own possible future course of action; whatever I do, I had better make sure that things don’t turn out that way for me.’45 Elaborating on these observations, he later uses phrases such as ‘vicarious experience of values’ and characterises fictions as ‘moral thought experiments’ that have the potential to expand our understanding of amateur fiction films such as Winner Takes All.46 Taking the symbolic value of this and other amateur fiction films seriously will increasingly enable us, in time, to discuss and study the peculiarly ‘amateur’ view of the world more confidently. Alongside an attention to amateur-­produced documentaries, consideration of amateur fictional works will inevitably modify scholars’ accounts of amateur film culture as an organised cultural movement and contingent historical phenomenon. Recognition of fictionality per se, however, seems likely to maximise the rewards of such scholarship. Carl Gustav Jung’s study of literature acknowledges the possible shortcomings of a methodology that does not at least attempt to go deeper than the surface qualities of fictional narratives: What is of particular importance for the study of literature, however, is that the manifestations of the collective unconscious are compensatory to the conscious attitude, so that they have the effect of bringing a one-­sided, unadapted, or dangerous state of consciousness back into equilibrium.47 13

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If we can say that Winner Takes All can be thought of as such a ‘doubled’ or ‘compensatory’ statement about the subjective experience of amateur cine culture, especially of amateur film contests, then it is particularly appropriate that almost all of the films detailed in the chapters that follow were similarly made for amateur film contests. In various ways, amateur fiction films are ideal vehicles to explore a number of issues of importance to amateur filmmakers, articulated both consciously and unconsciously. Themes and Connections Through the following chapters on a wide range of fictional output, scholars with differing perspectives seek to understand amateur cine culture in more holistic senses than have been possible hitherto. Concern with the historical (evidential) value of amateur non-­fiction/documentaries gives way to fascinations more attuned to the symbolic (metaphorical) value of amateur fiction films, and to the peculiarly amateur dimensions of their realisations. The rewards of such a changed agenda are suggested in the studies that follow. Framing fiction Future scholarship will rely heavily on critical engagement with the archive sector. In the opening chapter, the archivist Guy Edmonds details both the practical problems surrounding acquisition, and the categorical difficulties posed by amateur fiction films that are neither private nor public in the conventional senses of those terms. Bringing his first-­hand knowledge of the Dutch and British archival sectors to these issues, Edmonds argues that ‘misrecognition and old habits of scrutiny’ can sometimes conspire to demote amateur fiction films to low priority candidates for preservation.48 Conventionally, archivists have justified the inclusion of amateur films within regional and national collections on the grounds of their supposed ‘evidential’ value, usually as visual portrayals of ‘local’ and/or ‘national’ culture(s). Edmonds proposes that the fictitiousness of many amateur films can be brought into the spotlight by changing or adapting this criterion of value, and the development of policies more sensitive to wider artistic and socio-­cultural factors. Within his account, the acquisition process of many archives not only displays their own biases, but underlies decisions that are hugely important for determining what is allowed to become part of the archival collection, and hence what can be studied by scholars of amateur cinema. However, through initiatives such as the annual collector’s day at the EYE Film Institute Netherlands, as well as Home Movie Day, archivists are seen to have the potential to mould archival collections in new directions. Working in partnership with scholars, Edmonds points out that archivists can increase awareness of films produced by amateurs that were in dialogue with mainstream film culture, offering a fascinating insight into amateur cinema as a parallel movement, with its own ideologies ­14

introduction: ambitions and arguments

and communal standards. Rather than relegating the ‘amateur film’ to a mere genre of production, we can thereby increasingly see it as a sector composed of multiple genres and sub-­genres, both non-­fiction and fiction. With such an attention to ‘pro–am’ relations, Ian Craven then examines two examples of a particular fictional sub-­genre, often termed the ‘incident picture’ by amateur cine critics and filmmakers. The close consideration of Exercise Movie (1958) and Petrol (1957) allows Craven to chart the dialogue between the public figureheads of the movement and cine club members. By tracing their exchanges via agenda-­setting articles, responses from magazine letters pages, and close analysis of the films themselves, he argues for the tangibility of a ‘sectoral style’ that shapes and defines expectations about what constitutes possible and desirable fiction-­building within the cine movement. The genesis of Exercise Movie is characterised as a gentlemen’s wager amongst sectoral insiders, conceived as it was by journal editor Tony Rose in response to comments made by elder statesman George Sewell; in contrast, Petrol seemingly represents a test-­piece by the experienced amateur filmmaker Enrico Cocozza, completed as a personal creative challenge, yet the comparison between the two titles is shown to be instructive, and revealing of wider trends. Both films confirm Elliot Grove’s recent assertion that, ‘Shorts are to features what haikus are to ballads. Shorts have a variety of interesting structures. The principal one is cyclical: where the story starts and ends at the same place.’49 This observation is valid for many of the films discussed in this collection, although clearly by no means absolute, as demonstrated by other chapters revealing how cultural distinction is achieved by the use of insistently divergent artistic practices, which in turn help us to comprehend more fully how sectoral norms are introduced and maintained over time. Recognition of norms frequently drives an assertion of difference within amateur cine culture, whose critics and experienced practitioners tended to use their positions in order to communicate what has been termed elsewhere an ‘assertion of style’, resembling a ‘sermon preached in the name of a mysterious essence of photography, asserted all the more dogmatically the greater the teacher’s inability to define it (although there is no compulsion to define what is, by its very nature, ineffable)’.50 The ‘sermons’ or advice offered by Tony Rose and his colleagues in British cine journals such Amateur Cine World (1934–67) and Amateur Movie Maker (1957–64) echo throughout the following chapters, and are multiplied in a wide range of other national settings. Martina Roepke details how ‘expert’ knowledge helped to inform and influence creative choices for German amateur filmmakers interested in using their own family and domestic environments as casts and sets, during the interwar period. Whilst often a simple matter of availability and ease of access, Roepke outlines how writers such as Alex Strasser and Hellmuth Lange, working within the organised amateur movement, encouraged this practice. She shows how the stylistic and narrative conventions outlined by these writers helped shape the production of amateur family films such as 15

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Eine Nacht und ein Morgen (A Night and a Morning, 1934), informed by the conventions of screen fiction, and suggests how this film in particular allows us to understand the preoccupations of early amateur filmmakers, before cine club activity became popular in the post-­war era. Echoing Craven’s case studies, Roepke is interested in exploring what conventions were typical in this historical period, and how individual filmmakers responded and adapted these generic elements to their own ends. The competing attractions of fiction and non-­fiction emerge as conspicuous features in this context, most clearly discernible in the transformation of previously recorded footage of Marika Rökk, a famous UFA (Universum Film-­Aktien Gesellschaft) film star of the 1930s, into a key narrative element of Eine Nacht und ein Morgen. This amateur practice, of incorporating public material into private narratives, has strikingly modern resonances, yet Roepke outlines how this example of creative re-­appropriation needs to be understood in its cultural and historical context. On the surface, this sequence appears to turn footage from an evening of entertainment into a morality tale about the temptations of hedonism for a married couple, yet, much more than this, such amateur fiction films help in illuminating for us the desires and fantasies of people in the past, and the filmic conventions available for their articulation. Shifting fictional conventions are similarly at stake in Mats Jönsson’s innovative case study of a filmmaker who attempted to narrativise the subjective experience of women in Swedish society, using techniques revealing amateur exploration of ‘docu-­drama’ codes, and complex responses to surrounding socio-­cultural conditions. This chapter thus both outlines a national context for amateur fiction films in Sweden, and presents a survey of the work of celebrated amateur filmmaker Mauno Eksell, stressing relations with evolving professional practices at a range of levels. The consideration of historical and contextual factors, such as the formation of the Swedish welfare state, are seen as vital for understanding this filmmaker’s practice, but other more medium-­specific issues raised include the influence of instructional manuals, and the role of the Union Internationale du Cinéma d’Amateurs (UNICA), in mediating between national and international cine cultures, and as encourager of cosmopolitan perspectives amongst its members. Indeed, Eksell’s attempts to blur the lines between fiction and documentary are seen to have parallels outside Sweden, where the intersection between so-­called ‘amateur’ and ‘televisual’ techniques are increasingly being explored in professional contexts.51 Jönsson’s analysis confirms that such overlap can still be considered an act of fiction-­making; as Currie notes, ‘What distinguishes the reading of fiction from the reading of non-­fiction is not the activity of image making; a work of history or a newspaper article can bring images before the mind just as effectively. The distinguishing characteristic is make-­believe.’52 Therefore, while it would be misleading to label filmic devices such as hand-­held camerawork or jump cuts as representative of an inherent amateur aesthetic – an essentialism that scholars of amateur cinema would do well to avoid – it is notable that more ­16

introduction: ambitions and arguments

‘modern’ amateur filmmakers like Eksell increasingly used subjective camera moves, point-­of-­view cutting and close-­ups, in ways that arguably attempted to draw the spectator into the story world. Overarching concepts such as Odin’s ‘mise en phase’ perhaps help to explain this shift and become increasingly useful as we turn our attention from ‘lone-­worker’ amateur filmmaking to more organised and communal practices. Studio sensibilities While scholars of amateur cinema have extensively documented home-­ moviemakers and amateur artists, much less has been written about more collective forms of creativity represented by cine clubs, or the more particular phenomenon of amateur film ‘studios’. The very notion of an amateur film studio may seem like an oxymoron if one subscribes to the idea that amateurism should be an oppositional practice, opposing the trends and methods of commercial cinema. Yet as Francis Dyson demonstrates, in the case of Ace Movies, this London-­based amateur film studio functioned as a highly productive community of enthusiasts for around thirty years, whilst developing an enviable reputation for their high-­quality productions in the British amateur film press. Tracing their development and subsequent decline on either side of World War Two, Dyson explains how it was possible for Ace Movies to maintain their production base, and specialise in a particular kind of amateur fiction film, enhancing their critical reputation over three decades. Castel and Schnapper perhaps help with a more critical placement of Ace, when they argue that: camera clubs may be schematically classified in two groups: the members of ‘aesthetic’ camera clubs are afraid of seeing their activity reduced to mere technology in the name of a traditional conception of culture, while the other camera clubs seek to use technology to find a new justification for their activity as photographers.53 Judging by Dyson’s description of their films, it seems fair to suggest that, in terms of this heuristic distinction between aesthetic and technical valorisation, Ace Movies leaned more toward the former than the latter. The evidence of the amateur fiction films that emerged under their banner, at least the early titles that survive to be viewed today, suggests that they were interested in contributing to a British intellectual film culture that valued qualities such as experimentation and innovation, which were to be shunned as the movement expanded its membership. Overall, this chapter functions therefore as a historical survey of successive changes to the ‘studio’ with wider implications, whose expansion and contraction, and countless practical problems, imaginatively overcome by a small band of resourceful individuals, index broader shifts in understandings of cine club culture. Working as a form of self-­sustaining community, Ace 17

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Movies is an example of a group that was strongly results-­orientated, often achieving renown at the annual Ten Best contest. While Dyson’s chapter details a community group that seems relatively self-­ effacing, content with an anonymous authorship and little desire for individual recognition, the contrast with Soviet amateur filmmaker Iuriı˘ Grishin, offered by Maria Vinogradava, is indicative of more promotional instincts within the world of the cine clubs. Initially, there may appear to be much overlap between Ace Movies and the IuG amateur film studio, located in southern Russia, which she explores. However, as Vinogradova details, Grishin proved remarkably successful at persuading surrounding residents of his local community to act as cast and crew, effectively creating his own ad hoc film studio. As director of the town’s music school, Grishin was well placed, socially and culturally, to marshal diverse groups of people into helping to fulfil his ideas of what amateur cinema could and should look like. Vinogradova’s account records the career of an amateur filmmaker who, over a number of decades, both exhibited an enthusiasm for the practicalities of production, and developed an authorial style that arguably unites many of the films with which he was involved. In a chapter that combines contextual perspectives (especially primary research and original interview material) and close analysis, the author investigates why literary adaptations were so attractive to this particular amateur filmmaker. Interestingly, Grishin ‘considered documentary a lowly and utilitarian genre’, an attitude that would place him at the margins of the mainstream amateur film movement, while also strengthening his aspirations to aesthetic significance.54 As has been noted in relation to artistic trends in photography, for some, ‘Beauty must lie not in the signified, but in the transposition from the signified to photographic language.’55 In many ways, this credo helps explain Grishin’s attraction to film adaptations of the classics of Soviet literature, whose texts provided ready-­made and culturally respectable narrative templates for the ‘transposition’ of his own particular tastes and obsessions. The popularity of literary adaptation amongst amateurs is certainly notable elsewhere; short stories and folk tales are, however, more usually the basis for such production, rather than novels, often deemed likely to overstretch amateur resources. Grishin therefore offers a fascinating exception to the rules, allowing us to consider the aforementioned relation of literature to his work, as well as the possible influence of radio drama in his choice of subjects. Indeed, he was not merely content to produce short films, a format often considered appropriate for the amateur mode of production, but seemed to thrive in the creation of feature-­length amateur films, perhaps adding to the perceived cultural value of his work through their exceptional qualities. While Grishin might be regarded as a provincial or conservative figure in comparison to more metropolitan or modernist filmmakers, his films are arguably representative of a romantic spirit in relation to period recreation, which is certainly not limited to the Soviet Union. Histories of national filmmaking sensitive to geographical variation would ­18

introduction: ambitions and arguments

do well to include considerations of amateur films that are becoming increasingly available due to the diligent efforts of regional archives. Lila Foster presents a survey of the history of amateur cinema in Brazil with reference to early clubs, contests and key individuals, made possible by the conservation efforts of such organisations. Once again, such developments echo across national boundaries, as initiatives and organisations are established elsewhere with similar goals and ambitions. For example, while in Britain the chief advocates of film as an art form during the 1930s were Close Up (1927–33) and Cinema Quarterly (1932–6), Foster points out that remarkably similar territory was being covered by Brazil’s Cinearte (1926–) magazine. Connections were clearly as much formal as coincidental; early Brazilian cine clubs had various international links with other South American organisational bodies as well as the American Cine League, European societies and UNICA. Focusing more specifically on early clubs like the Foto-­Clube Bandeirante, which was formed by an established photographic society, and the later Foto-­Cine Clube Gaúcho, Foster shows how amateur cine culture developed from an élite activity to what could be considered a relatively mainstream one. Drawing on empirical research through local newspapers to trace the emerging importance of amateur film contests, she suggests that internal club competitions encouraged a diverse range of fictional productions, from animation to drama and even satirical comedies. When this is coupled with close analysis of two amateur fiction films, made by the club member J. C. Caldasso, it becomes possible to understand his two films O Caso da Joalheria (The Jewellery Store Robbery, 1960) and O Padre Nu (The Naked Priest, 1962) as examples of recognisably trans-­national amateur fictional tropes and structures, significantly inflected with local concerns and references. This amateur refraction of fiction by cine clubs is representative of an international film movement that crosses borders, but often contains consistent elements that are expressive and revealing of their parallel mode of production and exhibition. These types of club productions, which are often made collectively, exhibit characteristics that can contrast sharply with the more eccentric individualism of the amateur filmmakers considered in the next section. Single-­minded scenarios John Cook’s chapter on Peter Watkins, a filmmaker best known for his later British television work, is the first of two studies considering the early careers of cross-­over figures from the amateur film world. While employed in advertising, Watkins made a number of well-­received amateur fiction films. Using a cast assembled from a local amateur dramatic society, Watkins’s spare-­time efforts were a hybrid of fact and fiction, which in some ways challenged definitions of fiction as ‘make-­believe’, in that they were often based on real events and were designed to provoke misrecognition as non-­fiction footage. Specialising in bringing the trauma of battle to the screen, Watkins was undoubtedly 19

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attempting to educate his audience as to the futility of war, a mission that Currie finds valuable, ‘If works of literature – and of narrative fiction generally – have the capacity to affect us in ways significantly like the ways the world can affect us, then the idea that we can learn from fiction becomes at least very plausible.’56 Drawing on his own military experience, Watkins imagined what it might have been like to be a soldier in World War Two and World War One, and a freedom fighter in Budapest during the 1956 ‘uprising’, to create his scenarios for The Web (1956), The Diary of an Unknown Soldier (1959) and The Forgotten Faces (1961), respectively. Here, English locations doubled for both France and Hungary, demonstrating an ingenuity that set Watkins apart from most of his amateur peers. Of all the amateur filmmakers discussed in this volume, he seems least sympathetic to the artifices of fiction, and favoured the mode only as a useful means to reconstruct past events; Cook describes this as an ‘anti-­Hollywood’ approach, in which various experimental techniques are utilised in order to approach the ‘reality effect’. With his work constructed in this way, Watkins can be seen as an oppositional filmmaker in the amateur cine movement. In addition, as the quotations from Tony Rose suggest, the fiction films of Peter Watkins serve as examples of exceptional amateur practice – in particular, his use of subjective camera and voiceover in order to create the impression of a personalised newsreel account. While Watkins longed for increased cinematic ‘realism’, Ken Russell instead spent both his amateur and professional career trying to escape it. As Brain Hoyle explains, much like Watkins, Ken Russell also went on to work for the BBC, following a period of overwhelming critical praise for his amateur fiction films. Similarly, he also preserved the cinematic aesthetic developed during his amateur years, a commitment that, both authors argue, contributed to innovation in their professional television techniques. Russell’s emphasis on exaggerated visual spectacle corresponds closely to aesthetic aspirations that have been noted elsewhere amongst those who use paintings as a model for their photographic practice. Indeed, Russell’s experience as a professional photographer prepared him to cross over into amateur moving pictures. As Castel and Schnapper note, ‘The fascination with painting or the desire to differentiate between painting and photography conveys the same aspiration to art. Painting is the noble art, the one which provides the clearest guarantee of aestheticism for an activity in search of security.’57 Ken Russell’s amateur films are expressions of such a passion for ‘high’ art, which contributed to his perceived ‘outsider’ status in the British film industry, but was also typical of a love of European art cinema cultivated by the film society movement. Much like Enrico Cocozza, Russell enjoyed creating amateur fictions that often simultaneously displayed a cultural stance equally appreciative of popular comedic traditions and a more elevated ‘artistic’ filmmaking. Incorporating influences from Chaplin to Cocteau, amateur fiction films such as Peep Show (1957) and Amelia and the Angel (1958) demonstrate the enduring importance of silent film aesthetics to amateurs during this period more generally, ­20

introduction: ambitions and arguments

alongside growing receptiveness to continental influence in particular. Whilst a number of amateur filmmakers shared this aesthetic orientation and openness, few achieved the institutional support and artistic plaudits of Amelia and the Angel. This self-­supported amateur film received funding from the British Film Institute (BFI), to enable post-­production work on improving the soundtrack (poor-­quality soundtracks often being the giveaway of amateur status), and through his account, Hoyle details something that might be considered an oxymoron: the economics of amateurism. As the author reveals, both the BFI and the Catholic Film Institute had an important role in making sure Amelia and the Angel was seen by a wide public using their established distribution ­networks, and once again Tony Rose’s writings in Amateur Movie Maker meant Russell’s efforts were given a remarkable reception within the amateur press. All of these diverse factors help explain why some makers of amateur fiction cross over into the professional industry and many more never make that leap. Greg DeCuir’s chapter, dealing with a filmmaker considered one of the founding fathers of amateur cinema in Croatia and Yugoslavia, maps connections and contributions under-­represented in the emerging scholarship of small-­ gauge filmmaking. A survey of Oktavijan Miletic’s life and films as a member of the Zagreb Photo Club and Zagreb Ciné-­club provides the opportunity to outline an early institutional history of amateurism during the 1920s and 1930s in this region. DeCuir argues that the artistry and technique displayed in Miletic’s prize-­winning films set his work apart from more standardised modes of amateur cinema. As other chapters in this section have suggested, amateur artistry is often prone to critical relocation and assimilation to traditions within which it may be more readily understood, often at the expense of its specifically amateur resonances. Studies of ‘exceptional’ small-­gauge films and filmmakers, seen to transcend typical amateur trends, are often linked to establishing canons of ‘national’ production. In Scotland, for example, the student films of Norman McLaren have often been invoked to illustrate such supposed exceptionalism, yet the difficulty of using the work of one amateur filmmaker to symbolise the potential output of an entire nation remains problematical. DeCuir avoids such a pull towards metonymy, in describing the fluid fashion in which Miletic managed to move between the amateur and professional worlds. Like Watkins and Russell, he may have been best known for his professional works, but a critical re-­evaluation of his earlier amateur films reveals continuities between both types of ‘Oktavian Film’. Such research into small-­ gauge cine culture in socialist societies is particularly fascinating, as it allows scholarship to trace how amateurism developed within alternative socio-­ cultural contexts.58 DeCuir employs third cinema theory, in particular Julio Garcia Espinosa’s writing on an ‘imperfect cinema’, to theorise the generic hybridity of Miletic’s amateur fictional output. Describing these films, he notes that they resemble conventional generic exercises in crime, romantic comedy, psychological thriller, horror film, expressionism and literary adaptation, but 21

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stresses that, by playing with these genres, Miletic melds and reshapes them to the extent that they may exhibit generic instability to contemporary eyes. Miletic’s critical reputation in his home country is as a ‘master filmmaker’, a discourse that often attempts to account for such work using the language of the avant-­garde or modernism.59 However, as DeCuir points out, his films also pastiche/parody professional works, a creative manœuvre often seen as typical of amateur creativity, which makes problematic attempts to sustain a rhetoric of superiority around the achievements of certain ‘great men’ at the expense of examinations of wider influences and filmic trends. Genres and genericity If the chapters in the previous section sought to understand amateur cinema through the example of individual filmmakers, Siegfried Mattl and Vrääth Öhner demonstrate what we can we learn from the early history of amateur cinema in Austria from just one film. The title in question is The Green Cockatoo (1932), made by a loose collective of young Viennese enthusiasts, whose efforts produced an impressive feature-­length amateur work, further demonstrating the appeals of adaptation within the sector. While the film is nominally based on a controversial stage play by Arthur Schnitzler, this was no conventional literary adaptation. As Mattl and Öhner explain, the screen version employs many melodramatic devices and shifts in register in the telling of its story, again exhibiting the sort of generic instability also noted in DeCuir’s chapter. Drawing on a ‘bricolage of heterogeneous traditions’, including such diverse cultural material as pulp novels, tabloid stories, crime films and traditional folk tales, the group thus illustrate a very amateur tendency towards eclecticism and the reframing of ‘borrowed’ tropes in localised settings. Their films featured stock character types like the hero, the city vagrant and the foreign villain, alongside recognisable elements of narratives produced in the commercial cinema, and these ingredients were mixed by the amateur filmmakers, to produce a particular kind of city story. Based on an early example of Austrian amateur cinema, Mattl and Öhner’s close analysis of The Green Cockatoo benefits from their knowledge of the ‘situated’ nature of the film in both social and geographical terms. In addition to reflecting on the creative choices made by the filmmakers, their analysis introduces an investigation of the locations used in the film, in the process providing an extra-­textual context that enriches the viewing experience. The lococentric emphasis of previous chapters is reiterated in Karen Lury’s study of family films located almost exclusively in the home, which provide a sharp contrast with the more public geographical inscriptions investigated in Mattl and Öhner’s chapter. The work examined here is both more personal in nature, and the product of more privatised participations than most of the filmmaking considered hitherto. While cine club members often filmed their narratives in club premises or in relatively public settings, many ‘lone workers’ ­22

introduction: ambitions and arguments

crafted simple storylines around their own domestic spaces, turning their everyday environment into makeshift sets and their immediate family into temporary stars. On the one hand, these ‘family films’ can be utilised as visual documents of mid-­century middle-­class life, allowing spectators to indulge in an evidential interest in household objects and perhaps witnessing somewhat antiquated relations between parents and children, masters and servants. Yet on the other hand, unlike more conventional non-­fiction ‘home movies’, these family films can be interpreted as products of the imagination. Lury analyses this dual tension between merely recording everyday environments, and creating stories for wider public appreciation through recourse to Horace Necomb’s formulation of the ‘domestic comedy’. Lury is particularly interested in how such family film stories produce ‘something other’ than mere family records; like Mats Jönsson, she therefore discusses the ‘doubling’ nature of much amateur fiction, which attempts to turn the ‘real’ into a representation. When analysed together as examples of a distinct genre of amateur fictional filmmaking, rather than unique products of exceptional families, the attempt to capture childhood from the point of view of the child by an affectionate adult is more than discernible. United by a love for both the filmmaking process and the people in front the camera, these amateur efforts are seen as reframing reality as ­entertainment in a most engaging way. If some amateur filmmakers turned their love for their family into fiction, others worked to transform their love for commercial cinema into forms of production expressing remarkable dreams of participation, innate senses of ownership and deep-­seated attachment to particular genres and cultural moments. Ciara Chambers’s chapter on Northern Ireland’s celebrated Spence brothers (Roy and Noel) speculates on the reasons for such imaginative immersion, and considers the practical and/or conceptual reasons why such amateur filmmakers were attracted to making science-­fiction productions in particular during the 1960s and 1970s. As her chapter explains, Roy and Noel Spence clearly both delight in the practical problems of creating ‘no-­budget’ special effects and make-­up, but also in refiguring their favourite American popular culture into their own amateur fiction ­film versions, using local locations as backdrops. Indeed, some of the most interesting aspects of the Spence brothers’ filmic output emerge through a tracing of the overlapping national traditions and more proximate forces at work, and the tensions established therein with the encouragement to ‘make-­believe’ cued through invocation of such patently fictional inter-­texts. The brothers’ highly active engagement in British amateur cine culture during the 1970s and 1980s resulted in profiles published in amateur film journals such as Movie Maker (1967–85), yet, as Chambers argues, while Ireland on-­screen has been represented as either a rural idyll or a site of conflict, the Spence brothers’ films can be thought of as a distillation of a distinctly ‘Americanised Ireland’. For them, the production of their own amateur fantasy films was an outgrowth of the enthusiasm generated by their screenings of cherished commercial ‘cult’ cinema, especially 23

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American B-­movies of the 1950s. For example, as Chambers details, their film Keep Watching the Skies (1975) takes its title from a line in The Thing from Another World (1951), while the plot for the film was inspired by The Blob (1958). Perhaps most importantly, Chambers is interested in understanding the reasons why reworkings of American popular culture in another geographic and cultural context might have been pursued with such unashamed enthusiasm, arguing that amateur fantasy films can be interpreted as a displaced commentary on the socio-­political situation of the Northern Ireland of the time. Certainly, in relation to more theoretical frames of reference, such activities represent intriguing examples of a particularly heightened form of cinephilia. Thomas Elsaesser has elsewhere recommended a rethinking of cinephilia as a process of ‘deferral’, in which spectators are engaged in an act of nostalgia for earlier moments in film history and a desire for relocation to other locales; by moving from spectatorship to production, the Spence brothers underline the pertinence to such a formulation for a reconsideration of amateur affiliations.60 Certainly the trans-­national nature of fan cultures, which cross both temporal and national boundaries, is more than evident in Chambers’s case study of the Spence brothers. Indeed, the films produced by the figures featured in this final section are the clearest evidence yet of an often-­overlooked legacy of the amateur cine movement. If, to paraphrase André Bazin, we were to ask, ‘What is amateur cinema?’, at least one answer would be that amateur cine is the trace of a deep-­seated love of fiction.61 Notes   1. For example, see Anon., ‘The “Amateur Cine World” ten best films of 1948’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1949, pp. 26–7. The list of winning films was published annually.   2. For example, David Bruce writes that, ‘It should also be registered in something more than a footnote that during this time, the only other source of Scottish story films was the amateur movement, an area easily overlooked by historians,’ in ‘The History of Film and Cinema’, in Neil Blain and David Hutchison (eds), The Media in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 80.   3. For example, the programme for the three-­day conference ‘Saving Private Reels: On the Presentation, Appropriation and Re-­contextualisation of the Amateur Moving Image’, held at University College Cork, Ireland, in September 2010, lists abstracts for forty-­six papers; of these, only five concern amateur fiction films. Liz Czach’s ‘Selected Bibliography’, published in the edited collection Mining the Home Movie, includes a section detailing scholarly work on documentary titled ‘Home Movies and Nonnarrative Filmmaking’, but curiously no section is devoted to scholarly work on fiction; see Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann (eds), Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (London: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 302–4. Such observations demonstrate the extent to which the study of amateur cinema has evolved as a sub-­category of documentary studies.   4. Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. ix.   5. Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction, p. 11.

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introduction: ambitions and arguments

  6. For example, see Roland Barthes, ‘The death of the author’, in his Image Music Text (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 142–8.   7. For example, see Patricia R. Zimmermann, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995).   8. Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction, p. 18.   9. Ibid., p. 20. 10. Ibid., p. 21. 11. Gregory Currie, ‘What is fiction?’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 43, No. 4, 1985, p. 387. 12. Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction, p. 4. 13. See, for example, Dwight Swanson, ‘Inventing amateur film: Marion Norris Gleason, Eastman Kodak and the Rochester scene, 1921–1932’, Film History, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2003, pp. 126–36; Ryan Shand, ‘Amateur cinema re-­located: localism in fact and fiction’, in Ian Craven (ed.), Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema (Newcastle-­upon-­Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 156–81; and Ian Craven, ‘Hitchcock and small-­gauge: Shaping the amateur fiction film’, Journal of Media Practice, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2012, pp. 19–44. 14. Fred Camper, ‘Some notes on the home movie’, Journal of Film and Video, No. 3–4, 1986, p. 9. 15. Roger Odin, ‘A semio-­pragmatic approach to the documentary film’, in Warren Buckland (ed.), The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995), p. 228. 16. The term ‘Screen theory’ is used by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll in their Post-­Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), and refers to the scholarly film and television journal Screen, now published by Oxford University Press. 17. Roger Odin, ‘A semio-­pragmatic approach to the documentary film’, pp. 228–9. 18. Roger Odin, ‘For a semio-­pragmatics of film’, in Warren Buckland (ed.), The Film Spectator: From Sign to Mind (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995), p. 219. 19. Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). Alex Neill stresses the importance of seeing situations ‘from their point of view’, in his ‘Empathy and (film) fiction’, in David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (eds), Post-­Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), p. 181. 20. Previews / reviews of these two Ten Best winning films are highly informative. On Coming Shortly: ‘Sin by sin up the ladder of fame climbs the sultry heroine who drives men mad. What was the secret of her allure? But a trailer, though it lavishly hints, won’t tell you. You must wait for the film which is “coming shortly”. And to compel your patronage, dazzling highlights from the scorching drama are set before you, surging in mounting extravagance, boiling with lurid titles . . . This rich parody of the professional trailer is more than a mere collection of riotous snippets. There is coherence in its cunning assembly and a nice turn of wit in the linking of its mad excess with devastatingly pedestrian local scenes,’ in Anon., ‘The “Amateur Cine World” ten best films of 1954’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 19, No. 1, 1955, p. 52. On The Bottom of the Barrel: ‘Three script writers are at a loss for a script. What about this? asks one of them.’ The synopsis then details scenes that satirise the conventions of commercial genres such as romance, war and science fiction. The reviewer comments that, ‘Some parts of the film fail to make full impact because they fall too far below the level of the originals they satirise.’ Interestingly, the 26–year-­old filmmaker Michael Bradsell is quoted as saying, ‘“If the fact that I work as a film editor for United Motion Pictures . . . suggests that I have an unfair advantage, I would like to point out that the films I am paid to work on and the films I make because I want to are so different in subject matter that my

25

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own efforts are just as exploratory and experimental as any amateur’s,”’ in Anon., ‘The Ten Best Films of 1958’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 23, No. 2, 1959, p. 163. 21. An anonymous reviewer wrote of The End: ‘it is a short but all too complete anthology of the sort of things which the zealous but uncreative amateur cinematographer is liable to perpetrate when he’s let loose with a camera . . . We predict that this film will raise more laughter than anything else we have included in any Ten Best programme ever. Maybe the laughter will be just a little bit uncomfortable if there are many fellow-­producers in the audience!’, in Anon., ‘The Ten Best of 1960’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 1, No. 13, 1961, p. 535. The film was also previewed in the following way: ‘There has never been a film quite like The End. Here is someone who has looked mercilessly at his fellow-­cinematographers and exposed their obsession for our delight – and possibly to our discomfort! Here are wicked digs at everything which does not go to make a winning film. This is comedy with an Awful Warning,’ in Anon., ‘The man behind the movie camera’, Amateur Cine World Ten Best National Amateur Film Awards of 1960 programme, p. 7. 22. It is argued that three main trends emerge from these self-­reflexive tendencies:





1. Promotional pictures, advocating the benefits of well-­planned movie-­making, usually utilising a ‘sin and redemption’ plot whereby a lone-­worker filmmaker, who has bored friends and family with his early efforts, joins a club in order to learn how to make better films; examples include The New Member (1959) and Reel Success (1974). 2. Comic introductions, such as Clansman at Work (1965) and Handicap (1965),  which lampoon the production apparatus and routines of the pastime,  whilst also serving as short introductions to screenings of longer amateur films. 3. Satirical stories, in which cine club members satirise both their domestic lives, as in Hire and Higher (1963), and interactions with their filmmaking peers, a tendency well illustrated by In Committee (1966), The Persuader (c. 1970) and Big Ideas (1982) – a short comedy in which members try to come up with an idea for a production to be shown at an event on the theme of ‘inflation’, but instead decide to save money by submitting an old film.

23. Dalziel Cine Club was ‘originally founded by Jessie Matthews of Motherwell who placed an advert in the Motherwell Times inviting anyone interested in forming a cine club to meet at the Motherwell YMCA on 4th October 1960’. The club ran for almost fifty years, finally closing on 4 March 2008. Brian Saberton, ‘Dalziel Cine Club, Dalziel Cine & Video Club, Dalziel Camcorder Club, Season By Season’, Scottish Screen Archive paper collection, ref. no. 3/10/10. 24. Note: while this film was originally made as a silent production in the late 1960s, George Morice (club president from 1991 to 1993) later added a voiceover some twenty years later, which illustrates the interior thoughts of the main character. The film therefore pre-­dates the similarly titled Abba song ‘The Winner Takes It All’ (1980). This 1980s version is the one available to view in the archive, so it is to the later version that my analysis refers. 25. Robert Castel and Dominique Schnapper, ‘Aesthetic ambitions and social aspirations: The camera club as a secondary group’, in Pierre Bourdieu, with Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-­Claude Chamboredon and Dominique Schnapper, Photography: A Middle-­Brow Art (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), p. 103. 26. The Rose Bowl, the major trophy of Dalziel Cine Club, was first won in 1963 by John Graham. Brian Saberton, ‘Dalziel Cine Club, Dalziel Cine & Video Club, Dalziel Camcorder Club, Season by season’, Scottish Screen Archive paper ­collection, ref. no. 3/10/10.

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27. See James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value (London: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 3–4. 28. Ibid., p. 8. 29. Gregory Currie, ‘Visual fictions’, Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 163, 1991, p. 136. 30. Ibid., pp. 137, 138. 31. Ibid., p. 139. 32. Noël Carroll, ‘The power of movies’, in his Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 80. 33. Ibid., p. 84. 34. Ibid., p. 85. 35. See Ian Craven’s contribution to the present volume, ‘Sewell, Rose, and the ­aesthetics of amateur cine fiction’, pp. 55–82. 36. For example, the following quotations are taken from interviews conducted by the author and Dr Les Roberts during the ‘Mapping the City in Film: A Geohistorical Analysis’ project based at the University of Liverpool: Pauline Harrison, Preston Movie Makers, ‘It seems to be mainly for men, you know, there’s more men at this hobby than women,’ 4 November 2009; Sheila Evans, Warrington Cine and Video Society, ‘You’re lucky if you get about half a dozen ladies these days (attending club meetings). It’s male-­dominated (laughs). Have you found it always to be like that? Yes, yes, oh yes,’ 25 September 2009; Jim Morris, Southport Movie Makers, ‘I do feel quite strongly that this lack of female participation in club activities is detrimental,’ 4 March 2009. 37. The voiceover suggests that the character is inspired to commit these crimes by Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (1939), although it is unclear at this stage whether the original director Billy Rae was similarly influenced by this story, or if this was a literary allusion concocted especially for the purposes of clarifying the narrative within the voiceover, added at a later stage. The plot of Christie’s novel focuses on ten killings on a remote island, which are carried out in an exacting and systematic fashion. It was subsequently adapted as a play and published by Samuel French in 1944. 38. Ian Craven writes in the present volume, ‘the much-­endorsed “twist” ending, made acceptable rather than puzzling, through (albeit delayed) revelation of its underlying causal motivation’, p. 68. 39. Noël Carroll, ‘The power of movies’, pp. 89, 88, respectively. 40. Robert Castel and Dominique Schnapper, ‘Aesthetic ambitions and social aspirations’, p. 104. 41. Ian Craven, ‘A Very Fishy Tale: The curious case of amateur subjectivity’, in his (ed.) Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema, pp. 1–33. 42. Gregory Currie, ‘Realism of character and the value of fiction’, in Jerrold Levinson (ed.), Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 161. 43. Ibid., p. 163. 44. Ibid., p. 164. 45. Ibid., p. 169. 46. Ibid., pp. 173, 176. 47. Carl Gustav Jung, ‘Psychology and literature’, in his The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 114–15. 48. Guy Edmonds, ‘Historical, aesthetic, cultural: The problematical value of amateur cine fiction’, p. 34. 49. Elliot Grove, Raindance Writers’ Lab: Write and Sell the Hot Screenplay (Oxford: Focal, 2009), p. 41. 50. Robert Castel and Dominique Schnapper, ‘Aesthetic ambitions and social ­aspirations’, p. 127.

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51. See John Cook’s contribution to the present volume, ‘“This is not Hollywood!”: Peter Watkins and the challenge of amateurism to the professional’, pp. 183–200. 52. Gregory Currie, ‘Visual fictions’, p. 131. 53. Robert Castel and Dominique Schnapper, ‘Aesthetic ambitions and social aspirations’, p. 105. 54. Maria Vinogradova, ‘“High Art” locally: The screen adaptations of IuG-­Film’, p. 148. 55. Robert Castel and Dominique Schnapper, ‘Aesthetic ambitions and social aspirations’, p. 108. 56. Gregory Currie, ‘Realism of character and the value of fiction’, p. 163. Alex Neill has also pointed out that, ‘It is often held that the value of fiction lies largely in what it can contribute to the education of emotion. For example, in the Poetics, Aristotle holds that the pleasure we take in mimetic works is a pleasure that comes from learning,’ ‘Empathy and (film) fiction’, p. 179. 57. Robert Castel and Dominique Schnapper, ‘Aesthetic ambitions and social ­aspirations’, p. 110. 58. For an example of amateur non-­fiction films, see Leska Krenz, ‘Private cinema in the GDR – daily life in the GDR on amateur film’, in Sonja Kmec and Viviane Thill (eds), Private Eyes and the Public Gaze: The Manipulation and Valorisation of Amateur Images (Kliomedia: Trier, 2009), pp. 89–95; for an account of amateur fiction films, see Maria Vinogradova’s contribution to the present volume, ‘“High Art” locally: The screen adaptations of IuG-­Film’, pp. 144–63. 59. For example, see Sarah Neely and Alan Riach, ‘Demons in the machine: Experimental film, poetry and modernism in twentieth-­century Scotland’, in Jonathan Murray, Fidelma Farley and Rod Stoneman (eds), Scottish Cinema Now (Newcastle-­upon-­Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 1–19. 60. Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Cinephilia or the uses of disenchantment’, in Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener (eds), Cinephilia: Movies, Love and Memory (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), p. 30. 61. André Bazin, What is Cinema? (London: University of California Press, 2005).

Filmography Big Ideas (Dalziel Cine Club, 1982) 8mm, 8.15 mins, colour, sound. The Bottom of the Barrel (M. H. Bradsell, 1958) 16mm, 19 mins, black and white, sound. Clansman at Work (Clansman Films, 1965) 16mm, 4 mins, black and white, sound. Coming Shortly (High Wycombe Film Society/Tony Rose and Christopher Barry, 1954) 16mm, 4 mins, black and white, silent. The End (Wharfedale Films/John Wyborn, 1960) 16mm, 4 mins, black and white, sound. Handicap (Edinburgh Cine Society, 1965) 8mm, 4.42 mins, colour, sound. Hire and Higher (Swan Cine Club, 1963) 8mm, 18.16 mins, colour, silent. In Committee (Dalziel Cine Club, 1966) 8mm, 3.36 mins, colour, silent. It Happened Here (Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo, 1964) 16mm, 97 mins, black and white, sound. The New Member (Aberdeen and District Cine Club, 1959) 16mm, 9.14 mins, black and white, silent. The Persuader (Bryan Law, c. 1970) 8mm, 1.46 mins, colour, silent. Reel Success (Edinburgh Cine Society/Ron McLaren, 1974) 8mm, 14 mins, colour, sound. Winner Takes All (Dalziel Cine Club/Billy Rae, 1968) 8mm, 7.39 mins, colour, sound.

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It Happened Here was released commercially on DVD by Film First in 2006. The Bottom of the Barrel, Coming Shortly and The End are held by the East Anglian Film Archive, The Archive Centre, Martineau Lane, Norwich NR1 2DQ, United Kingdom; tel.: 01603 592 664; http://www.eafa.org.uk; email: [email protected]; The End is available online at the archive’s website: http://www.eafa.org.uk/catalogue/3989 Hire and Higher is available from Angus Tilston: Pleasures Past, 17 Poulton Road, Bebington, Wirral, Merseyside CH63 9LA, United Kingdom; tel.: 0151 3345546, www.pleasurespast.nepc.co.uk; email: [email protected] All other titles are available from the Scottish Screen Archive: Scottish Screen Archive, c/o: National Library of Scotland, Collections Department, 39–41 Montrose Avenue, Hillington Park, Glasgow G52 4LA, United Kingdom; tel.: 0845 366 4600; http:// www.nls.uk/ssa/; email: [email protected]

29

1. HISTORICAL, AESTHETIC, CULTURAL: THE PROBLEMATICAL VALUE OF AMATEUR CINE FICTION GUY EDMONDS

It is now well understood that a trio of partners should be maintained for the successful realisation of the archive sector’s public mission. Archives have realised that they can no longer operate in isolation, and have increasingly sought collaborations with the Academy and practitioners of the Avant-­garde, both as a way of extending their cultural reach and as a means of securing greater resources. The emerging relationships have been usefully described by Thomas Elsaesser as a matter of triangulation between these three key ‘A’s, and there are signs that contact is proving mutually productive.1 Although this new coalition is serving the sector well, it has, however, so far largely focused on professionally produced non-­fiction film. As a student of Elsaesser, I was impressed by this formulation of the three ‘A’s, and began thinking about how it might be applied to amateur film. Since then, I have been among those arguing for an extension of the network to include amateur filmmakers themselves. From such a perspective, this chapter suggests personalising the arrangement and introducing a fourth ‘A’ of the Amateur, alongside the existing Academic, Archivist and Artist.2 With amateur film as one’s subject, both non-­fiction and fiction varieties, this would seem an obvious step, but it is by no means universally undertaken, despite the increase in attention that production beyond the professional sphere has received in recent decades. To exclude the subject of one’s study from involvement in the study may make sense in terms of maintaining an impartial scientific approach, but the move has grave consequences in terms of gathering initial data. The three ‘A’s are part of a professional network accustomed to dealing with the work of professional filmmakers. To introduce the amateur into this system may require some re-­alignment of procedures, but I would argue that it is essential not just for the business of acquisition, which is the main concern 33

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of this chapter, but also for the successful interpretation of the works and the practices from which they have emerged. Such an extended network can also be more responsive to the operation of the amateur text, whilst identifying and resolving gaps in coverage of its ­distinctive features. We are currently in a situation where the study of amateur fiction film is gaining interest in the academy, a process of which this book is itself a part. Yet although the expanding literature of amateur Film Studies increasingly emphasises scholarly connections to archive practice, with a publication such as the 2008 anthology Mining The Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, equally weighting contributions from archivists and academics, there has been little scrutiny so far that has specifically concerned itself with the place of the amateur fiction film in the archive, or the issues that it raises there.3 This chapter aims to fill that gap and to encourage further exploration of the field. It is the archival response to the amateur fiction film with which the chapter principally concerns itself, though reference is also made to the role of artists and amateur practitioners themselves. Mapping the Field Despite my experience over ten years or so working among an international community of small-­gauge practitioners, and on amateur film preservation projects in the archive sector, I have rarely been specifically concerned with the question of amateur fiction film.4 Although both practitioners and archivists recognise the genre as something they have experienced, it has attracted little critical attention in its own right. In part, this seems largely a matter of misrecognition and old habits of scrutiny, for beyond their status as fictions, such works are always something else: repositories of personal memory, and records of places and people – in short, ‘evidential’ documents to be studied through diverse historical, aesthetic and cultural approaches. In the main, questions of fictitiousness per se tend to disappear as an issue in such a context, whose priorities lie elsewhere. Making a similar turn, study of such films as material objects, to be investigated on a technical level, with focus on features such as format, film stock and colour system, also rarely distinguishes any specifically fictional nature. So far, amateur fiction films have been archived primarily in these evidential and technical terms, with their catalogue entries as ‘amateur’ apparently requiring no further qualifying adjective. Without the aforementioned signalling from one of the ‘A’ partners, fascinating fictional works can thus hide under any number of categories and labels. Close inspection of archive holdings reveals, however, that they are often there, though not because they are amateur fiction films, and certainly not valued on that basis. Perhaps this simply reflects the current under-­development of archival thinking. After all, it is not long ago that amateur film in general was considered a specialism too far within established Film Studies circles. Scholarship and ­34

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research were rare, and dedicated courses even rarer. Over the past decade or so, however, specialist attention has become more common. Small-­Gauge Storytelling, of course, is part of the process of refining this emerging specialism further, extending exploration of the term ‘amateur’ with reference to another pre-­existing genre, much as I have done elsewhere, in juxtaposing the amateur with the term ‘widescreen’.5 Whilst this process of fine-­tuning terms takes time, and negotiation amongst the relevant community of intellectual stakeholders, within the confines of the archive, it will surely in due course lead from an initial awareness of more hybrid generic identities, to active steps – collection, preservation, access – that will support study more attuned to fictional status, always bearing in mind that time in the vaults runs a little slower than time in the outside world. Current collections offer considerable scope for research with such questions in mind. Most film archives have computerised catalogues, the different fields of which can be searched individually or in combination, to find particular records with common fields. Some will have a field for amateur film, now a reasonably well-­established category amongst archivists, but few if any will have a category reserved for the amateur fiction film. The question ‘How many amateur fiction films do you have?’ or ‘Can I see a list of your amateur fiction films?’ has simply not been asked often enough to stimulate the creation of such a descriptor, and ensure its addition to the searchable fields of the database. Indeed, when posing the question during the research for this chapter, the impression was very much that it had never been asked before.6 With no one asking to see what already exists in the archive, the impetus to collect more is, of course, reduced, underlining the key role to be played by the academic researcher in the concrete development of archive policy. Scrutiny of a particular archive’s practices refines some of the issues at stake here. The catalogue of EYE Film Institute Netherlands, for example, the national archive for cinematographic heritage, is accessed via three levels of information, identified as film titles, filmographic data and copy data. An amateur fiction film, if described correctly under current procedures, would be indicated as ‘fiction’ under ‘type’ (at the film title level), with a choice only between fiction, non-­fiction and unknown, and ‘amateur’ under ‘genre’ (at the filmographic data level). At this point, the drop-­down list of genres provides many other choices in place of, or in addition to, that of ‘amateur’, and thus the possibility of less than clear distinctions arises, when the different people responsible for registration assign definitional terms. In practice, the catalogue is used as a supplement to the knowledge of archive staff who can work through a request such as ‘How many amateur fiction films do you have?’ with an interpretative human intelligence. As archive culture moves towards prioritising online access and staff are reduced to a bare minimum, however, unqualified catalogue data is increasingly relied upon for guidance, whilst the insider knowledge so crucial to researchers and other users becomes an increasingly scarce resource. A speculative search for ‘amateur film’ in the EYE 35

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database, for example, yields 1,779 titles. Combining this with ‘fiction’ quickly narrows the search for amateur fiction films down to just sixty references. The result of Dorette Schootemeijer, collection specialist for amateur film, and the author discussing the search together, in fact, yielded just five titles. However, what initially appears like a victory for the electronic search engine produces a listing that requires further interpretation, and this still needs to be undertaken by archive staff. Of the sixty results, twenty-­one could be immediately discounted, because they refer to films that are known of from other sources, but which are not actually present in the collection – in other words, at the copy level there is no record. A number of the thirty-­nine remaining had titles that somewhat disguised standard ‘home mode’ holiday films. These had been catalogued as both fiction and non-­fiction, rather than simply as non-­fiction, indicative perhaps of the ambiguous social work and aesthetic ambitions of many such examples, or perhaps simply of bad cataloguing. Removing these ‘uncertainties’ left just thirteen titles, four of which coincided with the list of five films previously identified, through conversation with the collection specialist. Io Bacchoi (Oh, Bacchantes, 1964), an experimental drama on the theme of theatrical rehearsal, the one film we thought of that was not picked up by this search in my discussion of the case studies, will be returned to below. Its story is highly suggestive of the contradictions surrounding amateur film’s place in the archive. In both the academy and the archive, the question of defining amateur fiction film poses crucial problems. For the organs of the archive to function well, there must clearly be tacit agreement over the definition of a category, which, in the case of the amateur fiction film, has not yet been widely identified or discussed. The multiple users of a catalogue also ideally need to agree, as with one mind, as to what constitutes amateur fiction film, and even were this actually possible, they would still doubtless come across individual cases blurring the boundaries of any agreed definition. While students of amateur-­ generated footage also struggle with such questions of demarcation, amateur filmmakers themselves remain significantly aloof from such concerns. For those very films that frustrate the cataloguer by exhibiting both fictional and non-­fictional tendencies are perhaps indicative of a decidedly amateur impulse towards a reconciliation of the modes sometimes encouraged in movement discourse, and often symptomatic of typically amateur modes of production.7 Since we are concerned here with conscious attempts at fiction filmmaking, we can disregard the argument that at some level all films are fictional, recognising that the functions of family record films and family-­based fictional explorations are often overlain and inter-­dependent. As other writers in this volume note, manuals for amateurs often encouraged camera-­owners to narrativise their home movies, in the name of improved watchability,8 whilst some went even further, promoting fully-­fledged family ‘mellerdramas’, in ways suggested by this entry, drawn from the invaluable ‘Small Gauge and Amateur Film Bibliography’, compiled by Margaret Compton: ­36

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Garon, Jay, and Morgan Wilson. The Family Movie-­Making Book: Playlets, Comedies, ‘Mellerdramas’, Quickies, Short Stories, Even Talkies,  to Turn Your Home Movies into Great Entertainment. Indianapolis: Bobbs–Merrill, 1977. 249 pp., ill., 25 cm. Garon and Wilson focus on family story-­film production details such as costumes, makeup, and scenarios, as well as lighting, editing, titling, and sound considerations. A sample script is included, along with photos and line drawings illustrating their points.9 A good example of such a film, given a degree of notoriety through Susan Aasman’s publishing and lecturing, is the Dutch Kerstverhaal (Christmas Story, 1926), in which members of the filmmaker’s family play themselves as mother and child, and ‘fictional’ roles as religious figures, Mary and Jesus, simultaneously.10 While such a film may generate an interesting scholarly discussion over the problems of genre distinction, it clearly provides a headache for the archive worker attempting to register its presence and enter it into the catalogue. As has been suggested, such a film will probably not have been selected for acceptance because it is a good example of an amateur fiction film per se. Films of this type that have, through whatever circumstance, secured archival protection may well display a range of amateur characteristics and tendencies towards fiction, and at the end of the day, it is up to the individual cataloguer to determine how they should best be represented. At the moment of decision, the catalogue itself, with its often-­predetermined categories, introduces a further level of semantic complication. Where do we draw the line in the initial assessment of the film and where does the catalogue allow the line to be drawn? At the current levels of acquisition, such questions may well seem academic. After all, thirteen results from the national film archive of Holland may seem to be a rather paltry number. However, to be fair, EYE fits into a much wider network of national and regional archives, all of which can be seen to have some responsibility for collecting amateur fiction films. For example, the Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum, another vital institution on the Dutch scene, also has a national scope, functioning primarily as an archive of broadcast media, but also serving since 2006 as custodian of the collection of the former Smalfilmmuseum, the only national archive to have specialised in the collection of amateur cine material. Even here, though, the marginal status of amateur fiction film fails to make a specific impression on the archives’ individual missions. The primary task given to such institutions by the government, of preserving and making accessible the nation’s moving image heritage, does not of course state whether any specific amateur film should be collected by EYE, the Institute for Sound and Vision, or one of the regional film archives with responsibilities for collecting local documentation, including film material. The United Kingdom has a similar structure of regional and national film archives, and a large broadcast archive, whose members can theoretically lay 37

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claim to the collection of amateur fiction film, but largely refrain from doing so. Decisions over such questions of policy probably have rather more to do with practical realities than the existence of any official directive, however, if the Dutch experience is anything to go by. Genre-­bending and mode-­shifting as they are, amateur fiction films can be accommodated or excluded by all manner of institutional remits. Like other forms of amateur production, small-­gauge fictions have the potential to transcend the institutional confines of professionally produced film and its national and regional accommodations, and find an appropriate home in a sociological institute or a local history society. Clearly, there can be concerns regarding the facilities for preservation in such non-­specialist archives, and it is advisable to transfer films to a specialist repository if minimum requirements for storage cannot be met.11 A good example of a non-­film archive with an amateur film collection is the Huis van Alijn, a museum of everyday life, located in Ghent, Belgium. The large collection of films housed here consists mostly of digitised home movies, some of which are presented in special displays in the museum. Having received a large number of private films following public appeals, precious prints are out-­sourced back to the families that they came from after copying, and records kept, in case of the need for future consultation of the originals. Whilst this is a museum that, in theory, has no official brief to preserve film within its geographical area, it is nevertheless, as a result of this operation, a valuable member of the amateur film community. Certainly, the work it has done has greatly extended the coverage of the known body of amateur film, and made the resource available for researchers and artists as well as the general public.12 Collecting and the Collectors Archives are perhaps somewhat behind academic research in recognising the unique qualities of the amateur fiction film, but two greater problems in the sector, also seen in connection with other genres, are the absence of a definite collecting sense, and the concomitant fear of an avalanche of material. As a member of a UK cine club, I have been surprised at the lack of interest shown by archives in making contact with amateur practitioners, in contrast to that of television programme-­makers, for example, who seem more aware of the value and possibilities of collaboration with the cine sector. However, as a professional archivist, I am equally conscious of the minimal resources available to archives, a problem only likely to worsen in the current economic climate. Exigencies facing regional archives in particular mean that the work of collection development often becomes entirely reactive, driven solely by the offer of material. Once the existing collection has been secured, there is often little time or money left to mount active campaigns aimed at locating particular items, even those recognised as missing from current holdings. The result is that archives are often composed of what has come to them, rather than what ­38

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they really want in terms of coverage or diversity. Whilst this donation history is in itself valuable, and would certainly reward academic research, it may only serve within the archive to underline absences, duplications and uncertainties. Cine clubs themselves are often key repositories of amateur fiction films, which have been made by members in the past either collectively or as individuals, and which have been held for consultation by subsequent members. Retention of such films in these circumstances may pose important questions of authorship, since many films in such collections were produced as group endeavours and were never the property of a single individual. Of course, this depends on the circumstances of the specific organisation(s) in question, many of which have long since been wound up, but those still existing should provide a rich source of high-­quality fiction films with detailed provenance, which may significantly stimulate research in the field. A landmark example of such an acquisition is that of the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers (IAC) collection, housed since 2006 by the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA) in Norwich.13 The Northwest Film Archive (NWFA), based in Manchester, and contributor to the 2009 ‘Small-­Gauge Storytelling: The Amateur Fiction Film’ symposium in Liverpool, is a regional archive in good contact with cine clubs. NWFA archivist, Nick Gladden, visits clubs in the region two to three times per year, maintaining the archive’s visibility amongst this core community. This productive relationship was apparent at the symposium itself, and marked by the presence of a number of amateur filmmakers from the north-­west region. Events such as this are a good example of the ‘A’s coming together and generating the critical momentum that has partly stimulated the production of this volume. Clearly, such collaboration and exchange will be vital if the amateur fiction film is to survive for posterity and archive holdings are to be improved. Gladden related at the Liverpool gathering that there were 112 amateur fiction films then catalogued in the NWFA collection, representing only about 2 per cent of their total amateur film collection. The archive’s acquisition policy was clarified as following two criteria, the first of which allows for a traditional notion of collecting moving images depicting local content, and the second of which recognises those films which were indicative of the life and interests of north-­west people and organisations. With reference to this second criterion, effectively any film made in the north-­west region could seemingly be selected, whether it showed recognisable north-­west content or not. Acceptance of such a policy is, of course, necessary to the effective collection of amateur fiction films, as they will not always show recognisable local content, and may indeed work very hard to disguise it. Acceptance of less content-­oriented criteria for collection does seem to be spreading; at a national level, Nigel Algar of the British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive believes it would be more than possible to interpret their policy of collecting material that relates to the art, history or impact of film, to favour the acquisition of a desired amateur fiction film. In any case, the move away from questions of representation is an 39

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important step, if holdings of amateur fiction are to be expanded. Yet while sufficient policies seem to exist to avoid discriminating against amateur fiction films, it is difficult to find evidence of sponsors actively encouraging their acquisition. Although the ideal scenario involves long-­term collaboration between cine clubs and archives, the amateur fiction film can present a very good basis for more project-­based contact and collecting. Such an approach has been developed at the Netherlands Filmmuseum with regard to Dutch experimental film, in a three-­year project funded by the Mondriaan Stichting. Elsewhere, the Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, the Italian archive for home movies, has developed campaigns aimed at local collecting and outreach archiving, sponsored, often on a one-­off project basis, by city councils.14 Often, such initiatives have started life as active collecting initiatives, and then followed through with preservation and access phases. Contrasting, but no less valuable projects such as ‘Images for the Future’, based at the EYE Institute Nederlands, have concentrated on preserving and digitising what already existed in the archive.15 Pro-­active archival work of these kinds seems increasingly vital. Most amateur fiction films, like amateur films in general, are held in private collections, either in the care of the filmmakers and societies responsible for their production, or in the private hands of third-­party film collectors. This admittedly large body of film is, however, constantly being diminished, not only through the slow processes of decay that can affect film material, but also as a result of complete and instantaneous destruction. Amateur fiction films are frequently disposed of because films in general are disposed of. The people throwing them away do not know if they are unique examples of outstanding amateur fiction films or just yet another copy of a Mickey Mouse cartoon. The distinction does not occur to them, perhaps, because such material is seen simply as the detritus of one life that has to be cleared away before another can inhabit the space. These are simple enough facts but ones that bear restatement. Of course, such issues are particularly relevant to the case of amateur film collections because of the usually unique nature of the material. The death of a collector can all too easily also prove fatal for the collection, and there are no standard procedures to forestall such an outcome. The image reproduced here from Remember (1977) is taken from a unique amateur fiction film, which very narrowly avoided destruction, in a particular case of rescue in which I was involved.16 Private collectors are traditionally in the vanguard of any new collecting theme, seeing or perhaps feeling an interesting niche long before it has percolated through the system of As. Anyone interested in researching amateur fiction film should certainly make contact with this group, and so too should the archives themselves. At EYE in the Netherlands, an annual collector’s day is organised, to which members of the cine community are invited, and at which they are appropriately feted. The crisis caused to a collection by a ­40

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1.1  Ray Papaia in the role of Guy Fawkes, from the film Remember (1977).

collector’s death can often lead to its destruction, as items are co-­mingled with other everyday effects, and preparations for acquisition need to begin early. Such negotiations with private collectors are not always straightforward, of course, but can often be surprisingly pleasant, and many potential donors will respond delightedly to a rare display of recognition. Maintaining a line of communication is always very valuable, following first contact, often in unexpected ways. On one memorable occasion, I visited a particular Dutch amateur filmmaker, who enjoyed a certain notoriety for making feature-­length versions of Hollywood films using the Super-­8mm format. Having watched two of his films, inspired by The Godfather (1972) and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), in his home cinema with a colleague, we both felt the films would make an outstanding addition to the EYE collection, which then included nothing remotely comparable. The filmmaker was flattered by our attention but wished to retain his films, and the ability to screen them, for the time being. He nevertheless remains in touch with archive staff, should he decide the moment has come to entrust his work to their care, and in the meantime represents an important new link in the extended community. Some of the most remarkable, if not eccentric, examples of the amateur fiction film seem destined to emerge from such sources. The UK-­based artist and collector David Leister, for example, had already noted the appeal of such filmmaking in the 1980s. In his Kino Club events, fine examples of works 41

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such as Beauty and the Bishop (1959) were accompanied with live music and programmed with other found films, such as home movies, as well as sponsored industrial and educational films. One of the most successful amateur fictions was a film called Narcissus (c. 1970s), which was made up from the outtakes of a cine club drama film, its original narrative now radically re-­ ordered with decidedly avant-­garde outcomes.17 Such artistic reworking of pre-­existing material has been a major focus for the increased attention given to amateur film over the last decades, and often a basis for its critical legitimation. Although such works tend to draw predominantly on non-­fiction ‘found’ footage, the input of artists has also given rise to what might be called ‘second-­ generation’ amateur fiction films, where they have picked up on fictions within the non-­fiction material, teased out hidden meanings or freely created new ones. Zoe Beloff is another artist–collector, like Leister, who has assembled a sizeable collection of amateur film while trawling the flea markets of New York. Such material provides the partial source for her installation Freud’s Dreamland (2009), in which she creates a highly convincing and elaborate context for nine subtly adapted films, suggesting they were filmed versions of dreams experienced by members of the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society.18 In films such as The Fishing Trip (2004) and Errands (2006), Ruth Hinkel-­ Pevzner takes non-­fiction home movies from public archives and remoulds them, adding a narrated reminiscence, and thereby nudging them into a fictional but more complete existence.19 The films that she chooses to work with are, however, quite different from those usually sought out by academics, historians or programme-­makers. This may suggest possible dilemmas for the archivist, in his or her potential role as source-­provider for the amateur fiction film. Particularly in the case of the artist–user, it is not possible to collect with any assumptions as to what may be of use to them. Indeed, their value as archive partners partly lies in the way that they can make use of items that would be passed over by other user groups. In this case, the lack of acquisition policies offers a happy corollary for the operation of chance that many artists use to guide their projects. Artists, like collectors, are generally ahead of the game, though an interesting recent example of an art project inspired by amateur fiction film derives from a commercial success, and suggests that even mainstream culture has noticed the fascinations and cultural value of the amateur fiction film. The widely distributed theatrical feature Be Kind Rewind (2008) is perhaps the only such film to reference amateur fiction film. This film has itself been lately repurposed by its director, Michel Gondry, as an interactive environment and installed at venues around the world, including the 2012 International Film Festival Rotterdam. In its new guise as the Home Movie Factory, it becomes a space in which visitors are provided with all the tools and props to make their own fiction films, and revels in the fun of filmmaking in a self-­consciously amateurish way. It is evidence of a new subculture of amateurism evolving out of the appreciation ­42

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of vintage attempts at DIY creativity, from which scholarship around amateur fictional work may yet develop. Three Acquisition Case Studies EYE is the Dutch archive of cinematographic heritage. Films are selected for inclusion on the basis of their ability to represent film culture in the Netherlands. On the face of it, this should mean that the amateur fiction film has an assured place in EYE’s collection, as an intentional product of Dutch amateur film practice, in a genre that specifically relates to the mainstream film culture most familiar to the citizenry. One could argue that, for these reasons, such films should qualify for inclusion on two grounds, providing potential sources for a fascinating investigation of how cinema is actively produced, engaged with and re-­appropriated, in the wider national culture. In practice, however, acquisition policy is rarely so clearly defined and is often inconsistent. Whilst this has the advantage that no straitjacket is imposed on curators, specific acquisition themes may, as a result, remain under-­driven. Flexible policies or protocols, perhaps better described as customs, have none the less evolved over time, and these form a background to more localised decision-­making. Until recently, for example, the unwritten collection policy of the Netherlands  Filmmuseum regarding amateur film had an unusual bias. The organisation had, by this point, built up a very strong collection of amateur films shot in the former Dutch colonies, and having developed this specialism, and displayed its holdings in curated exhibitions and programmes, it naturally continued to seek out further examples.20 These films were seen as complementary to the professional material produced to inform the Dutch population about life in the colonies, and valued very much as the source of significant ‘alternative’ narratives. By the 2000s, such films were present in the collection in large numbers, the Filmmuseum having taken over custodianship of its film holdings from the Tropenmuseum or Institute of the Tropics. Meanwhile, the collection of amateur film produced in the twelve provinces of the Netherlands, being carried out by the Smalfilmmuseum, reinforced a tacit understanding not to duplicate the effort of collecting by either organisation. When the Smalfilmmuseum collection was taken over by the Institute for Sound and Vision in 2006 and absorbed into the latter’s vast holdings of professional broadcasting material, the benefits of these practices became very clear. The Sound and Vision catalogue now records by far the largest collection of amateur films in the Netherlands at some 6,800 titles, the majority of which come from the former Smalfilmmuseum. In turn, these institutional changes have affected the historical policy of the former Filmmuseum, now EYE, towards acquiring amateur film. The current situation could be described as marked by a loosening of former policies that allows for new acquisitions on a case-­by-­case basis. The organisation is therefore somewhat more open to exploring the wider variety of amateur sub-­genres than hitherto, though 43

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subject, as ever, to future changes in the way the collecting organisations arrange their affairs. The specialist Smalfilmmuseum, set up by Henk Verheul, a great natural enthusiast of amateur film, also built up a large collection of equipment, and an extensive paper archive to provide a complete general context to its film collections. Other archives, such as Northeast Historic Film in the United States, have managed to assemble similarly broad collections that provide an invaluable resource to researchers. Less specialised film archives still know well the importance of establishing and recording the individual provenance of each film, and will therefore usually engage in some form of interview process at the time of acquisition. A crucial part of that context is the entirety of the acquired collection itself: how fiction practices relate to non-­fiction filming can only be seen in relation to the entire collection, and not simply through the study of a particular film. The prolific amateur filmmaker Captain Zip, for example, has made 128 films at the time of writing, starting in 1967 and continuing to the present day. An exemplary amateur who has very good connections with archives and programme-­makers, he is best known for his films of punk street culture shot around the King’s Road, Chelsea, in the late 1970s, excerpts from which are often used by television programme-­makers and even feature-­filmmakers. Zip has, however, also made thirty-­six amateur fiction films. At the time of writing, the possible collection of material produced is somewhat dispersed. Seven of the historic punk films have been transferred to video by the BFI and now form part of the National Film Archive. The Wessex Film Archive, covering the period of his filmmaking when he lived in Fawley in Hampshire, has made further copies from his œuvre. Clearly, both archives have selected material consistent with their collecting strategies, but with little reference to the context of the output taken as a whole. As a result, the archiving of this collection is in an incomplete state and is currently split between different institutions. That part of it which concerns the present enquiry is, apart from the fourteen fiction films made in Hampshire, available only direct from the filmmaker himself. Even if an entire archive is housed under one roof, internal structures are likely to split it up, given that distinctions between fiction and non-­fiction remain fundamental to cataloguing practice and broader senses of value. A large archive, like the BFI National Film Archive in the UK, employs a number of curators assigned specifically to fiction or non-­fiction departments. At EYE, the provision of a specific post designated Collection Specialist Amateurfilm, brings all amateur film and home movie holdings under the control of one person. Splitting can occur if offered collections have material of mixed value or are deemed too large to take in their entirety, though EYE staff aim to avoid this practice. If such splitting does occur for pragmatic reasons, at the very least, good records should be maintained so that a sense of the context of the entire collection from which a given film comes can be, to some extent, preserved. Simply knowing the proportion of amateur fiction film in the collection ­44

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of a given filmmaker will provide an idea of their priorities. Of course, archives cannot be expected to collect information that will provide answers to all the questions that academic researchers of the future will wish to ask. More important is to collect enough contextual detail for the effective operation of their own tasks of preservation and presentation, and to maintain contact information with donors and depositors. In order to give an impression of some of the issues that arise around the archival acquisition of amateur fiction film, it is perhaps useful to examine three different examples of such work that have entered the collection of the EYE Institute in recent years. All three have been preserved on film and digitised for wider access, thereby travelling fully through the archive workflow, during the large-­scale project, ‘Beelden voor de Toekomst’ or ‘Images for the Future’. Io Bacchoi (1964), made by Lennaert Nijgh, is one of ten films acquired directly from the heirs of the filmmaker, when they made contact with the Filmmuseum in 2004. Nijgh is famous in the Netherlands as one of the most important songwriters of the second half of the twentieth century, and in particular for his writing partnership with the modern folk singer Boudewijn de Groot.21 The pair met while still teenagers at high school, and both attended the Netherlands Film and Television Academy, where Nijgh graduated as a qualified cameraman. The films in the collection were made throughout the 1960s, in a period before, during and after his studies, were personally funded, and feature performances and contributions from artists, musicians and actors in his coterie. Of course, in a case such as this, it is questionable how ‘amateur’ the films are, though, taking into account their means of production and indeed an instinctive impression of their aesthetic qualities, the label ‘amateur’ does seem appropriate. Another criterion of use in this situation is to look at the films’ screening history, and this seems also to have been mainly amongst the filmmaker’s circle of friends. His film, Een Vreemde Vogel (A Strange Bird, 1967), had far greater ambitions. Shot on 35mm and of feature length, written and directed by Nijgh, and co-­produced with Barbara Meter under the name of Colonna Film, before being shown in the Saskia Cinema in Arnhem, this film in no way deserves the designation ‘amateurish’. Nijgh’s situation here is rather more akin to that of committed amateurs such as Peter Watkins or Kevin Brownlow, whose dreams of ‘going professional’ may be traced in their initial works. Are Nijgh’s earlier films therefore to be dubbed professional in retrospect? Probably not, but whatever systems of classification we use need to have the flexibility to recognise the increasingly nuanced forms of film culture that have developed and are still developing beyond the mainstream. In the case of Nijgh, we can see with hindsight that Een Vreemde Vogel was not, in fact, the beginning of a career in the professional cinema, and that following its production he took more interest in his writing, to an extent that he is not now known as a filmmaker at all, but rather as a great songwriter. 45

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Though Nijgh can be seen as a borderline case, perhaps, most archivists would want his films to be picked up by a search of the catalogue for ‘amateur fiction film’ so that researchers could effectively make their own mind up. As can be imagined, Nijgh’s films are a good example of the problems of cataloguing alluded to previously, and the reason that only one was discovered in our search of the catalogue. The others, while correctly assigned as fiction, either had no genre description or in some cases had been designated by the descriptors experimental, romantic or psychological drama. For reasons such as these, Io Bacchoi was not even discoverable as an example of amateur fiction film, other than through discussion with archive staff. Due to his status as a national figure, little discussion was needed as to whether to accept the Nijgh collection into the archive, but the very personal and atmospheric insight that the films give into the artistic milieu of the 1960s was also appreciated. What is most interesting about Io Bacchoi to a mass audience now is that Nijgh’s friend, Jeroen Krabbé, takes the lead role. Along with Rutger Hauer and Carice van Houten, Krabbé is one of the few Dutch actors working on the world stage, taking significant roles, typically as the foreign criminal in action films such as The Living Daylights (1987). In Io Bacchoi, he is youthful but very confident and instantly recognisable as himself. Apart from his bit part in the professional film Fietsen naar de Maan (Cycling to the Moon, 1963), it is the earliest film in the collection to feature this well-­known performer. For this reason alone, the item would have been very welcome in the collection, and explains the decision to preserve it on film, unlike most of the other films in the Nijgh collection, of which only digital copies have been made. Io Bacchoi itself is a lightly fictionalised account of a weekend party with young people that could be of interest to amateur fiction film scholars focusing on representation, illustrating as it does how people have dramatised their own lives. One certainly feels in watching the film that the actors playing the roles are not straying very far from their real existences. Or, as Schootemeijer says, they are pretending to become something which they became later, as they dreamed the dream of their life, in a very sixties manner. By contrast, Ze Komen (They are Coming, 1969) entered the archive in a rather special way. Since 2008, the Filmmuseum and latterly EYE have held an annual Home Movie Day as part of the international celebration of this event in October.22 In addition to offering free inspection and projection of home movies brought in by members of the public, organisers decided to instigate a prize for the best film, as judged by three members of the archive staff. The prize included full preservation on film and entry into the permanent collection. The event itself has had a significant effect, by challenging existing acquisition customs and demonstrating, in a fairly random and democratic way, the sheer variety of approaches taken by non-­professional filmmakers in the Netherlands over the years, highlighting in the process several significant gaps in the collection. ­46

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1.2  Professional actor, Jeroen Krabbé, in the film Io Bacchoi (Oh, Bacchantes, 1964).

So it was that, for the 2010 event, Ze Komen was judged to be the best film seen on the day. The film itself uses animated wooden dolls of the type employed by artists to represent an alien invasion. The judges followed no particular set of criteria in assessing the work, but came to their decision through a discussion, in which the merits of Ze Komen were seen to be its high technical quality and its interesting use of stop-­frame animation combined with live action. This set it apart not only from the other films seen on that Home Movie Day, but also from most other amateur films in the collection. Its narrative elements were appreciated as a neat idea well executed within its three-­minute duration, but the fact that it represented a good example of an amateur fiction film was not taken into consideration. Technique, execution and concept were all judged highly, but fictionality was not a significant issue. The maker of Ze Komen, Gé Aarts, and its sole protagonist, his brother Bert, were delighted by this recognition, and gave a very full account of how the film came into being. From this valuable contextual information we can see that, for the makers too, the opportunity to stage a narrative that references the genre of mainstream science-­fiction film was not the primary motivation, and in this the judges had well discerned their intentions. The genre of sciencefiction provided a basis for experimenting with film technique, rather than telling a story or embodying personas; appropriately enough, the brother Bert, a photographer, plays a photographer in the film. 47

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1.3  An alien creature emerges from the ground in Ze Komen (They are Coming, 1964).

Drama in de Wildernis (Drama in the Wilderness, 1930–1) was offered to the archive by the daughter of the man who takes the female leading role. He and his older brother, who wrote the script and directed and shot the film, were young members of the wealthy Jurgens family, which had made its fortune from the industrialisation of margarine, their grandfather being the first to make it commercially available in 1871. Indeed, the business grew so well that, four years before this film was made, their company had been part of the merger that formed Unilever. The filmmaker, A. G. Jurgens, and his brother (playing the heroine Lilian O’Conor) assembled an all-­male cast from another seven of their friends, and staged the action on their country estate near Nijmegen. Family cars, horses and the pet dog – displaying a Rin Tin Tin-­ style intelligence – were all pressed into service. The resulting film is a magisterial example of an amateur fiction film, its three acts running to seventy minutes, with main titles, many inter-­titles and even titles for the beginning of the three reels. The cast are introduced with title cards showing their names and character names, followed by a portrait shot (see Figure 1.4), as the film adopts a style of credit sequence fashionable in early professional sound films of the period; in the case of C. Jurgens, two shots are used, one as himself and one in character, as if to emphasise the transformation wrought in his adoption of a female role. Drama in de ­48

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1.4  C. Jurgens as himself, in the leading role in Drama in de Wildernis (Drama in the Wildernis, 1930–1).

Wildernis is essentially a western but, as the internal archive viewing report points out, quite freely introduces other genre elements, such as romance and slapstick, thus indicating a high level of assimilation of popular film culture by the makers. The opening sentence of George Sewell’s 1932 manual Film Play Production for Amateurs states that, ‘The possession of a cinema camera almost inevit­ably leads, sooner or later, to an attempt by the owner at the making of a film play,’ and indeed Drama in de Wildernis would seem to be a classic contemporary 49

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illustration of Sewell’s idea.23 However, in that sense, it is valuable evidence of the road not travelled by the majority of people possessing a movie camera in subsequent decades. No other films were offered to the archive from this source, so its context as part of a wider collection cannot be validated. However, it would be surprising if such an accomplished example were to be a one-­off, or if there were not also non-­fiction family films made with the same apparatus. Drama in de Wildernis was selected for entry into the archive, when offered, primarily because of its provenance. However, when the viewing report was made in May 2008, its prioritisation for preservation work was partly justified: not because it’s particularly an artistic highpoint (though it is sweet) but because it’s a unique example of family film in a different context; the private fiction film made for the private audience. Everyone knows the phenomenon but we don’t yet have it in the collection.24 This last example perhaps indicates a changing awareness among archive staff. As can be seen, all three amateur fiction films considered here were selected for archive preservation for differing reasons, none of which was primarily a matter of their status as fictions. Conclusions On the evidence of the films examined here, amateur work in fiction has only achieved archival recognition when its interests can be seen as coinciding with other collecting parameters. Examples would include the early work of filmmakers who thereafter professionalised or became part of a celebrity coterie, or films that are technically ambitious, such as those examined in this chapter’s case studies. It is a truism often expressed by those involved in work with home movies, given their constantly surprising capacity for originality, that ‘the more you see, the more interesting they become.’ Those responsible in archives for collecting should have the lightness of touch to be able to recognise emerging genres and exceptional innovations, rather than simply following outdated and narrow collecting procedures. As I have argued in the past, a bad home movie can be exemplary of how obscure but nevertheless historic developments in home movie-­making history and technology have occurred, and should therefore be considered for selection despite a lack of conventional aesthetic merit.25 Amateur fiction film can be particularly vulnerable to exclusion on aesthetic grounds because the knee-­jerk critical response is to compare it unfavourably to the mainstream professional product that it frequently references. This is most definitely not the way to assess any amateur film. Indeed, for me, one of the joys of amateur film is its indifference to critical opinion. Despite the myriad manuals devoted to good filmmaking that were ­50

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published, bought and only intermittently consulted, and all the earnest discussions amongst cine club members, most amateur films, even of the fiction variety, disclose little expectation of, or concern with, their critical reception. If archivists and academics now impose such critiques, they risk establishing an unrepresentative canon of ‘classic’ home movies. Returning to the case of Remember (1977) as an example, it seems that some rather infelicitous editing seemed to have confounded its attempt at narrative. The inept latter-­day Guy Fawkes who is the main protagonist fails to destroy his targets, succeeding only in blowing himself up on three separate occasions. The shots that reveal his increasingly bedraggled state seem to have been muddled up. It might be argued that this is evidence of the difficulty of editing a significant amount of 8mm-­wide film material, or that it points towards an unusual division of labour among the participants – the film gives the impression that directing and editing roles were each carried out by multiple people. Whilst such infelicities would not help it to achieve success at the Ten Best awards, they do give a fine insight into what it was like to make a non-­cine club amateur fiction film in 1977. Just as the least artful home movie can appeal as revealing of amateur filmmaking technique, it is those virtually unclassifiable borderline cases, which cause the greatest difficulty in cataloguing, that can provide the crucial key to understanding the amateur’s use of fictionality. More work is certainly needed at these intersecting boundaries of hybrid film genres. The way to do this may well involve further demarcation of the territory, so that we think not only of amateur fiction films, but of a sub-­category of ‘home movie fiction films’ too. Another way forward could be to designate a film mode by terms such as chronological, narrative or fictional without forgetting the unfinished or the failure. Alternative means of classification can help find a way of interpreting unusual film collections, as in the case of the preservation of the Paul Julien collection at EYE, which was treated in terms of levels of intentionality, interpreting the intention of the filmmaker to work towards a finished film.26 Of course, no such index existed in the catalogue, but a combination of catalogue data and inspection of the film material itself provided a means of ordering and prioritising the preservation of no less than 243 reels of film. A sizeable percentage of archive work involves the creation of lists, as a means of shaping vast quantities of catalogue data into useful and manageable information that answers specific needs. Such list-­making renders strengths and weaknesses in collections fairly apparent, and gives direction to further acquisition attempts. In relation to amateur fiction film, I would suggest that two more lists could be of great help to archives. Firstly, I have no doubt that if archives produced a list of their amateur fiction film holdings and published it on their website, this would in itself stimulate researchers’ interest in the subject, even allowing for a certain amount of variation in the aforementioned issue of definition. Secondly, if researchers could produce a list of amateur fiction films, filmmakers and cine clubs that have appeared in the written 51

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discourse, archivists would be able to use this to track down canonical amateur fiction films.27 The formal division of labour implied here would, of course, break down in practice. Both researchers and archivists could use the lists to map the existence of surviving examples and begin to produce an accurate picture of production. As ever, collecting strategies need to be reinforced with extra resources but also increased contact with amateurs themselves, admittedly itself a resource issue. Finally, my hopeful prediction would be that, following the research and stimulus of this chapter, the first film to be selected on amateur fiction film grounds will shortly enter the archive. And the real sign of change will be when archives actively seek amateur fiction films out. Notes   1. See Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Archives and archaeologies’, in Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (eds), Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media: Studies in the Visual Culture of the Industrial Film (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), p. 33.   2. ‘From A to A, The five As of amateur film preservation’, conference panel with B. Andre, E. Hielscher, R. Hinkel-­Pevzner and S. Monizza, at the ‘Saving Private Reels’ conference, University of Cork, 18 September 2010. Two As were added to Elsaesser’s initial configuration: the ‘amateur’, which I have argued as elementary and essential, and the ‘artisan’, who, for the purposes of preservation, provides much-­needed technical expertise.   3. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann (eds), Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); see also Laraine Cookson, ‘Amateur film and the archives’, in James Ballantyne (ed.), Researcher’s Guide to British Film and Television Collections (London: British Universities Film and Video Council, 1993), pp. 5–14, for an earlier insight into archival acquisition practices, though regarding solely non-­ fiction amateur film.   4. The ‘Small-­Gauge Storytelling: The Amateur Fiction Film’ symposium organised jointly by the Universities of Glasgow and Liverpool, held in Liverpool on 9 June 2010, was a pleasant exception. This and the Northeast Historic Film symposium held in Bucksport, Maine, 21–3 July 2005, were the only occasions at which I have been present that were devoted exclusively to the amateur fiction film.   5. See Guy Edmonds, ‘Amateur widescreen, or some forgotten skirmishes in the battle of the gauges’, Film History, Vol. 19, No. 4, 2007, pp. 401–13.   6. I would here like to register my thanks to all the filmmakers and archive staff who have helped with my research for this chapter, including David Leister, Captain Zip, Dorette Schootemeijer at EYE Film Institute Netherlands, Mieke Lauwers and Valentine Kuypers at the Institute for Sound and Vision, Nigel Algar, Jez Stewart and Rebecca Vick at the British Film Institute National Archive, Jane Alvey at the East Anglian Film Archive, and Karianne Fiorini at the Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia, in Bologna.   7. For a discussion of fictional and non-­fictional priorities within the amateur cine movement, see Ian Craven, ‘Hitchcock and small-­gauge: Shaping the amateur fiction film’, Journal of Media Practice, Vol. 13, No. 1 (summer 2012), pp. 19–44.   8. See Martina Roepke’s chapter, ‘Crafting life into film: Analysing family fiction films from the 1930s’, pp. 83–101.

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  9. Margaret Compton, ‘Small gauge and amateur film bibliography’, Film History, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2003, pp. 252–71. Now available in a 2005 revised version online: http://www.amianet.org/groups/committees/smallgauge/bibliography/history.php 10. Susan Aasman, ‘Gladly breaking bread: Religious repertoires and family film’, Film History, Vol. 19, No. 4, 2007, p. 361. 11. See David Lee, Film and Sound Archives in Non-­Specialist Repositories (London: Society of Archivists, 2009), p. 3. 12. The website of Het Huis van Alijn – www.huisvanalijn.be 13. The acquisition of this collection in 2006 is a wonderful success story of film archiving and a remarkable resource awaiting further attention from researchers. Work is still continuing on the cataloguing but, at the time of writing, 1,298 titles have been included on the inventory. Of these, 390 are non-­fiction and 908 fiction. However, as Senior Archivist Jane Alvey notes, this is a very broad distinction, and ‘there are films which combine or transcend genre.’ Some 72 of the IAC films are available for online viewing on the EAFA website: www.eafa.org.uk 14. ‘Experimentele film in Nederland’ ran from 2005 to 2007, and collected 400 films by Dutch-­domiciled artists that were spread across personal archives often housed in attics or cellars; Home Movies – Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia in Bologna runs a number of different projects each year, including ‘Fotogrammi di Famiglia’, which began in 2007 with a three-­month period of collecting in Pesaro, and included the acquisition of amateur fiction films by Marcello Asdrubali. 15. ‘Images for the Future’, known as ‘Beelden voor de Toekomst’ in the Netherlands, was a national audio-­visual conservation and digitisation project, bridging four institutions and funded by central government. Based at the EYE Film Institute Netherlands, the project ran from 2007 to early 2012. 16. ‘“Remember, remember . . . An amateur narrative film and its half-­remembered context’, Plenary lecture delivered at the ‘Small-­Gauge Storytelling: The Amateur Fiction Film’ day event, University of Liverpool, 9 June 2010. During this lecture, I recounted the salutary tale of a friend whose collection fell into the hands of the local council on his passing. Despite the best efforts of myself and others, only half the collection was saved from destruction. 17. David Leister writes, ‘This latter film was a favourite at the club, and the piece was projected as found, giving a surreal quality with its random and non-­linear edits. The story, based on the Greek myth of Narcissus, is complete with the gods on Mount Olympus (cardboard cut-­out version), stuck on beards, bed sheet togas, and “special effect” smoke being visibly fanned by a not quite off-­screen “technician”. What the rubber chicken and stuffed tiger intercuts had to do with the plot I can only speculate. The film ends with the modern day (1960s!) female narrator of the tale being joined in bed by one of the fantasy characters. So perhaps it was not all a dream!’. Dates of screenings include The Two Eagles Pub (13 December 1990), with music by Aleks Kolkowski and Ian Hill; and the London School of Economics (24 February 1994), with music by Steve Noble, Steve Buckley and Roberto Bellatalla. 18. Zoe Beloff (ed.), The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and its Circle (New York: Christine Burgin, 2009). Book and DVD. 19. The artist’s website includes extracts from these films, at: www.hinkel-­pevzner.org 20. ‘Van de kolonie niets dan goeds: Nederland-­Indie in beeld 1912–1942’, 31 October to 24 December 2002. 21. Peter Voskuil, Testament: Leven en werk van Lennaert Nijgh (Kats: Uitgeverij De Buitenspelers, 2007). 22. Home Movie Day has been organised annually since 2003, and has done much to raise the awareness of threats to amateur film, as well as driving new approaches to its study and improving acceptance in professional circles. For example, an amateur fiction film ‘discovered’ during Home Movie Day in London in 2004 was

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presented by its maker, Tony Dowmunt, at the Northeast Historic Film symposium of 2005 – see note 4. Entitled The Sheep (8mm, 7 mins, 1964), it was also featured on the DVD Living Room Cinema, a compilation of the best of Home Movie Day from around the world. In this way, the film reached three new and varied audiences. Out of the twenty-­two films on the DVD published in 2007, there is one other amateur fiction film, Tarzan and the Rocky Gorge (16mm, 12 mins, 1936) by Robbins Barstow. Barstow also presented his film at the symposium. 23. George H. Sewell, Film Play Production for Amateurs (London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1932), p. v. 24. Author’s translation of EYE internal viewing report, No. 8790, by Dorette Schootemeijer, 7 May 2008. 25. ‘Aesthetics filtered through technology – The production and preservation of amateur films and home movies’, a presentation at ‘Home away from home: the displacement of amateur films’, the 4th ‘Collection Seminar’, hosted by the EYE Film Institute Netherlands, 14 October 2010. 26. See Guy Edmonds, ‘Conserving the unwieldy body – A material approach to the cinematographic remains of Paul Julien’, in Sonja Kmec and Viviane Thill (eds), Tourists and Nomads. Amateur Images of Migration (Marburg: Jonas, 2012). 27. The research carried out by Alan Katelle for his book, Home Movies: A History of the American Industry, 1897–1979 (Nashua, NH: Transition, 2000), is an early example of trawling the hobby literature for evidence of amateur film production. Katelle analyses (pp. 272–7) a sample of 200 Amateur Cinema League films, ordering them into five types: documentary, travel, drama, experimental and family record. The drama category accounts for 22 per cent of the films identified.

Filmography Beauty and the Bishop (Streatham Cine Club, 1959) 16mm, 8 mins, colour, silent. Drama in de Wildernis (Drama in the Wilderness, A. G. Jurgens, 1930–1) 16mm, 70 mins, black and white, silent. Een Vreemde Vogel (A Strange Bird, Lennaert Nijgh, 1967) 35mm, 90 mins, colour, sound. Errands (Ruth Hinkel-­Pevzner, 2006), digital video, 5 mins, black and white, sound. The Fishing Trip (Ruth Hinkel-­Pevzner, 2004), digital video, 4 mins, colour, sound. Io Bacchoi (Oh, Bacchantes, Lennaert Nijgh, 1964) 8mm, 50 mins, black and white, sound. Kerstverhaal (Christmas Story, Jos Huygen, 1926) 9.5mm, 1 min., black and white, silent. Narcissus (outtakes, unknown, circa 1970s) 16mm, 10 mins, black and white, silent. Remember (Ray Papaia, 1977) 8mm, 10 mins, colour, silent. Ze Komen (They Are Coming, Gé Aarts, 1969) 8mm, 3 mins, colour, silent.

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2. SEWELL, ROSE AND THE AESTHETICS OF AMATEUR CINE FICTION IAN CRAVEN

Amateurs – leave your lights, your pseudo-­stories, your clumsy grease paints and gauche acting – run right out of doors and look around at life. Film trees, clouds, smoke, birds, everything that moves. Children playing, women washing clothes, men sawing wood, actuality . . . This is the stuff for your films . . . Come to grips with life. No escaping into tawdry romantics and pseudo aesthetics.1 Scholarship engaging small-­gauge film as historical evidence or catalyst for memory has often absorbed Leslie Beisiegel’s advice to the amateur movie-­ maker, foregrounding non-­fiction genres within its purview and relegating fictional endeavours to an innocuous ‘pseudo’ filmmaking. From such perspectives, the fictitiousness of fiction seems only to compound anxieties over the quality of amateur media production more broadly, with work in the mode typically characterised by a certain failure of realisation, often interpreted as the result of misguided yearning to imitate ‘studio-­grade’ models. Such stances towards the cine sector have helped secure a crucial place for non-­fiction within amateur film practice, and helped to generate a precious body of material ripe for archive acquisition, creative redeployment and academic scrutiny from a range of directions. Archival sympathy towards the fictional output of amateur filmmakers has, however, been correspondingly reduced in this context, limiting preservation and opportunities for research, as study of collection policy in this volume and elsewhere illustrates with suggestive clarity.2 Even where it has won recognition and secured storage space, cine fiction’s admission to the archive has often seemed conditional, with the potential fascinations of amateur efforts apparently narrowed, to concerns with incidental 55

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features, such as background setting, contingent traces of cultural taste and social behaviour, and more random elements of ‘unwitting testimony’ suggesting micro-­level articulation with the altogether ‘grander’ narratives of local, regional or national history.3 Such evidential framings have also had impacts in more critical terms, conferring a certain transparency on the amateur story film, ‘thinning’ its textuality towards a mimesis supposedly encouraged by the technical circumstances of its production, and reducing senses of intrinsic productivity, born of more self-­conscious engagement with the forms or figures of surrounding film languages.4 Diverting attention from the material’s envisaged status as an aesthetic articulation, archival discourse has often favoured designation of the amateur fiction film as mere footage, adequately identified in the catalogue database by gauge, running time, subject matter and production locale.5 Conceived in this way, value emerges as a function of reference rather than artistry, with cine fiction re-­imagined as a cultural vein ripe for excavation against the fictionalising grain, of the ‘actualities’ that Beisiegel and others urge the amateur filmmaker to capture as a matter of priority. Despite discouragement from a stream of such onlookers, research quickly reveals the urgency of the fictional project for countless cine enthusiasts, clearly reluctant to accept dismissal of their efforts as a ‘pseudo’ cinema of distraction or imitation, and intent on securing an aesthetic objectification for their work. Surviving reels testify to every kind of fictional ambition, whilst inspection of the paper record exposes substantial counter-­investment in the definition, regulation and evaluation of fictional output by both sector ‘insiders’ and more casual participants, from the origins of the cine movement in Britain during the early 1920s, onwards.6 This chapter explores such cultivation of fictional technique by discourses around amateur cine, before sketching the parameters of an aesthetics deemed appropriate to the leisure filmmaker intent upon work in the fictional mode, clarified by a particular instructional moment from the 1950s. Persistence of the envisaged ‘sectoral style’, and exhibition of its manifestly ‘relational’ character, are seen as symptomatic of the amateur filmmaker’s broader cultural location, and as stimulus to instances of more idiosyncratic artistry, illustrated here with reference to a particular filmmaker’s arguable transcendence of the style’s accepted norms. The significance of such involvement with fiction is seen to lie in its qualification of non-­fiction’s centrality within larger studies of amateur cine culture in Britain, and its suggestion of aesthetic continuities through the film era and beyond, into the rather different ages of amateur videotape and digital image-­ making. As online access details recorded by successive chapters in the present volume remind us, such inheritances are increasingly underlined within new social media, simultaneously offering fresh exhibition outlets for some of cine amateurism’s most curious fictional works and unprecedented opportunities for long-­delayed study.

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Exercising the Fictional Although sometimes meeting intellectual resistance, the production of fiction films develops rapidly with the diffusion of ‘small-­gauge’ cine technologies, stimulating commentary and critique, and a steady flow of specialist publication aimed at the would-­be amateur ‘tyro’.7 Guidance to those seeking to develop the techniques of fiction filmmaking takes several forms within such emerging hobby literatures. Commercial inter-­texts are reviewed with focus on their instructional value, ‘theme’ competitions are staged to encourage exploration of particular genres or motifs etc., whilst advice from respected professionals, distinguished in the field of fiction, is regularly presented as general inspiration, and more specific mark of cross-­sector solidarity between filmmakers with shared creative interests.8 Acknowledging insistence that ‘exercises which aim at training the imagination (a faculty which, like every other human faculty, is capable of development) should be frequently indulged in’, screenwriting ‘routines’ and ‘treatment workshops’ are also recommended, alongside the more purely technical tuition aimed at improving amateur facility with the trickier formal devices, often seen as synonymous with cine fiction.9 A less frequent strategy is represented by production of the specialist teaching film, typically simply illustrating the pitfalls to be avoided by the beginner and stressing the feasibility of advanced work in the mode, but sometimes venturing towards more adventurous experimentation and inter-­activity.10 One particularly fascinating example of the latter impulse is represented by a still-­remembered project, organised in the late 1950s by the British cine journal Amateur Movie Maker (1957–64), in collaboration with sympathetic professional colleagues, the distribution arm of the British Film Institute, and reader–correspondents of the newly launched magazine.11 Surviving prints of the resulting Exercise Movie (1958) and records of its production and reception provide a fascinating insight into the tutorial relationship between the managers of cine amateurism, the wider movement’s rank-­and-­file membership, and the professional community whose relative competence the ‘exercise’ seemingly sets out to assess. More specifically for the present context, the project also speaks to the particular issue of fiction and its overlooked role within the cultivation of amateur film practice, encompassing forms of participation rather different from those advocated by Leslie Beisiegel, and recognising an amateur artistry very distinct from that of the citizen–observer validated by his comments. The genesis of the Exercise Movie project lay in the receipt of a short letter to Amateur Movie Maker from a new reader, in a dilemma as to whether he should buy an expensive camera in order to make more ‘successful’ movies. Editorial response from Tony Rose (1921–99) recorded contemplation of the issues involved: At first we were tempted to strike an artistic attitude and declare that a budding poet might just as well ask whether he need buy an expensive 57

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typewriter in order to write successful sonnets. After all, a camera, like a typewriter, is only an instrument for recording impressions and ideas. Etcetera, etcetera! Then a small voice within made us pipe down. The reader in question . . . is too intelligent a man to be fobbed off with that kind of half-­truth.12 Offering a supposedly ‘straight’ answer to his enquiry, the reader is initially reassured that many outstanding films have been made with cameras costing as little as £60 (when prices might range as high as £300), and examples are offered of prize-­winning ‘Ten Best’ and ‘Top Eight’ entries shot with much lower-­cost equipment, or older second-­hand gear, obtained cheaply by some of the sector’s most celebrated practitioners. Other familiar mantras of amateur endorsement are audible, underlining the primacy of imagination to creativity, asserting amateur comparability with the professional in terms of resourcefulness, and celebrating his or her freedom from the aesthetic ‘distortions’ of commercial constraint.13 Indeed, such emphases are recognised by the editor as already so rehearsed (‘Etcetera, etcetera!’) in the amateur sphere that they need scarcely be reiterated in the immediate context. However, with ‘artistic attitudes’ dutifully recalled and technical discrimination instinctively refuted, Rose’s commentary takes a somewhat unexpected turn. That ‘small voice within’ starts to make itself felt, and curiously qualifying notes begin to be struck. Having argued against the importance of superior equipment, Rose slowly backtracks from cherished orthodoxies, admitting that: the under £60 camera obviously has got its limitations and if money were no object we should all buy the most expensive models . . . The difference lies not so much in the quality of the finished result (for who could say definitely whether a given shot was taken with a camera costing £50 or £200) but rather in working methods and the range of possible techniques . . .14 Perhaps such an editorial, appearing opposite a full-­page advertisement for the upper-­end Eumig C16 camera – a new 16mm model incorporating a built-­in exposure meter, allowing variable frame rates, with facilities for multi-­lens turret attachments and even ‘an adjustable eye-­piece to suit individual eyesight’, retailing at almost £153 – simply indexes commercial sensitivity towards regular advertisers. Rose’s apparent anxiety suggests, none the less, that deeper contradictions between amateur ideals and the potential enhancement of more technically restricted filmmaking by higher-­specification equipment are on the point of real expression here.15 Unsurprisingly, the contradictions opened are quickly closed. With reservations ventilated, a return to more familiar conviction becomes apparent, and the letter-­writer is ultimately reassured that ‘no piece of apparatus can provide an easy passport to success, and never will until someone finds a substitute for imagination.’16 ­58

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2.1  Advertising ‘superior’ technology in Amateur Movie Maker (1958).

Matters were not to rest, however, with the re-­assertion of ‘devotion’ over ‘resources’, for just as an innocent enquiry apparently triggers second-­ thinking on the part of the Amateur Movie Maker editor, Rose’s ambivalent response in turn seems to have touched nerves elsewhere. Several follow-­ups to his short commentary were to appear in the letters columns of subsequent issues, initially led by no less a figure than George H. Sewell (1899–1971). 59

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Already venerated by the 1950s as a ‘founding father’ of the cine movement in Britain, as one of the original ‘gang of four’ establishing the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers (IAC) in 1932, and as much-­respected author of numerous articles and several influential manuals through the following decades, Sewell and his intervention would clearly demand a published response.17 This perhaps proved awkward, for by coincidence, a celebratory account of the correspondent’s long association with amateur film had only recently appeared in the pages of Amateur Movie Maker, below a tagline noting that, ‘If his criticisms sometimes seem harsh to the beginner, they are always inspired by his love of the medium.’18 Such a testimonial is certainly certified by Sewell’s ‘Odd Shot’ contributions to Amateur Cine World (1934–67) through the post-­war period, which mingle practical tips, movement publicity functions, and impassioned calls for a robust critique seen as increasingly scarce across the cine community: How I sometimes long for the early days when we went for one another’s films in no uncertain fashion, with no holds barred! But in addition to honest criticism, there was generous praise for truly good work instead of the half-­sneering semi-­praise that is often handed out in more ‘advanced’ amateur movie circles today.19 Much in the spirit of such fondly remembered encounters, Sewell’s correspondence with Amateur Movie Maker soon expressed conviction in a set of enduring amateur values, threatened with compromise by the sentiments expressed in Rose’s hesitating editorial. Questioning its author’s formulation of the ‘Way to the Stars’ for the amateur, Sewell’s short letter raised a series of objections to the commentary qualification of received wisdom, specifically challenging any suggestion that the purchase of more elaborate equipment might increase the chances of good filmmaking, and arguing forcefully that ‘added complexity in the apparatus only increases the responsibility of the user.’20 Pointing out the extended range of decision-­making attendant upon recourse to camera features such as variable frame-­rates, turret attachments and telephoto lenses (precisely those offered by the Eumig C16 camera), Sewell re-­asserts the greater importance of immaterial ingredients to good filmmaking. These include the preparatory study of appropriate methods and the willingness to submit to stringent criticism, along with: the acknowledgement that film stock and apparatus are much less important than the attitude and standards of the film maker and his continuous desire to improve his own work, however simple or personal it may be; the recognition that good film-­making, though rewarding, is a demanding pastime that requires thought, planning and devotion; and finally acknowledgement of one’s responsibility not to bore or exasperate one’s fellow men . . .21 ­60

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The appeal to personal commitment and emphasis on social sensitivity over the supposed seductions of technology resonate here with very traditional senses of the amateur as a figure guided by ‘higher’ principles, exhibiting scepticism towards the professional project, and with a faith in the artistic potential of the leisure filmmaker determined to master his or her technique, despite concerns over ‘falling standards’ and a cine culture apparently ‘overwhelmed by a vast sea of mediocrity’.22 Indexing a certain generational tension between the august pioneer and perhaps the definitive ‘angry young man’ of post-­war cine, the exchange reportedly triggered the suggestion from Sewell of a practical trial, designed to explore respective positions.23 The next issue of Amateur Movie Maker announced the ‘Exercise’ project, pitched as a quasi-­scientific examination of Sewell’s assertion that good filmmaking is not dependent upon expensive or sophisticated equipment, and that amateurs may match professional artistry, provided that their respective technical resources are comparable. Posing as sceptical of such propositions, Rose outlines a simple laboratory-­style test, reminiscent of exercises recorded in club syllabuses and ‘summer school’ ­programmes elsewhere: Suppose we bring the professional down to the amateur’s level – give him a camera and send him out on his own into the park to shoot a simple incident of the kind that might occur in any amateur movie. And suppose that on another day we give the newcomer the same camera, and send him into the same park and ask him to shoot the same incident. If that were possible, you will agree that the results should be very interesting indeed . . . Well it is possible. In fact, that is just what we are going to do and we have christened the experiment ‘Exercise Movie’.24 Initially pitching the professional against the amateur in simple opposition, the project quickly evolved to incorporate three classes of filmmaker, apparently at the suggestion of the magazine’s editor.25 George H. Sewell himself, by now a producer of industrial and educational shorts, would represent the professional; Brian Glanvill, a novice filmmaker still familiarising himself with his first 8mm camera, would participate on behalf of the newcomer; whilst Leslie Freeman, chairman of the London-­based Planet Film Society, would take part as an experienced 16mm amateur ‘thirty years at the game’, and thus well versed in the practical tribulations and aesthetic parameters of ‘proper’ small-­gauge production.26 Each would work with the same camera, the same location, the same performers, and the same 100 feet of film stock donated by Kodak,27 on a simple scenario: A girl enters a park and finds a bench over-­looking a tennis court where a game is in progress. A man is already sitting on the bench, reading a newspaper. The girl sits down on the bench, places her handbag on the 61

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bench between the man and herself, and opens a packet of sandwiches. The girl eats her lunch, at the same time watching the tennis and the passers-­by. Meanwhile, the man folds his newspaper and begins to doze off, his arms folded across his chest. Slowly, as sleep overcomes him, he slumps sideways until one elbow rests firmly on the girl’s handbag. Having finished her lunch, the girl turns to pick up her bag and finds that it is firmly pinioned. She tugs at it without success, looks at the man who is sound asleep, consults her watch. Then, in desperation, she blows up the paper bag in which her sandwiches were packed and bursts it near the man’s ear. Eventually she succeeds in recovering her bag and departs.28 With distinct echoes of the ‘tawdry romantics’ troubling Beisiegel, the synopsis envisages a very standard ‘incident picture’, one of a series of templates for short fiction developed for amateur filmmakers, whose evolution is sometimes credited to pioneers such as Sewell, and frequently deemed an appropriate vehicle for the development of amateur expertise in the mode.29 Effectively a ‘meet cute’ scene of a kind traceable within Rose’s filmmaking elsewhere, the material invites a range of treatments, within the boundaries of a single fixed setting and a deliberately limited number of plot moves. Such circumscription is associated by the exercise organisers with the practicalities of everyday amateur circumstances, and as helpful in cultivating more disciplined ways of working, which might approximate those of the amateur’s professional counterparts. At the same time, as the editor reminds his readers, ‘although the synopsis is quite detailed, the ending is intentionally vague to permit individual interpretation and invention.’30 The involvement of the three participants is described in successive issues of Amateur Movie Maker, which initially furnishes reports of the shooting process. Novice Glanvill’s two-­hour session was apparently ‘marred by a series of mishaps’, including the refusal of permission to erect a tripod, the premature cessation of the background sport described in the scenario, and the technical impossibility of planned visual effects, including double exposure and slowmotion. Imaginative attempts to elaborate the ending of the short narrative seem to have met with similar difficulties: On the spot he decided to develop the ending – the one part of the synopsis left free to the film makers to expand as they wished – to show that after the girl had successfully retrieved her handbag she ran back to the office, the man awoke, discovered he was too late, and ran by a different route to the same office, where he collided with the girl at the door.31 Unfortunately, however, over-­shooting left Glanvill short of stock, and we are told he was unable to finish the scene as intended, a situation put down less to poor planning than to improvisatory instincts indulged in shooting: ‘“He didn’t look at the script very often”, commented Joan Flicker afterwards.’32 ­62

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2.2  Exploring the sectoral style in Exercise Movie (1958).

The more experienced Freeman, however, seems to have avoided such problems, sticking closer to his preparatory segmentation of the action: Freeman had broken down the synopsis into fifteen shots, each sketched in roughly to give himself more chance to concentrate on the more immediate problems of shooting. Afterwards he confessed he wished he had spent even longer over the sketches, for though the location itself was completely new to him, they proved invaluable.33 Such an approach seemingly allows a firmer control over the temporal organisation of the material, allowing cut-­aways to tennis players and nearby 63

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pigeons, which eventually take flight at the sound of the bursting paper bag, whilst providing a baseline structure able to accommodate and rationalise the pleasing variations in camera position and shot scale absent from Glanvill’s effort. George Sewell’s practice is contrasted with that of his amateur counterparts, and characterised as confident, uninhibited by excessive respect for established convention, and apparently indifferent to technical constraint – an approach subsequently described by Sewell as a compromise between the ‘wild and free’ approach of the beginner and the ‘tight’ approach of the serious amateur.34 The professional’s practice thus apparently realises earlier critical insistence upon imagination over correctness, and the responsibility not to ‘bore or exasperate’: Sewell was the only one of the three filmmakers not to bother with an exposure meter. Nor for that matter, did he worry about using a tripod. With the ‘sun dial’ on the camera as his guide, he concentrated on camera angles and the action itself . . . whereas both amateurs had been troubled by the wire netting which prevented them from getting far enough away from the seat to take frontal shots, he foresaw the problem as soon as he saw the location and solved it quite simply by using another bench some way from the tennis court with plenty of space in front of it. Only when he wanted to shoot from the rear and show the tennis in the background did he make the actors change seats.35 Basic lessons are drawn at this stage from the uncut footage produced by the participants: selected camera set-­ups should be guided by the action; focus and aperture should be checked before pressing the camera release; close-­ups should not be squandered on ‘routine’ incidents, etc.36 Accounts of the editing phase are rendered similarly instructive: a marked change of camera angle aids smooth cutting on action; physical movement should not be split into different shots unnecessarily; cut-­aways should be used to ‘telescope’ routine scenes; unexpected effects revealed at the editing bench should be exploited; unexplained ‘set-­ups’ within raw footage produce problems in cutting for continuity, and so on.37 Even with running times of around just two minutes each, the three short fictions thus prove remarkably informative aids to the guidance of Amateur Movie Maker’s readers. Sectoral Style and Relational Aesthetics Scrutiny of the ‘exercise project’ underlines more broadly cultivated senses of a preferred amateur aesthetic, which, by no means confined to the realm of fiction films, instinctively finds its clearest definition in such generic contexts. It is certainly suggestive that the ‘exercise’ devised by Amateur Movie Maker involves a fictional scenario, undoubtedly tracing its editor’s own background ­64

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in the production of ‘film plays’, but also reflecting wider belief in many quarters that the mastery of fictional techniques represents the severest test for the amateur filmmaker.38 With its value seen to inhere in control of the medium rather than the social importance or informational charge of its subject matter, representing a less inhibited space for the play of artistic fancy, and inviting the broadest comparison with the ‘real’ cinemas of professionalism, the challenges of fiction seem particularly attractive to movement insiders.39 To this extent, Sewell and Rose share common ground, and similarly uncompromised visions of the amateur’s potential, often questioned further afield. In probably the first British manual devoted solely to production in the mode, Sewell expressly identifies the fiction film as the basis for positive comparison with professional counterparts: the amateur cannot hope to emulate the wealthy professional company by producing elaborate ‘whoopee’ pictures with cabaret scenes, luxury hotels and the like, but he can, by careful selection of story and intelligent handling, bring himself on to the same level as his professional brother.40 Thirty years later, Rose’s guides echo such sentiments, regarding fictional movie-­making by amateurs as source of regeneration for a commercial cinema losing its ‘magic’, the place where lessons learned at the local picture house may be put to their most productive use, and a terrain on which the amateur can stand side by side with the professional as collaborator in a shared ­enterprise, if he or she can recognise fundamentals: Film-­making stripped down to its bare essentials is no more than an exploitation of the power to record movement and to flit at will through time and space. Everything else is secondary. All the skill of actors, composers, set designers; all the mechanical aids and devices; all the teeming paraphernalia of a modern studio can only permit elaboration and refinement.41 Instructional works by both authors, and by many others, thus frequently envisage a progress towards these ends for the amateur filmmaker, from the snap-­shot generation of footage in the ‘home mode’, to the more structured record of the local documentary, to the ‘fully fledged’ fictional drama seeking the imaginative involvements of the ‘movie proper’.42 As both Sewell and Rose stress, the distinctiveness of such amateur fiction film and its chances of success will lay in the employment of templates evolved elsewhere, although antipathy towards strictly imitative production remains as marked in relation to the fiction film as the purposive documentary or more avant-­garde work.43 Reflection upon the ‘Exercise Project’ clarifies specification of the ways in which amateurs inclined to fiction should negotiate this apparent contradiction, helping to characterise a series of formal preferences, which may be 65

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seen to constitute a collective, or more specifically, amateur ‘sectoral’ style. Illustrating a cluster of constructional principles, usefully described as the norms of a ‘relational’ aesthetic, these represent both a conscious reworking of received professional variants, and perhaps an unconscious claim for amateur ownership of a particular fictional template. Beneath the pragmatic rhetoric of Sewell and Rose, therefore, lies a decidedly theoretical sense of their medium’s ‘historical poetics’, suggesting an approach to amateur cinema in more formalist than evidential terms. Unwittingly, perhaps, Sewell and Rose come very close to paraphrasing Tzvetan Todorov, for whom each film is ‘regarded only as a manifestation of an abstract and general structure’, within a formulation of textual poetics coincidentally under rehearsal as amateur cinema slowly emerges.44 The notion of a collective ‘sectoral’ style, developed specifically within the amateur milieu, proves productive in the present context, drawing attention to the amateur fiction film’s remarkable formal consistency across the work of many thousands of committed filmmakers. Such emphasis also poses a challenge to an area of film scholarship often occupied by individualist case studies, and qualifies the relocation of amateur authorships to aesthetic (often the experimental) and cultural (increasingly national) traditions, which may efface the more particular social work of amateurism. An approach through poetics also acknowledges a demonstrable continuity through time, with similar guidance to cine amateurs offered steadily from the 1930s to the 1980s, and maintained beyond the cine era into the age of videotape and digital imaging.45 With its connotations of inter-­connection and exchange, a ‘relational’ emphasis retains important acknowledgement of the amateur fiction film’s often ­conspicuous elements of derivation, and frequent pull towards homage. Even where a matter of asymmetry, reciprocities underlined by the term usefully frustrate dismissal of small-­gauge fiction as sub-­standard imitation of supposedly more accomplished professional endeavours, whilst inhibiting assimilation of the output to an ‘alternative’ or even ‘counter-­’ practice. Now coming under more critical scrutiny, within an extending scholarship attentive to such structural distinctions between ‘other’ cinemas,46 conflations in both directions have long generated a certain odium within the social world of amateur cinema itself. For in Britain and elsewhere, a strong sense of the movement’s early mission to integrate discrete zones of film practice (the commercial mainstream, the aesthetic avant-­ garde, non-­fiction cinemas from the documentary to the science film to advertising and so on) has been retained, and expressed through ceaselessly ‘relational’ activity, conducted at institutional and critical, as well as more directly aesthetic levels of engagement, variously aimed at revitalising film artistry.47 Assumed norms ideally shaping the production of fiction films by amateurs, and attendant values ascribed to the idea of fictionality itself, emerge from discourse around the ‘exercise’ project. Modesty and generosity surface as key themes, with lessons drawn from the initiative functioning both to limit the idiosyncratic instincts of the would-­be auteur, and to emphasise priorities ­66

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more conscious of the film spectator and his or her responsive needs. Sewell’s emphasis on a distinctly audience-­oriented aesthetics, for instance, ensures that shooting and assembly procedures appropriate to fiction are understood in broadly instrumental terms, avoiding ‘untidy, unplanned, self-­centred, pompous yards of shots which do not begin to form the basis of good film-­ making material’.48 Specific hallmarks of the sectoral style emerge from Tony Rose’s final summing-­up of the project, although the account is by no means comprehensive. Achievement of editorial ‘smoothness’, for example, is recognised as a crucial goal for the amateur fiction film, since this quality expresses respect for the audience’s presence, and functions as an aid to imaginative investment. Visual technique should properly serve the goals of an immersive storytelling and maintenance of a coherent fictional world, rather than the personal obsessions of the filmmaker. The propulsion of narrative should supersede the realist motivations usually treasured by vocational definitions of the sector’s role, where they run beyond an accounting of probable outcomes feasible within the given fictional scenario, and so on. As such aphorisms accumulate, it becomes clear that, for both Sewell and Rose, the sectoral style is above all a matter of moderation and balance, a point of resolution for competing logics and instincts. To serve this end, characterisation should be completed early and characters followed closely, but not allowed to ‘overbalance’ the film and distract the audience from the unfolding of the action. Overwhelming insistence is similarly placed on the generative function of the edit, which should be more than simply connective, whilst, at the same time, the amateur is advised to avoid over-­compensation for the threat of boredom with excessive cutting. Lighting should provide sufficient illumination, whilst cueing more localised expressive ambitions, and so on.49 Assessment of all three contributions to Exercise Movie is thus very much a response to their perceived realisation of such reconciliations, and avoidance of the perturbing elements that will threaten the equilibrium and unity of the film as a whole, qualities seen as foundational to any claim to aesthetic commendation. Striking is the stress on the centrality of motivation to the appropriate securing and distribution of shots; in the main, the participants are seen to have avoided the ‘empty long shots or purposeless panning movements (starting from nowhere and leading nowhere) that disfigure so much amateur work’, and to have secured good close-­up coverage of significant detail ‘important to story development’. Glanvill is gently taken to task, however, for unconsidered variations of set-­up and shot scale, and the ‘opposite fault’ of too much change in angle, whilst novice Freeman works with far fewer ‘master’ shots, leaving footage with which to secure significant ‘insert’ material. As an experienced amateur, Glanvill apparently achieves the best results from ‘a pictorial point of view’, securing balanced compositions, even exposures and ‘rock steady’ shots, but is somewhat chastised for ‘giving emphasis to the wrong story points’.50 This is where Sewell is seen to score over his amateur competitors: for, despite 67

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inconsistent exposure, unattractive compositions and idiosyncratic camera angles, his work apparently shows concentration on the ‘human subject matter’, and so best places technique in the service of clear storytelling: Sewell establishes his main character right at the start by shooting her approach to the seat from the front (in both medium shot and close-­up) instead of the rear. He uses close-­ups to underline important story points and continually fills the frame with action, keeping irrelevancies out of the picture. This of course makes for a much greater degree of closeness not only to the characters, but the whole situation.51 Stress on the emotional engagement with character apparently achieved by Sewell, with its promise of immersion for audience members, is a quality seemingly shared to some extent with that of the novice, and apparently out-­ points the technical correctness of ‘experienced’ amateur Freeman’s work. Both Sewell and Glanvill are seen to prepare the way effectively for the much-­ endorsed ‘twist’ ending, made acceptable rather than puzzling, through (albeit delayed) revelation of its underlying causal motivation. Freeman’s ‘experience’, by contrast, is translated only as adherence to formula, the sign of a risk-­aversive ‘percentage’ filmmaking. Specifications of the sectoral style thus coalesce as reworked expressions of decidedly ‘classical’ aesthetic preferences, with commentary favouring formal harmonies that will integrate the film, a sense of measurable proportion and rational development, and an assembly that will guide the spectator’s involvement with discretion and precision. Through appeal to conventions rehearsed well beyond its own sphere, therefore, worthwhile standards for cine fiction are delineated, and association claimed with aesthetic traditions ennobled by antiquity, and refashioned closer to home by commercial–professional film practice.52 On the evidence of Exercise Movie, elaboration of the sectoral style is evidently seen as placing ‘classical’ realisation well within the reach of the amateur filmmaker, and promising related satisfactions for his or her audience. For all its essential abstraction, the envisioned style clearly forms a strongly felt aesthetic reference point for amateur filmmaking, and attempts at more concrete summary abound in hobby literatures. Archie Reid, for example, regular columnist of 8mm Movie Maker and Cine Camera (1964–7), ­condenses a production ‘recipe’ through which it may be realised: Remember your camerawork must carry the story along smoothly and any jerks will destroy the illusion. Cut where possible on movement. Close-­ups are good for opening or closing a scene. Shooting from a low angle will make your subject more important. Looking down on him will make the audience do the same. Keeping in close adds drama and can give a claustrophobic effect. The constant use of long shots makes the audience an impartial onlooker . . .53 ­68

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Reduced to such aphorisms, specification suggests semantic rigidities and procedural formulae; amateur perspectives, however, also demand qualification of the more ‘zero degree’ model inherited from professional filmmaking, and an allowance of creative initiatives beyond those of diligent service to prescribed norms.54 Whilst appropriate style is to be secured by careful design rather than happy accident, a relative openness to circumstances is frequently advocated, even at the potential cost of disequilibrium. In this way, amateur filmmaking may retain the degrees of spontaneity and ‘freshness’ regarded as unachievable in the professionalised workplace, whilst restoring the aleatory fascinations of ‘pioneer’ cinema, so persistent in the amateur imagination.55 A certain intrusion of the unpremeditated element is thus seen to function in principle as a kind of guarantee of amateur authenticity, if it can also acquire convincing narrative motivation. Incidental contingencies, often fetishised from archival perspectives as historical evidence, are thus understood within aesthetic commentary as attractions to be admitted, albeit under a certain control, rather than systematically obliterated by strictly ‘plastic’ devices. Despite basic technical and constructional ‘errors’, novice filmmaker Brian Glanvill’s contribution to Exercise Movie is therefore congratulated for its apparent opportunism: One of Glanvill’s best scenes is good because of a natural, virtually unpredictable moment. After the girl has retrieved her bag and left the park, the man is left asleep on the bench with his paper spread across his face. Glanvill had a little girl snatch the paper and run off, an amusing variation on the original story . . . For once, he has been lucky.56 Leslie Freeman is similarly seen as the beneficiary of unforeseen circumstances, for as the woman in his film bursts the paper bag to awaken the dozing man, nearby pigeons take to the air, producing a startling ‘visual sound effect’ that could not have been anticipated, an element regarded as adding considerably to the climax of the story. Such emphasis not only underlines the value placed on receptiveness within elaboration of the broadly ‘closed’ sectoral norms, but also reveals a certain impatience with its potential confinement, never far from even the most affirmative endorsements of its foundational value to the amateur filmmaker. Overly rigid formulae seem here as threatening to the preferred sectoral style as the unplanned ‘shoot first’ approach detected with dismay in many a cine journal review column, suggesting affiliations to be explored between amateur filmmaking and a wider range of relatively ‘open’ film practices.57 Inclinations towards the inclusive, often characteristic of the amateur outlook, find expression here, then, in pedagogic terms. Illustrating more or less realised approximations of the imagined sectoral style with discrete instructional value, juxtaposition of three versions of the same scenario within Exercise Movie also serves unwittingly to underline the flexibility of 69

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the traditions being advertised. As the film illustrates alternative treatments of the same storyline, employing devices in combination that enjoy a certain functional compatibility, the reader is reminded discreetly that the scenario may exist in a multiplicity of forms. Although expressed in amateurism’s vernacular discourse as Archie Reid’s ‘recipe’, the sectoral style is effectively proffered as what film semiotics has long recognised as a paradigm: namely, ‘a virtual or “vertical” set of units which have in common that fact that they entertain relations of similarity and contrast – i.e. of comparability – and that they may be chosen to combine with other units’, according to individual or collective preference.58 Exercise Movie illustrates precisely this limited range of permissible alternatives, as they are exchanged for each, by filmmakers recognising an institutionalised background of cine movement expectations. Thus Freeman may pan, where Glanvill will cut or Sewell will tilt, but a resemblance between their strategies remains recognisable in semantic terms, suggesting an important emphasis for the amateur filmmaker: there is space for individualist treatment, and room for self-­realisation, even within the paradigmatic boundaries of a highly orthodox filmmaking. It is suggestive therefore that, once competition is at an end, all three versions attract a certain praise, whilst a related reluctance to rank the efforts is also very tangible. George Sewell’s conclusion that, through the exercise, ‘each of us scored in some way over the other two’ is endorsed by Tony Rose and subsequent letter-­writers; on the evidence of Exercise Movie however, it seems that the development of fictional technique, whilst approved as a sign of progress, is never secured without a certain sense of loss of more primitive pleasures.59 Deviation and Transcendence The direct influence of specific experiments such as Exercise Movie is difficult to establish beyond anecdotal reference, although responses to the project are recorded for some time after its completion in the pages of Amateur Movie Maker, and in radio coverage involving the participants.60 The aesthetic norms assumed and formal outcomes endorsed by the organisers of the project find ample illustration, however, across the work of numerous amateur filmmakers motivated by the possibilities of cine fiction. Both indexing the wide diffusion of the sectoral style, and underlining its compatibility with more idiosyncratic appropriations, localised case studies informed by ‘poetic’ perspectives provide a basis for a fuller understanding of specifically amateur authorships. Creative reconciliation of personal fascinations with the stylistic encouragements ‘exercised’ through the pages of cine journals and manuals is well represented, for example, by the case of Enrico Cocozza (1921–97), Scottish ‘enfant terrible’ of the cine scene in the 1950s, and producer–director of several celebrated fiction films, gaining awards in both national and international competitions.61 As initial research around Cocozza’s practice has suggested, influences upon the remarkably sustained output clearly extended well beyond the norms of ­70

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a professional ‘classical’ style reworked for amateurism. Inheritances from European art cinema, British documentary realism and the historical avant-­ garde have all been detected, providing connective threads through several particular cycles of films. Perhaps as a result of such diverse ‘relational’ diversity, Cocozza’s critical recognition remained decidedly uneven within a British cine culture insistently appealing to the norms of movement discourse in its judgements, where he was widely regarded as something of an enigma and often as a frustrating exemplar, even for those sympathetic to his imagination and creativity.62 Reviewers frequently found the films themselves puzzling, and whilst offering praise for technical aspects of the work or underlining ‘touches’ of compositional brilliance, most remained suspicious of Cocozza’s deeper artistic ambitions, especially when operating in the fantastic realms difficult to reconcile with the communitarian missions often identified as the appropriate preserve of a responsible cine movement. Harold Benson’s overview of Cocozza’s work, for example, echoes Beisiegel’s advice to the amateur filmmaker, elevating a very standard non-­fictional work above the more eccentric fictional efforts, which are seen as succumbing to self-­absorption and aesthetic excess: Sail to Inverary [is] a straightforward colour travelogue. In honest, orthodox style, it covers a crowded boat trip. Cocozza regards it as a very minor work, and so it is, but in my opinion it is one of the best things he has done. Why? My guess is that this is a production where he didn’t feel any necessity to strain after effect . . . It is not often one feels like encouraging an amateur to abandon his more personal experiments for the sake of comparative orthodoxy. But it’s my belief that Cocozza is at his best when he is not really trying and when he comes out of his private world into everyday surroundings.63 Such reaction to Cocozza’s output provides succinct illustration of the ways in which textual paradigms, endorsed by movement insiders via projects such as Exercise Movie, may impact upon the evaluation of particular amateur films and filmmakers, working to shape reputations, determine the distribution of competition awards, and influence more material career prospects.64 Amongst a catalogued output of around fifty or so finished works, covering genres from travelogue to posterity production, to comedy drama and fantasy film, the short thriller entitled Petrol (1957) stands out as one of Cocozza’s particular accomplishments. Illustrating the serious dramatic potential of the format rehearsed by Exercise Movie, the film underlines the possibility of a genuine artistry uncompromised by amateur codes, drawing strength from the norms of a sectoral style (which provides a tradition within which it may be understood), even as it places that self-­same paradigm under a certain constructional and cultural pressure. Apparently never entered into any public competition, the film is recalled by the filmmaker as a favourite work, 71

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exhibiting, in his view, precisely the ‘clean simplicity and conciseness’ valued in much movement discourse.65 In this sense, Cocozza’s production seems to confirm the opinion of both Sewell and Rose that significant amateur achievement in fiction will be a product of disciplinary restraint, as much as an expression of individual talent. At the same time, the broader output offers a sharp reminder that insider assumptions concerning film style will never determine the limits of actual practice, as particular filmmakers constantly re-­assemble and transform substitutable elements within the ‘official’ paradigm. Perhaps a definitive illustration of the amateur ‘incident’ picture, Petrol runs for just 2 minutes 35 seconds, and contains only nine shots, one location and two nameless characters. Concerning an unexplained and seemingly random act of roadside violence, its synopsis condenses the characteristically morbid themes that often troubled reviewers and competition judges confronted by Cocozza’s efforts (suicidal inclinations, insane visions and the strains of the melancholic develop as recognisable motifs through much of the filmography), whilst their transformation to the screen encapsulates Cocozza’s stylistic ­divergence and desire for transcendence of sectoral norms: Iris out. A car has halted on a deserted country road; its driver gets out and raises the bonnet to ascertain the cause of his breakdown; a lone stranger approaches the vehicle across an empty field; the driver anticipates assistance, but is immediately strangled; the killer lifts his victim’s body into the car, which he then drives away. Iris in.66 As with Exercise Movie, the premise here is simply that of the chance encounter that triggers an unanticipated outcome, occasioned by one of the sector’s favourite narrative premises, the car breakdown, employed elsewhere to a series of very different generic ends.67 Cocozza’s refashioning of the scenario in Petrol takes a typically sinister turn, confronting the audience with a seemingly arbitrary execution, whose causes and consequences will remain unexplored. An innocent driver is murdered by a stranger, apparently without provocation, who then takes possession of the corpse and drives his victim’s vehicle away towards the horizon. Before the audience can assess the action or formulate a possible rationale for its macabre consequences, the film is already over, although not before instituting a powerful screen memory, and a disturbing compulsion to review the material, in hope perhaps of some clearer understanding. Much in Petrol suggests lessons learned and specification accepted from definitional discourses: camera placement maximises the legibility of the scene; editing preserves the direction of figure movement; compositional scale is rendered appropriate to the significance of the action, etc. Complementary iris shots at the beginning and end of the image stream lend the film a visual symmetry, creating senses of narrational completeness and signalling clinical management of the material. Such features also mark a generous accommodation of the viewer and his or her basic spectatorial needs, securing viewing positions ­72

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very much in keeping with the style of treatment advocated by George Sewell in particular. Petrol thus offers a reminder that the amateur’s much-­vaunted freedom from the institutional constraints of the professional mainstream is no guarantee of any break with the ‘standardisations’ of one’s own sector’s film style, and that artistry within that sphere, as elsewhere, may well be a matter of modifying prescribed norms, rather than outright refusal or contravention. Cocozza, however, negotiates certain deviations from sectoral protocols, perhaps more attuned to Rose’s insistence that, in the production of screen fiction, ‘the idea must be wholly embodied in the visual material,’ rather than simply ‘covered’ by an image stream geared to omniscience.68 By soliciting traumatic participations palpably reduced by a merely instrumental sectoral style, the amateur filmmaker here stakes a claim to cultural distinction for his work, in other registers. Particular confidence, for example, is apparent in terms of camera placement, which shows Cocozza prepared to restrict vision in the interests of dramatic intensity and the creation of highly affective senses of volume (shot transitions suggest that the killer has moved worryingly behind the camera and the audience before confronting his victim). Introduction of the ‘professional’ low angles (from ground level, as the body is lifted into the car) that caused some concern in Sewell’s version of Exercise Movie also generate considerable unease. Awareness of the dramatic potentials of off-­screen space seems unusually acute here, with figure movement through these zones sustaining a complex play between the orientation and disorientation of the spectator, and introducing significant qualification of more benevolent spatial norms, whilst clearly ‘embodying’ Cocozza’s thematic interests, in the visual treatment. In Cocozza’s hands, therefore, the sectoral style is recognisable less as the inflexible prescription implied by the notion of ‘recipe’, whose dutiful realisation is accredited in Freeman’s version of Exercise Movie, than as an incentive to innovation and an exploration of altogether more semantically generative relationships between elements, which will allow transcendence of the basic ‘zero degree’ amateur style. Actually described as a ‘test piece’ by its originator, Cocozza’s Petrol feels very much like an exercise in its own right, perhaps to be understood as a determined critique of the redundancy often generating complaint in discussion of amateur fiction filmmaking, and sometimes associated with a specifically amateur sense of preciousness.69 Certainly, the effect is one of an attempt to distil a coherent treatment into as few set-­ups, shots and camera movements as possible, whilst maximising the dramatic impact and cultural suggestiveness of the larger story that we are invited to construe from these strictly limited plot materials. In this sense, Petrol confirms the repeated insistence of insiders such as Sewell and Rose that, for the amateur, ‘less is more’, and epitomises the textual economy objectified in such maxims. With resources supporting inferential activity reduced to such a minimum, the participation solicited from the audience is proportionately increased, whilst, for all its formal completeness and unity, Petrol gestures towards only unresolved 73

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2.3  Allusion, recognition and the uncanny in Petrol (1957).

questions and lengthier narratives, both sensed here as operating at the metaphysical levels entertained in several other of Cocozza’s films. Recourse to fiction for Cocozza serves to intensify aesthetic experience, with calculated artifice introducing a productive distance between the audience and the world of the film’s narrative, which nurtures inference and largely satisfies the demands of Sewell and Rose, for an amateur cinema of greater absorption and involvement. Entry-­level amateur attachments are none the less relinquished with a tangible reluctance, and the world of the audience, verified by a certain encouragement to recognise, is still sensed as a disturbance to the homogeneity of Petrol’s fictional world. Such instability recalls Stephen Heath’s proposition that, even in the most incorporating of stylistic systems: narrative never exhausts the image . . . Homogeneity is haunted by the material practice it represses and the tropes of that repression, the forms of continuity, provoke within the texture of the film, the figures – the edging, the margin – of the loss by which it moves. . . .70 Acting perhaps as something of a hallmark of the amateur fiction film more generally, such ‘provocation’ seems deliberately attenuated in Petrol; for, whilst Cocozza clearly works hard to integrate uncreated elements as created ones, the texture of his film makes very present ‘the loss’ by which it ‘moves’, generating a referential uncertainty that well describes the uncanny effects colouring several of the more striking works.71 In Petrol, the filmmaker’s treatment of the breakdown scenario is distinguished by a careful balancing of fictional unreality against a pull towards strongly mimetic effects that might be seen elsewhere to threaten a fiction’s diegetic intensity. The resultant aesthetic is illustrated most clearly, perhaps, by the fabrication of an atmospheric ­74

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2.4  Cultural taste and transcendence of norms in Petrol (1957).

setting, partly recognisable as a roughly cultivated Lanarkshire countryside, and partly recalling the other-­worldly environments of the ‘surrealist’ works by Jean Cocteau that held an abiding fascination for Cocozza throughout his creative life, and enjoying unparalleled visibility within British ‘minority’ film cultures in the later 1950s.72 Presentation of the empty landscape traversed by the killer, differentiated only by electricity pylons and distant spoil heaps, specifically recalls the dream-­like environments of Sang d’un poète (Blood of a Poet, 1930) and Orphée (Orpheus, 1950), which become a conspicuous component of Cocozza’s authorial signature in several other key works, whilst simultaneously registering a distinctly local geography, palpably experienced as an actual site for such encounters. Amateur desire for aesthetic objectification through the production of fiction finds expression, it seems, within prescribed parameters, and whilst Petrol reminds us strongly that the norms of the sectoral style are as much cultural as formal, Cocozza’s reception suggests that mastery of the latter may offer little compensation for infringement of the former, within amateur cine’s highly organised social world of the 1950s. Harold Benson’s formulation of Cocozza’s work as troublingly ‘private’ is suggestive here; like several other of the filmmaker’s ‘underground’ projects, Petrol seems designed to infringe the more public cultural standards never far from discussion of safer formal questions concerning composition, continuity-­editing and camera movement. Over fifty years since its production, the shock of Petrol remains considerable, and seems inconsistent with the maintenance of ‘decency’ sometimes identified as a social obligation for the amateur sector, in its perceived role as conscience for a professionalised cinema inclined towards excess, self-­indulgence and related cultural ‘superficialities’.73 Immediate experience seems to take precedence over the continuities and deferrals of the sectoral style, although celebrated 75

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amateur ‘freedoms’ feel subject to a restraining self-­censorship, even as the film pulls towards both literal and sensory assault. Respecting his audience’s sensibilities, Cocozza ensures that the act of murder itself is discretely obscured by the placement of the immobilised vehicle within the frame. Indexing an ethical norm at work, more clearly sensed as frustrating inhibition in several other films, the construction here serves the needs of fiction admirably. Yet even as Cocozza’s editing scheme spares his audience the spectacle of the driver’s moment of death, generating ‘aestheticising’ perspectives unattributable as optical point-­of-­view to any other character, and creating unease through their abandonment of explanatory imperatives, it simultaneously insists upon its own awareness of sectoral norms. Cocozza’s deeper emphases are perhaps more subtle and more enduring: mastery of the sectoral style may explain absolutely nothing; the true subject of Petrol will remain concealed despite the precision of its treatment; interpretation may be solicited by the responsive incentives of the textual assembly, although investment at that level may go just as unrewarded in amateur cinema as in its professional counterpart. Conclusions Creation and discussion of the Exercise Movie crystallise perennial concerns over the quality and techniques of the amateur fiction film. Organised to test a much-­repeated maxim that imagination and respect for proven aesthetic parameters are of a greater importance than sophisticated apparatus or financial resources to the hobby filmmaker, response to the work reveals shared understandings concerning the forms and functions of a peculiarly amateur ‘sectoral’ style. Understood in paradigmatic terms, such a style may be seen as forming a notional reference set for assessment of particular amateur fiction films, and as a premise for revision and transformation by particular filmmakers. The work of Scottish amateur filmmaker Enrico Cocozza offers a particular case study of creative engagement with the sectoral style, whose results in a work such as Petrol illustrate the dramatic potential and cultural critique within the reach of its formal codes, and the possibility of an amateur cinema of fiction radically distinct from its professional counterparts. Contemporary response to Petrol has yet to emerge from scholarship, although one suspects that reaction may have been as puzzled as that generated by several other of Cocozza’s works. Reaction from more recent viewers is, though, suggestive. Discussing the film briefly in a 2001 television documentary, then director of Scottish Screen John Archer comments that Petrol seems ‘a remarkably modern piece, it’s the kind of piece that you could transmit through the internet, very easily, very simply; you’re left with a great memory of something that’s really just very small’, within a more extended appreciation of the filmmaker’s work.74 Representing an overdue incentive to further archaeology and re-­assessment, Archer’s comments also gesture towards a certain persistence of aesthetic norms, and to the shifting circulation and ­76

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accreditation of historical ‘sectoral’ styles. Fictional forms once the domain of the amateur cine enthusiast have indeed found new life in subsequent media contexts, as the confined fictional templates of the incident picture have been recirculated as the television micro-­drama, as the YouTube video upload and through the archive website, where Petrol may now be viewed.75 Notes   1. Leslie Beisiegel, ‘Hard words to amateurs!’, Cinema Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1935, pp. 125–6. The author was, at the time of writing, editor of the Independent Film Makers’ Association Bulletin, and of the ‘Film Maker’ Section of Cinema Quarterly, the official publication of the Independent Film Makers’ Association.   2. See Guy Edmonds’s contribution to the present volume, ‘Historical, aesthetic, cultural: The problematical value of amateur cine fiction’, pp. 33–54; similar recognition of the priority accorded non-­fictional amateur production within the archive sector is made by Maryann Gomes, ‘Working people, topical films and home movies’, in Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann (eds), Mining The Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 235–48.   3. Bert Hogenkamp and Mieke Lauwers, ‘In pursuit of happiness? A search for the definition of amateur film’, CBG Nieuws, No. 24, 1993, pp. 107–16; for the development of the term ‘unwitting testimony’, see Arthur Marwick, The Nature of History (London: Macmillan Papermac, 1970), pp. 136–8.   4. By the early 1930s, for example, technological constraints, such as those of the ‘reversal’ film growing popular with amateurs, are seen as inhibiting the expressive potentials of the small-­gauge medium; the serious-­minded are encouraged to work with the more complex but more responsive ‘negative’ film process. See Eric M. Knight, ‘No more film plays!’, Cinema Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1933, pp. 61–3.   5. Cataloguing procedures in the UK archive sector are summarised in this fashion in D. M. Lee, Film and Sound Archives in Non-­Specialist Repositories (London: Society of Archivists, 2009), p. 30.   6. See, for example, an early report of the fiction filmmaking carried out by the London-­based Apex Motion Pictures in the later 1920s, in Bob Burgess, ‘One year later’, Amateur Films, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1929, pp. 5–7.   7. On early resistances to the development of fiction filmmaking, see Ian Craven, ‘Hitchcock and small-­gauge: Shaping the amateur fiction film’, Journal of Media Practice, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2012, pp. 19–44.   8. Jean Straker’s early column reviewing commercial releases is typical, first appearing as Jean Straker, ‘Professional films’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1934, pp. 40–1; perhaps the most fascinating of such competitions is represented by the production of a fiction film ‘kit’ comprising prop list, cast list, shooting script and camera position chart, for a film to be produced by journal readers detailed in Reginald C. Rogers, ‘Operation “Film”’, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 6, No. 11, 1963, pp. 534–6; instructional discussion with professional counterparts is well represented by Chris Wordsworth, ‘Freddie Francis’, Film Making, Vol. 16, Nos 8 and 9, 1978, pp. 35–41, pp. 30–1.   9. Erik Chisholm, ‘Work or play? A plan for amateur cine societies’, Cinema Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1932, pp. 51–4. 10. A fascinating example of the former is represented by Make Your Own Movies (16mm, 11 mins, 1959), produced by United Motion Pictures in Association with the Fountain Press, which illustrates a progression from home movie-­making to the development of fictional projects, before advertising Amateur Cine World and Amateur Movie Maker. The film was produced for circulation to cine clubs,

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distributed through the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers, and reviewed in Film User, Vol. 13, No. 157, 1959, p. 583. 11. Publicity for the exercise supported cross-­marketing via ‘sister’ publications: see Amateur Cine World, Vol. 22, No. 4, 1958, p. 406. Other such practical film exercises are reported in Tony Rose, ‘Imagination is not enough’, Movie Maker, Vol. 6, No. 9, 1972, p. 598. 12. Tony Rose, ‘The way to the stars’, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 1, No. 7, 1958, p. 183. 13. An early encapsulation of these key themes is offered by Paul Barralet, ‘Amateur v. Professional’, Amateur Films, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1929, pp. 67–8. 14. Tony Rose, ‘The way to the stars’, p. 183. 15. For counter-­arguments stressing dependencies between technical potentials and creative achievements, see Denys Davis, ‘Plan for a revolution in amateur movies’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 21, No. 1, 1957, pp. 42–71. 16. Tony Rose, ‘The way to the stars’, p. 183; an extended version of the ‘devotion over equipment’ argument is represented by Tony Rose, ‘Room at the top’, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 4, No. 8, 1961, pp. 396–7. 17. Sewell’s lengthy bibliography includes Film Play Production for Amateurs (London:  Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1932), Amateur Film-­Making (London and Glasgow: Blackie & Son, 1938) and Making and Showing Your Own Films (London: George Newnes, 1958). Something of the letter-­writer’s status is suggested by celebratory appraisal in his obituary, published in Movie Maker, Vol. 5, No. 9, 1971, p. 565. 18. George H. Sewell, ‘My first movie’, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1957, pp. 28–9. 19. George H. Sewell, ‘Odd shots’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 18, No. 6, 1954, pp. 568–9. 20. George H. Sewell, ‘The way to the stars’, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 1, No. 9, 1958, pp. 315–16. 21. Ibid., p. 316. 22. George H. Sewell, ‘Nevertheless, I’m worried about the films’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 21, No. 3, 1957, pp. 271–2. 23. Sewell makes this claim in the radio broadcast ‘Three men and a cine camera’, an episode of the BBC’s Third Network series, Photography and Cinematography, first transmitted 4 August 1958, featuring discussion between Freeman, Glanvill and Sewell. See Radio Times, Vol. 140, No. 1812, 1958, p. 26. Transcripts of the broadcast are retained by the BBC Written Archive, Caversham Park, Reading RG4 8TZ, File: TLO 63127. 24. Tony Rose, ‘Exercise movie’, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 1, No. 10, 1958, p. 347. 25. Rose’s modification of the project is recorded by Sewell, in the radio broadcast detailed above. 26. Ibid. Sewell suggests Freeman ‘has worked on proper productions in a variety of capacities’. 27. The role of the unnamed woman was played by Joan Flicker, editorial secretary of Amateur Movie Maker, identified as having ‘no acting experience whatever’ and thus an appropriate participant in an exercise designed to emulate typical amateur circumstances; the male character was played by Philip Johnson in Brian Glanvill’s version, by Michael James in Leslie Freeman’s effort, and by Tony Rose in the George Sewell film. Equipment comprised a G. B.-Bell & Howell 603T ‘Auto-­Load’ camera, a Linhof tripod and 100 feet of 16mm Kodak ‘Plus X’ stock – chosen to enhance enlargements for publication. Both 16mm and 8mm prints of Exercise Movie were produced for circulation to cine clubs, and for hire by individual filmmakers, at a cost of five shillings. A sound stripe commentary

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was eventually added before the film found distribution through the British Film Institute. 28. Tony Rose, ‘How would you tackle this assignment?’, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 1, No. 11, 1958, pp. 401–2. 29. An early film made by George H. Sewell and John H. Ahern, entitled Smoke (35mm, 6 mins, 1924), is later recalled as a ‘story film with an “ironical” twist at the end that was to set the pattern for amateur fiction in subsequent years’, in Sewell’s obituary in Movie Maker, Vol. 5, No. 9, 1971, p. 565. 30. Tony Rose, ‘How would you tackle this assignment?’, p. 402; see Gordon Malthouse, ‘The amateur story film’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1950, pp. 122–4, for a detailed assessment of Rose’s Paper Boat (16mm, 33 mins, 1949), prize-­winner in the 1949 ‘Ten Best’ competition. 31. Tony Rose, ‘How would you tackle this assignment?’, p. 402. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. George Sewell, in the radio broadcast detailed above, comments, ‘I suppose I compromise between the two of you. I do believe in very tight scripting, the tighter the better because you can think out all the aspects of the story more adequately during the scripting stage, but I do leave myself freedom to interpret it when I get on the floor or on location. . . .’ 35. Tony Rose, ‘How would you tackle this assignment?’, p. 402. 36. Tony Rose, ‘Three men and a camera’, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 1, No. 12, 1958, pp. 466–8. 37. Tony Rose, ‘Here is our verdict!’, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 1, No. 13, 1958, pp. 517–20. 38. Rose’s filmography reveals a marked stress on fictional productions; examples produced as a founder member of the High Wycombe Film Society include Paper Boat (16mm, 33 mins, 1949), Coming Shortly (16mm, 4 mins, 1954) and Water Lark (16mm, 12 mins, 1956), whilst his instructional manuals also place an unusual emphasis on fictional practice, often taking these titles as illustration of principles and problems; see Tony Rose, How To Direct Amateur Films (London: Focal, 1949), The Simple Art of Making Films (London: Focal, 1957), Tackle Movie-­Making This Way (London: Stanley–Paul, 1960) and Let’s Make Movies (London: New English Library, 1963). Rose’s fictional films are also introduced as instructional devices in the BBC TV series Film Club, transmitted 9 November 1960 to 10 May 1961. A small collection of Rose’s personal papers is held by the East Anglian Film Archive (contact details below). 39. For defence of the fiction film along these lines, see Marjorie A. Lovell Burgess, ‘The true function of ciné amateurs’, The Amateur Photographer and Cinematographer, Vol. 57, No. 2361, 1934, p. 138, and ‘A plea for the amateur film play’, The Amateur Photographer and Cinematographer, Vol. 57, No. 2372, 1934, p. 388. 40. George H. Sewell, Film Play Production for Amateurs, p. 3. 41. Tony Rose, Let’s Make Movies, p. 10. 42. See, for example, Gordon Malthouse, ‘Ideas for story films’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 4, No. 4, 1937, p. 170. 43. For an early critique of imitation around these various genres, see George E. Mellor, ‘The future of the amateur club movement’, Home Movies and Home Talkies, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1933, p. 102. 44. See Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction To Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), p. 6. Clarifying distinctions between scientific, poetic and interpretation-­based approaches to cultural production, the essay appears first as Poétique: Qu’est-­ce que le structuralisme?, Vol. 2 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968). 45. For persistence of the style into the post-­film eras, see David Buckingham, Maria Pini and Rebekah Willett, ‘Take back the tube! The discursive construction of

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amateur film and video making’, Journal of Media Practice, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2007, pp. 183–201. 46. See Ryan Shand, ‘Theorizing amateur cinema’, The Moving Image, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2008, pp. 36–60. 47. For discussion of such revitalising potential, see Eric M. Knight, ‘The passing of Hollywood’, Cinema Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1933, pp. 216–18. 48. George H. Sewell, ‘The way to the stars’, p. 316. 49. Tony Rose, ‘Here is our verdict!’, pp. 517–20. 50. Tony Rose, ‘Three men and a camera’, p. 468. 51. Ibid. 52. Exploration of aesthetic tensions between inherited classicisms and the industrial– technological modernity of the twentieth century are explored in relation to filmmaking in Miriam Bratu Hansen, ‘The mass-­production of the senses: Classical cinema as vernacular modernism’, Modernism/Modernity, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1999, pp. 59–77. 53. Archie Reid, ‘Try this recipe for better fiction films’, 8mm Movie Maker and Cine Camera, Vol. 9, No. 6, 1966, pp. 231, 234–5. 54. For discussion of the ‘colourless language’ of ‘zero degree’ aesthetics, with distinct echoes in formulations of the amateur sectoral style, see Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967), pp. 44–52. 55. Nostalgic studies of ‘primitive’ and ‘pioneer’ cinema appear regularly in British cine journals; see, for example, Kevin MacDonnell, ‘Who really invented the movies?’, Movie Maker, Vol. 7, No. 12, 1973, pp. 818–21; Gerald McKee, ‘Silents is golden’, Film Making, Vol. 17, No. 3, 1979, pp. 51–3; and Ian Rintoul, ‘Rediscovering the silents’, Making Better Movies, Vol. 7, No. 3, 1987, pp. 327–9. 56. Tony Rose, ‘Three men and a camera’, p. 468. 57. For a pertinent discussion of such ‘open’ practices, see Noel Burch, Theory of Film Practice (London: Secker & Warburg, 1973), pp. 105–21. 58. See Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-­Lewis, New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics, Structuralism, Post-­Structuralism and Beyond (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 9. 59. George Sewell, quoted in Tony Rose, ‘Here is our verdict!’, p. 520. 60. Published letters recording enthusiasm for the project appear for some time; see Anon., ‘Exercise movie again’, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 2, No. 5, 1959, p.  200; R. J. Shipman, ‘Exercise movie’, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 2, No. 6, 1959, p. 278; and J. Clohesy, ‘Exercise movie’, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 7, No. 2, 1964, p. 61. As noted above, a short (15 mins) programme entitled ‘Three men and a cine camera’, within the BBC’s Third Network series, Photography and Cinematography, gave radio coverage to the exercise, transmitted 4 August 1958. See Radio Times, Vol. 140, No. 1812, 1958, p. 26. 61. Key competition successes included awards for Chick’s Day (16mm, 32 mins, 1949–50), voted Amateur Cine World’s ‘Film of the Year’ in 1951; Robot Three (16mm, 12 mins, 1951), awarded both the Victor Saville Trophy (for most outstanding film) and the Alfred Hitchcock Cup (for best Fiction Film) at the 1952 Scottish Amateur Film Festival; and Corky (16mm, 20 mins, 1956), gaining the Scottish Film Council Prize at the Scottish Amateur Film Festival in 1958. 62. The most sustained exploration to date of Cocozza’s work as an amateur is provided by Mitchell Miller, ‘Enrico Cocozza as amateur auteur – Ideas above his station?’, in Ian Craven (ed.), Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema (Newcastle-­upon-­Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 270–300. 63. See Harold Benson, ‘The private world of Enrico Cocozza’, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 2, No. 6, 1959, pp. 291–2, for a typically mixed response to the filmmaker’s output. 64. For a more supportive response to Cocozza’s fictional efforts, see Forsyth Hardy,

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‘Critics’ verdict on the film festival’, The Scotsman, 24 March 1949, p. 5, and Tony Rose, ‘Corky is a corker!’, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1959, pp. 76–7. 65. Cocozza’s entry on Petrol in his ‘Filmoteca’ listing (an annotated filmography preserved amongst his personal papers, file 3/7/4) is worth quoting in full: ‘made as a short test piece for the young gentlemen (Eddie Cairns and Jack Smith) this film has a clean simplicity of form and conciseness that makes it a favourite for me.’ The Enrico Cocozza Papers are held by the Scottish Screen Archive, National Library of Scotland, Glasgow. Contact details below. 66. Synopsised by the author from catalogue entries and interview comment contained within the Enrico Cocozza Papers, now preserved at the Scottish Screen Archive, Glasgow. 67. See, for example, Roadside Drama (16mm, 7 mins, 1958), an instructional fiction film made by the Scottish Educational Film Association, explaining the safe way to change a car tyre, or Belt Up (8mm, 3 mins, 1967), a sex-­comedy short produced by members of the Westcliff Cine Club, Essex; car breakdown remains a persistent premise within guidance to amateurs embarking on story film production; see the ‘Take One’ course available via the IAC: Film and Video Institute, at: http://www. theiac.org/film/learn/wilson/takeone_1_2.html 68. Tony Rose, The Simple Art of Making Films, p. 181. An extended account of Rose’s approach to treatment-­building is covered by this manual, pp. 181–94. 69. See, for example, comments on tempo and the ‘highbrow’ in Tony Rose, The Simple Art of Making Films, pp. 92–3. 70. Stephen Heath, ‘Film and system: Terms of analysis, Part 1’, Screen, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1975, p. 10. 71. Works displaying similar tendencies include Fantasmagoria (16mm, 32 mins, 1948), Masquerade (16mm, 17 mins, 1953) and Twilight (16mm, 15 mins, 1955). 72. The first major retrospective of Cocteau’s work took place at the National Film Theatre in August 1958, with several of the director’s titles already well established in the programmes of emerging ‘specialist’ cinemas and the schedules of amateur-­ run exhibition societies. The journal of the Federation of Film Societies reflects the fascination of such ‘minority’ audiences with the director’s work; see, for example, ‘Letters on Orphée and Les Enfants Terribles’, Film, No. 4, 1955, pp. 8–11. 73. Robert Stebbins, ‘The amateur: Two sociological definitions’, Pacific Sociological Review, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1977, p. 587. 74. John Archer, speaking in the Scottish Television documentary, Surreally Scozzese (Caledonia, Sterne & Wyld, 25 mins, 2001), first transmitted 27 May 2001. 75. Several fiction films produced and directed by Cocozza may now be viewed at the website of the Scottish Screen Archive, now part of the National Library of Scotland. http://www.nls.uk/ssa/

Filmography Belt Up (Ron McEwen, 1967) 8mm, 3 mins, colour, sound. Chick’s Day (Enrico Cocozza, 1949–50), 16mm, 32 mins, black and white, sound. Coming Shortly (High Wycombe Film Society, 1954) 16mm, 4 mins, black and white, sound. Corky (Enrico Cocozza, 1956) 16mm, 20 mins, black and white / colour, sound. Exercise Movie (George H. Sewell, Brian Glanvill, Leslie Freeman, 1958) 16mm / 8mm, 6 mins, black and white, sound. Fantasmagoria (Enrico Cocozza, 1948) 16mm, 32 mins, black and white, sound. Make Your Own Movies (United Film Productions, Fountain Press, 1959) 16mm, 11 mins, colour, sound. Masquerade (Enrico Cocozza, 1953) 16mm, 17 mins, colour, sound.

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Paper Boat (High Wycombe Film Society, 1949) 16mm, 33 mins, black and white, sound. Petrol (Enrico Cocozza, 1957) 16mm, 2 mins 35 secs, black and white, sound. Roadside Drama (Scottish Educational Film Association, 1958), 16mm, 7 mins, colour, silent. Robot Three (Enrico Cocozza, 1951) 16mm, 12 mins, colour, sound. Sail to Inverary (Enrico Cocozza, 1956) 16mm, 10 mins, colour, sound. Smoke (George H. Sewell, John H. Ahern, 1924) 35mm, 6 mins, black and white, silent. Twilight (Enrico Cocozza, 1955) 16mm, 15 mins, black and white, sound. Water Lark (High Wycombe Film Society, 1956) 16mm, 12 mins, black and white, sound. Copies of Exercise Movie are available from a range of archive sources, including the Scottish Screen Archive, the East Anglian Film Archive and the National Film Archive. Petrol may be viewed online at the Scottish Screen Archive website, and also appears on the VHS compilation Surreally Scozzese, produced by the archive, containing three short films and a documentary account of Cocozza’s life and work, first broadcast by Scottish Television in 2001. Roadside Drama, Corky, Chick’s Day, Fantasmagoria, Masquerade, Robot Three, Sail to Inverary and Twilight are held by the Scottish Screen Archive. Copies of Make Your Own Movies, Coming Shortly and Paper Boat are held by the East Anglian Film Archive, although no trace has been found of Water Lark during preparation of this chapter. Smoke is held by the National Film Archive. Contact details: Scottish Screen Archive, c/o: National Library of Scotland, Collections Department, 39–41 Montrose Avenue, Hillington Park, Glasgow G52 4LA, United Kingdom; tel.: 0845 366 4600; http://www.nls.uk/ssa/; email: [email protected] East Anglian Film Archive, The Archive Centre, Martineau Lane, Norwich NR1 2DQ, United Kingdom; tel.: 01603 592664; http://www.eafa.org.uk; email: [email protected] National Film and Television Archive, Kingshill Way, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire HP4 3TP, United Kingdom; tel: 01442 876301; http://www.bfi.org.uk/nftva/; email: [email protected] and [email protected] [according to mode of specific film]

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3. CRAFTING LIFE INTO FILM: ANALYSING FAMILY FICTION FILMS FROM THE 1930s MARTINA ROEPKE

‘This is not our Sunday,’ I explained to her, ‘but more the principle of our Sunday, a highly condensed version of it.’1 In one of his manuals for the novice amateur filmmaker, Berlin-­based author and father Alex Strasser chronicles the ups-­and-­downs of a complicated but very productive ménage à trois involving a young man, his wife and their newly purchased cine camera, which he refers to as Kurbulus.2 From the day that the camera enters the family home, the relation between the three develops in problematic ways, only made worse when a baby daughter is born to the young couple – the reason why the camera was bought in the first place. Questions of what to film and when, and how to bring the baby into the moving picture properly, often culminate in comic arguments, followed of course by the formulation of imaginative filmic solutions. Written in the form of a diary, the book is decidedly humorous and often ironic, especially concerning respective gender roles. It provides tips and tricks, not only about how to make a good film, but also about how to maintain a healthy domestic relationship whilst doing so. Although Strasser makes it very clear to his potential readers that there are numerous obstacles to be overcome whilst filming, he always reassures the anxious that in the end, of course, the product will have been worth it. Instructional guides such as the one mentioned here provide valuable insights into the practice of family filming in specific contexts. Although the author clearly exaggerates the number and extent of possible disasters that may eventually occur when filming in domestic situations, he also points us towards emphases that have long been overlooked by film scholars: namely, that the happy and apparently spontaneous moments that fill home movies are 83

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actually the result of a complex process of more or less ambitious, more or less planned, and more or less skillfully coordinated activities going on in front of, as well as behind, the camera. In this respect, home movie practice has little in common with forms of filmmaking commonly associated by scholarship with ‘cinema naïveté’, a term introduced by American anthropologist Richard Chalfen in his much-­quoted studies, to refer to a kind of domestic film-­making that ignores questions of form, and in which artistic ambition, planning and rule-­following are conspicuously absent. As Chalfen observes, reporting on his research: An idea often mentioned in the interviews was that home movies were not an outlet for artistic expression. Just as there would be little artistic motivation when making a tape recording of something, there was little or no concern with making a home movie in an ‘artistic manner’.3 Despite the fact that the filmmakers interviewed obviously lacked aesthetic ambitions, family members still enjoyed the screenings of the resulting footage, and did not bother about the ‘bad’ quality of the films themselves. On this basis, Chalfen concluded that filmmaking in domestic settings mainly served a social function, and suggested that this might be so because the participants agreed about not paying too much attention to rules and conventions. Although Chalfen’s approach has had a major impact upon research into domestic film practices in general, recent scholarship has taken issue with its firmly synchronic approach, detaching as it does the practices in question from their concrete historical, social and technological contexts, which vary in terms of geography and change constantly over time. Several writers have pointed towards a reduction in scope here, given the fact that Chalfen a priori excluded films from his study that showed evidence of commitment to the more formal conventions of filmmaking. Ryan Shand, for example, has ­succinctly ­formulated the limitations involved: The analysis of how these representations are constructed formally continues in what might be considered a contradiction in terms: dealing with the formal characteristics of a filmmaking practice that is not in the least interested in form.4 In similar vein, French semiotician Roger Odin has pointed to the crucial relation of form and social function in filmmaking of this supposedly ‘naïve’ kind. In his approach to domestic movie-­making, he distinguishes more specifically between various kinds of engagement with film, among which the family mode is simply one distinctive variant. In this mode, the films screened function primarily to prompt viewers to articulate memories, and to exchange visions of a common past. To some extent, Odin thus shares Chalfen’s general assumptions concerning the social power of film in family settings, but sees a direct ­84

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3.1  The use of artificial lighting requires planning in advance to avoid harm and damage.

relationship between the formal characteristics of the films and the types of engagement that they stimulate. Far from representing failures of realisation, their open, repetitive, redundant and fragmented character actively cues family members to comment on the images, fill in missing information, and thus engage creatively in the construction of a shared version of the past. Odin goes so far as to argue that the editing and staging of family films actually works against this function.5 For both Chalfen and Odin, then, domestic filming becomes synonymous with unplanned and spontaneous shooting, carried out in a domestic context without reference to established conventions, or in other words, a modern cinema naïveté. Until now, scholars and archives alike have been rather reluctant to recognise family films that do not correspond with this formulation of cinema naïveté.6 The reasons are various and complex. First of all, more calculated works, as opposed to supposedly spontaneous or naïve filming that does not seek formal perfection, are clearly driven by ambitions and a striving for formal accomplishment that are very likely to be judged as ‘poor’ or ‘awkward’. While the supposedly unplanned and spontaneous visuality of home movies has served as a source of inspiration for scholars and filmmakers alike, who have appreciated their almost experimental use of technique, films that seem to aspire to more standard–commercial conventions are often regarded as false imitations. The German filmmaker and collector Michael Kuball, for instance, regards staging and editing in family films as producing a certain ‘loss of authenticity’ and a reduction of their potential value as historical evidence.7 According to the US film scholar Patricia Zimmermann, staged and edited family films only 85

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demonstrate the extent to which Hollywood has succeeded in ‘colonising’ the bourgeois subconscious, leaving the films produced effectively obsolete ideologically.8 This chapter broadens these views and takes a closer look at a form of domestic film practice that, unlike those associated with cinema naïveté, is clearly guided by aesthetic ambitions and a respect for convention. Part of the pragmatic motivation here is to bring materials that have been widely overlooked so far to the attention of archivists and museum curators, in a way that may inform future selection and presentation policy. In more theoretical terms, what follows departs from assumptions widely held within media and cultural studies that media practices, understood as cultural practices, contribute to the construction of a domestic sphere and shape the processes of identity formation that take place within it. As media sociologist John Thompson and others have argued, these processes are shaped by the media themselves, as well as the rules and protocols of their practical use.9 To understand better how the protocols and rules of filmmaking shape domestic participation in the activity, I propose to conceptualise this filmmaking practice as a form of ‘crafting’. As Richard Sennett has recently reminded us, the concept of crafting points to the effort it takes to make something, and in this sense is most obviously opposed to naïve practices, which frequently exhibit a certain casualness and lack of investment.10 The concept of ‘crafting’ also usefully accentuates the interaction of human agents with basic tools.11 From this perspective, a series of questions are explored: what rules and conventions inform this unexplored practice in this particular historical context? In what way are they adapted in family films of those years? Can we see anything of the crafting in these films? How does this crafting relate to the identity construction that takes place in the domestic context? As cultural practice, domestic filmmaking is imbedded into larger cultural processes and historical contexts. What follows focuses on a particular historical moment: specifically, the inter-­war period in Germany, the era when approaches to family filmmaking are first explored and conventionalised. The 1930s was a time in which access barriers to small-­gauge technology were lowered significantly and ‘expert’ knowledge was made available for rapidly growing user groups. Stimulated by this new accessibility, a flood of instructional literature set out to turn a rather specialist hobby for cultural élites into a popular leisure-­time activity, suitable for the whole family. In this context, a whole range of aesthetic norms and conventions are adapted for amateur use and appropriated by family ‘filmers’. What can we say about this process of appropriation? Is it visible in the films? Fictionalising the Family Eine Nacht und ein Morgen (A Night and a Morning, 1937) is an 8mm family film with a clear narrative.12 It depicts events that take place over one night ­86

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and one morning in the life of the parents of two children, a twelve-­year-­old daughter and a son who is around ten years old. Although we cannot be sure, the events we see could have taken place in the ways in which they are represented. However, the varied use of filmic techniques, including the introduction of montage and titles, makes it clear that the film is the result of a complex process of staging and editing with the purpose of entertaining an – eventually extended – home audience. The character of the film is thus twofold. On the one hand, it projects an image of the idealised family back on to the group of participants it features: a loving wife and mother, a faithful husband and well-­behaved children. On the other hand, it incorporates various ingredients that good narrative entertainment is often made of: romance, rivalry, a happy ending – and even a real star, as we will see later. The term ‘family fiction film’ might, then, be of value to refer to such a film, one that draws its material from the lives of the participants to tell an engaging story, often with a clear and distinct message assigned to its conclusion. Eine Nacht und ein Morgen illustrates these emphases well. The film’s opening sequence shows us a man and a woman returning home late in the evening. They have a cigarette in the living room before the woman goes to bed, while the husband remains seated in his chair. Gazing at the ceiling and enjoying his smoke, he recalls the few last hours, and in particular the performance of a female dancer at a theatre. He then retires to bed, where he dreams about the dance performance and other parts of the evening’s entertainment, while his wife dreams of dressed-­up children dancing in rows. The next morning, the couple is slow to rise, while their children get up, take a bath and play quietly in the living room and outside, and they finally all prepare breakfast together. After eating, the whole family departs for a walk. The children enjoy themselves, whilst the husband and wife fall into conversation about their family life and what it offers them. The question comes up of what is more preferable – a nightlife full of entertainment or a quieter life with the family? The film ends with a clear commitment to the family. Although the film starts as a chronicle of family events, the final scene, where the parents share their conversation, makes it clear that the actions depicted earlier actually served to prepare us for the central question raised in the film: what kind of life should be chosen? Is a family life with kids or a more hedonistic nightlife preferable? ‘So?’ ‘Oder so?’ – the titles formulate the problematic whilst the parents look out over the landscape. At this point in the film, material that has been shown earlier – the playing children, the dancer at the club – is re-­introduced to illustrate the guiding opposition: family life versus nightlife. The organisation of the footage clearly works towards a predetermined end: namely, the answer given by the husband and father that family life is to be preferred. Certain doubts perhaps remain, however, as the last shot of Eine Nacht und ein Morgen shows only a cloudy sky. One of the most obvious devices supporting the narrative is the variation in shot length and framing, and throughout the whole film there is a clear sense 87

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of motivation for the image stream. Orienting shots give the spectator an idea of the place and time in which the action occurs: for instance, in the opening scene, where a medium close-­up from outside shows the door of the family home. The recollection scene in the living room that follows is covered with a medium shot of the parents that brings the important characteristics of the location into the picture, such as the table at which they smoke. Editing is used to imply spatial and temporal relations and to create continuity. A close-­up on the clock at various moments indicates how time ‘flies’; a parallel montage of the sleeping parents and the children playing suggests the simultaneity of the two actions; conventional shot-­reverse-­shot is used when the parents talk together; a shot showing the kids looking through the keyhole is followed by a shot of the sleeping parents and so on. At other points, editing is used to cue dreams or possible worlds, an effect most obvious in the repeated use of similar shots. The scene with the dancer, introduced as the husband remembers that particular night, is later re-­used to visualise his dreams; and in the final sequence, the shots of the dancer are used to refer to a kind of life – in opposition to the family life – whose appeal is ultimately deemed superficial. In all of these instances, ‘blurry’ images – probably the result of some kind of double exposure – are used to indicate changes of reference. Finally, in terms of performance, all interaction between the person behind and the person in front of the camera is carefully avoided throughout the film. Rather, the members of the family clearly ‘act’ in accordance with their actual role as a particular family member, effectively ‘playing’ themselves. The fact that, in almost all the scenes filmed inside, additional lighting was set up, suggests that planning and coordination of camera behaviour and action must have taken place in order to avoid harm and damage. Even this short analysis suggests that this is not the kind of film that Richard Chalfen had in mind, in discussing movie-­making in the home. Eine Nacht und ein Morgen is a film that very obviously strives to achieve a form, and is driven by aesthetic ambitions as much as a desire to ‘record’. Some of the events might have taken place in this family’s life. Others might be made up. Rather than being a truthful ‘aide-­mémoire’, this film wants to be a film, it wants to tell a story and to communicate a message in order to entertain a home audience. Such ambitions recognised contemporary formulations of domestic filmmaking, and the new technology that might realise them. In 1931, Siemens introduced a small-­gauge projector for 16mm on to the German market, which was designed for classroom screening, as well as for home use. Advertisements for the projector show us the members of the family gathered in front of the screen, apparently delighted by what they see: happy moments from the past summer. As the text suggests, these kinds of home screenings will be enjoyed by the whole family, especially during the long winter nights. In her book Making Room for Television, Lynn Spigel has offered a close analysis of the ways in which advertisements for television paved the ­88

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3.2  Advertisements for home projection technology promise a new kind of entertainment for the whole family in the 1930s.

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medium’s way into the middle-­class home of the 1950s, and has argued that the new technology was supposed ‘to bring the family together but still allow for social and sexual divisions’.13 One might read the advertisement for the Siemens projector in a similar way, as foregrounding the social potential of the new technology while maintaining gender-­specific roles: the father acts as the ‘savvy’ operator, whilst his wife and children, who enthusiastically jump from their chairs when they see themselves on the screen, participate as the ‘adoring’ audience. As this image suggests, families with young children were clearly a significant target market for purveyors of early home movie technology. Whilst Dutch historian Susan Aasman has spoken of the camera as an ‘ideological apparatus’ that works towards binding the couple together, strengthening their inter-­relations by visualising their symbolic reproduction, the Siemens advertisement suggests complication in this context, since it also shows another person is present at the screening.14 We see her in the upper part of the image, a young short-­haired woman dressed in masculine style, clearly a representative of the modern ‘new woman’ of the Weimar years, and as such very much the counterpart of the caring and more emotionally engaged mother and housewife. But even from her more distanced position, she seems to be interested in what is going on during the screening. One could say, then, that home cinema in this advertisement brought the family together in the usual way, while also extending the family and allowing for alternative viewing positions. Advertisements aim at all times to sell products, which they depict in an idealised and promissory way. They seek to create desires on the part of the potential customer and promise satisfaction as a result of purchase. But how can we go beyond these ideologies of the happy family? A rather different idea of home screening is conveyed by another source: namely, manuals for the novice amateur that were published in those years. Such works communicate practical knowledge that a potential reader seeks to acquire, with the goal of creating finished ‘films’. Since they promise solutions to problems, they offer insight into the kinds of problems that typically occur, and thus a sense of filmmaking conditions. When these manuals talk about screening, for example, they highlight not the seamless pleasure of the spectator ‘lost’ in the image, but rather the problems and difficulties that often accompanied the advent of home movie technology in the home. Screenings are surprisingly often described here as disastrous and dangerous, although frequently in a rather humorous way. One of the most pressing ‘problems’ articulated in those texts is simply that of boredom. Manuals are very open about the fact that family films are often not exciting, or at least grow tedious after a while. As a consequence, they aim at educating the new filmmaker in how to make films that will prove entertaining, even after repeated viewings. What, then, is regarded as the best way to put one’s own family on to the screen of home cinema in 1930, without boring the audience?

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Educating the Amateur In one of his popular books for the new amateur cine enthusiast, author Hellmuth Lange described in detail why family films are often such an ­unpleasurable aspect of home cinema: During his lifetime the author has seen some dozen films of newborns. They resemble each other even more than amateur films already do. What is it that a baby does? He sleeps, he drinks, he cries and he ­misbehaves. And occasionally he looks confident.15 Domestic filming, Lange and others observe, tends to restrict itself to the documentation of family events and routines, with the newborn baby in particular often at the centre of all attention. As a result, the films lack variation, surprise and fascination. A limited number of subject topics, a lack of variation in shot length, and poorly composed framing are seen to make such family films boring, almost a ‘torture’ for the audience to watch. Authors of manuals therefore encourage their readers to select their subject matter imaginatively and to treat it dynamically, so that variation and thus pleasure will be provided. Hellmuth Lange was an active member of the German Amateur League and a popular author of the 1930s and 1940s, remaining a significant presence on the cine scene even after the Second World War. The League had been founded in 1927, as a direct response to the arrival of Kodak’s new 16mm safety stock in Germany. Founding members were mostly representatives of the cinematographic industry, the association of cinema owners, interested journalists and individual amateur filmmakers, who pursued a common aim: largely, to create a market for the new gauge by promoting ‘sub-­standard’ filming in the broadest sense.16 The excellent optical and technological qualities of the 16mm format attracted amateurs and professionals alike and contributed greatly to the development of an organised cine ‘movement’. When a new, even smaller and cheaper gauge reached Germany, however, such fusion of amateur and professional filmmaking was somewhat lessened. Kodak’s 8mm stock and its competitors clearly separated the amateur filmmaker from public or semi-­public exhibition venues, while conquering the domestic sphere as a medium for the family film or home movie. The light, easy-­to-­handle cameras were designed for a new market that was less technically versed and experienced than the first generation of organised and ambitious club amateurs. As discussion within the League showed, club amateurs feared that the lowering of the access barriers to small-­gauge technology would lead to a lowering of filmmaking standards and, in the long run, would discourage novices from keeping up their hobby.17 In this situation, a plea for pedagogical intervention in the growing market for family filmmaking emerged from within the League, and was supported by manufacturers interested in the long-­term 91

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commitment of their new clientele. The 1930s, then, mark the beginning of a flood of instructional literatures for the new amateur, written by amateurs for amateurs, that set out to teach the new generation how to bring their own life as cinema into the home, as a kind of entertainment that would allow everybody to act like a star, if only for one rainy afternoon. In order to maximise its appeal to this new generation of consumers, filming had to transform itself from a hobby activity for the individual male into a socially acceptable leisure-­ time activity for the whole family. Family stories told for home cinema audiences should be based on real-­life experiences and events, but be manipulated in such a way as to be entertaining, even after multiple viewings. To this end, manuals encouraged planning and scripting beforehand, as well as careful editing after shooting. In the case of ‘baby movies’, Lange, for instance, suggests inserting similar images from other films into one’s family films, such as images of baby animals, to broaden the referential scope of one’s own work and open it for additional readings. Elsewhere, Lange asks his – supposedly male – readers: why not try making fun of ourselves for a change? Family fathers, Lange recommends, should not hide behind the camera, but participate in the staging and show themselves in a new and surprising way. How about a film about things that go wrong in our daily routines, a film about our shortcomings? Why not make a film about the turbulences that occur when a family is preparing for guests on a Sunday?18 Scripts, he suggests, should encourage family members to perform and parody their own failings openly. The father starring in the role of the ‘enfant terrible’ who disturbs the household routines under female authority is a returning theme, but such controlled forms of misbehaviour are also allowed for the little ones. Far from restricting itself to recording family rituals and providing memories of the past, this kind of home cinema encouraged storytelling strategies that openly introduced a mocking or parody of everyday routines, and of the conventional gender roles usually inscribed in them. Among the numerous authors of those years, Hellmuth Lange was probably the one who put the most emphasis on scripting. His book, Filmmanuskripte und Filmideen: 123 Themen für den Kino-­Amateur, first published in 1931, included a substantial list of possible scripts that were defined in different genres, including those of reportage and types of comedy that amateurs could easily incorporate into their family filmmaking. And it seems he was very popular. The first edition of his book quickly sold out and was reprinted several times before the 1940s. Alex Strasser, who had also started his film career as an amateur filmmaker in Berlin during the 1920s, promoted a very different strategy. Strasser was especially interested in the technical possibilities of small-­gauge technologies and favoured the experimental in his own practice, as the illustrations in the book taken from his own films clearly show. Although little is known about Alex Strasser, there is evidence that he had close contacts with avant-­garde circles, and in 1929 joined the International League of the Independent Film at their first meeting in La Sarraz, Switzerland. ­92

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3.3  Guidance for home filmmaking proliferates through the 1930s.

It is not clear whether he ever joined the League officially, but he can be seen as a typical amateur of the Weimar years, who frequently crossed the boundaries between the professional, avant-­garde and amateur ‘movement’ sectors, and who shared an interest in film as a medium through which to explore the rapid changes of modern life around him. He seems very much inspired by Neues Sehen, a style of photography commonly associated with photography at the Bauhaus, which favoured dynamic forms and diagonal lines, and experimented with extreme lighting and angles to explore objects in their relation to each other.19 Strasser’s Mit Kind und Kegel vor der Kamera, first published in 1932, quickly reveals its roots in documentary and avant-­garde aesthetics. The author invites his readers on a journey through an unknown country, named ‘everyday life’, with the camera functioning simultaneously as instrument of exploration, surprise and compassion. Discovering the ‘poetics’ of everyday situations for Strasser seems to be merely a question of finding the right viewpoint. This is well illustrated by shots from the book, a number of which are taken from a high angle. One shows a little child sitting at a round table that covers almost three-­quarters of the image and leaves little space for the child positioned in the lower right side of the frame. Another image shows a young woman hanging up the washing. The woman occupies the upper right corner while the washing lines run diagonally through the whole image, and form a sharp contrast with the dynamic shape of the drying clothes buffeted in the wind. Strasser is thus clearly interested in the home environment as much as its occupants as a subject for filming. He organises the domestic space through drawing visual relations between humans to things mostly by choosing camera angles from slightly above. The camerawork of the Weimar film was also clearly a key source of 93

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3.4  Laundry in the wind: authors like Alex Strasser instruct their readers in the poetics of everyday life.

inspiration for Strasser. Canting or mounting the camera on a vehicle, and filming in ice and snow, are only some of the tropes of Weimar film aesthetics that he translated into the world of the novice amateur. The use of montage is also highly recommended. Recycle your archival footage and enrich your family film, Strasser writes, echoing the emphasis of constructivist film literatures. When it comes to montage, the amateur also apparently has a lot to learn from Weimar documentary filmmakers. Alexander Stüler, for instance, suggests that amateurs could make their own cross-­section film, on the model of Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Symphonie einer Grossstadt (1927), with random shots or left-­over footage re-­used to illustrate dreams or nightmares.20 Richard Groschopp, an amateur enthusiast who later pursued a successful professional career as director and filmmaker, strongly advocated the close-­up as a proper filmic device for the domestic context, apparently recognising its neglect by amateurs. Once praised by Béla Bálasz as a specifically filmic means to capture reality, the close-­up seemingly posed severe problems for the amateur filmmaker, especially in situations involving indoor filming.21 Close-­ups require planning, the coordination of on-­camera behaviour and, in most cases, additional lighting. However, for Groschopp, the close-­up was the ultimate way to portray the beauty of everyday life, and an important device for even the most basic of amateur filmmaking. ­94

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Family Filming as Crafting In their attempts to promote home cinema as a new entertainment medium, authors embraced a wide range of cinematographic strategies drawn from the cinemas of the Weimar Republic and the years before, including gender comedy and the documentary avant-­garde. From reading these manuals, it becomes very clear that the aesthetic conventions of the professional realm needed to be adjusted for the new amateur context. Amateur filmmakers operated under specific economic and social conditions that needed to be accounted for in terms of aesthetics. The idea was not therefore to copy the techniques of professional cinema, but rather to appropriate cinematographic conventions as a means of amateur self-­presentation. This meant adapting techniques to the specific social, technological and economic conditions under which filming takes place in domestic contexts. In Alex Strasser’s ‘confessions’ of an amateur filmmaker, from which this chapter’s introductory quotation is taken, we can learn more about this kind of crafting. The first-­person narrator is a young man who buys his first 16mm camera around the time his wife becomes pregnant with their first child. Once the baby is born, his wife expects him to document the beauty of the child and the happiness related to this new arrival. The young father is obviously interested in other things, however, and tries to abscond from the social obligations articulated by his wife. On his first visit to the hospital, he films the measuring and weighing of his daughter; and once mother and daughter are at home, he captures the laundry fluttering in the wind; both subject choices are, of course, fully determined by his wife. Baby films, she claims, should first of all show a happy baby. Meanwhile, the author confesses his jealousy of the newborn, resenting all the attention the child receives from the mother. He experiences difficulty in identifying his place in the new domestic order, in which day and night effort is now dedicated to fulfilling the needs of the baby. But as time passes, the narrative of the book suggests, he learns more about both, filming and caretaking with equal enthusiasm. His wife, on the other hand, expands her housekeeping capacities from laundry and kitchen technology to replacing light bulbs and fixing wires. After many sleepless nights, the author finally agrees to make the kind of portrait for which his wife has begged him. In the logic of the narrative, this means a compromise on the part of the amateur filmmaker, but also his integration into the film, and finally the new social regime at home. The story of the filming couple is a story of two people learning to make a film, but most importantly about learning to make it together. Along the way, they dispute questions of taste and their respective aesthetic ambitions; they argue about additional costs; they explore technological possibilities and, in doing so, they negotiate the role that small-­gauge technology is going to play in their domestic routine, and most importantly, in the way it is visualised. In order to stage their life as film, they re-­arrange the whole house from the attic 95

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to the cellar, and make room for a home cinema in which they will act as the stars in both a literal and a figurative sense. Throughout the book, Strasser makes it very clear to his readers that this process is far from easy. He keeps constructing situations in which the social obligations and technological determinations of the central characters clash: for instance, when the intense light of the lamp causes the happy baby to cry and thus ruins the portrait. The need for collaboration and compromise that equally applies to all involved is clearly present throughout the book. An amateur should temper creative ambitions, Richard Groschopp once wrote, or otherwise he will end up all alone.22 Strasser composes his tutorial for the new amateur as a succession of larger and smaller catastrophes, to prepare his reader for the worst case. With this in mind, we should be cautious about taking the text as a truthful historical record of domestic film practices during these years. Rather we should acknowledge the genre’s very nature and take it as what it is: namely, a selective representation of typical problems that might occur during filming. What this book makes clear is that, in the domestic context, aesthetic ambitions had to be coordinated with the social expectations of the other participants, always with an eye on the budget, of course. Some techniques would fulfil the specific need of the domestic filmmaker better than others. Editing in a cross-­section film, for instance, was a way to save everything that might be of value for one of the participants, while still adding form to the fragments and thus making them ready for home projection. Equally, we could say that the close-­up could function as an aesthetic as well as social device within home cinema. It spoke to the amateur’s desire to portray everyday life and, at the same time, it helped to avoid eye contact, one of the most obvious problems when filming in the domestic setting. This complex process, in which aesthetic conventions, technological determinations, social obligations and economic constraints are negotiated within the group of participants, is perhaps well described as ‘­crafting life into film’. Eine Nacht und ein Morgen clearly introduces many of the tricks that authors like Lange and Strasser write about in their manuals for the amateur filmmaker embarking on a new leisure pursuit. There is a great variety of shots; there is careful acting that obviously required planning; there is purposeful editing; and there is a narrative that makes the perspective of the father central. Rather than being a redundant display of ‘happy’ shots taken on typical occasions such as weddings and birthday parties, this film reflects on family life itself, and especially the position the father occupies within it, very much in the ways recommended by the manuals. But what can this film tell us about the act of crafting that brought it about? To answer this question, we should approach the film as a remnant of the practice in question. It is only the first step, then, to reconstruct the conventions and rules that were available to the amateur at that time; it is a second step to point to the visible moments in the film, where they obviously have been applied. But to understand the dynamics of crafting, we need to form an idea of how those rules and conventions are put ­96

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into practice by this group of participants. How can the product itself tell us anything about the process of its making? Is its creative construction visible?23 A closer look into a few moments in which the film’s careful narrative erupts offers us an insight into the dynamics of crafting. Consider, for instance, the moment when the two children peek through the doorway to see whether their parents are still asleep. The girl here puts the boy’s head in the right position by pulling his ear. During the breakfast scene, we see him in a profile shot eating, while for a brief moment he somehow manages to grimace at the camera, and later when he is at play there are long close-­ups on his hands moving model trains. In general, the boy’s behaviour seems more insecure than the behaviour of the girl. When the camera is directed towards him, he becomes uncertain, and is corrected by his elder sister. But he also displays some resistance to the visual and social regime of this film, most obviously when he grimaces at the camera, obviously breaking with the rule that seems so central in this production: namely, to avoid any visible eye contact with the camera. With this in mind, the close-­up of his hands indicates a cinematographic choice that testifies to the aesthetic ambitions and technical skills involved here. It is a shot very much in accordance with the ideas articulated by Strasser, Groschopp and others: that is, to search for the poetic moments in everyday life. However, the choice of the close-­up clearly also cuts the boy off from the possibility of making eye contact with the person behind the camera, and of thus further sabotaging the rules that govern the practice of crafting, as exemplified by this particular group of participants. Very much in contrast to the boy, the girl performs her role according to the rules and conventions, no matter what. She never looks into the camera, even in situations where the camera must have been positioned very close to her face. Even with intense light on her face, she is able to perform housekeeping duties, such as grinding coffee, without visible irritation. The narrative, which gives the children room to act as little adults during that particular morning, provides lots of possibilities for the girl to be a little housewife and mother. Apparently, she is aware not only of what is expected from her in this situation, but also of what is expected from others, and she acts accordingly. This becomes most visible in the moment when she directs the little brother, where she switches role from being an actor herself to being the director’s assistant. The different levels of cooperation we can detect in those moments might partly be explained by the age of the children, but they are also clearly supported by the narrative and its inscription of gender roles. The story is set up almost exclusively in the domestic sphere and, as a consequence, gives the girl plenty of opportunities to perform the role of her mother, but leaves practically no room for the boy to perform as a grown-­up man. The narrative shows her as a little housewife who, in the absence of her mother, easily takes over her role, preparing breakfast and taking care of her little brother. We are thus left with a little boy who obviously struggles to find his place in this picture, in a literal and figurative sense. 97

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In the array of performances, the father is clearly the most coherent with respect to the narrative. His gestures are clear and efficient, always functional and never redundant. Compared to the other ‘actors’, he seems to overplay at times, and it seems he is doing more than just performing his part as father of a family. He also demonstrates to the other family members what acting in this movie should be like. His wife’s performance again is very different. In the smoking scene, she is wearing a long, elegant dress. When she has taken her seat, she bends forward to rest her head on her left hand while holding the cigarette in her right hand. She inhales briefly and with visible discomfort. This is neither the position to enjoy a cigarette, nor the position to relax in when you come home. What this gesture actually communicates is a kind of disinterest in the whole situation. The question of why this is so must remain unanswered at this point. Whether the filming just took too long and she felt exhausted, whether she was a non-­smoker and disgusted by the cigarette, whether this was just her way to perform the role of someone who comes home early and is about to go to bed – we do not know. But as a glimpse into the making of this film, this bending, this clumsy smoking, tells us about the effort it takes for this woman to perform the role of an elegant lady enjoying her cigarette. Throughout the film, the smoking and the dress remain the only props that link her to a life outside the home and the family. For the rest of the film, she is the typical mother, who even dreams about her children and does everything to keep her husband content. The role she performs in the film makes a sharp contrast with that of the dancer in the nightclub, her rival, the independent and professional performer, a representative of an obviously very different world. The images taken at the club or theatre show us an acrobatic dance act, with a female performer attired in elegant swallowtail. This is not the most feminine outfit, and neither do we see a kind of dance that could properly be described as erotic or seductive, but the scene does show a very famous UFA (Universum Film-­Aktien Gesellschaft) star; we see her clearly, the dance-­ wonder of the ‘Third Reich’, Marika Rökk. The footage must have been shot in a theatre during one of her live performances, a context that was probably not at all eroticised. However, in the narrative of the film, she is presented as the mother’s rival. Although the housewife and mother finally ‘wins’, and convinces her husband to value family life more highly than the seductive appeal of ‘nightlife’, the real star of the film is clearly Marika Rökk. The shots of her return three times, and it seems that the film’s whole narrative is arranged in a way to make the most effective use of this footage. Displaying the material to refer backwards in time or to illustrate the husband’s dreams makes the film a true celebration of the ease with which the domestic sphere becomes permeable to public glamour. The display of this fragment must have been a triumph for the ambitious amateur. Besides that, it is a very effective and economic way to recycle footage and to ‘upgrade’ a family film at the same time. After all, the film now has a real star to offer, which makes it a show to watch, not only ­98

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for family members but also for a potentially wider audience. Integrated into the completed film, the footage of Marika Rökk gains a meaning that goes beyond its purely referential function. It is ‘narrativised’ as an alternative life that the father dreams about but finally abandons. Preserved in this form, the footage of the UFA star will inform the stories told and jokes made in this piece of home cinema, and thus become part of the family’s way to tell their story into the future. It will allow them to remember, every time they see the film, how they succeeded in the collaborative effort to craft their life into films: an ­entertaining story for the whole family. Conclusions In her book, Mediated Memories: Personal Cultural Memory in the Digital Age, José van Dijck has convincingly argued for a mutual shaping of memories and media, and has suggested that ‘people derive their autobiographical memories from both personal and collective media sources.’24 This chapter has shown how the rules and conventions for family filming, articulated at a given time, actually inform the way people negotiate a sense of self and their identities within the domestic sphere. This practice has been described as a crafting, to indicate that it is a process that involves social and aesthetic, as well as technical and economic aspects. It has been argued that, rather than it being an individual exercise, we should think of this as a collaborative act, carried out by a group of participants with diverging needs, competences and agendas. As a consequence of this, it has been suggested that we should approach family films as ‘remnants’ of this process, and search for traces that can tell us more about the practice at stake. This led to proposals concerning ways to analyse domestic films from this altered perspective. Scrutiny of Eine Nacht und ein Morgen reveals how various agents negotiate aesthetic ambitions and social obligations in a situation shaped by economic and technological constraints. This process seemingly loosens the ties of social expectations and everyday life routines to test alternative behavioural roles (in the case of the husband), undermine existing power relations (as in the case of the boy) and practise confirmative behaviour (as in the case of the girl), and it is in this role play that home cinema contributes to the identity work of this family. The broader aim here has been to contribute to a better understanding of the ways in which media practices relate to the notion of the private sphere. The argument subscribes to the widely held thesis that the distinction of a private and a public sphere never is, and never was, decisive. It assumes, rather, that we should be aware of the historical construction of a private sphere, and think critically about the use and function of the political, social and cultural fabrication of a private sphere at a given time. In the particular historical context dealt with here, we see how domestic filmmakers adopt very diverging aesthetic strategies, ranging from gender comedy to documentary avant-­garde, and use them for their particular purposes and needs. Similarly, 99

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we see that those practices draw on the images and ideologies displayed by a wide range of media products of those years. From 1933 onwards, the documentary qualities of family filmmaking gain increased attention within the German Amateur League, where attempts are made to prove the genre compatible with the ideologies of ‘Heim und Herd’ (‘hearth and home’), as propagated by the new political regime. Against this particular historical background, it seems urgent to elaborate further a perspective on domestic making that frees family films from their reputation as naïve documents, and draws more attention to aspects of crafting as proposed here. If we better understand the processes of staging and performing, and of mocking and faking revealed by this analysis, we may learn more about a culture and society at a given time than supposedly naïve family documents will ever disclose. For it is here, in the moments of staging and performance, that amateur domestic films tell us the most about the past. Notes   1. Alex Strasser, Mit Kind und Kegel vor der Kamera (Halle/Saale: Wilhelm Knapp, 1932), p. 86.   2. Derived from the German verb kurbeln: to crank (something).   3. Richard Chalfen, Snapshot Versions of Life (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Press, 1987), p. 135.   4. Ryan Shand, ‘Theorizing amateur film: limitations and possibilities’, The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2008, pp. 36–60 (quotation, p. 40).   5. Roger Odin, ‘Le film de famille dans l’institution familiale’, in Roger Odin (ed.), Le Film de famille: usage privé, usage public (Paris: Méridiens–Klincksieck, 1995), pp. 27–42.   6. There are remarkable exceptions, however, among which is Susan Aasman’s dissertation, published in Dutch. See, for example, Susan Aasman, ‘“Gladly breaking bread”: Religious repertoires and family film’, Film History, Vol. 19, No. 4, 2007, pp. 361–71.   7. Michael Kuball, Familienkino: Geschichte des Amateurfilms in Deutschland, Vol. 1 (Reinbek: Rohwohlt, 1980), p. 16.   8. Patricia Zimmermann, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).   9. John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 10. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008). 11. This is an approach inspired by Bruno Latour, lately adopted within media studies. 12. I came across this film while researching material for my book on the history and theory of home cinema. See Martina Roepke, Privat-­Vorstellung: Heimkino in Deutschland vor 1945 (Hildesheim, Zurich and New York: Georg Olms, 2006). The film is in a private collection. 13. Lynn Spigel, Making Room for Television: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 37. 14. Susan Aasman, Ritueel van Huiselijk Geluk: Een Cultuurhistorische Verkenning van de Familiefilm (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 2004), pp. 21–38.

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15. Hellmuth Lange, Filmthemen Noch und Noch: 150 Filmvorschläge für Eifrige Amateure (Berlin, Vienna and Leipzig: Otto Elsner, 1940), p. 76 (translation by chapter author). 16. Michael Kuball, Familienkino: Geschichte des Amateurfilms in Deutschland (1980). 17. Anon., Film für Alle, No. 11, 1932, p. 317. 18. Hellmuth Lange, Filmthemen Noch und Noch: 150 Filmvorschläge für Eifrige Amateure, pp. 76–7, 143. 19. One of the most important representatives of this style was László Moholy-­Nagy, who, at a certain point of his career, regarded the amateur realm as the only remaining place for independent filmmaking. Strasser worked with Moholy-­Nagy on a theatre production at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz in Berlin, before they both left Nazi Germany in the mid-­thirties. See Jeanpaul Goergen, ‘Die Avantgarde und das Dokumentarische’, in Peter Zimmermann and Kay Hoffmann (eds), Geschichte des Dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland, Vol. 3 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), pp. 493–526; see in particular p. 511. 20. Alexander Stüler, So Wollen Wir Filmen: Anregungen für die Inhaltliche Gestaltung des Amateurfilms (Stuttgart: Franckh’sche Verlagshandlung, 1932), p. 9. 21. Bálasz describes close-­ups as ‘dramatic revelations of what is really happening under the surface of appearances’, in his Theory of the Film (London: Dennis Dobson, 1952), p. 56. 22. Groschopp’s culturally uplifting family films were very much applauded by those who, after 1933, eagerly tried to demonstrate the cultural value of family filmmaking for the new political regime. The German National Socialist Party pursued, in the years to follow, what Hans-­Dieter Schaefer has called the construction of a seemingly apolitical private sphere, which was conceived as a safe place for the family and offered distraction from political developments. Home cinema as domestic entertainment technology fits well with this strategy and clearly makes it, in this context, more than ideologically obsolete. For a more extensive account of family filmmaking as part of amateur cine culture during the Third Reich, see Martina Roepke, Privat-­Vorstellung: Heimkino in Deutschland vor 1945 (2006). 23. Ann-­Sophie Lehmann has pursued this question with regard to creative practices in the digital domain. Although the subject matter is different, of course, our approaches clearly share a concern to develop appropriate analytical tools with which to analyse processes of production. 24. José van Dijck, Mediated Memories: Personal Cultural Memory in the Digital Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 18.

Filmography Eine Nacht und ein Morgen (unknown, 1937) 8mm, 12 mins, black and white, silent. The film is retained in a private collection.

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4. FRAMING THE WELFARE STATE: SWEDISH AMATEUR FICTION FILM 1930 TO 1965 MATS JÖNSSON

Until very recently, amateur film has received little attention within Swedish academia. Thanks to fundamental changes in attitudes vis-­à-­vis renovating, preserving and archiving small-­gauge film, however, one can now safely claim that scholarship has taken a decidedly archival ‘turn’ during the last couple of years. One result of the increased interest in private, local and regional versions of Sweden’s cultural heritage is a general recognition that film might offer new lines of inquiry into the history of the nation and its citizens. Another and more concrete event took place in 2003, with the founding of a new national archive for non-­theatrical films, located at the former iron mine site of Grängesberg. Initially, this archive came under the supervision of the Swedish Film Institute, which since 2012 has been part of the Section for Audiovisual Media within the National Library of Sweden. At Grängesberg, all institutions, companies and individuals depositing film need to sign a contract by which they approve scholarly use of the material. Thus far, the bulk of the collection consists of amateur, industrial, educational, commercial, ethnographic, anthropological and scientific film, shot in 8mm, Super-­8, 9.5mm or 16mm. In time, all films deposited will be migrated to digital format, whilst the celluloid originals will be v­ acuumed and stored in cooled containers for posterity. Research at Grängesberg has revealed an extensive collection of amateur films made by the Finnish-­born, Swedish filmmaker Mauno Eksell.1 Four of these holdings are fictions, entitled Depressed (Depressed, 1960), Kärlekens lön (Wages of Love, 1960), På 6: våningen (On the 6th Floor, 1960) and Tysta gator (Quiet Streets, 1964), and shot on 16mm Kodak and/or Gevaert ­black-­and-­white film stock, with magnetic soundtracks. As co-­winner of first prize in a national amateur film competition arranged by Swedish Public Service Television in 1965, at least one of these films, På ­102

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4.1  Mauno Eksell displaying one of his many prizes, around 1964.

6: våningen, obtained a wide audience when it was screened on the then only existing national television channel. The film was included in a programme entitled ‘Short Film Today’ (‘Kortfilm idag’) and transmitted on 4 March. In a review published the very next day, Eksell was particularly hailed for his ‘inquisitive documentary style’.2 He also won other prestigious prizes, among them an award for best small-­gauge film in Sweden, the so-­called White Doe, with Depressed in 1963, and the following year with Tysta gator. One reviewer described the former as ‘impressionistic’, while the latter was praised for its ‘psychological study of women’.3 In 1963, Depressed also earned Eksell the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet’s honorary prize at the Nordic Small Gauge Film Competition in Stavanger, as well as the Norwegian Amateur Filmmaker’s Nordic Prize. Inspirations and Inscriptions Eksell’s four small-­gauge fiction films share stylistic traits with each other, drawing much of their aesthetic influence from high-­profile feature films, as well as from realistic documentaries of the period. In one newspaper interview, Eksell emphasised the impact contemporary fiction films had had on him, 103

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especially in terms of their dramatic power and narrative drive. At the same time, he explicitly distanced himself from Michelangelo Antonioni’s slow narrative style, stressing that ‘films should be realistic and true, and have a fast narrative pace.’4 Apart from easily recognisable aesthetic traits, Eksell’s four fictions also contain a number of common thematic denominators, turning them into an even more homogenous body of work. The dominant theme can be described as follows: young, urban, working-­class woman confronts a harsh, male, sinister society, which, on the surface, sends out signals of material prosperity and social welfare, but which, viewed from below, reveals tragic lacunae of profound marginalisation and human loneliness. The storylines of the four films run as follows: Depressed deals with the psychological state of a depressed woman, specifically depicting her activities and changes in mood. In the opening scene, she visits a doctor, and thereafter a number of outdoor scenes show her watching children at a playground, standing absentmindedly by a pond, and wandering slowly through a cemetery. The film ends with scenes within the woman’s apartment, in which she finally falls asleep on a couch after taking too many pills. Kärlekens lön also opens with a woman’s visit to a doctor, following which she calls a man and tells him that she is pregnant. The man refuses to accept this and the woman tries to kill herself, but is absurdly interrupted by a door-­to-­door salesman who happens to ring her doorbell just as she is on the verge of jumping out of a window. Thereafter, a female friend gives the woman the secret address of a place where illegal abortions are performed. The following night, however, the woman starts to feel ill and, despite her friend’s help, she dies on the way to the hospital. På 6: våningen reveals the dull and monotonous tasks that a female hotel cleaner needs to perform. Among other things, she cleans, washes the dishes, makes the beds and carries breakfast trays, as well as being verbally abused and physically harassed by rude guests. In one scene, lonely children jump up and down on one of the hotel beds, and in another, a foreign, English-­speaking musician talks to his female companion. Finally, the cleaner’s day comes to an end and she can rest. Tysta gator follows a single mother who works as a newspaper deliverer and domestic cleaner, whilst trying to be a good parent. Due to her long working hours, her two young children spend a lot of time on their own; when her son suddenly disappears for a brief moment, the woman becomes desperate. The film thus displays some of the dangers and anguish experienced by a struggling single mother. Generically, Eksell’s four amateur fictions can be labelled ‘socially conscious’ dramas, dealing with the modern conditions of lonely urban women. The fact that these films are so obviously rooted in, entangled with and highly critical of Swedish society in the early 1960s is of central importance to the following investigation. For, regardless of their level of artistic quality, this contemporaneous focus undoubtedly strengthens their empirical value as prime source material. Or, as it has been concisely put in connection to amateur film generally, ‘aesthetic insignificance does not necessarily equal historical insignificance.’5 In ­104

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what follows, Eksell’s films will be analysed historically in relation to Swedish amateur film culture between 1930 and 1965 – with particular attention given to the role of two influential magazine editors and one of their amateur fiction predecessors. The first reason for the periodisation is that these years saw an almost exponential expansion and increased institutionalisation of Swedish amateur filmmaking. The second is that this was a time when the Swedish Model Welfare State emerged as the principal national project overshadowing all other domestic activities, and clearly a key reference in these fictions. In Sweden, the successful launch and implementation of the welfare state are primarily associated with the Social Democratic Party – a formidable political agency initiating many intricate mass media strategies during the twentieth century.6 Remaining in governmental power from 1932 to 1976 without interruption, the Social Democrats transformed Sweden into a politically, socially, economically and culturally unique nation in which the public sector functioned as both saviour and protector. These contextual facts are of crucial importance when films such as Eksell’s are to be evaluated, understood and located, for the omnipresent welfare state of Sweden stood at its absolute peak when Eksell produced his four socially critical small-­gauge fictions. In an interdisciplinary study of the Grängesberg film material published in 2008, it is suggested that one prime reason why Swedish amateur filmmakers began to record their environment in increasing numbers, with the help of moving images during the twentieth century, was the launch and subsequent triumph of the Swedish Model Welfare State.7 Depicting one’s materialistic success story on film – with new summerhouses in the countryside, exotic holidays abroad, and celebrations of birthdays and Christmas at home as prime motifs – became a significant marker of social class during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. As elsewhere, filming one’s private surroundings became a sign of personal progress for Sweden’s amateur filmmakers. Since these private success stories almost exclusively reveal individual and national self-­conceptions during an era of financial expansion, scrutiny of the contrasting output of an amateur such as Eksell seems rewarding. For whilst the filmmaker made many traditional home movies with little or no critical edge, typical of wider practice during some of Sweden’s most financially booming years, he also produced four small-­gauge fictions characterised by significantly different and highly sinister perspectives on these self-­same surroundings. In this context, it needs to be acknowledged that Eksell was by no means alone in his critical endeavour. The massive socio-­political project of turning Sweden into a leading welfare state made several amateur filmmakers of the period more socially conscious and politically aware. In other words, not everyone in Sweden followed the dominant trends Patricia Zimmermann ­outlines in one of her pioneering studies on home movies: By the 1950s, popular discourse in magazines and instruction books accentuated the social functions of amateur filmmaking as a commodity 105

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for use within nuclear families rather than its aesthetics . . . With an increase in leisure time and disposable income, amateur-­film discourse articulated Hollywood narrative style as a natural, filmmaking version of common sense . . . This domestication of amateur filmmaking as a leisure time commodity erased any of its social, political, or economic possibilities.8 In many ways, Eksell’s four fictions constitute contradictory cases in relation to Zimmermann’s description. The focus of these projects was never directed towards his or any other person’s nuclear family; nor did they hail the advantages of domesticity. In other words, his four productions did not erase, but rather emphasised and exemplified some of the ‘social, political, or economic possibilities’ of amateur filmmaking. This has, of course, chiefly to do with the fact that the productions in question were fictions and, as such, intended to be different from the rest of his output. Sure enough, Eksell’s traditional home movies were predominantly shot in domestic environments, with his family and friends as the main motifs. These latter works are thus thematically similar to Zimmermann’s commodities. Stylistically, however, they are anything but Hollywood-­like. Ambitions to create a classical Hollywood narration – with a causal story, continuity editing, plain inter-­titles and a generally invisible style – only come into play in Eksell’s fictional output. Consequently, in amateur fiction films such as Eksell’s, we not only form an idea of the contemporary reality surrounding the originator, but are also given clues as to how contemporary reality was supposed to be represented on film and in other media at a particular time and place. Sure enough, in Swedish news media, feature films and documentaries of the early 1960s, in-­ depth reportage with strong social pathos and explicit truth-­telling ambitions surfaced as a dominant narrative tendency. Although – or perhaps just because – the four films under study were fictions, Eksell apparently put great effort into staging them in as trustworthy and verisimilar ways as possible, according to these conventions. What we see in these films is thus nothing less than reality as fiction and fiction as reality. In his extensive work on the complex nature and function of fiction, reception theorist Wolfgang Iser touches upon these issues in ways that might be useful when analysing amateur small-­gauge fictions such as Eksell’s: [I]n fiction, sensation is doubled by a particular assumption of what reality is supposed to be, and its contingency is doubled by way of a specific form assumed by the awakened sensation. In this doubling structure, neither reality nor sensation takes precedence; fiction proves to be a matrix for all kinds of processes. . . .9 The fact that Eksell won several prizes for his small-­gauge fictions might be explained by his thematic and stylistic choices, which, given the success, must ­106

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have been in line with some of the ‘particular assumptions of what reality is supposed to be’ of the early 1960s. Interpreted in this way, Eksell’s fictions can perhaps even be described as private matrixes used in order to organise, understand and represent on-­going processes in society. By doing so, his assumptions about reality – and his representations of it – become evident for all to see. Eksell can certainly be said to be similar to many other amateur filmmakers if understood in this way – chiefly in terms of attitude, and to some degree also in execution. The main point of including the quotation from Iser, however, is to stress that we must always try to appreciate fictions as something significantly more than a generic categorisation dominated by make-­believe and storytelling. Productions such as Eksell’s small-­gauge fictions are unique remnants of the time of their production and reception, offering a multitude of information about everyone behind the camera and everything going on in front of it. For, as Iser also has concluded, when a fiction is regarded as insufficient and no longer valid within a certain spatio-­temporal context, it is always replaced by others, which only further underlines the fundamental necessity of fiction in all societies. Or, as Iser puts it: ‘What counts is success, and not truth.’10 Consequently, the fictions we study never need to be truthful in their contents and stories in order to be regarded as valid historical source material. Since fictions always try to be successful in the eyes of their contemporaries, they are as empirically valuable as any other form of representation when it comes to understanding how originators – professionals and amateurs alike – have tried to relate to, take inspiration from and work alongside existing tastes and preferences.11 Publishing, Positioning and Protecting For a long time, it was difficult for amateur filmmakers in Sweden to nurture their interest and competence, and they enjoyed little practical help or external expertise. In 1931, Helmer Bäckström – an amateur film pioneer who would function as editor-­in-­chief of the yearbook for Swedish small-­gauge filmmakers, Smalfilmaren (The Small-­Gauge Filmmaker), from 1937 to 1944 – addressed the dilemma in this key handbook for amateur filmmaking: ‘up until now . . . Swedish amateurs have lacked guidance in the new art.’12 It is, of course, no coincidence that this highly influential spokesman for Sweden’s amateur filmmakers chose to describe film as an art. By doing so, he not only underlined the aesthetic primacy of the medium, but also indirectly distanced the output of amateur film from the increasingly criticised commercialisation of cinema.13 During the following decade, Bäckström and his compatriots continued their quest to secure a better filmic climate for amateurs. Among other things, they initiated an active national network, increased the number of regional and local amateur film clubs, and also regularly organised festivals, competitions and seminars. In 1940, these efforts were rewarded, perhaps, when Swedish amateur 107

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filmmaking finally became officially institutionalised, thanks to the founding of the National Society of Sweden’s Amateur Filmmakers, originally consisting of twenty-­eight amateur film clubs scattered around the country.14 After the re-­organisation that year, Bäckström remained in office as an influential vice-­president, but was replaced at the very top by Count Lennart Bernadotte, a member of the Swedish royal family and at the time a well-­known filmmaker/ photographer in his own right. Having semi-­professional nobility as an active figurehead naturally provided the amateur filmmakers of Sweden with an aura of prestige that would prove useful in the quest for official recognition. Mauno Eksell would become a member of this national organisation, more precisely of its largest and most active local branch in Stockholm, during the 1950s. Parallel to getting organised nationally, Sweden’s amateur filmmakers developed their skills, thanks to a growing number of instructive texts. Apart from yearly publications such as Smalfilmaren, one periodical stands out as an important protector, instructor and mouthpiece for Sweden’s amateur filmmakers. FOTO: Tidskrift för Foto och Film i Skandinavien (PHOTO: Periodical for Scandinavian Photo and Film) was launched in January 1939, with the aforementioned Count Bernadotte functioning as both founder and editor-­in-­chief. From day one, amateur film constituted one of FOTO’s main fields of interest, and three of its six board members were small-­gauge film experts. Not surprisingly, the first issue included a brief history of Swedish amateur filmmaking, as well as the first in a long line of instructive texts describing how amateurs could become more technically skilled and artistically mature filmmakers.15 The journal’s emphasis on amateur filmmaking and photography can be seen in advertisements included in the magazine, such as the ones reproduced below, which are taken from the third issue of 1939. Several aspects of these advertisements are noteworthy. Three of the four examples are directly addressed to amateur photographers and filmmakers. Moreover, one of them is in the English language, suggesting that Swedish readers of FOTO constituted potential customers with foreign interests. The fact that this latter advertisement directed itself to Swedes capable of reading English additionally verifies that, as elsewhere, amateur filmmaking in Sweden emerged in direct relation to social class, amongst those with significant cultural capital. In the case of Eksell, however, the use of the English language also involves another dimension. One of his fiction films commences with a black sign on which large white letters announce ‘Mauno Eksell presents’ in English, followed by another slide with the title Depressed.16 This confirms that Eksell belonged to a well-­educated, middle-­class section of society, but also suggests that he aimed to direct his films to other countries.17 This tradition of amateur export was clearly well established. The aforementioned first issue of FOTO also included a report from an international amateur film competition held in Budapest in December 1938, at which all three Swedish films presented were successful. Among these, the film awarded ­108

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4.2  Advertisements in the Swedish periodical FOTO, Vol. 1, No. 3 (1939).

third prize in the fiction category, David, was made by a Mrs Gerd Baeckström, one of few women amateur filmmakers at that time, and a pioneer in the direction of amateur fiction. At Sweden’s second national amateur film competition in 1939, Baeckström’s film November proved to be the only entry in the fiction category, the other three categories being education, reportage and fantasy. November was meticulously produced according to high quality standards, 109

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using, for instance, two students from the most prestigious of Sweden’s acting schools, the Royal Dramatic Theatre, in the roles of its main protagonists. Not surprisingly, the film was also rewarded, and in its May issue, FOTO reported that it had received forty-­one points based on the international competition criteria of the day, resulting in another third prize.18 In his approving comments, one reporter described November as ‘based on a very original idea that was skilfully pursued thanks to good editing and direction’.19 In the July issue of 1939, FOTO reported from the international amateur film competition of the Union Internationale du Cinéma d’Amateurs (UNICA) in Zurich, held in connection with the fifth International Amateur Film Congress. On this occasion, fifty films from fifteen countries were competing in the same four categories as in Sweden earlier that year. Constituting the only Swedish amateur fiction entering the domestic competition, Baeckström’s November naturally represented Sweden in this category. Contrary to its success at home, however, the film finished in a disappointing eleventh place. According to the patriotic explanation in FOTO, one reason for this placement was that, despite high points awarded by all judges from the three winning countries in the national competition (Switzerland, Germany and Italy), it only took one or two judges from minor countries not fully understanding a film to damage its final result beyond repair.20 In FOTO’s last issue of 1939, Mrs Baeckström was finally given a chance to describe her work in her own words and she did so in a text entitled ‘Artistic small-­gauge film’.21 Among other things, Baeckström reflects upon the pros and cons of being an amateur filmmaker, and particularly elaborates on the dilemma of always having to compromise, due to lack of funds and equipment. In one paragraph, she concludes that every scene is of vital importance in a fiction, hereby stressing the centrality of the script when creating a fictional story. In this emphasis, she was not alone. Apart from recurrently featuring as an issue in both Smalfilmaren and FOTO, many other Swedish amateur film publications of the period also discuss the significance of scriptwriting at some length. Some of these texts were composed as formal, step-­by-­step guides to good scriptwriting practice, while others more loosely discussed the questions of adaptation surfacing when written words needed to be transformed into moving images.22 In one of his editorials, Count Bernadotte summed up the discourse, concluding that ‘the script is of the utmost importance for the ambitious maker of small-­gauge film.’23 In some of the more didactically inclined texts on amateur filmmaking, it becomes apparent that the aim to make better productions took part of its inspiration from the commercial industry. Count Bernadotte even ended another of his editorials by concluding that, since amateurs and professionals in Sweden largely aim towards the same goal, the former should not be discouraged but, instead, should constantly strive towards perfection.24 Obviously, ambition to become as skilful as professional filmmakers was an aspiration for the National Society of Sweden’s Amateur Filmmakers, at least amongst the most high-­profile filmmakers. ­110

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One important consequence of this ambition was that Sweden’s amateur filmmakers began to find themselves in opposition to the country’s leading avant-­garde and experimental filmmakers, with whom they previously, at least in part, had enjoyed fruitful cooperation. In this conflict, amateurs making fictions, such as Mrs Baeckström, found themselves caught between the two fractions. In her text in FOTO, for instance, she underlines how important the pioneering avant-­garde had been for later amateur filmmakers, and openly praises the early French avant-­garde filmmakers who, in her view, had a profound impact on the medium, insisting that ‘even their most severe mistakes were of great importance.’25 However, it soon became apparent that such tolerant attitudes were scarce among Sweden’s leading amateur film organisations, and ­fundamental disagreements surface increasingly in the post-­war era. Apart from having different views on the style, narration and commercialism of small-­gauge filmmaking, there were also more concrete reasons for the divide. When the insightful Baeckström underlined that technical progress on numerous occasions had come to the rescue of the amateur filmmaker and probably would do so in the future, she made a point with direct relevance to the on-­going split. In the emergent welfare state of Sweden, film equipment had become significantly cheaper and more easily manageable, which meant that almost everyone could buy a film camera of his or her own. As a result, the number of amateur filmmakers in Sweden had risen steadily to an all-­time high in the late 1950s. One result of the expansion was that the amateur filmmaker developed into a mass category, against which Swedish avant-­garde and experimental filmmakers began to position themselves. In the official and sometimes rather harsh rhetoric of these latter fractions, ‘amateur filmmaker’ was used as an exclusively derogatory term, where the degree of technical skill constituted the defining criteria motivating both symbolic and literal rejection of everyone lacking competence. The arguments put forward were based on a conviction that amateurs were not sufficiently visionary to be included in the narrow circle of ‘artistic’ practitioners, who frequently and officially described themselves as the only true experts in the film medium and its creative potentials. When the secretary of the Workshop for Film, an organisation for Sweden’s experimental filmmakers, entitled one of his 1955 articles ‘Who can afford to be an amateur?’, this should first and foremost be seen as a symptomatic attack on the traditional amateur film organisations, and not as an accurate description of how things actually were.26 Certainly, many could ‘afford’ to become involved in filmmaking. In the post-­war Swedish Model Welfare State, it had become easier for ordinary Swedes to make movies. This is not surprising, since heightened standards of equality, such as the ability to film privately, constituted crucial ingredients in the national project of Sweden, from the perspective of socio-­economic factors. Serious ambitions undoubtedly existed among amateur filmmakers to upgrade their identity and self-­image. At the same time, although much of its critical rhetoric was directed at amateur filmmakers, the opposing 111

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avant-­garde also constituted an important potential ally for the amateur sector. In an issue of the avant-­garde experimental film magazine Filmfront, for example, the National Society of Sweden’s Amateur Filmmakers published a column in which they invited domestic small-­gauge filmmakers to submit entries for that year’s national competition. It was particularly emphasised that the old rules of the competition had now been significantly modernised. In a remark about the new selection and categorising principles at work, it was highlighted that ‘a jury consisting of professional film people with an understanding of the possibilities of the amateur filmmaker’ would be responsible, and that ‘every film sent in receives a written analysis in which the terms “amateur” and “amateur film” are clearly defined.’27 In their quest to become recognised practitioners, the amateur filmmakers of Sweden were thus at least as uncompromising as the avant-­garde when it came to defining criteria for what a true member of their sector ought to be – and what he or she ought to do. To avoid being associated with experimental and artistic filmmakers, Swedish amateur organisations took great pains to distinguish their own uniqueness; sometimes this involved explicit denunciation of everything that was different. On one occasion in 1956, the national jury even chose to exclude a Swedish entry at the Nordic Amateur Competition in Oslo, because the film was said to have too much of an experimental style, and a non-­narrative structure, to be regarded as a pure amateur work.28 A few years prior to this event, similar exclusions had been known to apply in the context of domestic competitions.29 On certain occasions, state institutions even became involved in the debate. In 1961, the newly formed National Board of Film Premium gave the enormous amount of 100,000 Swedish crowns – equivalent to more than 100,000 British pounds at today’s value – to a fifteen-­minute animated colour film by the artist Leo Reis, Metamorfoser (Metamorphosis), which they considered to be a quality film. As expected, their decision instantly ‘led to a fierce criticism because Reis was considered to be an amateur and not a real filmmaker’.30 However, the critique mainly emanated from individuals within journalism, academia and the commercial film industry, rather than from amateur organisations or artist groups. The reason for this can be found in the fact that, during the early 1960s, the conflict between the latter two factions had already reached its peak. Prior struggles for position, recognition and legitimacy had resulted in two clearly defined groups, by now rarely in touch with one another. On the one side, we have the technically skilled, middle-­age amateurs primarily consisting of male engineers, doctors, dentists and teachers, who, from their middle-­class horizons, advocated established models of film aesthetics used by professional and commercial practitioners. On the other side were young students, writers and artists with little or no income, who provocatively experimented with the medium in avant-­garde fashions, in order to avoid narratives and styles similar to those dominating the film industry.31

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4.3  Hobby literatures illustrate the archetypical film and photo amateur at work.

The Case of Mauno Eksell What becomes apparent from the foregoing account is that Swedish amateur filmmakers from the 1930s to the 1960s differ in their practice quite substantially from the ways in which pioneering amateurs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been described, not least when it comes to their relations with professionals. As has been concluded elsewhere, 113

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early amateurs were often seen as cultural counterparts to a developing industrialism, with their leisure-­time amateurism conceived of as providing an aesthetic antidote against commercial professionalism.32 Half a century later, amateur film organisations and practitioners in Sweden displayed few or no such tendencies. Instead, they chose commercial photographers and ­professional filmmakers as their standards of perfection, towards whom they strove both as practising individuals and prestige-­seeking organisations. At the same time, Swedish avant-­garde artists and experimental filmmakers began to sympathise with some of the original ideas of the pioneering ­amateurs – ­especially with their pronounced need always to be independent of commercial interests. Consequently, small-­gauge Sweden of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s was dominated by a mutual quest for legitimisation, performed from two opposite sides of a contested arena, and utilising diametrically opposed strategies in their efforts to gain acceptance. Their respective goal was, however, one and the same: official recognition. Not surprisingly, their conflicts have therefore been described as ‘a discursive struggle’, mainly occupied with ways in which to define one’s own identity in contrast to the opponents on the other side.33 There is, however, one crucial exception to this generally accepted historiography of small-­gauge filmmaking in post-­war Sweden. Around the highly contested place just mentioned, amateur filmmakers producing fictions, such as Baeckström and Eksell, positioned themselves – or maybe were positioned by others – between the struggling factions. As in many other countries of the time, it was the entry of Swedish public service television in the late 1950s that came to their, and most other small-­gauge filmmakers’, rescue. As already mentioned, Eksell would personally benefit from this when På 6: våningen shared a prize sponsored by television in 1965. The filmmaker’s relation to public service institutions does not, however, stop there. Since his fictions can be described in part as actuality reports from the urban reality beyond the nuclear family preoccupying so many amateurs, one can, to some degree, also compare their social consciousness with developments within Swedish public service radio and television. There is, for instance, a fair amount of correspondence between the topics addressed in Eksell’s fictions and the change of focus in the news covered by the Swedish public service media. In the mid-­1950s, the Swedish public service media began fundamentally to change its views on how to portray contemporary issues, and how it should be organised to do so. The so-­called Sound Section was formed in 1956 and, within it, the Cultural Board was placed in charge of all socially engaged programmes. Fairly quickly, former ahistorical chronicles and general descriptions of society were replaced by new contemporary reporting with an emphasis on issues of actuality. Within the Cultural Board, the sub-­section designated Home and Family turned out to be especially active, creating a large amount of programming about the personal experiences and particular interests of Swedish women. This output drew ­114

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4.4  Diana Berg as the unnamed protagonist in Depressed (1960).

much inspiration from programmes such as the American CBS’s See It Now and the British BBC series Special Inquiry.34 Eksell’s fictions can therefore best be understood against the backdrop of the newly dynamic 1960s news media. Despite their fictitious nature, it is obvious that his four films are permeated by an ambition, similarly evident in mainstream television of the time, to display socially conscious stories objectively in a politically critical manner. Since storytelling takes such a central place in Eksell’s fictional reporting, there are also, of course, numerous allusions to some of the most renowned feature film directors of the time. Domestically, there are, for instance, several references to some of Ingmar Bergman’s famous productions. Thematic similarities between the portrayal of women in Secrets of Women (1952), Summer with Monica (1953), A Lesson in Love (1954), Dreams (1955), Through a Glass Darkly (1960), Winter Light (1963) and The Silence (1963), and in Eksell’s amateur productions are clear. Apart from the fact that all the main protagonists in Eksell’s four fictions are women, his depictions of their brief encounters with men are, as in most of Bergman’s cases, problematic, to say the least. Just like the Swedish auteur he seemed to admire so much, Eksell surrounded himself with a handful of women who constantly crop up in the production of his films. His wife Maire, for instance, takes the leading role in two of the four fictions, Kärlekens lön and Tysta gator, and she also takes a supporting role in Depressed.35 In the latter film, the lead is played by another 115

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of his favourite amateur actresses, Diana Berg, who in 1963 won the national prize for best female small-­gauge actress. Links to the younger generation of Swedish cinematographers surfacing in the early 1960s can also be found in Eksell’s fictions, with names such as Bo Widerberg, Jan Troell and Vilgot Sjöman constituting the most evident influences. Stylistic reference to such figures can be seen, for instance, in the use of hand-­held cameras, close-­ups of agonising faces and low-­angle shots of mundane interiors – such as city flats and stressful workplaces – as well as outdoor scenes with isolated women wandering endlessly and desperately in search of identity, origin or, as in Tysta gator, a lost child. The active use of music in Eksell’s fictions evokes additional influences from contemporary Swedish film production, with up-­tempo jazz tunes and modernist classical music functioning as a sometimes disturbing, sometimes invigorating, audio backdrop that mirrors the various psychological moods of the female characters. Influences from foreign feature filmmakers are also abundant. It is, for instance, hard to overlook the impact works emanating from Italian ­neorealism, British kitchen-­sink realism and the French New Wave might have had on Eksell. Thanks to the radical approaches to filmmaking launched by these movements, hand-­held camera work, on-­location shooting and live sound not only became commonly accepted practices amongst filmmakers and spectators alike – they also surfaced as central ingredients of the new film art.36 Non-­fiction influences mingle with inheritances from both European art cinema and the North American mainstream. In 1965, Eksell was officially praised in newspapers for his ‘inquisitive documentary style’ in Tysta gator – and his works can clearly be likened to the dynamic documentary forces of the time, not least those surfacing within American ‘direct’ cinema and French ‘cinéma vérité’. In the case of the former (and although many of these films came after Eksell’s four fictions), the harsh critique of American society and its institutions bears a close resemblance to how certain sections of the Swedish welfare state were scrutinised by Eksell, from the point-­of-­view and through the experience of individual citizens. In the latter case, attempts to try to define the modern human condition in Edgar Morin’s and Jean Rouche’s Chronicles of a Summer (1960) – which premiered the same year as three of Eksell’s four fictions – is hard to overlook. For one thing, the Frenchman and Swede alike tried to map the citizens of their respective hometowns anthropologically, with the help of film. Like his French counterparts, Eksell was on a mission to examine some general and commonly accepted truths about society at a particular time and place. Contrary to them, however, Eksell never actively took part in the stories by interviewing or engaging in discussions with people in front of the camera. In this respect, his films are indeed true works of fiction, constantly trying to erase any traces of responsible agents behind the camera. The fact that he never made comments or posed direct questions in his films does not mean, however, that we cannot use them as valuable testaments of early 1960s ­116

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Sweden. On the contrary, his four fictions posed just as relevant and politically crucial questions as any of the documentaries or news programmes of the time. While they could not help being part of the very same social project they were in the process of criticising, their critique of that project becomes tangible in the practice cultivated in the specific contexts of amateurism. In this connection, Eksell’s Finnish origin might well be of some relevance. Filming his surroundings at a time when Finnish immigration to Sweden was constantly rising surely affected his choice of topics and themes. It is, for example, obvious that all his female protagonists are portrayed as distinct outsiders, lacking, but also longing for, social inclusion on both professional and personal levels. Although the voices on the soundtrack never reveal any trace of a Finnish accent, Eksell’s films obviously deal with problems of communication, which, in part, might be triggered by linguistic shortcomings. Whatever the case may be with regard to language barriers, it is apparent that the protagonists only partially understand the culture and society with which they are confronted. In order to capture the innermost thoughts and anguish of these women protagonists, Eksell’s camera follows their destinies with the help of close-­ups and intimate scenery, which makes it easy to identify with their lives. And when, on occasion, he uses a subjective camera, we are given even more insight into how they experience their monotonous lives on a day-­to-­day basis. The final result is a number of convincing stories revealing a darker and more tarnished side of the otherwise so neatly polished Swedish welfare system, leading one woman to try to take her life and another to have an abortion that kills her (in Depressed and Kärlekens lön), while their counterparts in other films are increasingly estranged in their part-­time professions as hotel cleaner (På 6: våningen) and morning newspaper deliverer and domestic cleaner (Tysta gator).37 Such focalisation of his narration through character makes it is clear that Eksell was never just a passive onlooker. His four small-­gauge films did not merely register what was happening on the surface of Swedish society; nor did they positively portray societal changes for the better. Rather, what makes these audio-­visual testimonies so interesting is the ways in which, through a use of fictional devices, they stage an explicit in-­depth critique of some of the most debated ideological, cultural and social issues of the time, which by consequence confirms the empirical value of these films as a useful historical source material. Conclusions In Sweden, small-­gauge filmmakers concentrating on making fictions, such as Gerd Baeckström and Mauno Eksell, primarily functioned outside the discursive formations of the contemporary amateur scene. Repeatedly trying to produce fictions with little or no external help, amateur filmmakers such as these became marginal intermediaries positioned between contradictory 117

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forces. True, amateurs making fiction films strove for professional perfection and recognition in the same way as most other filmmakers – even recurrently entering competitions in order to have their productions appraised by their peers. But the choice to make fictions instead of home movies, reportages, education films, fantasies, artworks or documentaries seems to have been triggered by a twofold ambition. On the one hand, some of the small-­gauge filmmakers wanted to re-­establish amateur fiction as, in Baeckström’s words, ‘the origin for a new avant-­garde’, while they, on the other hand, and as in the case of Eksell, took an openly political stance by trying to reveal new truths about certain unexplored and impoverished parts of the otherwise homogenous and financial successful Swedish society.38 The fact that Eksell, like most amateurs, introduced himself in a supporting role (Kärlekens lön) and cast friends and family in many of his fictions underlines the personal, private and intimate dimensions of his output, regardless of genre or mode. Yet even though his four fictions from the early 1960s captured Swedish reality from decidedly personal points of view, they are simultaneously representative of general trends and opinions dominant at the time of their production. What specifically comes into sharp focus in them are national, local and private horizons of expectation that are just as linked to the external socio-­political, cultural and economic contexts as they are triggered by the internal driving forces of the filmmaker. Understood in this way, amateur fictions such as these illustrate various general critical issues and should have a central place in the history of small-­ gauge film. Just because they are fictions, they should not automatically be seen as less trustworthy than documentaries, news programmes or, for that matter, traditional written forms of evidence. A more productive approach would be to consider all cultural output – fictions and non-­fictions alike – as valuable audio-­visual statements about on-­going processes in society with a concrete impact on how individuals and communities conceive of and relate to themselves and their reality. This unique historiographical value of the amateur small-­gauge film was, in fact, already on the Swedish agenda in 1942 when the aforementioned Smalfilmaren concluded: As a promoter of Swedish cultural life, the small-­gauge film is in some cases even more accurate than its big brother, the normal film. Prior experiences have already affirmed this and as we know the small-­gauge film has a bright future lying ahead.39 Arguably, this prophecy has recently been confirmed. In today’s YouTube and Facebook era, small-­gauge productions by amateurs are ubiquitous, and in many cases they have substantially changed global debates and political agendas. Interestingly enough, many of the most productive amateurs of the early Internet period have now become bloggers by profession, which is a development with many similarities to aspiring Swedish amateur filmmakers ­118

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of old. But even though there are some high-­profile exceptions active in today’s commercial film industry, most amateurs producing fictions on the Internet still remain on the margins. A crucial question to pose, therefore, might be whether fictions or non-­fictions will dominate the social media of the future. However, such a question perhaps misses the point. During the last few decades, we have seen a fundamental blurring of high-­profile media boundaries both in content and in form, which confirms that the convergence culture is here to stay. In that respect, amateur fictions such as Eksell’s can be seen as docu-­dramas or ‘factions’ that were partly in line with, but also ahead of, their time, openly addressing socio-­political issues in fictional form via objective depictions of private lives that were registered from below. Consequently, small-­gauge productions of everyday life such as his do not merely constitute valuable historical sources from which we can learn about our past. They will be just as important for the future historiography of film and media. Notes   1. Today, Mauno Eksell is ninety-­one years old, and was regrettably unable to be interviewed during the preparation of this text. The information included comes from notes about the films left at the film archive when depositing them in 2004, as well as from telephone interviews and email correspondence with his son Paul and daughter Susanne. Additional information has been obtained from a filmed interview with Eksell, made by Finnish Public Service Television in 2008. I would like to thank the Eksell family for their generous cooperation.   2. T. Borglund, ‘Frä scha och spänstiga amatörfilmer’, Aftonbladet, 5 March 1965.   3. See Dagens Nyheter, 11 February 1963, and Svenska Dagbladet, 11 February 1964.   4. Svenska Dagbladet, 11 February 1964.   5. Ian Goode, ‘Locating the family film: the critics, the competition, and the archive’, in Ian Craven (ed.), Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema (Newcastle-­upon-­Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 182–207.   6. Mats Jönsson, Visuell Fostran: Film-­Och Bildverksamheten i Sverige under Andra Världskriget (Lund: Sekel, 2011).   7. E. Hedling and Mats Jönsson, Välfärdsbilder: Svensk film utanför biografen (Stockholm: National Archive for Recorded Sound and Moving Images, 2008).   8. Patricia Zimmermann, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 113.   9. Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 144. 10. Ibid. 11. Or, as Paul Smith once convincingly put it: ‘It is perhaps the fiction film which comes most into its own and offers the richest possibilities. It is precisely its character as “fiction”, which in regard to the recording of external reality seems to be an inseparable handicap, that now constitutes its greatest fascination, for it holds out the prospect of insight into those worlds of the imagination and the unconscious that history has hitherto hardly penetrated, but into which it is eager to advance.’ See Paul Smith, ‘The fiction film as historical source’, in K. Fledelius et al. (eds), History and the Audio-­Visual Media (Copenhagen: Eventus, 1979), p. 205. 12. Helmer Bäckström, Konsten att Filma: En Handbok i Amatörkinematografi (Uppsala: J. A. Lindblads, 1931) (translation by chapter author).

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13. The latter discourse culminated in 1937, when a large public meeting, entitled ‘Swedish Film – A Threat to Culture’, was held in the Concert Hall of Stockholm, during which leading representatives of Sweden’s literary and artistic communities expressed concern over the poor quality of domestic feature films. 14. Anon., ‘Amatörfilmarbetet hos svenska film – och fotoklubbar’, Smalfilmaren 1940–1941, 1940, pp. 105–9. Its two predecessors were Stockholm’s Photographic Society (founded in 1888) and Sweden’s Amateur Filmmakers (founded in 1936), both organisations within which Bäckström had already been a central figure. 15. See Lennart Bernadotte, ‘Kanske en anmälan’; Sten Rennerfelt, ‘Smalfilmen av idag’; and Nils Hallström, ‘Hur jag filmar’, FOTO: Tidskrift för Foto och Film i Skandinavien, Vol 1, No. 1, pp. 5–6, 24–5 and 33, respectively. 16. That the three other fictions also open with introductory signs (in Swedish) partially verifies Zimmermann’s previous suggestion that amateur filmmakers at this point in time increasingly tried to emulate Hollywood in their small-­gauge productions. 17. The English title can perhaps also be explained by Eksell’s Finnish origin, and the fact that Swedish and Finnish are fundamentally different languages with no mutual correspondence whatsoever. In interview, Eksell’s son explained that these fictions are still shown on Finnish television and that they have been repeatedly televised in Germany, among other countries. He also confirmed that his father periodically sent his films to international film festivals and entered them in foreign competitions. 18. The article is careful to explain to the reader how the international competition rules work, where first prize needed a minimum of 47 points, second needed 43 and third, 40. 19. S. A. Hansson, ‘Svensk amatörfilm går framåt’, FOTO: Tidskrift för Foto och Film i Skandinavien, Vol. 1, No. 5, 1939, pp. 28–9. 20. S. A. Hansson, ‘Amatörfilmkongressen i Zürich’, FOTO: Tidskrift för Foto och Film i Skandinavien, Vol. 1, No. 7, 1939, pp. 16–17. 21. Gerd Baeckström, ‘Konstnärlig smalfilm’, FOTO: Tidskrift för Foto och Film i Skandinavien, Vol. 1, No. 12, 1939, pp. 24–5. 22. See, for instance, O. Törnblom, Att Smalfilma: Den Moderna Handboken för Amatörfilmaren (Stockholm: Nordisk Rotogravyr, 1965); O. Tommelstad, Smalfilmning: Den Moderna Handboken (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1967); and George Wain, Så Smalfilmar Man (Stockholm: Nordisk Rotogravyr, 1966), a translation from an English-­language original entitled How to Film as an Amateur (London: Focal, 1949), which appeared in its fourth edition in 1966. 23. Lennart Bernadotte, ‘Den lilla skillnaden’, FOTO: Tidskrift för Foto och Film i Skandinavien, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1939, pp. 5–6. 24. Lennart Bernadotte, ‘Vi amatörer’, FOTO: Tidskrift för Foto och Film i Skandinavien, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1939, pp. 5–6. This editorial is entitled ‘We amateurs’ and commences with an official Swedish explanation of the word ‘amateur’, taken from the country’s most renowned encyclopaedias. 25. Gerd Baeckström, ‘Konstnärlig smalfilm’, pp. 24–5. 26. A. Lindgren, ‘Vem har råd att vara amatör?’, Filmfront, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1955, pp. 34–5. 27. Signature A. L., ‘Smalfilmfront. Årets smalfilm och den nordiska smalfilmstävlingen’, Filmfront, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1955, pp. 30–1. It is worth noting that the aforementioned Mrs Baeckström was part of the jury, this time under her new married name, Mrs Gerd Osten, under which she developed into one of the most respected writers on film in Sweden. Her daughter, Suzanne Osten, would became one of Sweden’s most successful film and theatre directors. Filmfront was a Swedish periodical published from 1953 to 1956, chiefly concentrating on avant-­garde and experimental film practice.

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28. In a recent study, this film is said to have been descried ‘as pretentious, hard to understand, or pornographic’. See L. G. Andersson, J. Sundholm and A. Söderbergh Widding, A History of Swedish Experimental Film Culture: From Early Animation to Video Art (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2010). 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., p. 123. 31. See L. G. Andersson, J. Sundholm and A. Söderbergh Widding, A History of Swedish Experimental Film Culture. 32. See Martina Roepke, Privat-­Vorstellung: Heimkino in Deutschland vor 1945 (Hildesheim, Zurich and New York: Georg Olms, 2006) and Patricia Zimmermann, Reel Families (1995). 33. L. G. Andersson, J. Sundholm and A. Söderbergh Widding, A History of Swedish Experimental Film Culture. 34. M. Djerff-­Pierre and L. Weibull, Spegla, Granska, Tolka: Aktualitetsjournalistik i Svensk Radio och TV under 1900–Talet (Stockholm: Prisma, 2001). 35. She appears as Marian in the information sheet covering the film in the Swedish Film Institute’s official database. However, Eksell’s son has corrected this and confirmed that her first name was Maire. 36. Since Eksell was a self-­taught sound engineer with a number of successful technical improvements to his name – installing a new sound system in a chain of cinemas in Stockholm, as well as creating a mixer-­board for the largest Swedish film company, Svensk Filmindustri – it is likely that he worked especially hard at accompanying his fictions with a sophisticated soundtrack. 37. Here it should be noted that the woman playing a hotel cleaner in På 6: våningen had this job in real life and was an acquaintance of Eksell, while his wife Maire played the newspaper deliverer in Tysta gator. 38. Gerd Baeckström, ‘Konstnärlig smalfilm’, pp. 24–5. 39. B. Hollsten, ‘Smalfilmen och våra folkrörelser’, Smalfilmaren 1942–1943, 1942, pp. 81–2.

Filmography Depressed (Depressed, 1960) 16mm, 16 mins, black and white, magnetic sound. På 6: våningen (On the 6th Floor, 1960) 16mm, 16 mins, black and white, magnetic sound. Tysta gator (Quiet Streets, 1964) 16mm, 37 mins, black and white, magnetic sound. Kärlekens lön (Wages of Love, 1960) 16mm, 18 mins, black and white, magnetic sound. Mauno Eksell’s films are deposited at the Grängesberg film archive, and available to borrow in DVD format for scholarly work. For more information, please contact the Head of the archive: Helena Modin, National Library of Sweden, Filmarkivet i Grängesberg, Dillners väg 17772 40, Grängesberg, Sweden; tel.: +46 (0)10–709 32 60; email: [email protected]

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5. OCCUPYING A DISTINGUISHED BUT LONELY PLACE IN THE AMATEUR MOVEMENT: ACE MOVIES 1929 TO 1964 FRANCIS DYSON

We are glad to learn that this famous society, whose pre-­war films attained a high reputation, is now being revived.1 In December 1948, the editor of the cine club section of Amateur Cine World welcomed renewed activity on the part of Ace Movies, a London-­based cine club, following a break of nearly eight years. Ace had enjoyed an exemplary reputation in the pre-­war era, and the delight expressed by the writer leaves little doubt that much was anticipated from those to be involved in the post-­ war period. Expectations were quickly fulfilled and, as articles in later magazines indicate, Ace Movies’ stature amongst other British cine clubs was duly enhanced in the years that followed. The success of the club’s film Marionettes (1948), not only in the first Amateur Cine World ‘Ten Best’ competition staged after the war in 1948, but also in international competitions, offered early evidence of a return to form.2 Curiously, however, Ace Movies did not live up to these expectations, in other significant respects. The club did not go on, for instance, to produce new films on a regular basis thereafter and, in this respect, its level of activity either side of the Second World War contrasts markedly. Having produced at least sixteen films in the 1930s, before hostilities forced temporary suspension, the club only managed to complete a further two works in the decade following Marionettes’ triumph.3 One of them, Sakura (1956), whilst highly regarded and winning awards in amateur film competitions, proved, in fact, to be Ace Movies’ swansong, and the club was soon to slip quietly once more from the cine club scene.4 Even though the last known article about the group in Amateur Cine World indicates that members had 125

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three film projects in production as late as 1964,5 Ace seems to have disbanded shortly thereafter, without completing any of the works then in progress. This chapter presents an overview of Ace Movies, from its beginnings in 1929 to this point of demise in the mid-­1960s, considering its activities in relation to the particular traditions of amateur cine studio culture of the 1930s, within which the club established its reputation. Recognising that Ace did not work in isolation, attention is also given to connective discourses and shared ambitions, which help to illuminate a neglected strand of amateur cine practice at a ­definitive stage of its development. Within the limited number of academic works devoted to amateur film, research into the activities of cine clubs, and in particular British cine clubs, remains an under-­explored area. Valuable excursions into this territory, including Melissa Stone’s ethnographic study of the San Diego cine club and, more recently, Sheila Chalke’s research into the animation activity of the Grasshopper Group in the United Kingdom, suggest, however, many promising avenues for future enquiry.6 Beyond these essays, little work has emerged that is devoted solely to cine club activities, especially during amateur cinema’s formative periods.7 The same is also true of the cine clubs, considered as a component of wider discussions concerning the development of an intellectual film culture in Britain in the inter-­war years. Although a number of academic works have focused on the development of such a culture in Britain during this period,8 cine club activities have remained somewhat on the margins of these explorations. Closer inspection reveals, however, that cine clubs provided important forums for the serious discussion of film in the late 1920s and 1930s, and it is a priority in this study to consider their activities as a formulated response not only to developments in film technology, but also as a creative interaction with wider cultural and critical practices. Ace Movies was one of a number of cine clubs that formed in London in the second half of the 1920s, during the initial expansion of interest in ‘serious’ and/or ‘alternative’ film cultures in Britain. The emergence of these cine clubs coincided, for example, with the publication of Close Up (1927–33), the first of a series of intellectual film journals, which, initially at least, viewed the amateur movement as a potential ‘breeding ground for new auteurs who might infiltrate the industry’.9 While such journals associated with intellectual film culture, by the mid-­1930s, came to regard the amateur movement with less optimism,10 and the cine clubs on the whole with a certain disdain, Ace Movies appears to have been one of the few clubs that was shown a modicum of respect.11 Even though the Ace Movies group therefore represented something of an exception to the rule and established a reputation for the excellence of its technical work, its films themselves, like those of so many of its peers, were still sometimes dismissed as a waste of effort. As one anonymous contributor to Close Up lamented:12

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5.1  Ben Carleton receives the Federation Cup in 1940 on behalf of Ace Movies, for their film The Miracle (1939).

[W]hat is wrong with the other ten per cent of the societies? Not technical competence, for their camera work is often surprisingly efficient, and finish, as in the case of Ace Movies, is frequently polished to a high degree . . . [These clubs] have all the resources with which to turn out good work, but, like the commercial studios, they are content to waste their talent on indifferent, if not puerile, subject-­matter.13 The quality of amateur filmmaking also became a much discussed subject in the specialist magazines generated to cater for the growing numbers of amateur filmmakers, who similarly took practical steps to raise overall standards. During the 1930s, for example, these magazines, together with a number of newspapers and other publications, sponsored a variety of amateur film competitions to encourage improved practice. Ace Movies achieved a number of early successes in such competitions, and was swiftly recognised within the social world of amateur filmmaking as a cine club that was capable of producing exemplary fiction films. The club maintained this reputation as it continued to garner awards, and became renowned not only for the making of highly regarded films, but also for defining a movement in cine club filmmaking that intended to emulate the studio environment of commercial film production companies, as a means to match its technical and aesthetic standards. 127

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Interwar Development Initially launched as Streatham Amateur Movie-­Makers in August 1929, the early membership changed their name within a month to Ace Movies, and the club retained this identity until its disappearance in the mid-­1960s. Although not the first such enterprise to be established in London, as the first cine club in the capital to acquire studio premises, Ace was quickly identified in British amateur film circles as a forward-­thinking operation. The group’s ambition was singled out in an early edition of Amateur Films (1928–30), a key focus for debate on such matters: What is the position of the London societies . . . ? The only London club, which at the moment, has an official studio, is a newly formed suburban body with a young and progressive man at its head. The best known Societies possess no such studio and one of them is reduced to roaming from place to place, while the other has to borrow the stage of a kinema in order to carry on its work . . . Can it be that the London bodies are resting on their laurels?14 In the same edition that the ‘Society Gossip’ section of the magazine lamented the lack of amateur film studios in the capital, and indicated that the development of such dedicated spaces was one of the prerequisites of a progressive amateur film movement, Ace Movies announced the acquisition of its first studio premises in Streatham: The Society has acquired permanent headquarters at 119 Mitcham Lane Streatham . . . comprising a large and well equipped studio and room for a meeting-­place. The lighting equipment . . . has been obtained through the enterprise and generosity of Mr H. R. Hughes, the Hon. Secretary and Manager. The Studio has been attractively decorated throughout by enthusiastic members . . .15 The club’s ambition did not go unnoticed in an era when the amateur movement was regarded not only as a potential source of new talent for the development of the medium, but also at a time when cine clubs were being encouraged to set up their own studios. The February 1930 issue of the same magazine went further, when it clarified the ‘progressive’ vision of Ace Movies in a full-­page feature.16 The report describes the effort that had been made in transforming the modest accommodation provided by a cellar in Streatham into a functioning studio, and highlights details within one of the sets of the film (The Kris) then in production.17 Although the report is brief (as the page is dominated by three still photographs), it none the less confirms the suggestion that the main energy behind Ace Movies at the outset, and arguably a significant influence over its formative years, was Horace Hughes. It would be ­128

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incorrect, however, to assume that the club revolved around just one personality, even in its early years. Although Hughes left the club in 1934, Ace Movies’ ambitions did not wane as a result, since at least three of the club’s four key members for the remainder of its existence had by then begun to play equally prominent roles in its film productions.18 Filmmaking was clearly paralleled by investment in developing the group’s profile, and like other successful amateur groups, Ace Movies engaged in a form of self-­promotion throughout the 1930s that continually raised and maintained awareness of the club’s activities. Members regularly contributed news to specialist amateur filmmaking magazines, that not only kept other enthusiasts up to date with the projects in progress and awards won, but also supplied stills of its productions and its facilities. Recognising a need to maintain levels of involvement, Ace repeatedly advertised through magazine club news columns for new members and more casual extras for productions, as well as giving details of the club’s screening sessions and announcing premieres of their own completed films. Ace also moved beyond exploitation of opportunities offered by the amateur film press to raise its profile, and engaged with a wider British film culture, as one of the few amateur cine clubs to contribute club news regularly to one of the intellectual film journals of the era, World Film News (1937–8). Ace Movies’ news bulletins indicate further that this self-­promotion had as much to do with the consolidation of the cine club movement, as a whole as it did with building its own individual reputation. One report, for example, outlined plans for monthly ‘film evenings’, which were proposed as ‘open’ events for all film club members: Apart from their activities in film production, Ace Movies are endeavouring to foster the general good fellowship and keenness throughout the movement by holding monthly ‘film evenings,’ which all and sundry bona-­fide amateur film club workers from any part of the world are cordially invited to attend. On 28th September they held the third of these meetings at Howard’s Restaurant, Brixton.19 Whilst it is not yet clear how long Ace Movies ran such events for, and there is some evidence to suggest that, by the end of the decade, the organisers had even discontinued projection evenings in the club, to concentrate solely on production, the sense of belonging to a larger community represented by this impulse is tangible. Certainly Ace Movies’ commitment to the wider amateur movement was never in doubt. Reports submitted to the cine press by the club itself, as well as by some of its peers, indicate not only that Ace members identified with amateur filmmaking’s wider social world, but also that they were willing to help others within it, when they could. The club regularly indicated that its studios were open for the inspection of other amateurs, and might on occasion be available for their use. Perhaps the first recorded example of such 129

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willingness to support others was a short acknowledgement of their assistance from the Jewish Amateur Film Society: As reported in previous issues of Amateur Films, the J.A.F.S. [Jewish Amateur Film Society] were instrumental in securing the use of the Savoy Cinema, Leyton, for the filming of their interiors, but it has since been found that the immobility of the lights and their distance from the set rendered the results hardly satisfactory. The question of a studio in which to do adequate justice to the interior sequences of ‘The Ghetto’ was fortunately solved by the generosity of Mr. H.R. Hughes, hon. Secretary of Ace Movies, who offered to loan the J.A.F.S. his own Society’s studios at Streatham.20 The report also reveals something of the intensity of activity around Ace. Even though it lent its studios to the Jewish Amateur Film Society, so that the latter could complete a production, the club’s own filmmaking continued without interruption: [O]wing to the fact that the Streatham amateurs occupy their studio every day and every evening, it was realised that the only practicable solution [for the J.A.F.S.] was to work all night.21 Such accounts paint a picture of serious and sustained investment, yet although the club was reported to be occupying its studios at every available opportunity, Ace Movies did not portray itself as a club that devoted inordinate amounts of time to any one production. The evidence available in the hobby literatures indicates, in fact, that the team worked swiftly on its early films: ‘Driftwood,’ the latest production, was completed in record time, having been made entirely in about eight weeks from start to finish. . . .22 News bulletins in this period indicate that the club usually had more than one film at some stage of preparation at any particular time, but also that it started to take longer over its productions from the mid-­1930s, as demonstrated in the table of productions reproduced below, listing completion dates and giving a sense of the genres explored. Unfortunately, Ace Movies’ club records are presumed lost, and the reasons behind the increasing length of production times are not wholly known. Accounts submitted by the cine club to various magazines indicate, however, that Ace Movies suspended film production on a number of occasions, although these temporary suspensions of activity do not by themselves explain the lengthening of the production process.23 The available evidence suggests, perhaps, that this may well have something to do with the fact not only that ­130

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Film Unnamed The Kris Delirium Road to Fleet Street The Kris Hells Belles Fall So You Say Resthaven Cottage Night Scene Rod and Line 2nd Crime Driftwood £20 Reward Three Floors Up Luna Park Plan for Kensington The Miracle Marionettes Sunny Afternoon Sakura Point 426 Kurt Kramer The Lonely Age

Year 1929 Unfinished 1929 1930 1931 1931 1931 1932 1932 1932 1932 1933 1933 1934 1936 1937 1937 1939 1948 1952 1956 Unfinished Unfinished Unfinished

1938 Film Description [Not included] N/A Drama Comedy Melodrama Burlesque Musical study Comedy Farce Fictional documentary Comedy drama Drama Drama Comedy Satire [No Description] Documentary [Not included] [Not included] [Not included] [Not included] N/A N/A N/A

the cine club began to produce films with more elaborate art direction from the mid-­1930s, but also that the club’s membership might also have been slightly in decline towards the end of the decade, before reaching a low point immediately prior to the outbreak of war in 1939.24 As the above listing indicates, Ace Movies produced a distinct body of films in the 1930s that not only engaged with popular film genres but also explored European film cultures.25 Although many amateur cine clubs tended to produce films in a variety of genres, including newsreel and other non-­fiction records of local events, Ace seem to have shied away from these categories of production to concentrate on more ‘studio-­grade’ filmmaking. There is little doubt that influential members were self-­conscious about the types of film that they intended Ace to produce, and preferred to concentrate on fiction films, having little intention of moving away from this mode of production, despite the typically inclusive attitude reported in 1937: Ace Movies is forming a documentary group to specialise in the production of films of social and educational importance . . . This is a new 131

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5.2  Production of Marionettes (1948), well under way in the Wimbledon studio, c. 1939.

departure for this club, which has in the past specialised with some degree of success, in photo-­play production. This latter type of production is not being discarded, the production of documentary films being supplementary to the club’s normal programme.26 In the event, the documentary group did not become an established feature of the club, and Ace Movies appears to have quietly shelved this idea, after producing Plan for Kensington (1936).27 Other genres were certainly explored, although the canonical status of three of its more ‘artistic’ fiction films, The Miracle (1939), Marionettes (1948) and Sakura (1956), tends to obscure the merits of some of Ace Movies’ earlier films, and the club’s engagement with more popular film genres from the 1930s, notably those of comedy. Unfortunately, as many of these films are now presumed lost, they now elude contemporary assessment. The club’s most celebrated films themselves reflect a cosmopolitan interest in cinema, and what is known about the creative process in the club is relevant in this respect. The evidence available indicates that Ace Movies developed its films from simple story ideas, often adapting the aesthetics of commercial films to the environment of a studio-­based cine club. It is in no way surprising, ­132

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therefore, that contemporary reviews of Delirium (1929) and Marionettes made connections with German Expressionist cinema. Assessing the club’s output today, we can see that the films seem to draw ideas eclectically from a wide body of cinema. Three Floors Up (1936), for instance, knowingly makes a number of connections with the Noël Coward play/Ernst Lubitsch film adaptation Design for Living (1933), while Driftwood (1933) evokes ­comparison with films associated with French poetic realism. While Ace Movies was not in any way unique, either in operating from a studio or in exploring techniques associated with the European avant-­garde cinema of the inter-­war years in an amateur environment, the club nevertheless evolved a recognisable style. The narratives are developed slowly and deliberately, and the films that remain accessible confirm the interest in, if not obsession with, getting the detail right, already remarked upon. Over the course of its life, Ace Movies acquired a reputation for a close attention to overall ‘finish’ in film production that has not always been associated with cine club films. Their films have, as a result, been praised in a number of ways, ranging from the care taken and attention paid towards the lighting of scenes, to the elaboration and ambition of the mise-­en-­scène, and the quality of performance. Revival and Retreat Following its remarkable period of expansion through the 1930s, Ace Movies suspended its activities in 1940 after the onset of the Second World War, and did not re-­emerge until late in 1948. Re-­establishment of the club is difficult to document in detail at this stage, with fewer reports about its activities reaching the journals in the post-­war period, and to date the history of this phase remains something of an enigma. Two observations, however, are possible. The first is that, while the club seems to have had the ambition, initially at least, to re-­form and recommence its activities in the same manner as prior to the war, it either could not do so, or at some point a decision was taken to operate in a more limited way. The second observation is that the club is noticeably less productive in the post-­war era, with the maintenance of a steady output seeming to give way to concentration on more isolated works. Ace Movies did provide a little information about the enforced suspension, and the straitened circumstances in which the cine club was resuming operation. The first news posting after the war is brief, though revealing in this respect: Work is proceeding slowly, partly through our technicians having aged somewhat, but mostly through the greatly increased overheads and ­scarcity of materials.28 Clearly, the war had a detrimental effect on the club; not only did it lose its studios but, lacking storage space, it also lost many of its stage settings, and 133

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with income reduced, assets were disposed of to keep things going. One report drew attention to the fact that Ace had even been forced to sell off its projector to cover costs: when the studio premises were requisitioned by the local council . . . we rented a room over a local garage into which we moved the studio lamps, cables, switchgear, furniture, hundreds of gramophone records and a ten year collection of ‘properties’ and costumes . . . We had to leave behind the entire contents of our scene dock – flats, timber, mouldings, etc . . . We had sold off the club’s projector to help pay off the debts way back in 1940.29 Ace Movies had clearly resumed its operations in a markedly different cultural climate. Wider shifts in generational attitudes occasioned by the war perhaps extended to the social world of amateur filmmaking, of which Ace Movies had been such a prominent pre-­war feature. By the late 1950s, it is clear that the club membership had aged, although enthusiasm seems undiminished. Although those still involved submitted less information to amateur film magazines than previously, Ace remained the subject of occasional articles. These describe a club that is still largely structured around four members from the pre-­war era – Ben Carleton, Cliff West, Maurice Fowler and Frank Biggs – but includes at least two new recruits in the persons of Matt McCarthy and Christopher (Kit) West.30 Change in all of these circumstances reshaped participation considerably. As early as 1949, the club noted that, even though members had taken on a variety of roles prior to the war, everyone now had to be prepared to tackle even more: We were in 1939 such a small unit, we are now even smaller, that everyone concerned in the making of the film (Marionettes) has had multiple jobs to do.31 There is evidence too that Ace Movies made further adjustments, drawing upon help from outside the cine club: I had a lot of friends in those days who were always fascinated . . . and they always came down . . . we used to work on Saturdays . . . and they all sort of mucked in . . . like in . . . the old boy film [The Lonely Age . . .] they had a big crowd scene, party scene . . . and we just gathered all my friends and they all mucked in. . . .32 Throughout its existence, members had, of course, adopted a multitude of roles. Ben Carleton, who joined the club some time in the early 1930s as an already notable amateur filmmaker, for instance, not only served a term as club secretary and later acted as chairman, but also made major contributions ­134

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5.3  Ace Movies’ studio accommodation in the 1950s.

to production as actor, cameraman and director, as each film required. The club news published in specialist amateur filmmaking magazines indicates that he was not unusual in this respect; Cliff West, another key Ace member, also undertook a similar variety of roles in front of and behind the camera. However, it is more than possible that some of the other members may have only taken on more specific duties behind the camera. In this respect, the role of women in Ace Movies is particularly difficult to determine, yet there does not seem to have been any significant change either side of the war. The news reports of the 1930s do not indicate that any female member of the club had any backstage technical roles, and certainly where the films were provided with credits in the interwar years, women seem only to have been employed in acting. There were apparently no female directors or camera operators in this club and, on the one occasion where there is a reference to appointments to the production committee prior to the war, only male club members are mentioned. Although the situation appears to be unchanged in the post-­war period,33 further examination is complicated by the lack of evidence, as well as by Ace Movies’ policy of not appending credits to their later films, suggesting that further research in this area is required. The down-­sizing of Ace Movies undoubtedly impacted upon the level of activity within the cine club. Although the filmography presented above shows that Ace Movies completed three films in the post-­war period and commenced a further three, the club only seems to have completed two wholly new ­productions – namely, Sunny Afternoon (1952) and Sakura (1956) – in the post-­war period. The filmography is also slightly misleading, perhaps, as Marionettes (1948) was filmed primarily prior to the war. According to Amateur Cine World, the film was hastily pushed through a post-­production process in 1948 and early 1949, so that it could be entered into the first Amateur Cine World ‘Ten Best’ competition after the return to peace. Sakura, on the other hand, which had been in development in 1939 but was shelved on account of the war, was resurrected by the cine club with the return of 135

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peace and filmed in the 1950s. As the record stands, apart from this example, it seems that only four films were wholly conceived in the post-­war period, of which only one, Sunny Afternoon, was completed. Amateur Film Studio Culture Central to the image of Ace constructed through early research is the figure of the studio, suggesting a particular approach to amateur film practice, as well as a particular kind of resource. Ace Movies occupied three studios during the 1930s. The first was located in a cellar underneath a chemist’s shop in Streatham, South London. After approximately five years at this location, the club took over the lease of the Croydon Amateur Film Society’s premises when this cine club folded in late 1934 or early 1935, before eventually finding its final pre-­war home in another basement, this time in the suburb of Wimbledon.34 After the war, it also occupied, at different points of time, premises at two locations in the Barnes area. While the club could reasonably be regarded as typical of many other studio-­based groups in the 1930s, by the 1950s Ace Movies was being recognised as one of the few amateur cine clubs still engaged in this mode of studio-­based production: A notable exception to this rule [that cine clubs do not operate from studios] is a club called Ace Movies who specialise in elaborately contrived impressionistic sets and whose production, Marionettes, has done more than any other film for the prestige of British amateurs in Europe . . . The Ace Movies unit . . . has continued the tradition of the silent cinema, and particularly of U.F.A., to the present day . . . [I]t occupies a distinguished but lonely place in the amateur movement.35 On this evidence, Ace Movies was regarded as being at the forefront of a developing amateur studio culture in the 1930s, effectively qualifying identification of amateur filmmaking in the period with the domestic ‘home movie’ or the locationism of documentary. By the end of the decade, with studio facilities in place, Ace Movies’ productions had become significantly more ambitious than those of many of their contemporaries, in an era in which it was by no means unusual for amateur cine clubs to set up specialist premises. In 1938, the magazine, Home Movies and Home Talkies (1932–40), published a series of articles about notable clubs of this type, often including illustration of well-­equipped stages, stores and libraries – and, not surprisingly, Ace Movies featured within the series. While the reports portray these cine clubs as being slightly unusual, for many commentators in the amateur film press, particularly in the early 1930s, such clubs were seen as both a natural and a desirable development, if the amateur cine movement was to continue to evolve as a parallel form of filmmaking to that of the commercial cinema.36 As one regular commentator noted: ­136

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It is surprising how many clubs are acquiring studio premises and club rooms, many of them are really sumptuously appointed. Ace Movies have recently moved their headquarters to Croydon, where they found more suitable premises than could be obtained in Streatham. In spite of the longer journeys which the majority of members would have to make, all voted for the move. This is definitely the right spirit.37 News bulletins in amateur film magazines indicate that Ace was always regarded as being in the vanguard of those cine clubs that operated from their own studios. At the same time, it was also recognised as a club in which the collective effort of the whole membership was directed to film production, as a typical commentator reports: When I was there a number of members were working on a set for the current film, each man having his own particular job to do, which resulted in a considerable advance towards completion in the space of a few hours.38 When the 1938 article referred to the collective nature of Ace’s way of doing things, it identified one of the key features that lay behind the club’s success and also differentiated it from many other cine clubs. Ace Movies, like other cine clubs investing in studios, seems to have developed an approach to amateur filmmaking that aimed to emulate the nature and division of responsibilities that characterise a commercial organisation. Though individuals might undertake a variety of roles within individual productions and also might vary these between films, there is evidence to suggest that the cine club was highly organised, whilst approving the specific projects to be undertaken, as a collective group: The postponed annual general meeting was held recently [. . .] and Messrs. Kindred, Sonin and West [were elected] to the Production Committee.39 Part of the strength of Ace Movies had always been the enthusiasm of its members, and there is evidence that this persisted well into the post-­war era.40 However, of greater significance were the skills that those involved brought to the club. Although the practical abilities of the members were remarked on from the cine club’s formation, Ace Movies took great pride in developing the technique and knowledge of its filmmakers throughout its existence, and expressed great satisfaction in the 1930s when members found employment in commercial settings.41 This does not mean, however, that those involved necessarily left the cine club environment, following cross-­over into professionalism. Maurice Fowler, who became one of the club’s key personnel from the mid-­1930s, was employed in the film industry after the war (and possibly 137

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before it) as an art director and designer, whilst remaining with Ace until its final disappearance.42 The visual ‘polish’ that Ace Movies brought to their productions had been remarked upon prior to the war, and had been considered to set it apart from many of its contemporaries.43 Set construction had attracted particular praise: The set in construction during my visit was a bedroom scene for Ace Movies’ latest production of ‘The Miracle.’ In one corner of the room was a very fine oak wardrobe, which one could swear was a solid and substantial piece of furniture, but which on closer investigation turned out to be a light framework of wood covered with ply and Essex boarding, the grains having been carefully painted in. On a chair nearby I noticed a postcard reproduction such as those issued by the British Museum, which could easily have been a photograph of the home-­made wardrobe, so complete was the detail. Detail is the essence of all the work of this society, as is clearly seen in their finished films, so that I was rather surprised to find that an apparently complete wall of the set had merely a hole for the window with no framework of any kind. I queried this and was told that the omission was deliberate, as the window would not appear full on the camera, and the main lighting would be directed through this. I wonder how many amateurs even pause to consider just where the light should be coming from in a particular scene?44 Ace Movies’ approach to filmmaking did not change with the resumption of its activities in the post-­war period, so it is not in the least surprising that, when one correspondent visited the club’s studio as late as 1959, he too noted the care, attention to particularities and technical skill that was incorporated into their pre-­shooting activity.45 Economic circumstances may, however, have been shifting. Although Ace Movies had been devoting greater time to its films since the mid-­1930s, there is little to indicate that it was investing large sums of money in them. There is, for instance, no sign that the cine club itself was a well-founded organisation or had a wealthy backer. While the cost of amateur studios had become the subject of heated discussion in Amateur Cine World in the middle years of the 1930s, Ace Movies had not contributed to this ‘Storm Over the Cine Clubs Controversy’ and its films do not seem to have attracted any adverse comment in this respect, either in the first discussions of this subject or in some of its later reincarnations.46 Unfortunately, the account books and budgetary records for Ace Movies are presumed lost, and while no information exists about the club’s finances, it is unlikely that the costs of Ace Movies’ productions were ever as great as one cine club claimed for one of its own films during the debates about studio production finance.47 It is thought that the cine club managed to get by on the contributions made by its members during ­138

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5.4  Ace set construction amazes the amateur cine press in the late 1930s.

its early years, and that their technical skills, allied with the club’s organisation, enabled it to produce well-­designed mise-­en-­scène and to do so with efficiency.48 Exhaustion of these resources in the post-­war era, along with a shrinking membership, inevitably hastened the demise of the club, and Ace Movies seemed to represent only a remarkable remnant of a vanished cine club culture, to at least one ­commentator, by the late 1950s: 139

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Where are the clubs of yesteryear? This thought occurred during a visit to the studios of Ace Movies. While there are many names, well known before the war, still with us, others which had produced much good work are now only an honoured memory . . . As for the veterans, there does not seem to be any one answer. Ben Carleton [a long-­serving and key member of Ace Movies], when asked for his secret, said he couldn’t think of one. ‘We have just carried on,’ he said . . . A club whose founders, while growing older in years, remain young in outlook . . . probably has found the answer to the riddle of what keeps a club in existence.49 Ace Movies had not found the answer to that riddle, though, and within seven years had become yet another cine club of honoured memory. Conclusions This chapter has provided an overview of the history of Ace Movies, which hopes to illustrate how a study of a particular cine club may illuminate developments within the wider amateur film environment at a particular point in time. The history offered is a symptomatic one: Ace Movies did not operate in isolation, although with its passing one of the most prominent exponents of that culture clearly disappeared from the British cine club scene. Future work on particular cine clubs may usefully illustrate how their behaviours trace interactions with wider industrial film structures and cultural practices, as well as the changing internal structure of the cine club movement itself. Ace Movies was formed in the late 1920s, and developed a studio-­based approach to filmmaking that was to change very little over the course of its existence. When the unit re-­formed after the war, the cine club environment had, however, altered. By the time of its own demise, the perception of Ace Movies by those outside its environment had also changed from that of a leading presence at the forefront of a distinct but not isolated group of cine clubs, into a revered entity operating in a manner that now distinguished it from the general movement. The honoured memory of the organisation clearly now extended to a particular cine club culture that had flourished in the 1930s, but now existed only in the minds of those who had witnessed or participated in its creation. Notes   1. Anon., ‘What the societies are doing’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 12, No. 8, 1948, p. 541.   2. The film, Marionettes, was placed third at the 1949 International Congress of the Union Internationale du Cinéma d’Amateurs (UNICA). Its other awards at amateur film festivals include (as far as they are known) the Victor Saville Trophy for the outstanding film of the festival at the 12th Scottish Amateur Film Festival in 1950, and a silver trophy at the 1953 Cannes Amateur Film Festival.   3. The two films are Sunny Afternoon (1952) and Sakura (1956). Ace Movies’ Highly

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Commended entries in the Amateur Cine World ‘Ten Best’ competitions of 1949 and 1950, Luna Park (1937) and £20 Reward (1934) respectively, had originally been completed in the 1930s.   4. At the 1958 Scottish Amateur Film Festival, Sakura was awarded the Victor Saville Trophy for the ‘outstanding film’ of the festival.   5. Alan Gill, ‘Club newsreel: Ace Movies stage public show’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 7, No. 22, 1964, p. 738.   6. See, for example, Melissa Stone, ‘If it moves, we’ll shoot it: The San Diego Amateur Movie Club’, Film History, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2003, pp. 220–37; Sheila Chalke, ‘Animated explorations: the Grasshopper Group 1953–1983’, in Ian Craven (ed.), Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema (Newcastle-­upon-­ Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 238–69.   7. Lance Bird, ‘A letter to the editor: cinema clubs and the world of tomorrow’, Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 38, No. 3/4, 1986, pp. 39–45.   8. See, for example, Jen Sansom, ‘The film society’, in Charles Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (London: BFI, 1986), pp. 306–13; Tom Ryall, Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema (London: Athlone, 1996), pp. 7–31; Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 13–18; James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus (eds), Close Up 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism (London: Cassell, 1998); and Jamie Sexton, Alternative Film Culture in Inter-­War Britain (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008).   9. Jamie Sexton, Alternative Film Culture in Inter-­War Britain, p. 42. 10. Ibid., p. 101. 11. The club was singled out on two occasions in intellectual film journals in the 1930s when amateur filmmaking was being discussed. See Ralph Bond, [Letter reporting on the 1930 London Photographic Fair], Close Up, Vol. 6, No. 6, 1930, p. 524, and Michael Rowan, ‘Wanted scenarios’, Cinema Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1932, p. 124. 12. Only one amateur film received fulsome praise in the journals; entitled The Gaiety of Nations (1929), the film was produced by two members of the London Amateur Cinematographers Association. See A. W., ‘An amateur film of distinction’, Close Up, Vol. 5, No. 4, 1929, pp. 346–7. 13. Michael Rowan, ‘Wanted scenarios’, p. 124. 14. Anon., ‘Society gossip’, Amateur Films, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1929, p. 97. 15. Anon., ‘News from the societies’, Amateur Films, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1929, p. 99. 16. Anon., ‘A progressive London amateur society’, Amateur Films, Vol. 2, No. 6, 1930, p. 134. 17. Ace Movies produced two films with this title. The first, referred to in Amateur Films, is the unfinished version and should not be confused with the later prize-­ winning film. 18. As the club’s records are presumed lost, details of individuals remain a little vague. However, it is clear that Ben Carleton, Cliff West, Frank Biggs and Maurice Fowler took prominent managerial roles within the club, as well participating in its film productions, and remained at the centre of club activity into the post-­war years. 19. Anon., ‘News of cine societies’, Home Movies and Home Talkies, Vol. 1, No. 5, 1933, p. 180. 20. Anon., ‘News from the societies’, Amateur Films, Vol. 2, No. 5, 1930, p. 123. 21. Ibid., p. 123. 22. Anon., ‘News of cine societies’, Home Movies and Home Talkies, Vol. 2, No. 8, 1934, p. 325. 23. For instance, Ace Movies temporarily ceased filming so that the cine club could showcase its productions in screenings at its studio. Certain reports refer to an annual film show but it is not known whether Ace Movies held shows throughout

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the period on an annual basis. Production was disrupted on two occasions in the 1930s when the club moved studios, and at least one production, Marionettes, was suspended in the late 1930s for an undisclosed reason. 24. Anon., ‘The making of Marionettes’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 13, No. 2, 1949, p. 131. 25. A definitive list of Ace Movies’ films is yet to be established. The cine club is known to have made one short film in the 1930s, which is not included in the table presented here. Similarly, other projects mentioned in club news reports in the 1930s have not been included in the table, as it is not known whether these were completed. The descriptions of film genre recorded have been taken from the Federation of Cinematograph Societies catalogue of amateur films for hire, published circa 1938. 26. Anon., ‘News of cine societies’, Home Movies and Home Talkies, Vol. 6, No. 4, 1937, p. 169. 27. One short film, In and Around Streatham, falls into this category. See Val Randall, The Amateur Cinema (Banstead, Surrey: self-­published, 1977), p. 51. 28. Anon., ‘What the societies are doing’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 12, No. 8, 1948, p. 541. 29. Anon., ‘The Making of Marionettes’, pp. 130–2. 30. See, for example, George H. Sewell, ‘Odd shots’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 22, No. 11, 1954, p. 1142, and Paul Zammit, ‘Inside Ace Movies’, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 2, No. 7, 1959, pp. 344–5. 31. Anon., ‘The Making of Marionettes’, p. 132. 32. Author interview with Kit West (conducted by the chapter author in 2010). 33. Paul Zammit, ‘Inside Ace Movies’, pp. 344–5. In interview with the author, Kit West confirmed that the cine club had a continuity girl at one point after the war. 34. The move from Streatham occurred some time between January and March 1935; the club’s final move to Wimbledon, prior to World War Two, took place at some point between April and October 1936. 35. Tony Rose, ‘Amateur films in Britain’, Sight and Sound, Special Edition, 1951, p. 63. 36. Anon., ‘Society gossip’, Amateur Films, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1929, p. 97. 37. Anon., ‘The club section’, The IAC Bulletin, Vol. 3, No. 8, 1935, p. 33. 38. F. E. T. Rainbow, ‘Round the cine clubs’, Home Movies and Home Talkies, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1938, p. 147. 39. Anon., ‘News of cine societies’, Home Movies and Home Talkies, Vol. 2, No. 8, 1934, p. 325. 40. Anon., ‘A progressive London amateur society’, p. 134. 41. Anon., ‘News of cine societies’, Home Movies and Home Talkies, Vol. 5, No. 8, 1937, p. 360. 42. Details of Maurice Fowler’s involvement in commercial films may be found at: http://ftvdb.bfi.org.uk/sift/individual/337247?view=credit and http://www.imdb. com/name/nm0288768/ 43. An example is a review of Driftwood, in Gordon Malthouse, ‘It’s the little things that count!’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 12, No. 3, 1948, pp. 225–6. 44. F. E. T. Rainbow, ‘Round the cine clubs’, pp. 147–8. 45. Paul Zammit, ‘Inside Ace Movies’, pp. 344–5. 46. Various, ‘Letters to the editor’, and ‘Storm over the cine clubs’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 2, Nos 3, 4, 5, 1935. 47. The Brondesbury club claimed during this debate that one of its films cost some £150 to produce (a sum equivalent to approximately £5,500 in today’s terms). 48. Ace Movies claimed a membership of thirty or so in its initial period, and later reported forty members. Anon., ‘British societies’, Amateur Films, Vol. 2, No. 5, 1930, p. 124.

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49. Bert Wicks, ‘The angry young men of the early years’, Amateur Film Maker, December 1957, pp. 15–16.

Filmography A full list of the films known to have been produced by Ace Movies is set out above in the text. However, as noted above, a number of these titles are presumed lost. The East Anglian Film Archive has made seven of the club’s films available to view via their website. The following films may be viewed online at: http://www.eafa.org.uk: Driftwood (Ace Movies, 1933) 16mm, 41 mins, black and white, silent. The Kris (Ace Movies, 1931) 16mm, 24 mins, black and white, silent. Marionettes (Ace Movies, 1948) 16mm, 21 mins, black and white, sound. The Miracle (Ace Movies, 1939) 16mm, 47 mins, black and white, silent. Night Scene (Ace Movies, 1932) 16mm, 17 mins, black and white, silent. Sakura (Ace Movies, 1956) 16mm, 29 mins, colour, sound. Three Floors Up (Ace Movies, 1936) 16mm, 34 mins, black and white, silent. Unfortunately, only another three of the club’s films are currently known to exist, and they do so only in a preservation format. The first two are located at the East Anglian Film Archive in Norwich, while the last (also known as Contrasts in Kensington) is held in the National Film Archive, Berkhamsted (now a part of the British Film Institute). Plan for Kensington (Ace Movies, 1936) 16mm, n/k mins, black and white, silent. Resthaven Cottage (Ace Movies, 1932) 16mm, n/k mins, black and white, silent. Rod and Line (Ace Movies, 1931) 16mm, n/k mins, black and white, silent. Contact details for these institutions are: East Anglian Film Archive, The Archive Centre, Martineau Lane, Norwich NR1 2DQ, United Kingdom; tel.: 01603 592 664; http://www.eafa.org.uk; email: [email protected] National Film and Television Archive, Kingshill Way, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire HP4 3TP, United Kingdom; tel.: 01442 876301; http://www.bfi.org.uk/nftva/; email: [email protected] and [email protected] [according to mode of specific film].

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6. ‘HIGH ART’ LOCALLY: THE SCREEN ADAPTATIONS OF IuG-­F ILM MARIA VINOGRADOVA

True, it has to be acknowledged that in fiction film amateurs have few successes, less than those who make documentary and science-­fiction films. It is known that a fiction film involves large expenses, substantial lighting equipment, additional film stock for retakes etc. But this is only one side of the issue. It is difficult to write a literary script, but amateurs frequently overcome this difficulty – they adapt a short story. But then the issue of actors arises – participants of amateur theatre cannot resolve it, as they do not know how to act in front of the camera, they usually cannot act in ‘pieces’. No less difficult is everything related to artistic and musical solutions. And all too often the most unsurmountable part for amateurs is directing – the ability to achieve a complete artistic unity in the film.1 In the sparse landscape of cultural activities of the town of Buguruslan, in the region of Orenburg in the south of Russia, IuG-­Film has overcome many of precisely these kinds of difficulties. Until recently, the group has largely involved active members of the local intelligentsia in creating screen versions of some of the most cherished works of Russian literature, constructing culture in an area whose remoteness from major centres has created less than favourable conditions for the accumulation of such intangible values. This chapter focuses on the work of IuG-­Film and the authorial style of its director, Iuriı˘ Grishin, whilst attempting to situate the group in the context of Soviet amateur cinema, Russian literary culture and a larger political history. The name ‘IuG-­Film’, best translated as ‘South-­Film’, points towards the broad circle of local community members involved in the group’s work, although the true significance of this name is much more particular: IuG also conflates the initials for Iuriı˘ Grishin, who claims sole authorship of all the studio’s films, insisting that the role of the community has been to assist him ­144

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in the realisation of his creative ideas.2 Whether as community enterprise or as the instrument of an individual amateur filmmaker, IuG-­Film produced eleven amateur fiction films, most of them best described as ‘medium-­length’ features. Early portions of this chapter deal with the biography of Iuriı˘ Grishin, who is justifiably recognised as perhaps the most important continuous thread running through the broader history of IuG-­Film. Rather than looking for ‘complete artistic unity’ in its œuvre, however, what follows explores the group as an index of the ‘localised microhistories’ recognised by Patricia Zimmermann as characteristic of amateur films, which: suggest that microhistories are pluralized and discordant. Amateur film inscribes family life, minoritized cultural practices, fantasies, the quotidian. Amateur film contains the history of self-­representation, an auto-­ ethnography. The amateur camera mediates between the self and fantasy, between self and others.3 The chapter considers more specifically the ways in which this mediation occurs in the fiction films of IuG-­Film. In this sense, the organisation is viewed very much as a one-­man operation, but its history is clearly also defined by extensive collaborations and the social network of Buguruslan’s cultural community. Iuriı˘ Grishin’s creative biography is inseparable from these connections and exchanges, which form a basic context for an understanding of him as an amateur auteur as that role is constructed here. Never having been an enfant de cinémathèque, Grishin undoubtedly developed his own unique style of work, whose elements are sometimes at odds with ideas of cinema that circulate within metropolitan film cultures. Committed to working with ‘high’ subjects and sources dignified by tradition, he also firmly believed in the virtues of technological progress – digital technologies, for instance, have allowed him to ‘beautify’ his original films further, decades after their supposed completion. Authorship is often asserted on screen, and Grishin has never hesitated to cast himself in roles in which he was to be an object of female passion or an incarnation of genius (such as that of Beethoven). Energy and stubborn perseverance enabled him to develop this personal ‘signature’ consistently, which, in retrospect, has created a highly original body of work that offers an unusual perspective on the practice of amateur filmmaking. The final part of the chapter focuses more specifically on the issue of adaptation in Grishin’s films, and argues that what is being transformed in the IuG-­ Film output is not only a series of literary classics, but also a series of related cultural ‘texts’, which are interwoven through the films’ specifically amateur contextual settings. Acknowledging borrowings from literary adaptations and heritage film of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the incorporation of notions of Soviet kulturnost, in Grishin’s work, the analysis reveals the particular influence of radio drama on his films. Ubiquitous in the Soviet cultural and media landscape, the genre of radio drama has received relatively little attention 145

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from scholars. This analysis thereby suggests the relevance of radio drama to adaptation studies, and the possible guidance of techniques developed in radio to the future study of amateur film form. Finally, a IuG-­Film case study demonstrates the way in which the purpose of local film may go beyond representation of local environments and community events, towards asserting the place of local identity within the realm of national culture. Five Decades of IuG-­Film Iuriı˘ Grishin was born in 1935, on the Sovkhoz Chkalova state farm, about forty kilometres away from Buguruslan. His father, a Pole by nationality, was executed as an ‘enemy of the people’, at the peak of Stalin’s repressions in 1938. Half-­orphan since early childhood, Grishin was raised by his mother, who worked as a cleaning woman. Uneducated herself, she was none the less able to understand and appreciate her son’s relish for the arts and creativity at an early age. Despite the hardship of wartime, she bought him a cello on hire purchase, and thus nurtured an interest in music that was to persist throughout Grishin’s life. The region of Orenburg and the whole area around the Volga river, remote from both the metropolitan centre and the nation’s borders, was one of the main destinations for the evacuation of population from Russia’s central cities at this time. Such evacuation transformed many provincial areas of Russia, and Iuriı˘ Grishin agrees that this population movement was an important factor in his life, which ‘brought culture’ to Buguruslan and the neighbouring towns and villages.4 He recalls that there were about ten evacuees among his close acquaintances, including a Jewish astronomer, a university professor and a theatre set designer, although it is hard to be precise about who was evacuated for their own safety, and who were political exiles sent away from the big cities by the Stalin regime. Interestingly, these newcomers did not estrange themselves from the local population – on the contrary, they tried to get involved, and most frequently found occupations related to education. At Sovkhov Chkalova, the set designer taught Grishin to make hemp wigs; other evacuees and exiles organised concerts and performances, and Grishin remembers that he always found reasons to remain behind after these performances ‘to hang out’ with them.5 Such a context created a fascinating ‘playground’ for the young boy that Grishin was at the time. Not being under any pressure to work, he devoted every spare moment to inventing and discovering. He played several instruments in the school orchestra, most of which he learned at local hobby groups or by himself, painted tapestries, created postcards, participated in school theatre productions, and constructed several improvised technical devices. Thomas Edison’s phonograph was replicated from his physics textbook, and a few years later he constructed a radio, early signs of the technical ingenuity that would support his amateur filmmaking. Cinematic hobbies began with ­146

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what Grishin later called ‘cartoons’ – glass slides that he painted and projected with a magic lantern of his own construction, comprising a box with a slot for the transparencies, a carbide lamp and a magnifying glass. The only ‘cartoon’ that he made for this apparatus was The Sleeping Princess, based on a story by Pushkin, which was projected for his friends in an abandoned house. He recalls that they were thrown out as soon as someone noticed them there, since the carbide lamps involved an open flame, and were extremely flammable. His other cinematic effort was safer because projector-­free, a flipbook with his own version of Chapaev (1934), the immensely popular film by the Vasilyev brothers, for which his schoolteachers provided help with the drawings. According to Grishin, the film was a favourite with Soviet children, who frequently re-­enacted the story in something like a ‘Cowboys-­and-­Indians’ game. In the mid-­1950s, Grishin left his sovkhoz for Buguruslan to study violin at the music academy, to which he was admitted despite the absence of prior formal training. Upon completion of the course, he returned to his place of birth where he took up the position of director of the workers’ club. During the three years (1956–9) that Grishin worked there, he was able to learn more about the various activities that excited him as a child, amongst which cinema occupied a central place. As small-­gauge film equipment was mostly unavailable to Soviet film amateurs until the early 1960s, Grishin constructed his own cinema camera, with which he shot chronicles of life within his immediate community.6 Film screenings were organised at the local film club several times a month, and the addition of ten minutes of such material was one of Grishin’s innovations to the programming. ‘I was a narodnik’, remembers Grishin. ‘I was raising culture, bringing it to the masses.’7 In 1959, Grishin moved to Buguruslan permanently, working first as a cello teacher, before being appointed as director of the music school in which he had been employed. Filmmaking continued, however, and he soon made his first fiction film on 8mm stock, Bezzakonie (Lawlessness, 1959), based on a short story by Anton Chekhov. With this author being clearly the most important writer for Grishin in his early filmmaking, all the fiction films produced in the first two decades, with a few exceptions, were based on Chekhovian sources. Unfortunately, Bezzakonie has not been preserved, and it is his next project that Grishin frequently identifies as his first. This short film Na Dache (At the Dacha, 1962), also based on work by Chekhov, was a success, and proved something of a watershed; the film won the first prize at the All-­Union Amateur Film Festival, and Grishin was awarded his own 16mm film ­equipment for his efforts. With Na Dache began the active part of Grishin’s life as filmmaker, bringing a measure of foreign recognition and contact. Between 1961 and 1995, he travelled to film festivals at least once every two years, often screening IuG-­ Film material. His commitment to fiction seems to spring from this experience, although Grishin fixes 1957 as the actual year when IuG-­Film itself began organised operation. Still making chronicles at Sovkhoz Chkalova, Grishin 147

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6.1  Amateur improvisation and technical ingenuity, Grishin’s camera.

never entirely abandoned the genre during the later years, although he now considered documentary a lowly and utilitarian genre, and significantly never included these works in his filmography.8 The first feature-­length film by IuG-­Film was Tsvety Zapozdalye (Belated Flowers, 1968), on which Grishin used 16mm equipment for the first time.9 The film was screened to a full theatre at the local dvorets kul9tury (DK, or ‘palace of culture’), and won the first prize at the Orenburg film festival. The most precious praise came from Alexander Antonov, Eisenstein’s former assistant, who was present at the film’s screening in Moscow, and commented ‘You know, there are stunning ideas in your film.’ Grishin never dared to ask which.10 Grishin found collaborators among his co-­workers, students and members of the local community. Most participated as actors and extras, and several players from the local dramatic theatre lent their voices to the characters in these films. Production teams were also formed from members of the ­148

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community of Buguruslan, who had useful technical skills. One of the longest-­ term collaborations was that with Alexander Shiperov, a pilot and teacher at the Buguruslan academy of aviation, who worked as cameraman on most IuG-­ Film pieces after Tsvety Zapozdalye. Shiperov learned the basics of filmmaking from Grishin, and later shot his own chronicles, documentaries and essay films. Alexander Khryaschikov, Grishin’s student at music school, was his other favourite cameraman, who worked with him from the late 1980s. The most celebrated collaborator of IuG-­Film was, however, Evgeniı˘ Bogatyryov, also Grishin’s student, who later became director of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. Local supporters provided remarkable assistance with locations. The Sokolov family in Buguruslan, for example, frequently lent their flat, furnished with antique furniture, as a setting for Grishin’s films. In Polinka Saks (1972), they are credited as consultants for sharing their expertise in historic costumes and knowledge of manners. The Sokolov apartment, as well as the auditorium of the music school, was transformed numerous times to create living rooms, bedrooms, dining rooms and sick rooms. The props from IuG-­Film pictures also came from diverse sources. Whatever Grishin could not find in the Sokolov apartment he frequently created himself, producing several paintings and sculptures that re-­appear in many of his films; among these objects, a particular item that speaks volumes about Grishin’s ingenuity is a collection of medals made from tin cans. Polinka Saks was the most ambitious IuG-­Film production in terms of overall scale. For a story set in 1840s Saint Petersburg, creating a generic nineteenth-­century setting would clearly not suffice – Grishin needed the brilliance of the imperial capital, and introduced this through the incorporation of actual location footage. He shot the façade of Ostankino mansion during a trip to Moscow with Evgeniı˘ Bogatyryov, to use as outside views of the house of the Saks family. The film also demanded the largest choreographed scenes in Grishin’s whole career. Dressing about fifty extras in historic costumes would be unthinkable for a film with a typical amateur budget. Once again, however, a personal connection helped to solve the problem: an acquaintance of the Sokolov family was working at the Kirov theatre of opera and ballet in Leningrad as a dresser, and provided IuG-­Film with three bags of nineteenth-­ century costumes. The results enabled Grishin to take a further step in his filmmaking career. In 1975, ‘under the pressure of cultural community’, Iuriı˘ Grishin went to study at the Moscow State Institute of Culture (MGIK).11 The organisation was home to one of the three educational programmes in filmmaking then established in the Soviet Union, mainly with the aim of preparing cadres for placement within amateur film studios. Grigoriı˘ Roshal9, himself a prominent director of adaptations and a leading figure in the development of Soviet amateur cinema, chaired the programme in Moscow. Roshal9 was familiar with Grishin’s talents from work screened at film festivals, encouraged the 149

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filmmaker to apply, and was his principal advisor during the course of his study. In the main, Grishin pursued his studies at MGIK through a correspondence course that only required his presence in Moscow twice a year. Forty years old by the time he began the programme, Grishin had no intention of leaving Buguruslan, where he continued to work as director of his music school. He made three films, however, during his training – Nocturne (1976), based on his own short story, Neudacha (Failure, 1979), a remake of the film that he had made in 1961, and another screen adaptation of a short story by Chekhov, Aptekarsha (The Pharmacist’s Wife, 1980), his feature-­length graduation project. As usual, he shot all these films in Buguruslan, again drawing on local resources and pursuing fictional interests. In the 1980s, upon his return from Moscow, Grishin only made two films, Vospominania v Litsee (Memories at the Lyceum, 1985), based on Grishin’s original story of Pushkin’s school years, and Posledniı˘ Vizit (The Last Visit, 1988), an adaptation of the story of the ageing Beethoven, written by the nineteenth-­century author Alexander Odoevskiı˘. During this decade, Grishin focused on work in other media, particularly the so-­called ‘slide theatre’, which combined stage performance with projection of moving or still images. Just like his films of the time, most of the plays that Grishin staged in collaboration with his students told the stories of nineteenth-­century musicians and writers, such as Grieg, Paganini, Tchaikovsky, Pushkin and the composers of ‘Moguchaya Kuchka’ (‘The Mighty Coterie’). From the 1990s, all IuG-­Film pictures were shot on video, as the medium gradually displaced small-­gauge film. Grishin embraced the new format with enthusiasm and realised its creative possibilities at an early stage. Colour could be used for the first time, and even more importantly, video provided a solution to the age-­old problem of all amateur filmmakers, the recording and synchronisation of sound. The ability to create a soundtrack and record it directly to videotape made the work much easier and faster, and Grishin’s career was perhaps extended by the technology. The filmmaker, however, continued to be faithful to his favourite genre, the screen adaptation, and quickly made two films based on Pushkin’s Stantsionnyi Smotritel (The Stationmaster, 1993) and Mozart i Salieri (Mozart and Salieri, 1995). His last fiction film to date is Staryı˘ Povar (The Old Cook, 2003), based on a story by Konstantin Paustovskiı˘, in which the old cook of the title (played by Grishin himself) encounters a young boy named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Grishin retired from his music school in 1999, but remains active in the cultural life of Buguruslan. The school continues the tradition of celebrating Pushkin’s birthday every year on 6 June, and Grishin still organises this music, poetry and performance event. Switching between operation of his digital camera and the seat of a violinist, he mourns the gradual decrease in attendance and the apparent passivity of his co-­workers. His long contribution to the local community has not, however, gone entirely unrecognised, for in 2009 Grishin was named the first honorary citizen of Buguruslan. ­150

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Iurii˘ Grishin, an Auteur from the Provinces During the five decades of its existence, IuG-­Film produced a body of work sufficiently extended to allow us to speak of Iuriı˘ Grishin as an amateur auteur. Consistency, vitality and zeal provide the distinction usually associated with authorial style and compensate for a certain lack of sophistication, which may well, in fact, be one of the abiding values of the work. Grishin himself has never seemed to have any doubts about the validity of his creative approach and is quick to acknowledge the benefits of ignorance in his work. In Moscow, he was, it seems, criticised for choosing the most clichéd of all projects: namely, adapting Russian classics, and particularly the work of Pushkin. ‘I didn’t know that I couldn’t make an adaptation of Pushkin, so I made it,’ he winks naughtily. His answer to a question as to why he began to make films at all perplexes even further: ‘I always wanted to be an actor, but there was nowhere to act.’12 Grishin thereafter acted in each of his films, as part of a wider claim to their authorship, and it is evident that the type of character that captivated his imagination and suggested possibilities of impersonation shaped his choice of stories. Up until about 1976, Grishin’s typical character is a young lover who becomes an object of affection, before his own love unfolds. Doctor Toporkov in Tsvety Zapozdalye at first appears egoistic and impenetrable. Coming from a modest background, he relies on rationality to achieve his goals, and will never let emotions distract him from his drive towards material prosperity. The female protagonist, Marusya, is his complete opposite. She sells her last possessions to provide money to support her corrupt but beloved brother’s hedonistic lifestyle, and borrows the last five rubles from her servant to pay for another appointment with Doctor Toporkov, in the hope that he will diagnose her with a grave enough disease that would allow her to see him regularly. His attitude remains one of detached professionalism; he adopts a mentoring tone when he gives his medical recommendations, as if instructing her to stop being so silly. When she is no longer able to contain her feelings, she confesses awkwardly: ‘I . . . love you, doctor!’ This confession touches his soul and melts the ice of his heart immediately. The confession scene in Nocturne, produced fourteen years later, replicates this one almost precisely, almost as an homage to Grishin’s earlier work. In this film, Grishin’s character, the cellist, first ignores the tears that fill the eyes of the young ballerina when she watches him playing his instrument. He calls her Ninochka, the diminutive of Nina, while she addresses him by his full name and patronymic, Oleg Nikolaevitch, as is appropriate when addressing seniors or authority figures. He takes a patronising attitude towards her: ‘Good, Ninochka. Thank you, Ninochka.’ Her humble but firm reply is ‘I love you!’ The melodrama of confession reaches its peak in Polinka Saks, in which Polinka writes to her friend Annette that she is deeply in love with her first husband, Konstantin Saks (played by Grishin), whom she once abandoned for an urbane but superficial lover. Dubbed by a professional actress in an 151

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6.2  Doctor Toporkov (Iuriı˘ Grishin) examining Marusya (Lidia Ezhova) in Tsvety Zapozdalye (Belated Flowers, 1968).

exaggerated manner characteristic of Russian theatrical declamation and contemporary radio dramas, this confession, shot in a lush chiaroscuro and narrated so as to synchronise the rhythm and phrasing with incidental music, can equally provoke a grin or goose bumps in the spectator. As an object of these confessions, the character played by the young Iuriı˘ Grishin acts as a catalyst for these women characters; loving this man apparently articulates nuances of each of these women’s souls and composes them into a personality. That each of the heroines confesses her love to Iuriı˘ Grishin rather than the character in the film’s scenario is never really a secret, as the fictional world on screen seems to thin in very amateur fashion, revealing the personal relationships between the film’s producers, in an effect more reminiscent of ‘home mode’ movie-­making. The theme of authorship and control intensifies in Grishin’s later films. After the 1980s, his interests evolve towards the exploration of the various dimensions of a creative personality, such as Beethoven, who copes heroically with his inexorably approaching loss of hearing, or the composer Salieri, who poisons Mozart when he is unable to curb the jealousy he feels because of the latter’s genius (following the account created by Pushkin, in his drama Mozart i Salieri). In his latest films, Staryı˘ Povar and Stantsionnyı˘ Smotritel, Grishin explores images of intense suffering; Pushkin’s stationmaster is a ‘little man’ humiliated by an insolent youth from the upper class who seduces his daughter ­152

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6.3  Polinka Saks (1972).

and keeps her as a mistress, whilst Paustovskiı˘’s old cook is aware that he is living through his final hours. These later characters dramatise an extension of the theme of the author and his (sic) authority; whenever Grishin’s character is not an artist or an object of love, he is a father, a teacher or a mentor. Interestingly, this fictional authority is not imagined to extend to that of the ultimate auteur role of cinema: namely, that of the film director. The inevitable multi-­tasking of the amateur filmmaker seems to frustrate a little in this respect: ‘I always wished I had a director for my films. It is more interesting to be an artist, cameraman, to do things,’ he says.13 Grishin makes himself present in virtually every part of his films’ mise-­en-­ scène by populating it with various props – paintings, sculptures and ‘antiques’ often created by himself. While the same actors (except for Grishin himself) rarely appear in more than one of his films, these paintings and sculptures migrate from one picture to another, and Grishin ensures that they are given sufficient exposure. Thus, in Polinka Saks, Konstantin, Grishin’s character, rings a bell to call his servant. A close-­up of his hand is carefully framed to ensure that a circular female portrait (that of Polinka), an example of Grishin’s work, is visible and given a lengthy four-­second exposure. Replicas of antique busts and statues, painted nudes, landscapes, portraits and haut-­reliefs, as well as façades of nineteenth-­century buildings, are generously inserted between the scenes of filmic action, as narrative devices to accentuate the turmoil in which the characters find themselves, but more importantly, to complete the picture 153

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6.4  Salieri (Iuriı˘ Grishin) shedding tears of remorse, in Mozart and Salieri (Mozart i Salieri, 1995).

of the world of beauty that Grishin sees as saturating life in the nineteenth century. Effectively, he creates films as Gesamtkunstwerk. The art of cinema, in his interpretation, involves production of a film filled with works of art, and his own filmmaking becomes a vehicle for the recirculation of heritage properties, as tangible traces of a past that has survived to the present. For Grishin, articulation of this heritage culture became an extension of his creative personality. At film school, his pieces were criticised mostly for their failure to exploit the potential of documentary and to engage with contemporary subjects. As if submitting to the pressure, Grishin made his only ‘contemporary’ film, Nocturne (1976), during his involvement with this professional film institution. Even this film, however, stubbornly refused to be ‘realistic’ and clung to the conventions of fiction. Nocturne was based on Grishin’s own short story, in which a spark of love emerges between a ballerina and a cellist as they rehearse a piece together. At the end, Grishin includes a view of night-­time Buguruslan, with a neon sign of a local bank – ‘to add a sense of location’.14 Whilst the film was a favourite of Grigoriı˘ Roshal9, the director of the programme, another MGIK professor, Boris Nasshchekin, who was a professional cameraman and author of books on amateur cinema, wondered why Grishin did not want to provide more context: ‘why not make Ninochka, the ballerina, a daytime accountant who dances in amateur theatre during her leisure time, and the cellist, likewise, a dedicated amateur musician?’ he apparently asked.15 Grishin was not interested, however – for it was only the world ­154

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of art and elevated emotions that he wanted to depict. There is some sense here that the milieu of amateurism was recognised as the best context for doing so. Svetlana Elizarova, who played his ballerina, learnt ballet from her elder sister, who had formal training in classical dance. Her apparently insecure pointe-­ work in the film does not disturb Grishin: ‘In Moscow I could have as many real ballerinas as I wanted, but I wished to create my own.’16 Embracing these limitations in his work, Grishin does not aestheticise or seek to rationalise imperfection, and never misses an opportunity to improve what can be improved. Whenever technology allowed him to polish what he failed to smooth to a finish during the initial shooting or editing process, he took the opportunity to do so, and sentimental attachment to film’s medium specificity has never been evident. In the 2000s, he ‘restored’ most of his 16mm films digitally. This was an opportunity for him to improve the sound, that vulnerable spot of all amateur films. He also re-­recorded several sound fragments using different voices – no one in Buguruslan has noticed the difference, he claims. ‘I think it’s better to use a different voice, but in a good quality, than keep the original one in poor sound.’17 To enliven the editing, he even added video effects in transitions between shots. In Nocturne, he replaced the black-­ and-­white shot of a flower over a music score with a colour version: ‘They would have never tolerated it at MGIK, but now I am free to do whatever I want.’18 He is more than happy to screen his films digitally: ‘Why tolerate the sound of a 16mm projector?’19 An avid music lover, he sees no problem in using a recording of the Moonlight Sonata ‘enlivened’ with electronic sound effects, such as delays, on a synthesiser. The version of Posledniı˘ Vizit, his 1988 film about Beethoven, that he screens nowadays opens with the freshly inserted theme by Michael Nyman, from The Piano (1993). If this practice may seem eclectic, it is conducted here in the name of beauty, and remains in fact a very characteristic feature of amateur practice, which frequently revisits and reworks its post-­production phase. Film Adaptation as a Local Film Recent studies in film adaptation have stressed the insufficiency of merely ­analysing the relationships between the two texts involved – in this instance, literary and cinematic, the boundaries of their respective languages, or the degree of ‘fidelity’ of the adaptation to its ‘original’ source. Thomas Leitch, in particular, suggests that adaptation studies should aim at a broader investigation: Given the myriad differences, not only between literary and cinematic texts, but between successive cinematic adaptations of a given literary text, or for that matter between different versions of a given story in the same medium, what exactly is it that film adaptations adapt, or are ­supposed to adapt?20 155

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This type of questioning is both contextual and inter-­textual, and opens up adaptation studies to include an amateur cinema that is constantly oscillating between the categories of personal and public, local and national, reality and fantasy, amateur and professional. The history of Soviet cinema has certainly known no lack of literary adaptations. Russian culture has always been deeply rooted in its literary traditions, and as Stephen Hutchings observes, the relationship between literature and film has always been reciprocal: in the Stalin era, he argues, ‘[t]he adaptation . . . helped shape the literary canon of foreign, Russian and Soviet classics for a socialist realist framework and consolidate the Soviet national identity project.’21 While the Stalinist adaptation typically preserved fidelity to the source text as a matter of ideological principle, subsequent approaches have produced new readings of the classics, and many films of the ‘thaw’ period were intended to be ‘true to the spirit’ of the original text, instead of following its formal organisation closely. Two adaptations of Chekhov, Poprygunia (Grasshopper, Samson Samsonov, 1955) and Dama s sobachkoi (The Lady with the Dog, Iosif Kheifits, 1960), are especially representative of this paradigm, and Grishin’s Tsvety Zapozdalye may be placed neatly within the lineage of these films. A shift towards the personal in post-­Stalin culture meant both a greater attention to the individual in literature and cinema, and a more personal reading of literary texts in film adaptations. As the case of Grishin indicates, this was an impulse very much in keeping with amateur inclinations. Grishin’s work on the script for Polinka Saks involved probably his most personal engagement with a literary text. The original Polinka Saks is an epistolary novella by the ‘secondary’ author Aleksandr Druzhinin (1824–64), who was probably better known as a literary critic. Grishin first became aware of the work when he heard the 1956 radio play of Polinka Saks, and was deeply impressed by the story. ‘I knew from the very beginning that I would like to film it, and was preparing myself for twenty years.’22 Because Druzhinin was a defender of ‘pure art’, says Grishin, it was not easy to obtain the original text, but he was eventually able to find it in a brochure. At that time, ‘promoters of “pure art” – aesthetes, Formalists, Modernists, and cosmopolites’ – were opposed to ‘progressive’, that is, Socialist Realist artists and writers, and found little favour with the Soviet authorities, making copies of their work scarce.23 The copy at his local library had missing pages, and during one of his trips to Moscow in the 1960s, Grishin was forced to visit the central Lenin library to read and duplicate these missing pages. ‘Write an official letter saying that you are writing a dissertation,’ the librarian said. Grishin, who realised that he had forgotten to take a notebook, had to beg for pieces of paper, in order to copy the sacred pages by hand.24 Patricia Zimmermann speaks of ‘the residual myth of the individual inventor’ as a ‘basic component of amateurism’, and that myth seems very much in play here.25 Just as Grishin ‘invented’ his first camera and every prop in his films, ‘chiselling’ a script from a novella written in letters between the main four characters, his determination to secure these ­156

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pages traces a distinctly amateur attachment to invention and adventure. Some sense of forbidden pleasure, due to the text’s ambiguous and elusive status, also comes across from the anecdote. In the 1970s, when Grishin was working on Polinka Saks, some of the best-­known adaptations on Soviet screen were made by brothers Andrei Mikhalkov-­Konchalovsky (Dvoryanskoe gnezdo/Nest of Gentry, 1969; Dyadya Vanya/Uncle Vanya, 1971) and Nikita Mikhalkov (Raba lyubvi/ The Slave of Love, 1975; Neokonchennaya pyesa dlya mekhanicheskogo pianino/Unfinished Piece for the Player Piano, 1977; Neskolko dnei iz zhizni I. I. Oblomova/Oblomov, 1979). As Birgit Beumers puts it, ‘the worlds of Turgenev, Goncharov and Chekhov are captured on screen in an attempt to produce a national space for Russia’ in these films, although they may also be understood in generic terms.26 The films by the Mikhalkovs closely follow the visual conventions of heritage films, as described by Andrew Higson in his account of the British variant: the camera style is pictorialist, with all the connotations the term brings of art-­photography, aesthetic refinement, and set-­piece images. Though narrative meaning and narrational quality are rarely sacrificed, these shots, angles and camera movements frequently seem to exceed narrative motivation.27 In addition to this, the films are marked by the strong presence of an authorial voice, through such elements as the insertion of black-­and-­white scenes into a colour film, and their extensive use of still images. In Dvoryanskoe gnezdo, the journeys of the main character, Lavretsky, are narrated through a succession of etchings showing images of European cities that he visited, while in Dyadya Vanya, photographs from Chekhov’s albums, as well as pre-­revolutionary archival photographs, are inserted throughout the film. The Mikhalkov brothers took pride in their own noble roots, and plainly in their films, nostalgia for a pre-­revolutionary past comes to the foreground and motivates the choice of texts for adaptation. In the 1970s, the Soviet critic and filmmaker Aleksandr Macheret expressed the view that, in adaptations, ‘there is no objective Pushkin, Tolstoi or Chekhov, but only “my Tolstoi”, “my Pushkin”, “my Chekhov”.’28 Macheret thus re-­affirms that adaptation would have to be a personal and interpretive process, whilst also usefully characterising a notion of Soviet kulturnost that is perhaps helpful in a framing of Grishin’s amateur cinema. Vera Dunham has analysed kulturnost as a distinct phenomenon within cultural practice: ‘Strictly and minimally, kulturnost turns into a fetish a notion of how to be individually civilised . . . [forming] the self-­image of dignified citizens.’29 For Dunham, knowledge of the classical canon was a crucial part of this self-­image, and the experience of classical literature and ‘high art’ is viewed as something that belongs to the everyday, supplanting the reality of contemporary culture 157

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and the memory of the immediate past. Something of just such a sensibility is glimpsed when Grishin says that he would not relish making a film set in the 1940s, the decade of his own childhood, because ‘it is easier to recreate the age of Pushkin, as we know so much more about its costumes.’30 Within the paradigm of kulturnost, active engagement with classical texts is encouraged, but with the proviso that this engagement should be affirmative rather than subversive. The openly dissident stance that the Mikhalkov brothers took in their films, however, did not prevent them from being immensely popular (although Mikhalkov-­Konchalovsky eventually was proclaimed an ‘enemy of the people’ by officials and had to emigrate to the United States of America), perhaps because the majority of the audience typically perceived this opposition as aesthetic rather than political, as part of a struggle for national heritage culture. It is also possible that some spectators did not perceive it as a struggle at all, but saw these highly spectacular melodramas as simply kulturnye filmy. For Grishin, his ‘adventure’ with an ideologically ambiguous Druzhinin text was mainly a struggle for the beauty that attains a ­near-­religious status in his films throughout his amateur career. There is no doubt that Grishin’s style and vision, especially his use of non-­ narrative elements, owe some debt to the highly popular films of the Mikhalkov brothers. Their nationwide popularity coincided with the time when television became firmly established within everyday Soviet life, making new films available to audiences in such remote areas as Buguruslan. Grishin, however, began to experiment with filmmaking about two decades before that, and his style is shaped not only by the conventions of professional cinema, but to a large degree also by his ignorance of these conventions. Before the age of television, radio was, in any case, the most important medium, not only for circulation of news but also for dissemination of culture and its mythologies. Polinka Saks was inspired by a 1956 radio drama adaptation of Druzhinin’s text, and familiarity with this Hörspiel reveals that Grishin’s film was influenced by it in a no less significant way than by Druzhinin’s novella or a Mikhalkov-­type heritage film. In particular, it is not coincidental that, while Grishin would be content with amateur-­style acting, he insisted on using the voices of professionals. Two professional actors from the local theatre, Viacheslav Manevskiı˘ and Tatiana Timchenko, therefore dubbed the roles in Polinka Saks, including Grishin’s own. Grishin himself only used his own voice to dub minor episodic roles in the film. The radio version of Polinka Saks is narrated slowly, with abundant use of music by the composer Rossini, and an epistolary novella turned out to be an interesting choice of source text for a radio play. Following the original text, it contains little dialogue, and evolves in a dreamy space created as an overlay of various shifting perspectives when a letter from one character is read by another (frequently a letter from a female character is read by a male character and vice versa), and sometimes a ‘stolen’ letter is read by a third character. Much of Grishin’s investment in his script lay in converting the texts of these letters into dialogue. In the radio play, we learn most details of the ­158

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story through written accounts of the characters, including their descriptions of appearances, situations and emotions. Grishin converts that which is visual and narrative (‘I signed the paper; he bowed and left’) into acted scenes, whilst preserving verbal descriptions of emotions in a few letters (‘I am dying like a butterfly in the wind!’) that his characters read throughout the film. Earlier, in Tsvety zapozdalye, Grishin only used one voice (another male actor, Nikolaı˘ Sedoı˘) for the narrator and all characters. The film has few dialogue exchanges, which occur only as frequently as direct speech is introduced into Chekhov’s text. In this sense, Tsvety is somewhat akin to a silent film, with voiceover narration used instead of inter-­titles, but without preserving the brevity typical of inter-­titles presented on screen. While Grishin does not indicate a radio predecessor for his adaptation of Tsvety, the influence of the radio drama on this film becomes very evident. The influence of radio, the appeal of popular film adaptations, and notions of kulturnost clearly help to explain the style and themes of Grishin’s cinema. Such factors form an important framework for his personal biography, shaping both his professional occupation and his ‘hobby’ filmmaking. What, however, is the social place of Grishin’s films at home, the common ground of so much amateur film activity? Produced within a locally defined community, they seem to demand categorisation as local at some level, especially given the key place that questions of the local have come to occupy in the study of amateur cinema. Film scholars argue that recognising oneself, one’s friends and acquaintances, and the familiar landscape is the primary attraction of local films.31 In Grishin’s films, local elements are mostly de-­emphasised in an attempt to produce the space of the nineteenth century, and everyday realities of local life are virtually absent. This, however, did not prevent these films from proving immensely popular in Buguruslan.32 Even if those who participated in their making made up a large part of their audience, there were also others who were not immediately related to Grishin and the community of IuG-­Film. In his study of itinerant filmmakers in American towns, Dan Streible gives examples of films that ‘put less emphasis on the local and the amateur’ and are produced in ‘a nearly professional mode of work’.33 He observes that ‘many itinerant filmmakers encouraged amateur performers to imitate the commercial, star-­driven movies familiar to them as moviegoers,’ which, among other things, suggests that the appeal of making movies was an important factor in their popularity at home.34 The fact that Grishin graduated from a film school perhaps allowed some of his fellow townsmen to claim proudly that he had made the grade as a ‘professional filmmaker’, although this requires qualification.35 The filmmaking course at MGIK was one of the programmes at institutes of culture that was not intended to prepare workers for the top end of the cinema industry. Grishin did not attend the school full-­time, only travelling there twice a year for study sessions and examinations, and he himself claims that he never wished to be a professional filmmaker.36 As previously noted, his decision to make adaptations of classics at film school was criticised for the 159

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inconsistency of this ambition with the scope and sphere of application of such an education. Producing films locally as an amateur was surely the only way for Grishin to make the kind of films that he wanted to make, and locally they were accepted more warmly, perhaps out of a particular kind of ­recognition of this conviction.37 In a small town such as Buguruslan, having a personality with such credentials as Grishin within the local community must have validated and strengthened senses of civic identity. If its members could see films dealing with ‘high culture’ on television and sometimes in the cinema, Grishin’s films, which produced such ‘high culture’ locally, were a statement of participation in this culture, in an area that had traditionally been remote from its sources and prestige. In this respect, Grishin’s films do offer visual evidence of their place and time, yet they are more than just a visual exhibition of local characters or settings. They constitute, rather, within the dreams and fantasies encapsulated within them, a collective and shared local experience, to which the mode of fiction, as something imagined, is crucial. Conclusions The cinema of IuG-­Film provides an excellent example of fiction film as a distinct mode of amateur filmmaking, and a basis for a counter-­argument to frequent misinterpretation of such filmmakers as Iuriı˘ Grishin ‘as those who could not make it into the professional film industry’.38 Grishin, while being fully aware of the difference between himself and professional filmmakers, opted not to work in the usually favoured amateur genres, such as the documentary or chronicle film. Despite that choice, his fiction films are rich documents of both local (collective) history and individual creativity. Some aspects of this story, such as the provenance of costumes that IuG-­Film obtained from major national theatres, provide fascinating evidence of nationwide non-­official cultural networks, of which amateur cinema is but one intersection. Grishin’s treatment of the conventions of filmmaking, and especially the genres of adaptation and heritage film, reflects the work and dissemination of the Soviet myth of culture and kulturnost, as well as popular appropriation of ‘high’ subjects for local ends. His firm position within this cultural mainstream, if not obvious to himself, challenges a common idea that amateur cinema is formed by the ‘impression that only cultural bohemians or patriarchal fathers ever made amateur films’.39 In this analysis, Grishin was constructed as an amateur auteur, claiming that the notion of auteur may be disconnected from its traditional associations with the avant-­garde or other forms of ‘alternative’ practice. The five decades of IuG-­Film is a story of creativity, perseverance and productive ignorance of conventions, of amateur film outside of the notions of radicalism or conformity. These films provide rich material for film scholars, slavists, historians and ethnographers, but they are also another indication of how much of Russian history remains outside of the archives. ­160

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Notes   1. S. Ilichev and B. Nasshchekin, Kinolyubitelstvo: istoki i perspektivy/Amateur Cinema: Origins and Perspectives (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1986), p. 30 (author’s translation).   2. In this essay, all biographic information concerning Iuriı˘ Grishin and facts about IUG-­Film, as well as quotations from and opinions expressed by the filmmaker, are derived from my personal interviews with Grishsin, conducted 6–12 June 2011.   3. Patricia Zimmermann, ‘Morphing history into histories: From amateur film to the archive of the future’, in Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmermann (eds), Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), p. 275.   4. Interview with Iuriı˘ Grishin, 7 June 2011.   5. Ibid.   6. The Soviet Union launched its own production of 8mm and 16mm equipment around 1961, following a series of decisions made in the late 1950s. A small number of enthusiasts were able to purchase small-­gauge equipment abroad; others either used standard 35mm equipment or constructed their own apparatus.   7. Interview with Iuriı˘ Grishin, 7 June 2011.   8. Ibid.   9. For Iuriı˘ Grishin, a feature-­length film is one that would more usually be described as medium-­length: that is, with a running time longer than about thirty minutes. Grishin’s terminology appears valid for amateur films, for which ten minutes is an average duration, and is consistent with descriptions in circulation around both European and American amateur cinemas. 10. Interview with Iuriı˘ Grishin, 7 June 2011. 11. Ibid. 12. Interview with Iuriı˘ Grishin, 10 June 2011. 13. Interview with Iuriı˘ Grishin, 12 June 2011. 14. Interview with Iuriı˘ Grishin, 10 June 2011. 15. Interview with Iuriı˘ Grishin, 12 June 2011. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Interview with Iuriı˘ Grishin, 10 June 2011. 20. Thomas Leitch, ‘Twelve fallacies in contemporary adaptation theory’, Criticism, Vol. 45, No. 2, 2003, p. 150. 21. Stephen Hutchings, Russian Literary Culture in the Camera Age: The Word as Image (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 113. 22. Interview with Iuriı˘ Grishin, 10 June 2011. 23. Robert Stacy, Russian Literary Criticism: A Short History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1974), p. 242. 24. Interview with Iuriı˘ Grishin, 10 June 2011. 25. Patricia Zimmermann, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 12. 26. Birgit Beumers, ‘The Mikhalkov brothers’ view of Russia’, in Stephen Hutchings (ed.), Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 1900–2001: Screening the Word (London: Routledge Curzon, 2005), p. 103. 27. Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 39. 28. V. Beliaev, A. Macheret and P. Dmitrieva, Kniga sporit s fil9 mom / Book versus Film (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1973), p. 239, quoted in Stephen Hutchings, ‘Introduction: The ekranizatsiia in Russian culture’, in Stephen Hutchings and Anat Vernitski

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(eds), Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 1900–2001: Screening the Word (London: Routledge Curzon, 2005), p. xxiii. 29. Vera Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 22. 30. Interview with Iuriı˘ Grishin, 7 June 2011. 31. Thus, according to Toulmin and Loiperdinger, ‘[t]he direct connection or the moment of overlap between audience and the subject matter of the film is only manifested in local films when the subjects that are projected coincide with the spectators in the show. This moment of recognition can often be a personage, a locality or, more importantly, the moment when the spectator’s gaze is projected back to them . . . ,’ in Vanessa Toulmin and Martin Loiperdinger, ‘Is it you? Recognition, representation and response in relation to the local film’, Film History, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2005, p. 8. 32. According to one local history book, ‘Buguruslan’s biggest venue, “Iubileı˘ny” did not have enough seats for everyone who came to see the premiere of the fiction film Polinka Saks’, see V. Al9tov, Buguruslan (Chelyabinsk: Iuzhno-­Ural9skoe knizhnoe izdatel9stvo, 1990), p. 297. Grishin says that Tsvety Zapozdalye was screened at the music school almost every month for about a year and a half after its release (interview with Iuriı˘ Grishin, 10 June 2011). 33. Dan Streible, ‘Itinerant filmmakers and amateur casts: A homemade “Our Gang”, 1926’, Film History, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2003, p. 183. 34. Ibid., p. 181. 35. This is illustrated by a comment from one of the guests at the annual celebration of Pushkin’s birthday (6 June 2011) that Grishin organises at the auditorium of the music school where he was formerly a director: ‘What can you do – he is a professional, and that shows.’ 36. Interview with Iuriı˘ Grishin, 10 June 2011. 37. Grishin’s films also won first prizes at the most important national amateur film festivals, but at these festivals they were judged by enthusiasts of amateur filmmaking and in their own category, largely outside of the notions of coherence applied to professional cinema. 38. Ryan Shand, ‘Theorizing amateur cinema: Limitations and possibilities’, The Moving Image, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2008, p. 52. 39. Ibid.

Filmography Films by IuG-­Film Aptekarsha (The Pharmacist’s Wife, Iuriı˘ Grishin, 1980), 16mm, 17 mins, black and white, sound. Bezzakonie (Lawlessness, Iuriı˘ Grishin, 1959), 8mm, black and white, sound (lost; runtime n/a). Mozart i Salieri (Mozart and Salieri, Iuriı˘ Grishin, 1995), VHS, 36 mins, colour, sound. Na Dache (At the Dacha, Iuriı˘ Grishin, 1962), 8 mm, 10 mins, black and white, sound. Neudacha (Failure I, Iuriı˘ Grishin, 1961), 8mm, 3 mins, black and white, sound. Neudacha (Failure II, Iuriı˘ Grishin, 1979), 16mm, 6 mins, black and white, sound. Nocturne (Iuriı˘ Grishin, 1976), 16 mm, 7 mins, black and white, sound. Polinka Saks (1972) (Iuriı˘ Grishin, 1972), 16 mm, 48 mins, black and white, sound. Posledniı˘ Vizit (The Last Visit, Iuriı˘ Grishin, 1988), 16mm, 19 mins, black and white, sound. Tsvety Zapozdalye (Belated Flowers, Iuriı˘ Grishin, 1968), 16 mm, 41 mins, black and white, sound.

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Stantsionnyi Smotritel (The Stationmaster, Iuriı˘ Grishin, 1993), VHS, 43 mins, colour, sound. Staryı˘ Povar (The Old Cook, Iuriı˘ Grishin, 2003), VHS, 17 mins, colour, sound. Vospominania v Litsee (Memories at the Lyceum, Iuriı˘ Grishin, 1985), 16mm, 32 mins, colour and black and white, sound. Popular films mentioned in the chapter Chapaev (Georgi and Sergei Vasilyev, 1934), 35mm, 93 mins, black and white, sound. Dama s sobachkoi (The Lady with the Dog, Iosif Kheifits, 1960), 35mm, 83 mins, black and white, sound. Dvoryanskoe gnezdo (Nest of Gentry, Andrei Mikhalkov-­Konchalovsky, 1969), 35mm, 111 mins, colour, sound. Dyadya Vanya (Uncle Vanya, Andrei Mikhalkov-­Konchalovsky, 1971), 35mm, 104 mins, colour and black and white, sound. Neokonchennaya pyesa dlya mekhanicheskogo pianino (Unfinished Piece for the Player Piano, Nikita Mikhakov, 1977), 35mm, 103 mins, colour, sound. Neskolko dnei iz zhizni I. I. Oblomova (Oblomov, Nikita Mikhalkov 1979), 35mm, 140 mins, colour, sound. Poprygunia (Grasshopper, Samson Samsonov, 1955), 35 mm, 1 min., colour, sound. Raba lyubvi (The Slave of Love, Nikita Mikhalkov, 1975), 35mm, 94 mins, colour, sound.

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7. BRAZILIAN AMATEUR CINEMA AND FICTIONAL FILMS FROM FOTO-­C INE CLUBE GAÚCHO LILA FOSTER

In 2007, a collection of amateur films from the Cinemateca Capitólio, based in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, won a restoration grant, funding work that was subsequently carried out at the laboratories of the archive. The films, ­produced between 1932 and 1962, were shot by five different filmmakers: Sioma Breitman, a Ukrainian immigrant who established a successful career as a professional photographer; Fernando Moreira Machado, a doctor and amateur filmmaker; and João Carlos Caldasso, Nelson Furtado and Moacyr Flores, all prominent members of the Foto-­Cine Clube Gaúcho (FCCG). Thanks to the efforts of film researcher and preservationist Glênio Póvoas, this exemplary collection, comprising home movies, newsreels, animated films and shorts, all shot on 16mm, was fully preserved and is now accessible to the public for viewing and research. One of the greatest achievements of the project was the revelation of the varied fictional productions made by members of the FCCG, including the animation films Guerra e Paz (War and Peace, 1959) and Os Egoístas (The Egotists, 1960), and the comedies O Caso da Joalheria (The Jewellery Store Robbery, 1960) and O Padre Nu (The Naked Priest, 1962). Coming from a regional archive, these surviving films from the FCCG were pointers towards the work of similar associations in other Brazilian cities. The productions of the club also began to suggest how different forms of amateur filmmaking, such as the domestic mode and the ‘community’ mode, may be creatively combined in particular circumstances, a possibility recognised in recent scholarship around cine club activity, where it is usefully defined not by the work of individuals or ­groupings, but by:

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the ambivalent exhibition space it occupies between the home and mass modes. Filmmakers working within the community mode include those who belonged to film societies and entered their group-­made films into the annual film festivals that were held all around the world, as well as travel filmmakers who toured with their films, and also more locally based civic filmmakers who rented town halls and other available ­exhibition spaces.1 As many of the members of Foto-­Cine Clube Gaúcho shot family films, enrolled them in contests and screened them to an audience outside the family nucleus, family films can also be a theme within the community mode, as they are in the analysis to follow. In both these respects, the restoration of the films made visible a kind of production that has been neglected hitherto by the historiography of Brazilian cinema. As in historical accounts dedicated to national cinemas elsewhere, the amateur cine movement in Brazil has hardly been subject to coordinated or systematic empirical research. This absence leaves the researcher in a difficult situation. As most historical inquiries begin as problematisations of preceding historical investigations, the absence of a consolidated debate in the Brazilian case means research must effectively begin from ground zero. This chapter therefore attempts to set out some preliminary bases for the investigation of amateur cinema in Brazil, combining overlapping perspectives. Initially, the chapter briefly traces the consolidation and professionalisation of Brazilian cinema, and discusses some ways in which the cine movement contributed to expectations of how such a cinema should be practically organised, be realised aesthetically, and function socially. The analysis then introduces a case study of the activities of the Foto-­Cine Clube Gaúcho in Porto Alegre, capital of the southern state Rio Grande do Sul, before moving on to closer scrutiny of some of the key films, emerging as a result of recent restorations and research. The Brazilian Cine Club Scene in Context In his essay ‘Il cinema amatoriale’, Roger Odin argues for the definition of amateur cinema as a distinct field of study.2 Such theoretical efforts in this direction and concerning this topic are, however, complex and methodologically suspect, as they require the construction of the very object they wish to study. Such problems are all too familiar to theorists of genre, where isolation of a particular category of film from a field necessarily involves criteria for selection, which logically may only be fixed retrospectively, once the genre has already been isolated. The historian of amateur cinema faces the same problems (and sometimes worse ones), compounded by the practice’s relationship to commercial and professional cinema: difficulties in the construction of the object of study (if cinema is already hard to separate from other areas of society, amateur cinema is hardly separable from cinema in general); difficulties 165

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in the selection of sources (considering the immensity of the amateur production, what should we hold in consideration, preserve and analyse?); and difficulties in transforming film fragments into historical narratives (how do we make such films speak?). The choice of the most appropriate methodological framework when analysing amateur films is then of crucial importance, and its selection is not necessarily an easy decision. The biggest issue, perhaps, in the present context remains the selection of appropriate levels of analysis. Even if we feel nostalgic or sympathetic towards what amateur filmmakers as a whole were trying to achieve, at present it is difficult to see individual films as part of a larger unified history of amateur cinema. At the moment, therefore, we can work most effectively, perhaps, with small-­scale samples for analysis, and the best that can be done is to attempt to understand them as examples of more general tendencies within the amateur mode of production and exhibition. Odin identifies four levels at which the historical investigation of amateur cinema may reasonably advance: via a study of technology, with attention to specific filmmakers and their works, through analysis of discourse, and as part of a circumscribed local history. When considering the specific scholarly initiatives that draw upon amateur films as important sources for regional histories, and noting the importance of preliminary work done by regional archives, Odin identifies a lack of connection between local and national histories, resulting in a fragmentary view of the past. In the specific case explored here, wider cultural debates concerning Brazilian cinema will be of extreme importance; amateur cinema should not be seen as a separate enclave, but as an activity that is an integral part of a more extended cinema culture. In the case of a dependent country in which the scientific, technical and aesthetic development of cinema was being decided elsewhere, defining what is professional can be just as complicated as defining what is amateur. What gives a certain unity to the history of Brazilian cinema is that, regardless of the periods and the shape many discourses have acquired, the nation’s condition as a dependent country has very frequently led to a location of cinematic production in terms of semi-­professional activity, or as caught up endlessly in the process of professionalisation. The foreign standard, in terms of both economic and aesthetic issues, has very frequently driven filmmakers, critics and historians to organise film production according to foreign norms, whilst the need for greater independence has often been driven by feelings of nationalism. In view of the difficulties surrounding the production and distribution of full-­length features in Brazil, making movies has often been viewed as an act of nationalist pride and resistance.3 From these perspectives, the growth and dissemination of amateur technology and the spread of amateur cine culture have sometimes been seen as an important contribution to the progress of Brazilian cinema. Amateur film columns, dedicated to film discussion in local newspapers, have played an important role in outlining the ambivalent movement between these ideals, and the realities of actual practice. These sources are of key importance to ­166

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understanding the various contexts of amateur film production, including those of Brazil. As Ryan Shand has observed: It is clear that debate about the community mode could initially focus on the relationship between film journals/manuals and film production. Certain key issues overlap quite naturally with work on professional cinema, such as authorship and genre. Amateur films made according to the cine-­club model can provide examples of an authorship that has more in common with the Hollywood studio system than it does with avant-­ garde film or the home movie.4 In the late 1920s, the period of emergence of amateur cine culture in Brazil as elsewhere, Hollywood movies, European avant-­garde cinema and Soviet cinema circulated widely in Brazil, stimulating energetic debates within international fan magazines and specialised columns in more serious film journals. It is not possible to determine precisely where and when the first amateur column started to be published, but in the pages of the influential and widely distributed Cinearte magazine, the column ‘Um pouco de technica’ (‘A little technique’) first appeared in 1926, where it was signed by the anonymous ‘Filmophilo’.5 Mainly concerned with technical issues, it displayed a deep admiration for Hollywood cinema, and was frequently illustrated with pictures from the sets of Hollywood films, reproduced from material sent by the marketing agencies of different studios. The underlying concern was how amateur filmmaking, and the understanding of cinematographic techniques and narrative codes would contribute to the progress of Brazilian cinema.6 In 1927, Sergio Bareto Filho began writing Cinearte’s amateur column, now named ‘O desenvolvimento do Cinema de Amadores no nosso paiz’ (‘The development of amateur cinema in our country’), as the cine movement slowly expanded.7 For a brief period, he also published in O Fan, the official ­publication of the Chaplin Club, a cine club created by four young ­intellectuals – Almir Castro, Claudio Mello, Plinio Sussekind Rocha and Octavio de Faria – interested in the development of cinema as an art form. The magazine, published in Rio de Janeiro between 1928 and 1930, and reaching a total of nine issues, showed a keen interest in directors like F. W. Murnau and D. W. Griffith. Entitled ‘Fan Films’, the first column, published in October 1928, announced the creation of a cinematography department dedicated to the practical side of cinema, an investment that in the future would lead to the production of amateur films to be shared and screened for club members. Lest he be seen as a dreamer or fantasist, Bareto Filho describes the North American experience to reassure readers of the real possibility of film production: It would be useless to explain the value of such an initiative which, indeed, is not mine. In the United Sates various clubs like ‘Chaplin Club’ are used to inviting their members and the local community to follow 167

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their inclination towards the production of amateur films, some people being in charge of continuity, others preparing the props, others allowing their gardens and villas to be used as locations, and so on. It is not a dream, it is real and I can prove it with letters and brochures about the subject.8 Following this call for a move into filmmaking, a long survey of the equipment available in the Brazilian market is provided – Pathé Baby, Cine Kodak and QRS cameras are discussed, with an account of their technical advantages and limitations, as well as the formulation of some rules for narrative construction and acting used in North American films, such as the ‘Type Law’. The truth was, however, and the author recognises this in the same column, that not many cameras were actually available. Even though Bareto shows knowledge of the subject, we may suspect that most of the information available came from foreign publications and manuals. There were, however, some amateur filmmakers shooting at the time, mostly people from the élite classes that could afford to buy equipment and supplies abroad. Even though amateur filmmaking was advertised as cheap and accessible, that was not really the case for Brazilian amateurs. Many of the storage containers for home movies of the period show that, in some cases, films were sent to the headquarters of Kodak in Rochester, New York, for processing. Curiously, the column ended in January 1929, due to what were described as ‘divergences in orientation’ between the editors and the columnist.9 This is perhaps indicative of the relative status of amateur cinema. As the scenario contest that was launched in the same issue would prove, the Chaplin Club was especially concerned with the aesthetics of silent cinema, and the column could have seemed both too technical and not sufficiently ambitious aesthetically. As noted by researcher Fabrício Felice, it would have been of primary importance to the members that attention to the practical side of cinema should be guided by a governing concern with the expressiveness of the cinematic image.10 Central precepts in this respect were an economy in the use of inter-­titles, an assumption of the scenario as the source of authorship and, with the introduction of sound, the defence of silent cinema as the ultimate ­expression of the medium’s specific potential. What is important to observe here is the division emerging, when it came to amateur filmmaking, between a cinephile culture with very high aesthetic ambitions, and the inherent technical limitations facing local production. Cinema’s fictional worlds, in particular, seemed to be located elsewhere. With ambitions so high and the chance of actually making films so low, it was perhaps unsurprising that the scenario submitted by cine club member Octavio de Faria was set in New York and Chicago, and that the Chaplin Club never produced any fictional amateur films. This contradictory trait can also be identified at other moments throughout the history of the cine movement in Brazil, with cine clubs and members frequently expressing different interests, some ­168

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concerned primarily with technology and the practical aspects of production, and others expressing more aesthetic sensibilities. Despite its relatively short life, Bareto’s column in Cinearte fostered intense communication between amateurs around the country, through the letters and advice that were published. Several aspects of this discourse are noteworthy. The creation of many cine clubs and amateur associations were announced, including the Cine-­Club de Amadores in Porto Alegre. The Associação Brasileira Cinematográficos (Association of Brazilian Cinematography), from Rio de Janeiro, even sent pictures of the set of the fictional film entitled As ferias de Durval (Durval’s Vacation) that they were producing. Further research still needs to be carried out in order to detail the existence of the many associations and clubs that were formed at this stage. It also remains uncertain whether films were actually produced by the writers and administrative team (readers and staff of Cinearte were real enthusiasts) and if they still exist today in some unknown collection. Even though journals such as Cinearte confirm that clubs were being created, and that amateurs were making fiction films at such an early stage, the institutionalisation and rational coordination of cine club activity would not take place until the late 1940s with the formation of a cinema department within the Foto-­Clube Bandeirante (FCB).11 Created in 1939, in São Paulo, by a group of amateur enthusiasts, this photographic society had as its main ideal the appreciation of still photography as an artistic process. Throughout the following years, the FCB played an important role in the development of Brazilian photography, organising salons and festivals, inspiring the creation of other clubs, and connecting amateurs countrywide through the publication of their monthly bulletin. Closely linked to the São Paulo cultural élite, many of their members, including Thomas Farkas, Geraldo de Barros, Benedito Junqueira and Eduardo Salvatore, would establish notable careers as photographers and filmmakers. The FCB also laid the ground for what is now called ‘modern Brazilian’ photography, where formal experimentation came into contact with and exchanged influence via Brazilian themes, traditions and narratives. The creation of the cinema department within FCB would take place in 1946, the same year that the circulation of their monthly bulletin was initiated, and thereafter the club would be renamed the Foto-­Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB). The group’s interest in cinema, according to researcher Vanessa Lenzini, could be attributed to the novelty that the moving image would add to the somewhat traditional photo club culture, as well as the popularity in the 1940s and 1950s of Hollywood movies in particular.12 Such a move may also reflect wider economic circumstances. The late 1940s were a period of robust growth in the São Paulo economy, due to heavy industrial development and the creation of greater wealth. This had direct results in the cultural realm, with money from rich entrepreneurs, many of them of Italian descent, being invested in a diversity of cultural institutions. Within this context, for example, Companhia Vera Cruz was created in 1949 with lofty ambitions and high 169

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investment, a project of the Italian producer Franco Zampari and the industrialist Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho. The development of such studios had a huge effect on cinema culture, fuelling the dream of a Brazilian Hollywood, as well as creating an infrastructure that would contribute to the professionalisation of many technical jobs.13 Euphoria around such developments drew attention to cinema from many sectors of society and was spread nationally. Wishing to attract new members interested in filmmaking, the FCCB’s first bulletin announced the creation of a new department presided over by the Dutchman Jan Jure Roos, advertising activities such as film screenings, including selected titles from international cine clubs, and promising the publication of technical articles on film production. The columns were thus very similar to the ones published in the 1930s, with their emphasis on how to become a ‘real’ amateur and not just an occasional weekend filmmaker, simply creating footage as a personal record. In the event, the department remained fairly inactive, however, due to the still considerable production costs entailed in cinematography, which clearly created some conflict within the club. A column published in 1949 would reveal an internal dispute over the high investments required, in comparison with those demanded by still photography. According to some members, the club was abandoning good photography to engage in bad filmmaking.14 For these various reasons, cinema would always be a ­secondary activity at the FCCB. With occasional columns dedicated to amateur cinema written by Antonio da Silva Victor, then director of the department, and intermittent activity involving meetings with other Brazilian cine clubs, it was not until 1950 that the cinema department built up a more organised structure and programme of events. In October 1950, the FCCB created its first International Amateur Cinema Festival, accepting films shot on 8mm, 9.5mm and 16mm gauges. Organised with the help of the American Cine League, Cine Clube Uruguayo, Fotocine Clube do Chile, the French Federation of Amateur Cinema Clubs, and the Union Internationale du Cinéma d’Amateur (UNICA), eight countries submitted the fifteen amateur films that were accepted. With a great sense of pride, the FCCB bulletin republished a column dedicated to the festival, originally written for the Argentinian magazine Correo Fotográfico Sudamericano, attesting to the prominent position FCCB now occupied in South America and worldwide, as the representative of amateur cinema in Brazil.15 This acclaim would prove inspiring, and the pages of the FCCB bulletin were soon publicising the activities of other cine clubs around the country, such as Foto-­Cine Clube de Campinas and Foto-­Cine Clube Recife. In August 1951, the same publication announced the creation of Foto-­Cine Clube Gaúcho, based in Porto Alegre. Foto-­Cine Clube Gaúcho and Fiction Filmmaking The Foto-­Cine Clube Gaúcho (FCCG) was founded officially on 3 July 1951, by twelve photographers linked to the Association of Professional ­170

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Photographers from Rio Grande do Sul. Members of an amateur enclave within an association of professional photographers, they shared a desire to explore the photographic medium as an artistic expression. Since their interests did not coincide with the professional environment of the association, they decided to become independent, and the FCCG was the result. Upon the creation of the new club, its members immediately sent still pictures to different contests and salons, and in less than a month they could claim seventy-­seven associates. From the beginning, however, the FCCG insistently maintained a cinema department, whose president, Nelson França Furtado, was selected from the twelve founders. A dynamic and very active figure, he would supervise many subsequent amateur productions and personally direct at least ten short films during his tenure.16 A quick survey of the newspapers of the period reveals a very intense cinema scene in Porto Alegre, a city with a very deep cinephile and cinematographic tradition. Clube do Cinema, a cine society dedicated to the appreciation of cinema, close in spirit to the cinephile traditions of the Chaplin Club, held weekly screenings in local cinemas, securing high attendance figures and garnering significant press coverage. Vento Forte (Strong Wind, 1951), the first sound feature film shot in Rio Grande do Sul, was released in the city, and many other regional productions were announced in the pages of the local newspaper, the Correio do Povo. Amateur cinema would also draw attention, due to the influence and reach of FCCB, stimulating further involvements. Clube do Cinema, for instance, attempted to create its own technical department (having mainly been concerned in its early years with film screenings and discussions), with the help and guidance of FCCB,17 although the attempt seems to have been overshadowed by the creation of FCCG.18 Meanwhile, exhibition also developed as an aspect of FCCG activity, alongside its interests in practical filmmaking. The pages of the local newspapers announced the weekly screenings held every Monday in the headquarters of the club, for which both ‘classics’ and more contemporary fare were programmed. Primarily oriented to the technical side of cinematography however, the club organised frequent workshops and staged internal competitions, which would prove a great incentive to film production. There were also regular screenings of the films that were being produced by club members, at which criticism would be offered and general technical problems discussed. Such gatherings indicate the seriousness informing much of the work. Competitions, in particular, represented an important sign of the FCCG’s decidedly ‘emulatory’ amateur practice, creating an amateur awards culture akin to that now firmly established within professional filmmaking. The inaugural internal contest took place in April 1952, at which Nelson Furtado won the first prize with the short Em Busca do Tesouro (Treasure Hunt, 1952); he would also win the top award in the first national contest organised for 16mm films, with Barbeiro de Cedilha (The Barber, 1953), whose title offered a playful variation on that of Gioachino Rossini’s celebrated 171

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comic opera, The Barber of Seville (1816). Very talented in the fabrication and adaptation of equipment, Furtado managed to build an improvised printing machine, which was used by all members. Another very active member was Bruno Hochheim, who would be responsible for supervising many of FCCG’s cinema workshops.19 He also found time to direct approximately eighteen films from 1956 to 1965, including medium-­and full-­length feature films with melodramatic storylines like Noite de Terror (A Night of Terror, 1960), in which a lonely woman reads horror magazines and is haunted by the image of a butcher with a deformed face, and O Anjo de Fogo (The Angel of Fire, 1959), concerning the strange relationship of a man married to a prostitute, that ends in tragedy when she starts meeting old lovers.20 Films such as these illustrate well the range of professional filmmaking informing the FCCG output, and the diverse ambitions of club members. Judging from the titles listed in the club’s bulletins, fictional endeavours were mixed with non-­fiction work produced during the club’s workshops; travelogues and family films are also well represented, along with local documentaries covering topics such as the opening of local sports facilities in Inauguração do Estádio do Grêmio (Inauguration of the Grêmio Stadium, 1955) and traditional gaucho culture in A Vida do Gaúcho (A Gaucho’s Life, 1956). In fact, the third internal contest, held in 1957, would divide its prizes across the following categories: Fiction, Fantasy, Documentary and the Family Album. Sioma Breitman would receive a special mention for his documentary Instituto de Radiologia (Radiology Institute, 1957), whilst Nelson Furtado and Bruno Hochheim appeared mainly in the Fantasy category with O Náufrago (The Castaway, 1957) and Desembarque (Landing, 1957) respectively, winning first and second places with titles that would also take fourth and fifth places during the VII National Amateur Cinema Contest promoted that year by the FCCB, in São Paulo. Forms of Fiction at the Foto-­Cine Clube Gaúcho The contest of 1959 introduced the first work of fiction from the collection of recently restored FCCG films: namely, Guerra e Paz (War and Peace, 1959) by Nelson Furtado, a short puppet animation film on the theme of war’s futility. Opening with inter-­titles introducing the production company as Filmes do Cruzeiro do Sul, two characters taking cover in the trenches are quickly introduced: Peri Tônio and Pará Mécio. The action starts with Peri observing Pará through binoculars in a shot-­reverse-­shot figure. Closer set-­ups show that Peri has an interest in the sword the other holds, whilst Pará hides as Peri brings out his guns. With both sides armed with bombs and dynamite, Pará lets his pipe fall on the ground, as explosions follow. They are both thrown up into the air and the film closes with a shot of the only survivor: the sword. It cannot be verified whether this scenario was directly inspired by Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869), but the second character wears a Russian hat and army clothes. ­172

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7.1  Peri observes Pará behind the trenches in the animation sequence from Guerra e Paz (War and Peace, 1959).

Ironically enough, the two names combined, Para-­mecio and Peri-­tônio mean, respectively, a kind of amoeba and a membrane of the digestive system. Os Egoístas (The Egotists, 1960), directed by Moacyr Flores, would also include a moral lesson at the end, of the kind often favoured within short amateur fictions. Produced by Flores’s production company, Charrua Filmes (named after the Charruas, an indigenous people that inhabited the south of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay), the film features two Indians fighting over a fish. Pulling it from one side to the other, they both end up with nothing as the fish escapes. The end titles include the popular Brazilian saying ‘quem tudo quer, tudo perde’ (‘who wants it all, loses it all’). Shot with a Keystone A-­9 camera the director still owns, this animation film was produced using a glass-­painting technique and was the first to be produced by the filmmaker. He has recalled his intention as the creation of characters different from those of the Walt Disney films that were his first inspiration, whilst exploring the techniques involved in their ground-­breaking animation. The same characters appear in O Dentista Bossa Nova (The Bossa Nova Dentist, 1960), the story of a man suffering from a serious toothache, who calls a faith-­healer for help. Such animation films tell very simple stories, but the technique and time-­ consuming work that animation films require demonstrate clearly their creator’s remarkable ability and perseverance. Their production also illustrates the 173

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7.2  In reverse shot, Pará, in a Russian outfit, protects his sword, in Guerra e Paz (War and Peace, 1959).

range of participations that may characterise the ‘community mode’ of club filmmaking. Moacyr Flores mostly made his animation films on his own, using the doorframes of his house to support the special structures built for the job.21 More fascinated by the technical challenges of production than the apprehension of narrative codes, animation perhaps furnished the most appropriate medium for the expression of his interests. His first work with FCCG, however, was as an actor in the live-­action melodrama Frutos da Bondade (Fruits of Goodness, 1959), directed by Pedrotto Hengist. A young history student in the 1950s, his interest in filmmaking began when he first attended one of the club’s photography workshops in 1959 and discovered the cinema department, always apparently sidelined and even belittled by the still photography crowd. His identification in interview of two kinds of groups that attended the cinema workshops (those who desired to make better family films and those who wanted to move away from American cinema) is perhaps indicative of wider divisions within amateur cine culture. Flores’s own intentions were made clear by the characters chosen and the usage of popular tales in his animation work. João Carlos Caldasso, described as ‘somewhat eccentric and full of crazy ideas’, directed more audacious fictional works, seemingly owing a considerable debt to Hollywood genres and stylistic techniques.22 O Caso da Joalheria ­174

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(The Jewellery Store Robbery, 1960) is a silent film, and maintains a very intricate narrative structure in which four testimonies introduce different points of view on the crime of the film’s title. Each inquiry reveals a mystery to be solved with the next testimony. Following spinning credits, four characters are questioned by a police officer in turn; their statements are dramatised in flashback sequences. The film can thus be easily divided into four parts, around the four testimonies, linked by the overall framing situation: 1. First testimony: the leader of the gang The gang of four robbers arrive in a car and the leader observes the routine and layout of the jeweller’s. After the shop is closed, they go to an apartment to plan the robbery. The leader draws a map of the space and plans the action. He moves toward a door and, as he opens it, he sees a woman, who he pushes. They finish the planning and go back to the jeweller’s. As they walk in, three of them divert the salesman’s attention as one of them sneaks into the store. The three leave and wait in a bar next to the shop. After some time, they go back and see the salesman being rescued outside the shop. They run back to the apartment and find their friend lying dead on the ground. The police arrive and they are arrested. Back in the police station, the leader signs his testimony.

7.3  Point-of-view shot of the unexpected robber walking into the jewellery store, in O Caso da Joalheria (The Jewellery Store Robbery, 1960).

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2. Second testimony: salesman The salesman walks in with a patch over his eye. Fade out. An armed man walks into the store. The salesman hands him the money and suddenly pulls out a gun. They both open fire. The robber who was inside the store runs away. The salesman is rescued out on the street. He signs his testimony and walks out. A woman walks in. 3. Third testimony: the woman The police officer offers her a cigarette; she lights it. In the apartment, she puts on silk stockings and listens to the meeting in the room next door. She drops something and the leader walks in, sees her and slaps her face. She watches the rest of the meeting, and as they leave, she shows intentions of revenge. As she goes through the leader’s personal objects, the robber (the one that ran away from the jeweller’s) walks in. She finds a gun and shoots him. She leaves and runs away to the airport. The police arrive and arrest her as she boards the plane. She signs her testimony. 4. Fourth testimony: the neighbour As she goes up the stairs of the apartment building, she sees the woman leaving the flat. She finds the man who has been shot lying on the floor, goes back to her place and calls the police. As she waits, she sees the robbers arriving, and right after them the police. They are all arrested. One police officer checks the dead robber, while the nosy neighbour tells him about the woman who has fled and identifies her on a forgotten ID card. Back at the police station, the officer dismisses the neighbour and stamps the inquiry files with CASE CLOSED. This brief description shows how ambitious Caldasso was in his attempt to build a narrative structure that would maintain suspense while the case was being investigated, by the spectator and the police officers at the same time. Logically, it is a puzzle solved when all the pieces are correctly located. In terms of temporal coherence, however, some actions seem not to fit precisely. The director is keen to emulate commercial film styles, and a certain mastery of narrative devices is evident, using fade-­outs and fade-­ins, irises and a temporal ellipsis, with some confidence. When the robbers are waiting at the bar, for instance, a dissolve from an empty ashtray to a full one suggests a time-­lapse with real legibility. Caldasso also understands the conventions of camera placement, introducing point-­of-­view shots for characterisation and selecting interesting camera angles to enhance dramatic effect. The same suspense is also built into the comedy O Padre Nu (The Naked Priest, 1962). Adapted from the short story O Homem Nu by Fernando Sabino, it tells of a priest that, after a series of incidents, ends up being arrested for walking around naked. The storytelling here works much better in terms of temporal and spatial coherence, perhaps because the film adopts a simpler structure and a more limited range of settings. The film starts inside a church as the priest preaches against the wearing of bikinis by female members of his ­176

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7.4  Amateur artistry: the camera sees through a stencil, cut out through erotic drawings on the wall, in O Padre Nu (The Naked Priest, 1962).

congregation. A reverse shot shows documentary images of an actual mass. Back home, he discovers that the water is off at his apartment, and asks for a fellow priest for help, eventually winding up in another flat in the same building, lent by another friend. The occupant has posters and drawings of naked women all over the bathroom walls, and we are offered point-­of-­view shots of the images. The priest looks at them, with a terrified expression, but soon enough he also finds himself naked. He loses his clothes when, after answering the doorbell, his towel gets stuck on the door handle. More and more distraught, he walks around the building trying to escape the neighbours and children playing all around. Nobody sees him, though, as he always manages to escape and crawl under things to avoid their gaze; the spectator, however, sees what the other characters cannot, and this builds up the suspense until he is finally caught. There is a sense of irony at the end when the crowd and the police drag him into the police car, and his priest friend arrives and nods knowingly, as if wondering where this world will end up. Technically, Caldasso’s films show their amateur origins to some extent, with noticeable film splices, some unevenness in scene lighting and a reliance on hand-­held camera movements. A lack of sound is also suggestive of a tangible lack of professional resources. None the less, on this evidence, Caldasso was clearly a talented filmmaker and storyteller, and he appears to have been 177

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well regarded in these respects. O Caso da Joalheria gained fifth prize at the National Amateur Film Contest in São Paulo, and O Padre Nu won the internal contest. In 3 March 1962, the local newspaper Jornal do Dia would bring news of the filmmaker’s latest activities: Mr. J. C. Caldasso, the brave amateur filmmaker, activist of the Fotocineclube Gaúcho and winner of the highest grades during the V Amateur Cinema Festival (12/12/1961), can be seen in the streets of Porto Alegre with camera and script in his hands, being followed by technicians in deep concentration. We are curious to know what will emerge from this. It can’t be a joke. You don’t make fun of a man’s most profound aspirations. Maybe J. C. Caldasso’s name will travel around the world.23 Conclusions A sense of pride arises from the fact that, in the 1960s, most of what was produced in terms of fictional films in Porto Alegre was the work of amateurs. It was a different situation in the 1950s, where the dream of an industrial-­scale cinema was at its height, feature films were being produced locally, and even small companies maintained some commercial film production. By the 1960s, this industrial infrastructure no longer existed in the same form, and amateur filmmaking seems to have occupied the cultural space left behind. The ambitions and investments of the amateur sector differed markedly, however, from those of their professional counterparts, even where club organisation echoed the codes of professional behaviour. Foto-­Cine Clube Gaúcho did not have an aesthetic agenda, and their activities seemed to be guided largely by the pleasure of making films, although individual involvements varied. Caldasso certainly made other films and was involved in other projects as a filmmaker. His profile as an amateur was different, therefore, from that of Nelson Furtado and Moacyr Flores, more interested as they were in the technical aspects of filmmaking. The high cost of production – film was expensive and had to be developed in other cities – would hinder some filmmaker’s activities, including those of Flores. Once a stalwart of the FCCG, he stopped making his animated films when he started working as a history teacher in a local school and had to raise his children. What remained thereafter was his interest in local history, and he would become a professor specialising in the history of Rio Grande do Sul and the original indigenous population. The films discussed here reveal the importance of valuing Brazilian and local culture, even if not in a programmatic way, and underlines fascinating connections between local preoccupations and the more international development of amateur cine culture. Cine clubs in Brazil have often adopted names related to Brazilian or local culture: Cruzeiro do Sul, Charrua Filmes, Equipe Cinematográfica do Sul. The appeal to both national culture and national themes was thus clearly linked within amateur cine culture to a sense of ­178

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pre-­national traditions, and articulated very differently from the ways in which political and aesthetic debates around the same issues were being discussed and put into practice by other filmmakers, such as the young generation of filmmakers now associated with ‘Cinema Novo’. Certainly there seems to be a division in the profile of these Brazilian filmmakers, at least the ones detailed in this chapter. A split between the world of liberal professionals making films as part of their leisure activity and amateurs more connected with the artistic and cinematographic universe is very evident. In the 1960s, the second kind of amateurism would prevail, even though cine clubs were still active around the country. Undoubtedly the collection of amateur films from Cinemateca do Capitólio gives us a valuable indication of how varied amateur filmmaking was in this area. The emergence of fresh evidence however raises new questions: more films still need to be found and preserved so we can deepen our understanding of Brazilian amateur film culture. Notes   1. Ryan Shand, ‘Theorizing Amateur Cinema: Limitations and Possibilities’, The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2008, pp. 36–60. According to this author, the community mode ‘addresses and acknowledges the limited public exhibition context enjoyed by these filmmakers, without implying that they are simply home moviemakers, or attempting entry into the mass mode’, a formulation confirmed by analysis of the Foto-­Ciné Clube Gaúcho.   2. Roger Odin, ‘Il cinema amatoriale’, in Gian Piero Brunetta (ed.), Storia del Cinema Mondiale: Teorie, Strumenti, Memorie (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 2001), p. 333.   3. The traditional historiography of Brazilian cinema has frequently divided the nation’s filmic past into cycles. A cycle would correspond to a period during which there was a minimum production of films and their release in the exhibitions market, meaning it was reasonably viable in economic terms, or simply when films were being produced, as in the case of the regional cycles. This was the case for Brazilian cinema’s ‘Belle Époque’ period, between 1907 and 1911, when artisanal production dealing with local themes could still resist the entrance of foreign product. Brazilian filmmakers would subsequently have to resist the dominance of foreign product in the exhibition sector, the difficult adaptation to technological innovation (for example, the introduction of sound), and the shortage and high prices of film and film-­related products. Non-­fiction production, such as newsreels and documentary films, usually commissioned by prominent politicians and later via subsidised by government agencies, would be the main activity throughout the years. For an invaluable overview, see Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, Cinema: Trajetória no Subdesenvolvimento, 2nd edn (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1995).   4. Ryan Shand, ‘Theorizing Amateur Cinema: Limitations and Possibilities’, pp. 56–7.   5. See ‘Um pouco de technica’, Cinearte, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1926.   6. See Lila Foster, Filmes Domésticos: Uma Abordagem a Partir do Acervo da Cinemateca Brasileira, MD dissertation (São Carlos: Universidade Federal de São Carlos, 2010).   7. See Cinearte, Vol. 4, No. 151, 1929.   8. Sergio Bareto Filho, ‘Os fan-­films’, O Fan, No. 2, 1928, p. 1.   9. Anon., O Fan, No. 3, 1929, p. 1.

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10. Fabrício Felice, ‘O cinema brasileiro em O Fan’, Confibercom – Congresso Mundial de Comunicação Ibero Americana, August 2011, pp. 1–15. 11. Institutionalisation here refers to the creation of bodies with a considerable number of members, a board of directors and heads of department, supervising a network of clubs, exchanging information both nationally and internationally, and involved in the organisation of festivals. 12. Vanessa Lenzini, Noções de Moderno no Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante: Fotografia em São Paulo (1948–1951), MD Dissertation (Campinas: Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2008). 13. Maria R. Galvão, Burguesia e Cinema: O Caso Vera Cruz (São Paulo: Civilização Brasileira, 1981). 14. Vanessa Lenzini, Noções de Moderno no Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante: Fotografia em São Paulo (1948–1951), pp. 20–4. 15. Anon., ‘1o Festival Internacional de Cinema Amador’, Boletim FCCB, Vol. 5, No. 53, 1950, p. 27. Correo Fotográfico Sudamericano, might be translated as South American Photographic Mail. 16. Research notes on Foto-­Cine Clube Gaúcho by Glênio Póvoas, Cinemateca do Capitólio. 17. Correio do Povo, 11 May 1951. 18. Fátima Lunardelli, ‘O cineclubismo em Porto Alegre’, in T. Becker (ed.), Cinema no Rio Grande do Sul (Porto Alegre: Unidade Editorial, 1995), pp. 33–8. 19. Interview with Roado Hochheim by Glênio Póvoas, conducted 20 April 1995. 20. None of these films have survived, although the storylines are described in Antônio C. Textor, ‘Os agitados anos 60’, in T. Becker (ed.), Cinema no Rio Grande do Sul, pp. 60–7. 21. Interview with Moacyr Flores, conducted 2 February 2012. 22. Antônio C. Textor, ‘Os agitados anos 60’, p. 63. 23. Jornal do Dia, Porto Alegre, 27 March 1962.

Filmography Guerra e Paz (War and Peace, Nelson Furtado, 1959) (Cinemateca Capitólio), 16mm, 3.48 mins, black and white, silent. O Caso da Joalheria (The Jewellery Store Robbery, João Carlos Caldasso, 1960) (Cinemateca Capitólio) 16mm, 9.48 mins, black and white, silent. O Dentista Bossa Nova (The Bossa Nova Dentist, Moacyr Flores, 1960) (Cinemateca Capitólio), 16mm, 1.42 mins, black and white, silent. O Padre Nu (The Naked Priest, João Carlos Caldasso, 1962) (Cinemateca Capitólio) 16mm, 7.42 mins, black and white, silent. Os Egoístas (The Egotists, Cine Clube Gaúcho, 1960), 16mm, 1 min., black and white, silent. The films discussed in this chapter are held within the Cinemateca Capitólio, Av. Borges de Medeiros, esquina R. Demétrio Ribeiro, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil; tel.: (51) 3226.3311; website: http://www.capitolio.org.br/; email: [email protected]

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8. ‘THIS IS NOT HOLLYWOOD!’: PETER WATKINS AND THE CHALLENGE OF AMATEURISM TO THE PROFESSIONAL JOHN R. COOK

Discussion of the amateur fiction film might usefully acknowledge the contribution of British practitioner, Peter Watkins. Born in suburban Norbiton, Surrey, in 1935, he is best known to cinéastes and media historians as an early proponent of the dramatised documentary or documentary drama genre of the 1950s and 1960s. This expansive category includes films or television programmes researched as documentary, but presented as dramatic reconstruction using actors, or, in the case of documentary drama, more ‘make-believe’ material shot in a documentary style. Key stylistic features include, for example, hand-­held camera, natural lighting and location sound recording, usually coordinated to create the powerful effect of actuality. In their popular abbreviated forms, the terms ‘drama-­doc’ and ‘docu-­drama’ are frequently conflated in discussion, whilst the hybridised modes they designate have enjoyed a long and often controversial history, both in film and television production and in related scholarly criticism.1 Certainly, Watkins’s work has been the subject of heated debate. He remains best remembered for two ground-­breaking films made for BBC Television at the start of his professional career: Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965). Culloden famously reconstructed the 1746 Scottish battle between government ‘redcoats’ and Jacobite rebels, as if modern television news cameras had been there to cover events, and reporters present to interview participants. The startling result was hailed as one of the most remarkable professional debuts ever made, whilst attracting the polarised response that would accompany Watkins throughout his subsequent career.2 The War Game would provoke even stronger reactions and remains an infamous work 183

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to this day. A documentary-­style ‘pre-­construction’ of the apocalyptic horrors that would attend a nuclear strike on Kent, England, the film was banned by the BBC from television screens for twenty years, ostensibly on the grounds that it was too ‘horrifying for the medium of broadcast’, though many wondered whether the British government had been actively involved in censoring it, on account of the film’s questioning of the adequacy of UK civil defence provision during the Cold War.3 The ensuing controversy turned The War Game into a 1960s cause célèbre, which would eventually gain the film a limited theatrical release. Following exposure in this medium, and much to the chagrin of the BBC, the film went on to win an Oscar in Hollywood in 1967, in the Best Documentary Feature category, and has subsequently developed something of cult following. Both Culloden and The War Game were to exercise huge influence upon the generation of British film-­ and programme-­makers that followed in Watkins’s wake, not least Ken Loach, who, just a year after Culloden, began to experiment with similar ‘documentary-­style’ techniques for his now-­ celebrated sixties BBC TV dramas Up the Junction (1965) and Cathy Come Home (1966).4 The traditions inaugurated here have proved durable. More recent British film and television directors who have utilised ‘drama-­doc/ docu-­drama’ techniques in their work include Roland Joffé, Peter Kosminsky and Paul Greengrass. Films such as the latter’s Bourne Supremacy (2004), United 93 (2006), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) and Green Zone (2010) suggest how far the vérité style of dramatic filmmaking has been assimilated into the mainstream. Once a matter of transgression and difference, it is now ubiquitously deployed in contemporary film-­and television-­making as a visual shorthand for gritty authenticity. With Culloden and The War Game, Watkins pioneered documentary-­style techniques that have had a lasting and important influence upon professional film and television production, and have been much celebrated. Less well known or remembered, however, is the role of amateur film culture in providing the director with the crucial experimental space within which to develop the now well-­formulated style that he would later bring into the professional sphere. Closer inspection reveals, though, that Watkins was recruited to the BBC to make Culloden very much on the strength of his work as a gifted and highly successful amateur filmmaker, who had won awards for a series of films shot between 1956 and 1962 with the help of Playcraft, a local amateur dramatic society based in Canterbury, Kent. These works would bring him to the attention of the BBC, for whom their various attempts to lend a documentary-­style realism to dramatic depictions of war and conflict were appealing. Their ‘anti-­Hollywood’ attitudes, in the sense of deliberately eschewing conventional filming techniques, seem also to have been in tune with the spirit of the Corporation at this time. With such contexts in mind, this chapter argues that Watkins developed a personal amateur aesthetic, brought to a wider public with Culloden and The War Game, and that an important ­184

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8.1  Peter Watkins directing The War Game (1965).

(and hitherto little discussed) continuity existed between the amateur fiction film movement of this period and the commercial mainstream, which helps to explain influential stylistic developments within professional British film and television drama practice. As this chapter will show, Watkins can be seen as one of the most tangible bridges between the worlds of amateur and professional filmmaking, whose study helps to clarify the values and belief systems of the respective sectors. Indeed, even after he turned professional, Watkins continued actively to espouse the amateur ‘spirit’ over the professional in almost every regard, directly challenging what he believed to be the spurious ‘professionalism’ of the mass media. For Watkins, film and television production still need to follow this early amateur lead, to be opened up much more to the general public, and not be the closed preserve of established media institutions and interests.5 185

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Towards a Personal Amateur Aesthetic In many ways, the amateur film movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, out of which Watkins emerged, functioned as Britain’s true ‘underground cinema’ of this period. Crucially, it nurtured a generation of filmmakers, a number of whom would eventually move into the professional sphere, taking something of its ‘alternative’ amateur outlook with them. Watkins was, of course, by no means the only prominent British director of the 1960s to follow this route. There had been a number of precedents already in terms of amateurs being recruited by the BBC. Both John Schlesinger and Ken Russell, for example, had been recruited to work on the influential television arts programme Monitor (BBC TV, 1958–65), having impressed its series editor Huw Wheldon with their amateur films Sunday in the Park (1956) and Amelia and the Angel (1958), respectively.6 Such cross-­over is perhaps indicative of the relative proximity of the amateur and professional sectors through these years. Exchange between the so-­called ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ spheres seems to have been fluid and continuous in the early post-­war decades. In the amateur realm, there was a crystallisation around Amateur Cine World (ACW) magazine, edited during this period by Gordon Malthouse, which stressed connections. Of course, ACW reported the activities of the leading amateur filmmakers of the day, but also followed the careers of those who had now crossed over into the professional realm. The magazine expressed pride in several key amateur alumni, and devoted frequent space to Watkins, both before and after he turned professional. By the same token, amateurs were also showcased for the professional onlooker. ACW, for example, gave individual filmmakers prominence through its amateur film ‘Oscars’, awarded at its annual Ten Best film competition. Winning films would receive a showing at the National Film Theatre in London, and be given wider distribution by the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers, as well as the British Film Institute, which would organise the duplication of prints. In this way, award-­winning amateur filmmakers of the time had a platform on which to be noticed by those working in the national media, which later generations of amateur filmmakers would not enjoy to the same extent. Extracts from winning amateur films were also screened on national television, further enhancing their visibility, and the possibility of an approach from professional media interests.7 Contraflows were equally apparent: feeding into the movement were filmmakers and technicians with established jobs in the professional sphere who made amateur fiction films in their spare time, both as a form of personal film education, and as a respite from the commercial restrictions of their working lives. A key representative of this tendency was Kevin Brownlow, who wrote a series of columns on silent cinema, a life-­long passion, for ACW from the 1950s. As early as 1956, the young filmmaker was working as a trainee for the sponsored film company, World-­Wide Pictures, when he recruited military specialist, Andrew Mollo, to become his eventual co-­director on It Happened ­186

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Here (1964), an ‘epic’ amateur production shot sporadically in Brownlow and Mollo’s spare time over a long period between 1956 and 1963. The film presented a counterfactual history, hypothesising what would have happened had Britain been invaded by the Nazis in 1940. Enjoying almost a mythical status within amateur cine culture, it would prove a key influence on Watkins, and not least on The War Game, which introduces a similar ‘what if . . . ?’ scenario, hypothesising the potential breakdown of British society in the face of an overwhelming external threat. Brownlow and Mollo’s attempts to offer a plausibly authentic reconstruction of the Second World War period through, for example, striving for complete historical accuracy in military uniforms and props, both echo and anticipate Watkins’s own careful reconstruction techniques in his subsequent films. As a fellow amateur filmmaker inclined to fiction, Watkins offered assistance to Brownlow and Mollo on various aspects of their It Happened Here production, including make-­up, set dressing, acting, stills photography and assistant direction. Collaboration would continue after completion of the film; having also been recruited to World-­Wide Pictures, Watkins would work beside Brownlow professionally, as his assistant in the company’s cutting rooms.8 Watkins continued to work on his own amateur fiction film projects on the side, throughout this period. He first became interested in filmmaking when, after leaving the army in 1956, he bought an 8mm Bolex spring-­driven camera and began to make short films with Playcraft. He had become a member of the amateur theatre group in Canterbury, Kent, whilst stationed there during his two years’ compulsory National Service. Watkins had joined Playcraft as an escape from what he felt to be the brutalising effects of military life, and during this period he acted in and directed a number of its theatre productions. Using his new camera, he began to shoot footage of those productions, and from this it was a relatively short step to deciding to make his own amateur fiction film, drawing on Playcraft’s personnel and other resources. By this stage, Watkins had found his first full-­time job with a London advertising agency, George Street and Company. The firm made television commercials, and over the next three years, prior to joining World-­Wide in 1959, Watkins worked his way up to the role of an assistant producer, responsible for making thirty-­ and sixty-­ second television adverts.9 Despite later acknowledging this as a wonderful training ground for becoming a film and television director, Watkins hated the world of advertising with all its backbiting and competitiveness.10 Making amateur films in his spare time with Playcraft offered a welcome relief from the pressures of this commercial world, just as it had during his years with the military. Watkins’s first amateur fiction film made with actors from Playcraft was a typically concise amateur narrative entitled The Web (1956). Shot on 8mm, this ambitious twenty-­minute film, silent, with captions substituting for recorded dialogue, gained Watkins unexpected attention when it won the Gold Star Award, after he had entered it into ACW’s Ten Best competition in 187

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1956. Just as ambitious as Brownlow and Mollo’s work in many respects, The Web attempted to provide an authentic reconstruction of the Second World War period on a shoestring budget – in this case, a recreation of the turmoil following the D-­Day landings in Normandy in 1944. With the countryside around Canterbury doubling for its fictional French settings, the film tells a simple story of a German soldier who tries to flee the Maquis (the rural guerrilla bands of the French Resistance) following the death of a comrade. He is discovered by a local French girl, who nurses a wound above his eye, despite her noticing the Nazi uniform beneath his overcoat. This act of individual humanity forms a stark contrast to the collective actions of the Maquis, who later discover the wounded soldier and give him the impression he can escape, before cruelly shooting the unarmed man in the back as he tries to walk away. The film ends with an emphatic close-­up of the dead soldier’s hand still clutching the handkerchief the girl had given him earlier to clean his wounds. Even in the brief outline sketched here, some of Watkins’s major artistic preoccupations are clearly visible in the film. While the material is shot fairly conventionally (Watkins’s famous newsreel style would come later), a strong anti-­war theme is evident, as is a clear empathy with those on the losing side of history, which would run right through the director’s subsequent work. A hatred of all forms of military power is marked – a theme no doubt owing much to Watkins’s recent experiences of National Service. The film’s unusual reversed focus, in which events of the Second World War are viewed sympathetically from the ‘enemy’s’ perspective, is mirrored within the themes of the story itself: the brutal shooting of the soldier by the Maquis, who are fighting with the Allies, undermines any claim that ‘our side’ has absolute moral superiority. Shift the point of view to the opposing side, the film suggests, and suddenly ‘we’ begin to look just as much like the aggressors as those we normally think of as the ‘enemy’.11 These are key Watkins themes, which are echoed in his later professional work, such as Culloden, which portrayed the famous battle not from the perspective of the victorious British government army but from that of the downtrodden Highland rebels, dismissed by the winning side as ‘savages’. It seems that, for Watkins, the only hope against the ­dehumanising capacity of nations and other groupings to demonise those they regard as ‘the other’ is the power of individuals to cross barricades, and make direct links with the other side in acts of human kindness and empathy. As the earlier film’s title suggests, we are all, in the end, dependent upon each other and inter-­related in a ‘web’ of connection. The dead German soldier clutching the girl’s handkerchief at the end of the film symbolises this recognition, and insistence that the capacity of individuals to empathise with each other is the fragile hope we must cling to in the face of all the collective ­brutality in the world. After the success of The Web, Watkins decided to shoot another war drama for his second amateur fiction film. Some desire to raise technical standards is apparent, and The Field of Red (1958) was the first film Watkins shot on ­188

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16mm, having recently acquired an old hand-­cranked Ensign Kinecam camera. Another silent film made with the help of Playcraft, The Field of Red was a drama set during the American Civil War. It seems also to have been more aesthetically ambitious, although records of its reception remain uncertain of its success in this respect. For Kevin Brownlow, Watkins had clearly not yet found his feet as a director. He later wrote that the production, despite having compositional flair, betrayed ‘the awkwardness of an amateur film whose director wasn’t quite sure where to put the camera. It lacked fluidity and conviction, and it was very stylised.’12 Watkins appeared to agree, and would later condemn it ‘as very bad indeed’.13 It is perhaps significant, therefore, that only one print of the film was ever made and that it is now no longer extant. Nevertheless, Watkins would continue to show an interest in North American topics. The final amateur fiction film he would shoot before joining the BBC was Dust Fever (1962), an ambitious seventy-­five-­minute western about the California Gold Rush, made with the help of Playcraft in an old stone quarry near Canterbury. The film was designed to be a western of ‘authenticity’,14 being carefully researched and anchored in historical fact, and as such an antidote to more mythical Hollywood excursions into the genre. Like Watkins’s other US-­set amateur production, this film would, however, prove ill-­fated, only reaching the rough-­cut stage prior to the filmmaker deciding to set it aside and later join the BBC. Today, like the earlier film, this intriguing-­sounding work is, very sadly, no longer extant. It was, however, by the two amateur fiction films that Watkins shot between The Field of Red and Dust Fever that his reputation would be made. The Diary of an Unknown Soldier (1959) and The Forgotten Faces (1961) both won him amateur ‘Oscars’ in the Ten Best competitions of 1959 and 1961 respectively, and both would illustrate Watkins’s strong anti-­war preoccupations and empathy with the forgotten victims of conflict that had already been so significant in The Web. Even more importantly, through both films, we can trace the evolution of the characteristic ‘Watkins style’: his personal amateur aesthetic that he would develop and take with him into the professional sphere. During his time with Playcraft, Watkins had directed and acted in an amateur theatre production of R. C. Sherriff’s play, Journey’s End, which depicted the claustrophobia of life in the trenches during World War One, as soldiers waited for an Allied offensive to begin. For The Diary of an Unknown Soldier, Watkins returned to this scenario – here imagining what life must have been like for a young soldier ordered to the front for the first time, and exploring the thoughts and fears running through his head as he prepared to go over the top and into battle. The resulting drama is rooted in a supposed documentary artifact – built around extracts from the unnamed soldier’s diary, found after the battle that has killed him – an epistolary device much favoured in amateur cine fiction-­building. Voiced by Watkins himself on the soundtrack, these create a posthumous narration effect similar to that of 1940s and 1950s Hollywood noir films such as Double Indemnity (1944), D.O.A. (1950) and 189

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8.2  Peter Watkins filming the unfinished Dust Fever (1962).

Sunset Boulevard (1950), all of which involved dead or dying characters as narrators. Watkins’s soldier intones at the beginning of the film: ‘Diary. 24 September 1916 . . . The last day of my life.’15 Tight close-­up shots depicting the soldier and his relationship with his comrades in the trenches are counterpointed with the commentary scripted by Watkins and added to the film in post-­production, the first use by the director of what would become a characteristic voiceover narration in his films. Here, however, the commentary is highly emotional, lending the film a neo-­ expressionist stream-­of-­consciousness effect as the soldier agonises about what he knows is his impending death: ‘When you know this is going to happen to you, your body suddenly becomes something terribly precious to you.’ All of this generates a deepening sense of claustrophobia and entrapment, as the soldier realises the sound of artillery shells is coming nearer and nearer. Perhaps drawing for inspiration upon the memories of his own personal feelings about army life, Watkins explores the disjunction between inner and outer selves in the life of a soldier under the extreme pressure of imminent military engagement. The public persona of stoicism and bravery the soldier must present to his comrades is juxtaposed with the very private fears and ­apprehensions raging deep within him. To his friend Kevin Brownlow, Watkins’s finished film ‘was an astonishing improvement on his earlier work’,16 though still vulnerable to criticism since ­190

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8.3 Waiting for the attack: Diary of an Unknown Soldier (1959).

‘it was still the work of an amateur’ in his opinion.17 The use of the word ‘amateur’ in a pejorative sense here by Brownlow here is telling, perhaps suggestive of a new distance from the movement of his origins, but also of an awareness of the constraints of that status. These were perceptions, however, generally shared within the wider amateur film community. Amateur Cine World asserted of The Diary of an Unknown Soldier that it ‘must be ranked as one of the outstanding amateur films’. Nevertheless, the film was also criticised for an ‘overall pattern’ that is ‘not completely satisfying’, including some ‘visual gimmicks’ and ‘an overly “literary” narration’.18 Such commentary is indicative both of movement preferences in terms of fictional style, and of Watkins’s interest in more expressive effects. With regard to such recognised norms, the director’s voiceover was particularly criticised for being overemotional, seeming ‘so solemn and pacifistic as to suggest self-pity’.19 With his next fiction film as an amateur, The Forgotten Faces, Watkins would deal decisively with these various criticisms, draw a valuable lesson from the reception of Diary within the amateur film community, and in the process, forge a new ‘Watkins style’ that he would later carry over into the professional sphere. Clues to the shift perhaps lie in Tony Rose’s much later recollection of the moment in Diary that really got Watkins noticed by his amateur peers: 191

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For the most part the film was well shot and edited in a conventional way but what really lifted audiences out of their seats was a battle sequence in which the camera cut loose from its tripod and became, as it were, a participant in the action.20 In this battle scene (a subjective premonition on the part of the soldier of the conflict he is about to face), Watkins had tried to convey the horror and confusion of war by detaching the camera from the tripod where it was normally mounted, and shooting hand-­held as if from the point of view of the soldier in the trenches running into battle. This conveyed visually the individual soldier’s subjective experience of war, which was the key focus of the film. It was also a neat way of transcending the budgetary limitations of an amateur production that militated against any large-­scale staging of the sequence. Tight close-­ups and a constantly moving camera to simulate the adrenalin of military action, would hide the fact that the quagmire of the Western Front in Diary was little more than the lawn of a Playcraft member’s garden, flooded with a hose-­pipe and churned up to create the impression of a mud bath.21 The effect on audiences, however, was visceral; the camera suddenly seemed free and dynamic, as if the viewer was actually right in the thick of the fighting beside the soldiers. Rose describes the moment well: So he went in close with his camera, filled the frame with writhing bodies and hurtling feet, allowed the lens to be jostled and jumped over and practically trodden into the mud. The result was magnificent and it looked like war as the soldier sees it.22 Such leading opinion-­formers within the amateur film community clearly responded to this attempt to create an effect of enhanced realism and solve practical staging problems, through dispensing with the more conventional filming techniques of the time. For his next production, Watkins would learn from this experience and extend his newly discovered ‘reality effect’ across the whole running time of his film. With The Forgotten Faces, Watkins shifted his focus from restaging military conflicts of the past to reconstructing more recent events, more politically charged for his own generation perhaps. The attempted Hungarian Revolution of late October 1956, when a people’s uprising against the communist government was brutally crushed by Soviet tanks rolling into the capital of Budapest twelve days later, had proved a defining moment for many of Watkins’s generation. The filmmaker’s turn to these events as the source for his next project was therefore, to some extent, tribal. Its development reflected a widespread feeling that the West, by turning away at their time of need, due to fear of precipitating a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union, had ‘betrayed’ the Hungarian people, effectively condemning them to incarceration behind the Iron Curtain.23 These were ‘the forgotten faces’ invoked by ­192

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the title of Watkins’s film five years later, with the Cold War now deepening still further across Europe. In seeking to piece together the suppressed history of exactly what had happened in Budapest in October 1956, Watkins met and spoke with a variety of Hungarian refugees and ex-­freedom fighters from the Revolution.24 He also studied hundreds of still photographs of what by now had been dubbed the Hungarian ‘uprising’, drawn from the pages of Paris Match and Life magazines.25 It was at this point, prompted by the need to signal to audiences that he was carefully reconstructing an actual situation from recent history,26 that Watkins decided to forego conventional filming techniques, in favour of the style he had used to such success for the battle sequence of The Diary of an Unknown Soldier. As he would later write of this decision: I dismissed making it in a ‘fictional’ way, and also decided not to filmically handle it in the more conventional style of clear cut and composed photography with orthodox moves and cutting points. Instead I decided to treat the subject as an out-­and-­out documentary, filming it as seen through the eyes and lenses of newsreel cameramen. To do this meant that I literally had to recreate the Hungarian Revolution. . . .27 For the recreation of these momentous events, Watkins commandeered a narrow cul-­de-­sac in the backstreets of Canterbury that housed a half-­ demolished gasworks, which helped suggest the environment of a bombed-­out Budapest.28 Using mainly members of Playcraft to portray the Hungarian freedom fighters, he carefully matched their likenesses to the stills of the actual rebels he had studied in Paris Match and Life. He then shot many of his violent action scenes in the style of a cinema newsreel cameraman caught in the middle of the events and surprised by the action happening all around him, his hand-­held camera panning from side to side, being jostled and shaken and struggling to stay in focus as it attempted to grab as much of the chaos on film as it could. Later, in the editing room, Watkins would demonstrate important lessons learned from the reception of the over-­emotional commentary in Diary. Requiring a voiceover to bind his various silent newsreel sequences into a coherent narrative for audiences, Watkins eventually opted to go as far away from emotionalism as he could, by substituting its precise opposite: a ‘voice of God’ newsreel-­style narrator (voiced by Frank Hickey), which details the facts and contexts behind what we are seeing in a hard, clipped and seemingly detached tone. It was these parallel developments of a newsreel-­style reconstructive technique, alongside a hard-­hitting ‘voice of God’ narration, which would become the twin foundations of the ‘Watkins style’ that he would later use to such effect in his professional films, starting with Culloden. Such innovations now got Watkins noticed well beyond the confines of the amateur film sector. The actuality effect achieved by the filmmaker remains striking, and was clearly a revelation to contemporary audiences. When film 193

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8.4  Reconstructing the Budapest uprising: The Forgotten Faces (1961).

buyer Milton Shulman showed a version of the film to his bosses at Granada Television, it was assumed by the executives that this was actual newsreel footage bravely smuggled out of Soviet-­controlled Hungary. There was general astonishment when it was learned that it was, in fact, shot in Canterbury with amateur actors.29 Response was equally positive across the television ‘divide’, and before long, The Forgotten Faces led directly to Watkins being invited by Huw Wheldon to join the BBC in 1962. If this was what Watkins could do on an amateur shoestring budget, went the thinking, what could he achieve with the resources of the British Broadcasting Corporation behind him? For leading figures within the amateur film world, such as Tony Rose, The Forgotten Faces was nothing short of a ‘marvel’, and confirmed deep-­seated senses of the sector’s transformative potentials: Not just a mountainous physical achievement but, artistically speaking, one of the two or three most memorable amateur films of all time. Beside it, the majority of professional features looked puny, inconsequential and old hat.30 Others had used what Rose called ‘a subjective camera’ as a ‘means of whipping up excitement in action sequences’ but they had then always ‘returned to a clinical objective viewpoint for the quieter parts of the narrative’.31 No one before had used a hand-­held newsreel technique throughout the entire film, and the ambition it represented was clearly understood here as evidence of a decidedly amateur sensibility at work. Impacts were also felt in terms of amateur production elsewhere. The implication of Rose’s observations were not lost on Kevin Brownlow, who, with It Happened Here, had also been incorporating newsreel-­style and hand-­held action sequences into his film (despite much of the rest of it being shot classically), but It Happened Here was not yet finished and here was his friend and ­194

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colleague stealing a march on both him and Mollo by using a similar reconstructive technique with similar meticulous attention to detail. As Brownlow would later recall, it was all a little depressing: Peter’s film was an achievement of the first order; he had paid for it, directed and photographed it himself and there was no doubt in my mind he was the better film-­maker. I had imagined Andrew [Mollo] and myself in a class of our own, somehow impregnable because we’d been at it so long and no competition had ever been visible. Suddenly, the competition pops up under our noses, learns from us and does better than us. And certainly, even though it was a short film, he had finished it in one burst. He seemed to have incorporated every ingredient that was in ours – crowd scenes, night scenes, battle scenes, the violent deaths of military personnel. Having taken so long over our film, working out the best ways of shooting it, the best ways of staging it, the most effective techniques, it all came as a bit of a shock. I just wished he would find subjects which were not so close to ours.32 Despite this imagined setback for Brownlow and Mollo, It Happened Here would eventually be completed, and become an acknowledged success in its own right, even gaining a commercial cinema release in May 1966.33 What this history seems to point to more importantly, however, is a shared aesthetic with roots in amateur practice evident in the work of Watkins, Brownlow and Mollo during this time, championed and encouraged in the pages of ACW for its authenticity, and which would subsequently go on to win wider attention and greater influence in the professional sphere. If subsequent scholarship would be oblivious to its origins, its proponents would retain a powerful sense of where its ambitions had been nurtured. Conclusions The work of Peter Watkins and some of his amateur contemporaries suggests that, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was a shared preoccupation with reflecting, in a more realistic way in their filmmaking, the grittiness of war and social conflict. Growing up during the Second World War and reaching maturity at the height of the Cold War, these filmmakers perhaps understandably shared a generational obsession with depicting such preoccupations. As Kevin Brownlow has summed this up: ‘We were totally obsessed with war because that’s all we’d known.’34 A desire to represent the experience of war and conflict more accurately than previous film depictions led to reconstructive techniques that could give a greater sense of authenticity. Research into the production of such efforts reveals something of the competitive aspects of relationships between fellow members of the amateur filmmaking community. Drives towards distinctive amateur standards are also exposed. According to 195

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Brownlow, the recruitment of the military specialist Andrew Mollo was a key development in this regard: [Mollo] taught me the importance of what, for want of a better word, I’ll call ‘authenticity’. He also taught it to PW [Peter Watkins] . . . If you want to simplify it, I would describe it as ‘dirtying up’ the scene. Look at pre-­1960s reconstruction. It’s all so clean and hygienic. Andrew believed not only in using original props and costumes whenever humanly ­possible – he believed in muddying them up and dirtying them down . . . PW adopted this for all his pictures too. Actually, he seemed to ­understand our methods so well that we were rather taken aback.35 The challenge from these particular amateur filmmakers to the professional at this time was therefore to make it seem more ‘real’. This might involve techniques such as ‘dirtying up’ the scene but also, crucially, the use of amateur actors for ‘period face[s]’,36 as Brownlow labelled them: non-­stars, who would often be cast according to how ‘authentic’ their face looked in relation to pictures of their historical counterparts. Watkins, too, would go on to champion the use of non-­professional actors throughout his career, and would always prefer to make extensive use of them in his films, not least in his first two professional productions, Culloden and The War Game.37 Watkins’s advance was to develop newsreel techniques of shooting and to extend them across the entire film in order to make it seem that the carefully researched characters and settings were, in fact, the subjects of actuality footage, captured by a documentary crew filming on the hoof and grabbing its shots as and where it could. This was his own personal amateur aesthetic, which, with virtually no compromise, he brought into the professional sphere with Culloden and The War Game, and which he refined and developed, increasingly self-­reflexively, over every successive film of his career. Both Culloden and The War Game had, in fact, originally started life as amateur projects before he joined the BBC, and as Watkins made clear at the time of their production, he had made them for television in ‘exactly the same way that he would have made [them] as an amateur’,38 notwithstanding the increased technical resources available. Interviewed by Tony Rose for ACW on the eve of the first television transmission of Culloden, he declared his determination to continue making films in this ‘amateur’ vein, despite his move to the professional sphere. His ambitions might well have provided a template for the amateur maker of fiction films: I am trying to get into my films a style of realism . . . [To] take ordinary people out on to location and use a flat form of lighting . . . [This] is, for my money, something close to real life as opposed to the typical star-­ridden-­film-­set cluttered thing which is always patently a piece of fiction.39 ­196

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This was not the fiction of Hollywood, but clearly something new and different for the British film and television industry, and it had come from the amateur film sector.40 Throughout his subsequent career, Watkins’s on-­going championing of this aesthetic of the amateur marked his work out as different to that of many of his contemporaries, even those working in superficially similar ways. As he would later reflect on his career overall: ‘I think not only did my work artistically stem from my experiences as an amateur, but I think my ability to fight, to stick it out, and to develop and pursue my own kind of personal vision . . . has its roots in that experience.’41 Notes   1. For discussion of the controversial history of ‘drama-­doc’ and ‘docu-­drama’, see, for example, Derek Paget, No Other Way To Tell It: Dramadoc/Documentary Drama on Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), and Julian Petley, ‘Fact plus fiction equals friction’, Media, Culture and Society, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1996, pp. 11–25.   2. For one example of the critical acclaim amongst many, see the following newspaper review of Culloden, published in the wake of its first television transmission in December 1964: ‘No reservations at all about the instant stardom of Peter Watkins. This young auteur leaps straight from nowhere to the first rank,’ in Phillip Purser, ‘Culloden reconstructed’, Sunday Telegraph, 20 December 1964, p. 18.   3. Michael Tracey, A Variety of Lives: A Biography of Sir Hugh Greene (London: Bodley Head, 1983), p. 252. Tracey was quoting from the press release that the BBC put out in November 1965, setting out its apparent reasons for the broadcast ban.   4. Loach has acknowledged Watkins’s influence on his work. See, for example, his interview for a 1990s BBC Scotland television documentary on the making of Culloden: ‘Making reel history’, first transmitted BBC1 Scotland, 15 April 1996.   5. Watkins discusses extensively the need for what he sees as greater involvement by the public in the process of media production on his personal website: see ‘Peter Watkins Filmmaker / Media Critic’, at http://pwatkins.mnsi.net/   6. For further details on Ken Russell as an amateur, see Brian Hoyle’s chapter in the present volume, ‘Start as You Mean to Go On: Ken Russell’s Early Amateur Films’, pp. 201–20.   7. Tony Rose records that Watkins’s Amateur Cine World ‘Ten Best’ award-­winning film, The Forgotten Faces (1961), ‘was given some quite generous airings on television, including one on the Tonight programme (BBC TV, 1957–65) when it elicited a faint “phew” from Cliff Michelmore’. See Tony Rose, ‘Running, jumping and never standing still’, Movie Maker, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1967, p. 262.   8. For further information on the making of It Happened Here, see Kevin Brownlow, How It Happened Here (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968).   9. Joseph A. Gomez, Peter Watkins (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), p. 20. 10. James Michael Welsh, Peter Watkins: A Guide to References and Resources (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), p. 3. 11. Here, Watkins may have been influenced by Lewis Milestone’s (1930) Hollywood film adaptation, from the novel (1929) by Erich Remarque, of All Quiet on the Western Front, which, faithful to the novel, portrayed World War One trench warfare through the experience of the German soldiers in order to show the pity of war for all sides. 12. Kevin Brownlow, personal correspondence on Peter Watkins, 16 March 1979,

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p. 1. This extended letter reminiscing about his early friendship with Watkins has been made available from his archive for research purposes by kind permission of Kevin Brownlow. 13. Rose, ‘Running, jumping and never standing still’, p. 260. 14. Anon., ‘Dust Fever’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1962, p. 13. 15. Both The Diary of an Unknown Soldier and The Forgotten Faces have been released on DVD/Blu-­Ray, most recently as extras on the British Film Institute’s Region 2 release of Watkins’s first theatrical feature film Privilege (1967): see ‘Availability’ below. All soundtrack quotations are taken from the DVD release (2010). 16. Kevin Brownlow, personal correspondence, p. 3. 17. Kevin Brownlow, draft of unpublished autobiography, dated May 2002, p. 5. Extracts relevant to Peter Watkins from this unpublished autobiography by Kevin Brownlow have been supplied for research purposes by kind permission of its author. 18. Anon., ‘The Amateur Cine World ten best films of 1959’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 23, No. 12, 1960, pp. 1214–17. Summarised and quoted in James Michael Welsh, Peter Watkins: A Guide to References and Resources, p. 65. 19. Kevin Brownlow, personal correspondence, p. 3. 20. Tony Rose, ‘Running, jumping and never standing still’, p. 261. 21. Peter Watkins, interview with the author, Vilnius, Lithuania, July 2001. 22. Tony Rose, ‘Running, jumping and never standing still’, p. 261. 23. For a historical account of the events of the Hungarian ‘uprising’ of 1956, see, for example, Victor Sebestyen, Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 2006). 24. See Peter Watkins, ‘Staging a revolution’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 4, No. 22, 1962, p. 804, which describes the making of The Forgotten Faces film. 25. James Michael Welsh, Peter Watkins: A Guide to References and Resources, p. 4. 26. According to Watkins: ‘Most of my feelings about this kind of what I would call documentary or reconstruction of reality came from studying photographs. I think that’s where my feelings about grain and people looking into the camera came from . . . especially those very strong photographs taken in the streets of Budapest and published in Paris Match and Life. That was my first in-­depth encounter with an actual situation. I studies [sic] hundreds of photographs to try to recapture the feel in film’ (cited in Joseph A. Gomez, Peter Watkins, pp. 24–5). 27. Peter Watkins, ‘Staging a revolution’, p. 804. 28. Joseph A. Gomez, Peter Watkins, p. 29; Watkins, ‘Staging a revolution’, p. 804. 29. For that reason, the Granada executives decided not to screen it on television. As recorded by Shulman, their justification tellingly foreshadowed the difficulties Watkins would experience with media institutions throughout his professional career over his mixing of documentary with drama. If we show this, the executives said, ‘no-­one will believe our newsreels.’ See Milton Shulman, Marilyn, Hitler and Me (London: André Deutsch, 1998), p. 240. 30. Tony Rose, ‘Running, jumping and never standing still’, p. 262. 31. Ibid., p. 261. 32. Kevin Brownlow, unpublished autobiography, p. 6. 33. Though Brownlow has candidly recalled, ‘It came into the West End three weeks after The War Game had opened [in a limited cinema release] to tumultuous praise. You can imagine what an anti-­climax ours was.’ Quoted in Brownlow, personal correspondence, 1979, p. 11. 34. Kevin Brownlow, personal interview with the author, London, May 2002. 35. Kevin Brownlow, personal correspondence on Peter Watkins, dated 1979, pp. 6–7.

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36. Kevin Brownlow, How It Happened Here, p. 128. Brownlow and Mollo would develop their techniques further with Winstanley (1976), revolving around the seventeenth-­century Diggers, which, similar to It Happened Here, was completed over a period of eight years with a predominantly amateur cast. See Kevin Brownlow, Winstanley: Warts and All (London: UKA, 2009). 37. For a fuller account of Watkins’s use of amateur actors throughout his career, see  John Cook, ‘“Don’t forget to look into the camera!”: Peter Watkins’ approach to acting with facts’, Studies in Documentary Film, Vol. 4, No. 3, 2010, pp. 227–40. 38. Tony Rose, ‘Running, jumping and never standing still’, p. 263. Culloden had originally been suggested to him as an amateur film project by two members of the Playcraft Group, Stan and Phil Mercer, whilst The War Game had originally been conceived of as an amateur fiction film, After the Bomb, focusing upon survivors of a nuclear blast huddled together in a cellar. See James Michael Welsh, Peter Watkins: A Guide to References and Resources, p. 5, and Joseph A. Gomez, Peter Watkins, p. 46, respectively, for further discussion. 39. Tony Rose, ‘Faces of the “45”’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 8, No. 25, 17 December 1964, p. 834. 40. ‘N’oubliez pas de regarder dans le caméra! Ce n’est pas Hollywood!’ (‘Don’t forget to look into the camera! This is not Hollywood!’). This is what Peter Watkins would frequently shout, in the native language, to his French cast during the making of La Commune (Paris 1871) (2000) in July 1999. Watkins’s last major production to date, it helps to underscore continuities between Watkins’s later career and his earlier amateur roots that are explored in the main text. 41. Joseph A. Gomez, Peter Watkins, p. 30.

Filmography Culloden (Peter Watkins, 1964), 16mm, 75 mins, black and white, sound. The Diary of an Unknown Soldier (Peter Watkins, 1959), 16mm, 17 mins, black and white, sound. Dust Fever (Peter Watkins, 1962), 16mm, 75 mins, black and white, sound. Unfinished. Not extant. The Field of Red (Peter Watkins, 1958), 16mm, 20 mins, black and white, silent. Not extant. The Forgotten Faces (Peter Watkins, 1961), 16mm, 18 mins, black and white, sound. It Happened Here (Kevin Brownlow, Andrew Mollo, 1964), 16mm, 97 mins, black and white, sound. The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1965), 16mm, 47 mins, black and white, sound. The Web (Peter Watkins, 1956), 8mm, 20 mins, black and white, silent. For Peter Watkins’s extant amateur films, contact:   Janet Smith   Institute of Amateur Cinematographers   24c West Street   Epsom   Surrey   KT18 7RJ   UK   e-­mail: [email protected] Culloden and The War Game are available together as Region 1 DVD releases from Project X Distribution, Canada (The War Game/Culloden; and as part of The Peter

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Watkins Collection box set). They are available together as Region 2 DVD releases from Doriane Films, France (La Bombe/Culloden; and as part of the Coffret Watkins box set). They also received separate Region 2 DVD releases by the British Film Institute, in the UK, in 2003. The Diary of an Unknown Soldier and The Forgotten Faces are available together as ‘extras’ on the following DVD/Blu-­Ray releases: Coffret Watkins (Doriane Films, Region 2 DVD); Punishment Park (Doriane Films, Region 2 DVD); The Peter Watkins Collection (Project X, Region 1 DVD); and Privilege (British Film Institute, Region 2 DVD + Blu-­Ray). The Diary of an Unknown Soldier and The Forgotten Faces also appear respectively as ‘extras’ on the Region 1 DVD releases of The Gladiators and Punishment Park (Project X); and the 2003 Region 2 DVD releases of The War Game and Culloden (British Film Institute). It Happened Here is available on DVD (Film First, Region 2; Milestone, Region 1).

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9. ‘START AS YOU MEAN TO GO ON’: KEN RUSSELL’S EARLY AMATEUR FILMS BRIAN HOYLE

It is hardly unusual for a director to have made amateur films before becoming a professional. Ken Russell, however, represents something of a special case. While many filmmakers attempt to distance themselves from their earliest experiments with a movie camera, Russell clearly remains proud of his ‘small-­ gauge’ origins. On numerous occasions, he has noted that he ‘launched [his] directing career with a film [he] made for four hundred pounds and the help of a few friends’.1 The film in question, Amelia and the Angel (1958), eventually earned him a coveted job on the BBC’s flagship arts programme, Monitor, in 1959. The film is no mere curiosity, relevant only because it enabled its director to make the transition from amateur to professional. Indeed, while Russell has admitted that he always wanted to ‘make films professionally and . . . find a place in the film industry’,2 he has maintained a tangible affinity with amateur principles and practice throughout his career. Indeed, this has been ‘one of the defining marks of his work’.3 Many of his early BBC arts documentaries took amateurs as their subjects, from the players in colliery brass bands to the ‘Sunday’ painter, Henri Rousseau; and when he did make documentaries about professionals, he often stressed their amateur beginnings, as he did in his films about Isadora Duncan and Sir Edward Elgar. This reference carried over to his feature films, each of which ‘involves an amateur performance of some kind or another’.4 The fascination was clearly an abiding one; during the final decades of his life, when he was unable to secure funding for further features, Russell began producing films with his family and friends that returned to the spirit of his earliest efforts. Limited resources indeed help to clarify the filmmaker’s ‘signature’; while Amelia and the Angel and the films that preceded it are technically crude at times, they are also ‘unmistakably and uniquely his work’5 and demonstrate that his singular style, which has made him one of 201

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9.1  Russell remains an amateur alumnus as his professional reputation grows.

British cinema’s most distinctive and controversial auteurs, was present from the very beginning. Indeed, as this chapter will show, through a brief examination of his earliest fiction films, Peep Show (1956) and the unfinished Knights on Bikes (1956), and a more detailed appraisal of Amelia and the Angel, Russell clearly started as he meant to go on: telling stories with bold images ­202

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and placing himself at odds with many of his contemporaries, even his fellow amateurs, by rejecting the prevailing preference for realism in British cinema. Long after his cross-­over to the professional sphere, Russell would remain a key reference point for amateur cine culture in Britain, sometimes explicitly offered as an inspiration for those who might follow. The First Films: Peep Show and Knights on Bikes Russell arrived at the filmmaking that would become his vocation via a somewhat indirect route. As a young man in his early twenties, following his national service, he unsuccessfully tried his hand at acting and dancing. In his mid-­twenties he worked as a freelance stills photographer and fared somewhat better, selling photo-­essays to magazines such as Picture Post. These photographs, such as a series on the Teddy Boy phenomenon, and another featuring Russell’s future wife and costume designer, Shirley, as Emily Brontë, should be counted as his earliest attempts to tell stories with images. Although his earnings as a photographer were meagre, he saved up enough money to begin making his first amateur film, which would eventually emerge as the comic fantasy Peep Show. As Russell recalls, these abortive careers and work with still photography gave him some understanding of the rudiments of film directing, as ‘[he] knew how to expose film. [He] knew about composition. [He] knew a little bit about acting . . . [He] knew a little bit about dancing . . . so it all started to come together.’6 Production was shaped at the outset by a lack of resources. Russell could not afford his own equipment, but ‘one of the more lowly members of the staff’ of a documentary company in Soho lent him a 16mm Paillard Bolex that was not needed on weekends.7 The filmmaker remembers that this philanthropic young man also lent the camera to other enthusiastic amateurs by the names of Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson. Correspondences suggested by such coincidence should not, however, be over-­estimated. Although he has, on occasion, spoken with admiration of their subsequent feature films, Russell was keen from the outset to distance his work from that of those who would become the Free Cinema alumni, and he viewed himself, quite accurately, as something of an outsider. While the name Free Cinema was partly chosen to stress its young filmmakers’ liberation from the constraints of commercialism, Russell has quipped that it also derived from the fact that ‘they received free handouts from the British Film Institute’ (BFI) as part of its subsidy programme for small-­gauge production at that time.8 This may, of course, seem like a case of sour grapes, as Russell’s first application to the Institute’s Experimental Film Fund in 1957 had been unsuccessful. However, Free Cinema was undeniably reliant on such state subsidies, and backing from commercial enterprises such as the Ford motor company. Russell’s work, on the other hand, was genuinely self-­funded, and it is worth pointing out that he never applied to the Experimental Film Fund for money to back a proposal, 203

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9.2  Russell’s amateur credentials support advertising of small-gauge cine cameras.

but only to finish films he had already shot using his own savings. While it may therefore be more accurate to view the Free Cinema films as existing in a hinterland between the amateur and the semi-­professional, Russell’s amateur credentials seem incontestable. Distinctions between Russell and Free Cinema do not end with funding, however. Free Cinema was predominantly a documentary movement, and the films made under its banner were essentially realist in nature. These films aspired to capture the poetry in everyday life, and sought to depict the lives of working-­class people, who, according to Anderson, had previously only ‘appeared in British films . . . as comic relief’, in an affectionate and dignified way.9 Russell, on the other hand, had a very different agenda. He was not interested in capturing life and people unawares, so much as creating imaginative worlds and telling fictional stories with the help of like-­minded collaborators. He underscored this point in an article appearing in Film, the journal of the British Federation of Film Societies, published in early 1959, shortly before gaining his job at the BBC, where he notes that ‘the friends at my disposal would be painfully self-­conscious in portraying ordinary, everyday characters’ and that they were at home in films ‘of a more fantastic kind’.10 A brief examination of Peep Show also reveals an important aesthetic difference. As Russell put it, the more typically British approach of Free Cinema ‘was rooted in the wartime documentaries of Humphrey Jennings’, while he was ‘inspired by the bold imagery of Fritz Lang and the surreal world of Jean Cocteau’, both ­influences discernible in the film’s conception and final execution.11 ­204

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Peep Show begins with a graduation ceremony at the ‘Bogus Beggars’ Academy’, where the gruff headmaster has been teaching his students how to limp and cajole passersby into surrendering their loose change. However, some of the headmaster’s veteran beggars find their ‘patch’ invaded by a father and daughter act, in which the latter plays a life-­sized doll and the former her master, controlling her by playing his magic clarinet. Furious, the headmaster and his henchmen knock out the daughter and kidnap the old man, who is locked in the doll’s box. Once they have taken his earnings, the headmaster suggests throwing the old man in the river. Horrified, one of the bogus beggars tries to intervene, but he too is knocked out cold. Meanwhile, the girl has regained consciousness and followed her assailants. Seeing how the reformed beggar tried to help her father, she helps revive him, before they again give chase and manage to give the old man back his clarinet. When they reach a river bank, the old man turns the tables on his assailants by playing his instrument and leading them, Pied Piper-­like, into the water, where they are cast adrift in the doll’s box. Finally, the reunited father and daughter and their new friend dance off into the distance. Russell has described the film as a ‘Chaplinesque comedy’, perhaps a strategic move, as he did not have access to any sound equipment, nor for that matter, any experience of writing dialogue or directing actors to speak it.12 Like many of his amateur counterparts, he made a virtue of necessity and conceived the entire film as a parody of a two-­reel silent comedy, complete with a Mack Sennett-­like chase at the climax, and inter-­titles resourcefully chalked on to pavements, walls and fences. While the debt to Chaplin is evident, the other influences one can detect here are almost exclusively European, indexing traditions quite divorced from the dominant realist modes of British cinema. The final shot, for example, in which the trio dance away from the camera, recalls the concluding images of René Clair’s À Nous la liberté (1931), whereas Joseph Lanza argues that the story contains ‘allusions to J. J. Peachum’s beggars scam in Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera’ (1928), and sees the doll, with her ‘white face makeup and moppy-­blonde wig’, as ‘a yin version of Cesar the somnambulist from [The Cabinet of Dr.] Caligari’ (1919).13 The influence of Sergei Eisenstein, another of Russell’s heroes, can also be felt in the framing, which often favours large, slightly grotesque close-­ups, and in the decisiveness of the cutting. While some critics have noted that a ‘common fault with amateur films’ is that many ‘shots [are] held too long’,14 one would be hard pressed to level such a charge against Peep Show, which is driven by rapid montages, a fact which becomes all the more impressive when one knows that it was cut in the director’s bedroom, by hand.15 The scene in which the three ‘old boys’ are seen busking, before they realise something is amiss, lasts just under eighty seconds and contains thirty-­eight shots of greatly varying length. The scene begins with a five-­second shot that establishes the location and the fact that one man impersonates a lame ex-­serviceman, while the others play a banjo and a trumpet, and pretend to be blind and one-­eyed, respectively. 205

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There is then a series of tight close-­ups that are repeated throughout the sequence: a hand presenting a coin; the bogus soldier doffing his cap in thanks; the one-­eyed man playing the trumpet; the soldier’s cigar box, full of coins; and the blind man playing the banjo. At first, these shots last around one second each. However, on their first repetition, Russell begins changing the order of the shots and cuts slightly quicker. By a second repetition, the shots appear on screen at a rate of three a second. Already, Russell seems to have understood the secret of varying shot lengths in order to create a sense of rhythm, and the rapid cutting suddenly gives way to much longer shots of each of the three men and their empty coin box, lasting around eight seconds each. This sudden slackening of the pace gives one the immediate sense that ‘business’ has slowed, and that the men, who look around their surroundings, dismayed and uncertain, have realised that something out of the ordinary has happened. Not all of Peep Show is quite as confidently done as this sequence, however, and there are moments that are amateur in the pejorative sense of the word. There does not seem to have been the requisite money or film stock to reshoot when the second title card (chalked on to the pavement) pulls out of focus, and other lapses in technical standards are apparent. During the final chase, Russell breaks one of the cardinal rules of continuity editing, endlessly reiterated for amateurs, and has the action change screen direction half-­way through. Such minor quibbles aside, Peep Show was a remarkably promising debut. It had, however, apparently cost Russell £100, his entire savings.16 Hoping that something else would come of the film, he showed it to John Huntley, then chairman of the BFI’s Experimental Film Fund, who was encouraging but suggested that it needed a soundtrack. Russell remembers putting ‘a bit of Shostakovich and some dialogue onto tape’, and sending the film back again for consideration.17 Not hearing anything for months, Huntley eventually told him that the Fund could not afford to support him at that time. A pianola score, which perfectly suited the mock-­silent aesthetic, was later added to the picture track when Peep Show was picked up for distribution by Contemporary Films. The company had, by then, enjoyed great success with Amelia and the Angel, and detected a market for other early films by the young filmmaker. In the mean time, however, Russell set to work preparing a follow-­up to Peep Show. He eventually settled on Knights on Bikes, which he subtitled ‘a romance’, although the tone is ultimately comic. The origins of the idea were typically pragmatic. Russell had ‘access to a couple of penny-­farthing bicycles’ and a partial suit of armour and thought ‘it would be quite a natty notion to have a knight in armour riding around the countryside on a penny-­farthing bicycle doing valiant deeds’.18 From this rather thin premise, Russell came up with a short scenario in which the Knight (played by the filmmaker) would rescue a Princess from the clutches of an evil old man and his two henchmen. The climax would feature a joust between the Knight and the villain – on bicycles, rather than the more usual horses. In the end, however, only the opening sequences, in which the knight is introduced, eating his lunch-­time sandwich ­206

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through his visor, along with the subsequent kidnapping of the princess, were actually filmed. The reasons why the film remained uncompleted are simple. Russell still did not have his own equipment, and was reliant upon borrowing a camera from a man he knew named Rich Adrian, who the filmmaker remembers as ‘also [having] a bit of money to buy film’.19 Production was to take place at weekends, but when Russell came to collect his collaborator for the second planned shooting session, Adrian was seemingly nowhere to be found. The film had to be abandoned. Taking into account the three-­and-­a-­half minutes that were shot and edited, this hardly feels a great loss. Indeed, Knights on Bikes is something of a technical step backwards from Peep Show. The credits are again periodically out of focus and the cutting lacks the energy of the earlier film. Moreover, the multiple set-­ups of Peep Show are here replaced with a series of static extreme long shots, which are not satisfactorily varied, and provide coverage rather than any real sense of narration. Although he was disappointed that the film could not be finished, Russell learned a valuable lesson from the production experience. As he recalls, it showed him ‘how much you depend on other people when making a film by yourself, and a lot of people get very discouraged. Only about one amateur film in fifty ever gets finished really satisfactorily.’20 Similarly, he admitted that ‘One of the biggest mistakes [in making Peep Show] was in having a cast of half a dozen who had to be on the screen most of the time. If one failed to turn up, everything was ruined’.21 With this experience in mind, Russell ensured that his next film would be a more intimate affair, and refused to allow himself to become discouraged, realising that the problems he had faced were common ones. After the BFI had declined to support Peep Show, Russell remembers attending ‘a screening of some of the shorts it had financed. Most of them were unfinished or very short. One, I remember, involved a man on a bicycle riding down the road into an underground station, down on to the platform, then out of the exit. I thought; well, my first effort was better than that for a start.’22 Speaking to Gene D. Philips about his early films, Russell laments the number of would-­be artists and filmmakers who give up too soon due to initial setbacks or criticism, underlining a need for self-­belief: everyone is a potential artist . . . It is a pity when one, either through force of circumstance or because one is afraid of being ridiculed by others, won’t produce and expose to every one that little spark of something special which is unique to him alone. This is what I tried to do in my first steps in filmmaking.23 Indeed, it is possible to say, without danger of being hyperbolic, that the ‘little spark’ that is unique to the filmmaker’s work emerges in Amelia and the Angel, which deserves to be viewed as the first proper Ken Russell film. 207

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Producing Amelia and the Angel During the filming of Peep Show, Russell made the life-­changing decision to convert to Catholicism. With the zeal typical of a convert, he immediately set about trying to make a film celebrating his newly found faith. Looking for support, he contacted the Catholic Film Institute, and to his surprise, found that the organisation was, in effect, run by a single man, a Father Tony Evans. Less encouragingly, he also discovered that the Institute did not make films, but simply distributed them to Catholic film societies and schools. It transpired, however, that Evans shared Russell’s enthusiasm and he agreed to help make a film, if the aspiring director could come up with a suitable topic. Russell’s original idea was to develop a project about a day in the life of the priest, but Evans asked for something more potentially saleable.24 Inspired by a screening of Albert Lamorisse’s celebrated amateur film The Red Balloon (1957), Russell and his wife (and fellow convert) set out to write a religious parable about a child. Although the film is recalled as taking several months to develop, the story of Amelia and the Angel is remarkably simple.25 The nine-­year-­old Amelia is to play the part of an angel in her school play. Too excited to wait for the performance, she ignores her teacher’s warning that there are ‘no more wings to be found this side of heaven’ and takes her angel’s costume home to show her mother. However, her brother steals the wings and absconds with them to the park, where he proceeds to ruin them. Realising that she is in trouble, Amelia garners all her savings and embarks on an odyssey across London to find a replacement pair. She first tries the market, but the junk lady there only has beetle wings. She then encounters an animal trainer, Mr Mike Sniver, whose pet and partner, Rock the Wonder Dog, has a pair of angel wings; but they are too small for Amelia. About to give up hope, she sits by the statue of an angel in a park and sees a woman run past with a remarkable pair of wings. She gives chase and ends up in an old dark house. As she climbs the stairs, a headless woman seems to float past her (in reality a man holding a seamstress’s dummy). On the top floor, a man in flowing white robes and a beard is painting the woman with the wings. When Amelia asks if he has another pair, he climbs to the top of an enormous ladder. Momentarily disappearing from view, he descends with a pair of wings identical to the ones Amelia’s brother had destroyed. Overjoyed, she runs home with her new wings. Once the story was complete, Russell ‘scrimped and saved £300, and started looking around for a little girl’ to play the main protagonist.26 Eventually, Evans suggested Mercedes Quadros, the daughter of a neighbour, who also happened to be the Uruguayan Ambassador. She turned out to be perfect for the role. The Quadros family were also Catholics and proved to be very accommodating, allowing their daughter to be on constant call for nearly six months, ready to shoot whenever light and money permitted. While Russell may be slightly overstating the case when he argues that ‘all the accolades the film ever won were mostly down to her’, Quadros’s natural gifts as an actress ­208

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9.3  Prize-winning performance by Mercedes Quadros in the title role of Amelia and the Angel (1958).

undoubtedly contributed greatly to the film’s success.27 In his review of the film for Amateur Movie Maker, Tony Rose judged ‘it to be a thought out and sustained performance – something to wonder at’, and although Russell had chosen a subject that could ‘at any moment become fey or topple over into bathos’, the young actress is seen as able to keep mawkishness firmly at bay.28 Much of Peep Show had been shot within a set Russell constructed on the flat roof of his house, but Amelia is mostly filmed on location around London, in places, ‘from Vauxhall to Kensington to Crystal Palace’, that were specifically chosen to lend the film some ‘free’ production values.29 Also, since Russell had no lighting assistant, he elected to ‘work entirely by available light’, a risky strategy that paid dividends in several scenes, not least that with the little girl pavement artist, in which the sunlight streams down between the branches of a tree, and during the dénouement in the mysterious dark house.30 Despite the use of natural light and location photography, Amelia and the Angel is clearly at odds with the ambitions and aesthetics of social realism. Shots of Amelia walking down a busy London street with her angel wings clearly situate the film in the realm of the imagination, and with each encounter, from the almost surreal sight of the junk lady dancing in her beetle wings, to the joyful whimsy of the scenes with Mike and Rock, the ties with mainstream aesthetics are increasingly severed. Russell’s imagery also becomes progressively bold, and 209

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the final sequence, beginning with Amelia’s sighting of the ‘angel’ in the park, does not merely betray the influence of Cocteau; it bears specific comparison with his work. Indeed, this shot, the subsequent appearance of the ‘headless woman’ on the stairs and the entrance of the Christ-­like artist are all ‘superbly timed’ and give the impression that Amelia is inhabiting a world where ghosts might exist and miracles could happen.31 While Peep Show had been quite aggressively cut, Russell’s mature film style is notable for combining montage sequences with longer takes, in which the movement of the actors and the camera are carefully choreographed. One sees the germ of this style in Amelia. The opening sequence, for example, in which Amelia’s teacher rehearses the angels for the play, combines shots of over twenty seconds in length with ones lasting only twenty frames, and static set-­ ups provide contrast with sequences in which the camera seems to dance with the young girls. Indeed, in Amelia, Russell moves his camera with noticeable energy, and in a manner that seems poles apart from the ‘candid camerawork . . . of the Free Cinema school’.32 The sequence in which a dog chases after Amelia lasts a mere twenty seconds but features eleven shots, all but one of which are mobile, and is indicative of the style’s liberation from realist constraints. Another illustration is the scene in which Amelia’s brother takes the wings to the playground; Russell films the scene with childish abandon, introducing several ‘subjective’ shots (which the then thirty-­year-­old Russell must have filmed) of the brother running, sliding down the slide and playing on a swing. However, the most notable and charming example comes when Mike Sniver is reunited with Rock. Russell films the dog running towards his owner partly from Rock’s point of view, tracking with the camera very close to the ground (the camera was hand-­held and Russell was apparently being pushed in ‘a very uncomfortable bath-­chair’).33 The filmmaker even maintains this viewpoint as Rock jumps into Mike’s arms, having his actor pick up the camera after its rapid track and film himself with it. Like Peep Show, Amelia was shot without direct sound, although unlike the earlier work, it never approaches pastiche of silent film techniques. There are no inter-­titles. Russell did, however, want a music score and, having run out of money, he approached John Huntley at the BFI for a second time, seeking financial support. It was a testament to the recognised development of Russell’s technique since Peep Show that Huntley confirmed, in a letter dated 10 February 1958, that ‘the Experimental Film Fund will advance the sum of approximately £100 towards the completion of the sound track and it is possible that a further sum of about £35 can be provided to cover your existing commitments.’34 The soundtrack, made possible thanks to this backing, illustrates clearly how Russell puts a great deal of thought into the music he uses in all his films. His original concept was wildly ambitious and involved ‘mammoth fairground organs, a string quartet, a harpsichord, a lute, a pianola and a symphony orchestra’.35 Eventually, however, it ‘dawned on [him] that a certain continuity of style was essential’36 and he finally settled ­210

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on the idea of using melodies played on a ‘Polyphon’ and an ‘Ariston’, forerunners of the gramophone, which operated mechanically from perforated metal discs (the first of which appears in the film’s opening shot). The tinny, music-­box quality of the notes produced by such devices certainly adds to the fairy-­tale unreality of the film, and the scoring of the music is equally suggestive. However, for the climax, in which Amelia enters the mysterious house where she will finally acquire her wings, Russell made the decision to switch from the Polyphon to an arrangement of the 1730 Bach–Vivaldi Concerto for Four Harpsichords. While he has argued that this transition from one type of music to another involves ‘a bit of a jump’, it is, in fact, an inspired choice.37 The scenes in the house, as detailed above, are the most important in the film and the thin texture of the Polyphon music simply would not suffice to convey the necessary emphasis. Rather, music of more substance is needed to accentuate both the menace of the headless woman and the religious transcendence of the final images. The abrupt switch to a completely new sound underscores the importance of these scenes, and contributes to a definite sense of climax in the work. In addition to the music, the BFI’s support led to the recording of a voice­ over, intoned in the third person in BBC English, which, in the event, has proved to be one of the more criticised aspects of the film. For Rose, the voice­ over itself is not a problem, but he states that he ‘would have preferred the narrator to speak as Amelia – to give voice to her thoughts – rather than speak about her’.38 The journal Screen Education finds the commentary restrained, but notes ‘at least one case where we are told what we can see for ourselves (“The angel was made of stone”)’ recognising a redundancy often also derided in commentary within the amateur cine sector itself.39 The most damning critic is Russell himself, who wrote in Amateur Movie Maker that ‘Several people have told me there is too much commentary, and I think it a pity that there had to be one at all.’40 One can see his point. The images and the acting tell the story lucidly enough and the narration often feels unnecessary. For example, in the scene with Rock the Wonder Dog, one can easily see that Amelia catches sight of the dog’s wings and follows him into the station, with little need for a voiceover. The viewer can also ascertain that his owner, Mike, is worried by the way the dog is acting, and recognise the joy he displays upon finding his pet. The fact that Mike is not a very successful animal trainer has already been made obvious by their impoverished surroundings. Russell’s comments here are indicative of things to come; the filmmaker would always be far more comfortable telling stories with images rather than words. The BFI’s terms for giving Russell the completion grant were typical. The agreement stated ‘that the British Film Institute would arrange and operate distribution of the film, with a 75/25% division of the profits in our favour until the total outlay has been recovered, where-­upon the positions reverts to 25/75% in your favour’.41 While the financial aspects of this contract would prove problematic, the BFI’s patronage was undeniably beneficial in other 211

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9.4  Rock the Wonder Dog in Amelia and the Angel (1958).

ways. Most importantly, as the film would subsequently be listed in the BFI’s catalogue, there was a very good chance that Amelia would now be seen by audiences beyond Russell’s friends and family. Distribution and Reception of Amelia and the Angel Before one can assess the reception of Amelia and the Angel, it is first necessary to place the film within the context of amateur filmmaking in Britain at the end of the 1950s. On the one hand, this culture was thriving. Not only were there amateur film clubs and societies throughout the country, but as noted above, popular journals such as Amateur Cine World and Amateur Movie Maker organised high-­profile competitions, and from 1956 the former’s ‘Ten Best’ list of the previous year was screened at the National Film Theatre (NFT) in London. At the same time, such visibility generated unprecedented levels of critical reaction, not all of its positive. A vocal faction in British film culture, attached to journals including Films and Filming, argued persistently that cinema was best left to the professionals and for this faction, as one irate reader put it, ‘amateur’ was an unambiguously ‘dirty word’.42 Such contradictory developments marked a certain struggle around the ownership and identity of small-­gauge cinema that would persist well into the 1970s. It was in this heated atmosphere that Russell’s film was given its first major ­212

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screening at the NFT, on Sunday 11 May 1958, opening the second day of a weekend devoted to ‘New Films Sponsored by the Experimental Film Production Fund of the British Film Institute’. Sharing the bill with Amelia were Alain Tanner and Claude Gorretta’s documentary on urban leisure culture, Nice Time (1957); John Daborn’s pixilation film, Bride and Groom (1956), described as ‘a study using the technique developed by Norman McLaren, of using live actors with stop action’; and a film about Basil Spence’s designs for the new Coventry Cathedral, by amateur veteran Dudley Shaw Ashton.43 Elsewhere in the NFT’s programme were the final two Free Cinema screenings, which included early works by François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Roman Polanski, and Amateur Cine World’s Ten Best of 1957. The April issue of that journal devoted a full page to these screenings, declaring that amateur films were about to ‘achieve their most elaborate theatre showings yet’, and that ‘Amateurs everywhere have good reason to be gratified by this remarkable evidence of the mounting popularity of their hobby.’44 On the following page, an extended article by Stanley Reed, the Secretary of the Experimental Film Fund, openly celebrated its achievements and its support for both amateur and professional filmmakers alike. Reed writes that the board ‘glory in the fact’ that ‘nobody can really tell how much of some of the Experimental Committee’s productions is genuinely amateur and how much is owed to professional participation’, and states that ‘We at the British Film Institute seek every opportunity to bring [amateurs and professionals] together’, as professionals can learn from the ‘best amateurs’, just as amateurs can learn from professionals.45 Reed’s comments clearly fell on deaf ears in some quarters; in the July issue of Films and Filming the editorial staff took two separate opportunities to attack the programming of amateur films at the NFT, the Experimental Film Fund and amateur filmmaking in general. The first of these short pieces argues that amateur filmmaking is a solipsistic exercise and that: Of the fifteen films so far aided by the [Experimental Film Fund], few have been experimental . . . Most of these films represent little more than the fulfilment of an amateur’s desire to make a picture – and make it, if he can; partly at someone else’s expense.46 The second intervention is even more direct in its criticism. It notes that the screening of the Ten Best Amateur Films had ‘nothing much’ to offer, and that such competitions are ‘flattering these amateurs’ whose films ‘are fine for their families and friends, and may even interest some cine clubs, but . . . are unlikely to entertain or stimulate anybody else’.47 While Reed’s earlier article had, in fact, already addressed these issues, a direct rebuttal also came from no less a figure than Sir Michael Balcon, then Chairman of the Experimental Film Fund. In a letter printed in the September 1958 issue of Films and Filming, Balcon writes that, while the journal had 213

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found ‘little evidence of talent’ in the films, he insists that this ‘view is not shared by other critical opinion’,48 and offers a vindication of the Fund’s ­practices, noting that: Films backed by the committee have won awards in most of the major Film Festivals . . . Few critics, we believe, would agree with you that Together, Mama Don’t Allow, Coventry Cathedral, Indian Fantasy, Nice Time, Amelia and the Angel or Short Vision (all made incidentally by professionals or by young men or women who have since become ­professionals) are boring and lack talent.49 In response to the more specific charge that few of the committee’s films were genuinely experimental, Balcon conceded that ‘the word is perhaps difficult to define in this connection’ but reassures us that the committee: is confronted with a good many proposals for films of the most esoteric and, even to us, incomprehensible sort. By and large our policy has been to reject these ‘experiments’ (most of which were tried out in the twenties anyway) in favour of proposals for films which seem to have some intelligible meaning, and which show evidence of individual talent. If this policy has resulted in films which have some relevance to commercial production, we feel that is nothing to be ashamed of.50 Examining Balcon’s words, it becomes obvious where Russell and Amelia and the Angel fit into the Committee’s remit. The film is not overtly experimental in form or content. On the contrary, it offers a clear, intelligible meaning, very much in the manner Balcon imagines. More precisely, Russell’s film, to quote John Huntley, was regarded as ‘One of the most charming . . . to be seen for many years’ and seen to show both commercial potential and evidence of an individual talent and originality. Despite support from Balcon and Huntley, in an undated letter written to Balcon ‘in the hope that [he] might be able to help . . . or offer . . . some advice’,51 Russell was keen to correct the celebrated producer on one small, but crucial point. As the filmmaker wrote: I read your letter . . . in the current issue of Films and Filming with considerable interest. One of your statements is, however (unfortunately for me), not entirely correct. You list a number of films and follow on with ‘all made incidentally by professionals or by young men and women who have since become professionals’ . . . My film Amelia and the Angel is among those you mention but I alas am still a despised amateur. I want to make films professionally and should like to find a place in the film industry but without contact this seems to me at times to be an almost hopeless ambition.52 ­214

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Although its maker was still a ‘despised amateur’, and regardless of the high-­ profile debate about the place of amateur film in Britain, Amelia and the Angel was, by this time, well on its way to becoming a success with both ‘minority’ and mainstream audiences. As Film magazine put it in 1959, it was ‘probably the most popular film society short’ in distribution, and had by that time been ‘shown c­ omplete on television in Holland, France, Belgium and Eire’.53 Rather than handling the film through its own distribution division, the BFI had entrusted the distribution of Amelia and the Angel to Contemporary Films, a Soho-­based company. To help sell the film, Contemporary produced what amounts to a modest press pack. This four-­page document features images from the film, a plot summary and production notes, which declare the film’s ‘30 year old Writer and Director . . . a discovery in every sense of the word’.54 The final page, which is of particular interest, gives pride of place to part of a review of the film by Tony Rose, then editor of Amateur Movie Maker, in which he states that: So far as I am concerned, this is the film of the year. It seems a miracle that one man could have photographed it, and at the same time got such a lovely performance from the nine year-­old actress who plays the title role. If I could award ten ‘Oscars’ they would all go to Amelia and the Angel.55 Rose’s original three-­page review of the film had been almost as unqualified in its praise, and even went as far as to say that the film has restored the author’s faith in amateur cinema. Appropriately enough, later that year, Amateur Movie Maker did indeed name it their best film of 1958. Over the next few years, the film would be screened all over Britain, and the variety of institutions that booked it testifies to the film’s wide appeal. While the records of the main distributor, Contemporary Films, do not note how many people actually saw the film, they usefully reveal the places it was shown, and the kinds of audiences that would have seen it. The records from 1958 to 1965 show that Amelia was booked for screenings in private homes; countless primary and secondary schools; regional film societies; university film societies from Oxford to Hull; numerous churches, and at least two convents. It is also worth noting that several of these institutions rented the film more than once. Indeed, between September 1958 and September 1965, the Catholic Film Institute, clearly proud of its part in making the film, rented it no less than twenty times.56 While this last statistic seems to vindicate Russell’s own view of it as a Catholic film, it is also worth noting that non-­Catholic institutions such as the Glasgow Presbytery Films Committee, who were shown the film by Don Elliott of the Scottish Film Council in 1961, also clearly warmed to it.57 The BFI, however, were also keen to promote the film abroad. For instance, Huntley submitted the film to the Brussels Experimental Film Festival and it was subsequently shown on Belgian television, as well as in Germany, Italy and 215

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Australia. Huntley was also insistent that Contemporary Films, who had an office in New York, also pushed the film in America – a necessity, it seems, for amateur as well as commercial works. Indeed, as late as 1963, Huntley wrote to Russell expressing his concerns about having the film break the American market.58 Despite Huntley’s concerns, Amelia very quickly turned a profit both for the BFI and, eventually, for Russell himself. Amateur filmmaking could clearly be an expensive business. The dubbing and soundtrack for the film had cost £113, and an additional advance meant that Russell had taken around £150 in total from the Experimental Film Fund. However, by February of 1959, the film had been hired forty-­three times and already earned just under £130. The rentals for the rest of 1959 earned close to £145, of which Russell was due one-­quarter.59 Having put all of his savings into his films, he badly needed the money. This is made abundantly clear in several memos from Huntley to the BFI Accounts department, which ask for payment to be made quickly to the ‘desperate’ young director.60 Perhaps the most interesting of these memos compares Russell’s financial state to that of Karel Reisz, and reads: Please pay the following cheques to the film-­makers of Experimental Films: 1.  K Russell, [. . .] (Amelia and the Angel) £55:0:8 (This man is starving to death in Upper Norwood: please pay him first). 2.  Karel Reisz, [. . .] (Mama Don’t Allow) £41:7:3 (Not starving at the moment, but has a large family).61 Although the exact date on which the film went into profit is not known, a handwritten letter from Russell, dated 16 November 1960, confirms that he is already due 75% of the film’s profit, meaning that he paid off his debt to the Fund in less than two years.62 Collecting his share of the revenue would subsequently prove more difficult, however, and Russell had consistently to badger the BFI for his royalties. By Christmas 1972, during the making of Savage Messiah, Russell finally received a cheque for £940.87, three-­quarters of the film’s profits since his last payment in March 1964, worth around three times what he had originally spent on the film.63 Such an account underscores one of the potential ironies of amateur filmmaking. The amateur filmmaker, who, unlike the professional, generally works with his own money and equipment, is sometimes in the privileged position of owning his films. Therefore, he is often in the advantageous situation of being able to claim the lion’s share of the profits, should his film achieve any success. ­216

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This is an almost unthinkable situation on a professional film. Such an amateur work, pound for pound, may finally prove to be more profitable than one actually made for financial gain. However, the fact that Russell eventually made money from Amelia and the Angel should in no way compromise its status as an amateur film, originally made for the love of making it. Following Amelia and the Angel, Russell made one more amateur film, Lourdes (1958). This film, about the famous Catholic shrine, was another key work for Russell, being his first documentary, his first film in colour, and his first significant engagement with the work of a British composer (Russell secured permission to use Benjamin Britten’s recording of Prince of the Pagodas for £25).64 However, this rarely seen film has had none of the impact of Amelia. Moreover, it was the earlier film that allowed Russell to make the transition from amateur to professional, when, on the strength of Amelia, Huw Wheldon, the intellectually imposing head of Monitor, chose Russell to replace John Schlesinger, who was now at the final point of crossing over from the amateur sector, and embarking on a career in feature films. Russell would, of course, eventually follow him, with no less success. Conclusions A self-­professed believer in ‘seeing a person’s work before [he] saw them’,65 Wheldon remembers being shown Amelia by Norman Swallow, the Corporation’s Assistant Head of Films, and thinking that, despite showing: all the signs of having been shot on lavatory paper . . . [i]t was also romantic, eccentric and in many ways not at all my cup of tea, but whatever else it was, it was neither predictable nor cliché-­ridden, and so I thought I would see the author.66 Their first interview led to a commission to make a short film on John Betjeman, and the result, A Poet’s London (1959), would be Russell’s first professional film, marking the start of a five-­decade career directing for film and television. Russell’s own take on Amelia’s appeal to Wheldon is simple. He remembers that ‘A lot of people who were trying to get work on Monitor at the time made films about things like the barrow-­boys of Elephant and Castle,’ very much in the vein of Free Cinema. Amelia, however, was ‘such a change from anything like that and Huw was impressed by it because it was so unusual; he wasn’t expecting a film of that sort of quality. It got me into the BBC and launched me on my career.’67 For that reason alone, Amelia and the Angel will always be a pivotal film in the Russell canon. However, the film has taken on a significance beyond this and has become one of Russell’s most popular works. Russell argues that it is because the film tells ‘a nice story’.68 This is perhaps partly the case, but there is more to it than that. Amelia is also the source of the all-­too-­ often forgotten vein of lyricism and playfulness that runs through Russell’s 217

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work, and which, on the basis of this analysis, owes much to the filmmaker’s amateur origins. To paraphrase Stanley Reed’s defence of amateur filmmaking, Amelia is one of those rare amateur films from whose visual invention, energy and originality professional filmmakers could almost certainly learn. Amateurs too can turn to the film for inspiration. Not only does it demonstrate just how much can be achieved with remarkably few resources; with hindsight, one can also see Amelia’s dogged determination mirroring the unflappable spirit that Russell believes all aspiring filmmakers need. Notes   1. Ken Russell, Directing Film: From Pitch to Premiere (London: Batsford, 2000), p. 112.   2. Letter from Ken Russell to Sir Michael Balcon, British Film Institute Special Collections, Box N/28.   3. Brian Hoyle, ‘In defense of the amateur’, in Kevin J. Flannagan (ed.), Ken Russell: Re-­Viewing England’s Last Mannerist (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2009), pp. 40–1.   4. Ibid., p. 41.   5. G. D. Phillips, ‘The early films: Peep Show and Amelia and the Angel’, in Thomas R. Atkins (ed.), Ken Russell (New York: Monarch, 1976), p. 18.   6. Ken Russell, Director’s commentary for Salomé’s Last Dance, Geneon DVD, 1999.   7. Ken Russell, Fire Over England (London: Hutchinson, 1993), p. 81.   8. Ibid., p. 81.   9. Lindsay Anderson, ‘Every day except Christmas’, in Paul Ryan (ed.), Never Apologise (London: Plexus: 2004), p. 72. 10. Ken Russell, ‘Untitled Article’, Film, No. 19, 1959. Available at: http://www.iain fisher.com/russell/ken-­russell-­article-­early.html (accessed 23/02/2012). 11. Ibid. 12. Ken Russell, A British Picture: An Autobiography (London: Heinemann 1989), p. 15. 13. Joseph Lanza, Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and His Films (Chicago: Chicago Review, 2007), p. 30. 14. Anon., ‘VPR: Amelia and the Angel’, Screen Education, No. 23, 1964, p. 44. 15. John Baxter, Ken Russell: An Appalling Talent (London: Michael Joseph, 1973), p. 99. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., p. 100. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., pp. 100–1. 21. Ken Russell, ‘How I made Amelia and the Angel’, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 1, No. 8, 1958, p. 245. 22. John Baxter, An Appalling Talent, p. 99. 23. G. D. Phillips, ‘The early films’, pp. 17–18. 24. John Baxter, An Appalling Talent, p. 104. 25. Ken Russell ‘How I made Amelia and the Angel’, p. 245. For detail on the production of The Red Balloon, see Albert Lamorisse, ‘Boy Meets Balloon’, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1957, pp. 19–21. 26. John Baxter, An Appalling Talent, p. 105. 27. Ken Russell, Directing Film, p. 48.

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28. Tony Rose, ‘Amelia restores my faith’, Amateur Movie Maker, Vol. 1, No. 8, 1958, pp. 244–5. 29. Anon., ‘VPR: Amelia and the Angel’, p. 43. 30. Ken Russell, ‘How I made Amelia and the Angel’, p. 245. 31. Anon., ‘VPR: Amelia and the Angel’, p. 44. 32. Tony Rose, ‘Amelia restores my faith’, p. 244. 33. Ken Russell, ‘How I made Amelia and the Angel’, p. 245. 34. Letter from John Huntley to Ken Russell, 10 February 1958, British Film Institute Special Collections, Box N/28. 35. Ken Russell, ‘How I made Amelia and the Angel’, p. 245. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Tony Rose, ‘Amelia restores my faith’, p. 243. 39. Anon., ‘VPR: Amelia and the Angel’, p. 44. 40. Ken Russell, ‘How I made Amelia and the Angel’, p. 245. 41. Letter from John Huntley to Ken Russell, 10 February 1958, British Film Institute Special Collections, Box N/28. 42. P. H. Scott, ‘Dirty word’, Films and Filming, Vol. 4, No. 12, 1958, p. 33. 43. National Film Theatre Programme, 1958, p. 12. 44. Anon., ‘Ten Best triumph’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 21, No. 12, 1958, p. 1198. 45. Stanley Reed, ‘Opening a door to experiment’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 21, No. 12, 1958, pp. 199–201, 1240. 46. Anon., ‘The wrong way to experiment’, Films and Filming, Vol. 4, No. 9, 1958, p. 16. 47. D. Conrad, ‘The ten best? Oh, yeah’, Films and Filming, Vol. 4, No. 9, 1958, p. 31. 48. Michael Balcon, ‘Letter from Sir Michael Balcon’, Films and Filming, Vol. 4, No. 12, 1958, p. 3. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Letter from Ken Russell to Sir Michael Balcon, British Film Institute Special Collections, Box N/28. 52. Ibid. 53. Ken Russell, ‘Untitled article’, Film, No. 19, 1959. Available at: http://www.iainfisher.com/russell/ken-­russell-­article-­early.html (accessed 23 February 2012). 54. Amelia and the Angel pressbook, British Film Institute Special Collections, Box N/28. 55. Ibid. 56. British Film Institute Special Collections, Box N/28. 57. Letter from Don Elliott to John Huntley, 16 March 1961, British Film Institute Special Collections, Box N/28. 58. Letter from John Huntley to Ken Russell, 18 March 1963, British Film Institute Special Collections, Box N/28. 59. British Film Institute Special Collections, Box N/28. 60. Memo from John Huntley, British Film Institute Special Collections, Box N/28. 61. Ibid. 62. Letter from Ken Russell, 6 November 1960, British Film Institute Special Collections, Box N/28. 63. British Film Institute Special Collections, Box N/28. 64. John Baxter, An Appalling Talent, pp. 106–7. 65. Ibid., p. 118. 66. Ken Russell, A British Picture, pp. 17–20. 67. Phillip French, ‘Britain’s best film directors show some early promise’, The Observer, 26 September 2010, p. 14. 68. Ibid.

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Filmography Amelia and the Angel (Ken Russell, 1958), 16mm, 26 mins, black and white, sound. Knights on Bikes (Ken Russell, 1956), 16mm, 5 mins, black and white, silent. Unfinished. Lourdes (Ken Russell, 1958), 16mm, duration not known, black and white, sound. Peep Show (Ken Russell, 1956), 16mm, 16 mins, black and white, silent. Currently, only Amelia and the Angel is commercially available, as part of the BFI’s DVD of Russell’s The Devils. The film can also be consulted via the British Research Viewing Service, 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN. However, all three films are available online at the follow addresses: Amelia and the Angel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au24RVeQcE0&feature =related Knights on Bikes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCdpdqvkKs8 Peep Show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl-­c06E-­ctQ&feature=related

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10. THE NOCTURNAL AFFAIRS OF MR MILETIC´ : AUTHORSHIP, GENRE AND CINE-­AMATEURISM IN YUGOSLA VIA GREG DeCUIR, JR

This chapter examines the amateur film work of Oktavijan Miletic, a founding father of Croatian and Yugoslav cinema in the 1920s, who was also to play a key role in determining the broader shape and direction of film production in southeastern Europe, well into the 1970s. Particular attention is paid to the aesthetic qualities of Miletic’s amateur fiction films, which are often marked by play with genre and the pastiche of professional inter-­texts. Case studies illustrating such tendencies are drawn from two award-­winning amateur films directed by Miletic: Les Affaires du Consul Dorgen (The Affairs of Consul Dorgen, 1933) and Nocturno (1935). Beyond its concerns with personal aesthetics, the argument of this chapter is that an institutional history of amateur film and its cultures in Miletic’s region and beyond would be incomplete without a consideration of the contributions made by the filmmaker to the burgeoning mode of non-­professional filmmaking in the inter-­war period. Miletic helped to institutionalise amateur film culture in numerous ways. In 1928, he was a co-­founder of the cine section of the Zagreb Photo Club, which acted as a predecessor to the Zagreb Ciné-­club. He was also involved in many film festivals, both amateur and professional, across Europe and attended various Union Internationale du Cinéma d’Amateurs (UNICA) congresses and related film competitions. Such mobility underlines the cosmopolitan nature of amateur cine activity in this era, demonstrating that amateur film culture was alive and well in places other than Western Europe during the 1920s. Miletic’s own film production more particularly illustrates what can be described as an ‘artistic mode’ of amateur filmmaking flourishing at that time, which may be contrasted with more popular and domestic variants. Caught between a range of filmmaking worlds, Miletic also offers an 221

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interesting case study for the analysis and theorisation of the amateur’s ‘cross-­over’ passage to professional status, often a particular bone of contention within amateur circles. The question of whether the amateur cinéaste is a ‘latent’ professional aspirating to the professional, or a contented lover of filmic expression working only for personal satisfaction, has relevance in charting the separation between the two modes of working beyond their relative definition in simple financial terms. In this respect, the central question ‘what is amateur film?’ lies at the heart not only of this particular essay, but also of this edited collection as a whole. The Formative Years Oktavijan Miletic was born in 1902 in Zagreb, at that time part of the Austro-­ Hungarian Empire, and now located within modern Croatia. His father was Stjepan Miletic, a celebrated stage director, accomplished playwright and well-­known critic, who also worked as the reformist manager of the Croatian National Theatre. Young Miletic was therefore born into an artistic family – his sister Renata became a serious stage actress by the age of sixteen, playing in the early Croatian film Gricˇka Vještica (The Witch, 1920). As noted in a book-­length study written on the filmmaker published by the Croatian Kinoteka in the year 2000, ‘Miletic grew up in an encouraging atmosphere,’ in which ‘the home of his parents was a cultural meeting place of numerous actors and writers.’1 The famous nineteenth-­century actress Sarah Bernhardt, for example, was a guest of the household in 1899.2 Miletic’s first encounter with film production came in 1917, when a company of theatrical actors shot a film directed by Arnošt Grund in the house; it was entitled Brcko u Zagrebu (Brcko in Zagreb), and has been identified as the first fiction film shot in Croatia. We can assume that Miletic fell in love with the filmmaking process as an impressionable teenager, and only a few years later, in 1919, left home for Vienna without his family’s knowledge, to pursue this fascination. The moment was one of political change, following Croatia’s declaration of independence from the Empire and the formation of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, constituted in 1918, before becoming the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. Utilising his father’s name and contacts, he was apparently able to obtain voluntary work assisting the Austrian director Hans Homma (an accomplished actor and director from the Burgtheater in Vienna) in shooting the film Die Hölle von Barballo (The Hell of Barballo).3 However, the possibility exists that the legend of Miletic leaving home at such a young age may be somewhat exaggerated, as Homma’s film is actually dated 1923. Nevertheless, there would have been ample opportunities for Miletic to continue learning the craft of filmmaking by assisting professionals in his hometown, perhaps with the Austrian director Heinz Hanus, who made the film Kovac Raspela (Kovac Crucified, 1919) in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes with the domestic company, Jugoslavija Film. Still only an ­222

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adolescent at this stage, Miletic could not remain a transnational film worker for long, and was forced by his family to return to Zagreb to complete school. He would soon however take his filmmaking into his own hands. In 1926, Miletic bought a 9.5mm Pathé-­Baby camera that was part of the amateur film system that the company had introduced in 1922; 9.5mm film was originally designed by Pathé to distribute copies of standard 35mm commercial films through the expanding home cinema market. After a camera was produced to work with 9.5mm film, however, the system enjoyed widespread acceptance amongst amateur filmmakers, because of its low cost.4 As such, and because of its relative ease of use, the development of 9.5mm film equipment can be seen to have stimulated the spread of an extensive amateur filmmaking community in Europe. This moment inaugurated the first period of Miletic’s amateur career, during which he produced various film exercises, that usually included personal friends playing roles in stories situated in either the contemporary world or more imaginary settings. Miletic’s early amateur films were normally shot in his family home. This reliance on accessible material resources can be regarded as a key determinant of a recognisably amateur aesthetic, which is normally dependent on economic considerations rather than considerations of quality or even style. We can consider immediacy to be another characteristic of the amateur aesthetic, as films that are produced cheaply tend to be produced quickly. One of the earliest films Miletic made was Smrt Maharadže od Daj mi Mira (The Death of the ‘Leave-­me-­be’ Maharajah, 1927), which was a Sherlock Holmes parody whose story is set in India. This short was conceived and improvised immediately after Miletic and his friends saw a detective film at the cinema. The film is notable also because it ignited the filmmaker’s continuing interest in the crime genre, and initiated his repeated use of detectives as central characters in his films. Miletic also made romantic comedies such as the film Mr. Crockefeller (1927–31), about an ugly millionaire chasing after a pretty young girl. We first begin to see Miletic experimenting with a melding of genres at this formative stage, as well as moving across multiple genres in the many films he made. In 1930, for example, Miletic put together an odd-­sounding film called Kralj Tohu Wabohu je Gladan (King Tohu Wabohu is Hungry), described as a ‘rustic comedy about cannibals’, while the subtitle of the film sarcastically announces a ‘cannibalistic drama about hunger and love’.5 The plot concerns a tropical king who sends his servants out to find him food – they bring him back two young lovers as a meal. There is a suspenseful chase at the climax, the girl being rescued by her boyfriend just before she is eaten by the cannibals. Kralj Tohu Wabohu je Gladan thus displays Miletic’s freeform creativity and playful sense of humour, which will become characteristics of his later films. One of Miletic’s most remarkable early works was Ah, Bješe Samo San (Oh, It Was Only a Dream, 1930), described in the opening credits as a ‘film novel’. This short concerns a young man who confuses his dreams with 223

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10.1  Miletic standing next to a professional-grade film camera as the film industry is re-organised in post-war socialist Yugoslavia.

his waking hours. The main actor is Šime Marov, a young law student who would go on to star in many of the amateur films made by Miletic. Ah, Bješe Samo San is characterised by its poetic expression, and is also unique within the overall output in terms of its use of drawings and the introduction of an animated conclusion. The historical importance of this picture lies in the fact that it was the first of Miletic’s efforts to be screened to the public at large, winning ­international acclaim at the Berlin Photokino-­Verlag film contest in 1932. In 1934, Miletic made Faust, a retelling of the classical German legend. As in his earlier film based on Sherlock Holmes, Miletic here utilised adaptation and appropriation as strategies through which to develop his own style. Faust became another very successful film for Miletic, winning second prize at the All-­Slavs Film Competition held in Zagreb. This competition was organised by ­224

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the cine section of the Zagreb Photo Club, in collaboration with the Prague Pathé-­club, and the Polish Society of Photography in Warsaw. In 1935, Faust won a prize at the International Amateur Film Festival in Barcelona, the first film competition run by the newly established UNICA organisation. Such exposure ensured that Miletic quickly made a name for himself on the festival circuit as something of a ‘master amateur’.6 Though in subsequent decades he would go on to an extensive career in professional filmmaking, producing landmark films within the history of Yugoslav cinema and collaborating with some of the best film artists of his day (such as the iconoclastic filmmaker Dušan Makavejev), Miletic’s lasting reputation was forged as an amateur (as which he won the majority of his awards), and it is as an amateur that he brought international acclaim to an emergent Yugoslav film culture. Placing Miletic In his article ‘Theorizing amateur cinema: limitations and possibilities’, Ryan Shand argues that ‘most amateur filmmakers involved in cine-­club production occupied an ambiguous position between public and domestic exhibition strategies; they were not making films for their own private use, nor were they seeking to engage with an avant-­garde subculture.’7 This positioning is seemingly unambiguous for Miletic, who seems to have relished such liminality, moving decisively from a domestic approach to an external ‘master amateur’ mode that was very much engaged in a festival culture, which itself shared multiple spaces with avant-­garde sub-­culture. In retrospect, it may appear that this shift was a step towards eventual professional engagement and status for Miletic, though the question that remains and deserves further theorising is whether most amateurs yearn (either knowingly or unknowingly) to matriculate to such a position. Pierre Bourdieu offers the thought that members of photo clubs ‘seek to ennoble themselves culturally . . . and to find within the disciplines of the sect that body of technical and aesthetic rules of which they deprived themselves when they rejected as vulgar the rules that govern popular practice.’8 This also holds true for cine clubs, many of which evolved from within photo clubs, where the logical end result of this supposed ennobling is a similar desire to break free of a vulgar amateurism for a more sacred craftsmanship. The ambiguity surrounding the amateur filmmaker indexes a contradiction addressed in the work of Patricia Zimmermann, who writes that ‘Amateur film occupies one of the central contradictions of communications in the twentieth century: on the one hand, domination and consumption; on the other, resistance and hope.’9 Zimmermann quite correctly sees emancipatory potential in a form that she feels has been marginalised and therefore robbed of its potential for political disruption. Cine-­amateurism was certainly an emancipatory practice in socialist Yugoslavia, free from the confines of dogmatic ideological interference, though perhaps marginalised all the same, 225

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10.2  Miletic (right) at the crossroads of his amateur and professional career, pictured on the eve of the Second World War in Yugoslavia.

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if not entirely suppressed. The same is evidently the case in socialist Poland, which makes for a good comparative analysis with Yugoslavia because of the historical ties between the countries in the arena of amateur filmmaking, and the institutionalised nature of their various cine clubs, which emerged were transformed into socialist republics. In the case of socialist Yugoslavia, cine clubs actually engendered political disruption, as the socially critical film movement derisively tagged as the ‘Black Wave’ grew directly from the liberated spaces of the amateur film.10 Amateur film can certainly seem to hold the potential to become wholly politicised when we consider essays such as ‘For an Imperfect Cinema’ by the Cuban critic and cinéaste Julio García Espinosa, which opens with a statement that ‘perfect cinema – technically and artistically masterful – is almost always reactionary cinema.’11 In this respect, one can think of amateur cinema, as described earlier, as often a vulgar cinema, and thus as potentially radical in relation to a more polished professional cinema. Espinosa sees imperfect cinema as taking a stance against the hegemonic professional cinema of dominant cultures, and dreams of a future utopia where the means of production will be in the hands of the masses. He feels that the future will lie with folk art, ‘but then there will be no need to call it that, because nobody and nothing will any longer be able to again paralyse the creative spirit of the people’.12 Such idealistic yearning seem to come rather late, however, and take little account of amateur cinema as already broadly construed; as we can see, it flourished much earlier than the appearance of Espinosa’s political screed in 1979 (suggesting that the emergence of amateur cinema in Cuba would be a subject worth investigating in more detail). Espinosa seems to envisage the practice of amateur cinema as an act of ‘social justice’, which is achieved by the realisation of ‘the possibility for everyone to make films’.13 Read in this manner, the practice of amateur cinema, as an ‘imperfect’ and non-­industrial cinema, is a de facto political act that can take its place in the revolutionary struggle – though it was certainly not promoted in this way in either socialist Yugoslavia or Poland, precisely because of cinema’s powerful ideological potential. Other aspects of the essay seem pertinent to an analysis of Miletic and his contexts; Espinosa, for example, ultimately defines his imperfect cinema as ‘the opposite of a cinema principally dedicated to celebrating results, the opposite of a self-­sufficient and contemplative cinema, the opposite of a cinema which “beautifully illustrates”’.14 Amateur cinema in the artistic mode, however, often aspires to dominant studio principles and the ethics and aesthetics of professional cinema, and frequently seeks precisely to ‘beautifully illustrate’. If it is imperfect, it is so naturally, without affect. This would place its aesthetic at odds with Espinosa’s forced imperfection, which can then be seen, ironically, as that of an unnatural work of art – ironically, the same type of art that he sought to denunciate. Espinosa also writes that imperfect cinema ‘rejects exhibitionism’, which again puts it at odds with amateur cinema that is designed to be shown – an amateur artistic cinema. Even domestic amateur cinema is made 227

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to be looked at – by a limited audience, granted – and is no less narcissistic than more self-­conscious artistic modes. In the preface to her book Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film, Patricia Zimmermann states, ‘To study amateur film means detouring from the analysis of textuality into the power relations of discursive contexts, a much less-­finite pursuit.’15 Such an emphasis perhaps implies however that we differentiate amateur cinema in its two dominant and aforementioned modes: the domestic and the artistic. Zimmermann’s book is focused on the former at the expense of the latter, and the study of discursive contexts predominates there. Textual analysis would none the less be a chief concern in studying the artistic amateur film, since much cine club production is, by default, artistic production, which actively demands aesthetic consideration and may even be produced for that purpose. Power relations also, of course, still come into play through investigations of cine club culture, in examining the status of the individual versus the collective in these settings, not to mention the surrounding political environment of institutionalised cine clubs in Yugoslavia and nearby countries in its region. Miletic clearly demands scrutiny in aesthetic and textual terms. As noted in a key volume devoted to his filmmaking, ‘Amateurs often made family movies, which Miletic abhorred.’16 His propensity for parody and experimental filmmaking marks him rather as something of an ambitious amateur, or perhaps a dilettante, in the more enlightened sense of the term. In writing about the situation of socialist Poland’s cine clubs in The Significance of Grass-­roots Film Making, Wieslaw Stradomski highlights ‘a compensatory function in amateur film’, which can be read as a reaction against ‘routine, cheap commercial productions where bad taste rules’.17 The artistic amateur implicitly believes in the power of his art; as Espinosa would say, the one thing he will not endanger is the status of his work as art, and we can venture to say that he tries to express himself in a manner that may compensate for what he finds to be a lack of quality or imagination in commercial cinema. Judging from his strong and diverse creative leanings, particularly in his propensity for parody that carries a critical edge with it, Miletic was apparently no exception to Espinosa’s rule. In his book Photography: A Middle-­brow Art, Pierre Bourdieu suggests that the artistic practice of photography, as opposed to its popular use, is most common among single middle-­class men.18 Malte Hagener, in his book Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-­Garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919–1939, argues idea that ‘The ciné-­clubs on the whole remained high-­brow and elitist.’19 With these perspectives in mind, it could be deduced that club practices are, more often than not, ‘artistic’, while domestic practices do not necessarily aspire to higher exhibition aims – and that perhaps this divergence has social ramifications. The members of the Zagreb Photo Club were certainly middle-­ or upper-­class citizens, who could afford the pastime of experimenting with relatively costly camera equipment, a particular sub-­set of those who could afford the freedom of a pastime at ­228

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all. Though, as demonstrated by contributions elsewhere in this volume, the production of artistic films (or fiction films) was not limited to club contexts and is not wholly dissociable from domestic or more working-­class settings, the artistic ambitions of the club were definitely marked, and shaped Miletic’s work in many ways. In the late 1920s, Miletic joined the Zagreb Photo Club, where he would have met and begun working with a dentist by the name of Dr Maksimilijan Paspa, then president of the club and also a budding cine enthusiast. This passage from a domestic (internal) phase to a collaborative (and external) mode of filmmaking can be read as pre-­meditated, and therefore has implications for the problem of situational ambivalence as posed by Shand. The organisation was a well-­established one; the Zagreb Photo Club had originally been incarnated as the Zagreb Amateur Photo Club in 1892. Dr Paspa had founded a cine section within that club in 1928, with Miletic effectively acting as a co-­founder. From this moment on, the two men became very active on the amateur film scene, and for the initial four years of the existence of the cine section, they directed all of the fifteen films that were produced. This association, to all intents and purposes, marked the beginning of the second phase of Miletic’s amateur career. During these years of activity, Miletic tended to produce fiction films while Paspa, for the most part, concentrated on documentaries. Both of them wrote, directed, shot and edited their own films. As Shand writes, ‘Despite the differences between the approaches to amateur cinema from domestic and oppositional perspectives, they share the recognition that both home movies and the amateur avant-­garde are significantly individualist practices.’20 Though the case of Ace Movies, discussed elsewhere in this volume, illustrates the existence of clubs that functioned very much within the tradition of the studio system, in Yugoslavia (under both the royalist and socialist regimes) cine clubs more often served as showcases for individual talent rather than as co-ordinators of group efforts. The contrast suggests an area for further investigation in researching amateur film practice, and considering the ­respective positions of the individual and the collective within cine club culture. Shand’s unpublished doctoral thesis, Amateur Cinema: History, Theory, and Genre (1930–80), delivers an excellent overview of this mode of film production; its perspectives are however largely defined by a focus on Scotland and its particular context. The work’s findings, though revelatory, cannot necessarily be extrapolated and used to serve other national settings, as can be noted in the unique cases of ciné-­amateurism in Yugoslavia and Poland. Shand writes, for example, that ‘amateur film culture has long favored non-­ fiction over fiction.’21 Perhaps in the domestic mode that is the case, but it is now apparent that amateur cinema may be considered in two broad trends, which we can perhaps label the ‘domestic’ (family films, home films) and the ‘artistic’ (club films, festival films). The amateur film culture that Miletic practised was heavily weighted towards the fictional, while cine club practices in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (and later in the Socialist Republic 229

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of Yugoslavia) were equally at home in both fiction and non-­fiction formats from the beginning. Of those fifteen films that were produced in the first four years of the Zagreb Photo Club cine section, six were fictional projects while nine were described as documentary.22 In the year before he co-­founded the cine section, Miletic produced nine fiction films and three documentaries. Furthermore, when the Belgrade Cinephile Club was formed in 1924, in the neighbouring republic of Serbia within the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, their initial effort was a fictional film by Boško Tokin and Dragan Aleksic, called Budi Bog s nama, ili Kacˇaci u Topcˇideru (God be with Us, or Albanian Outlaws in Topcˇider Park, 1924). When the Yugoslav Film Society was formed in Belgrade in 1932, their debut production was a fiction film called Avanture Doktora Gagic´a (The Adventure of Doctor Gagic´, 1932), directed by Aleksandar Cerepov. The amateur community in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia therefore had a very strong tradition in fiction film production, though it must be said that the ‘domestic’ strand of amateur filmmaking in the country has not yet been properly studied. Shand also writes, ‘The amateur art cinema, while it had its devotees, was not especially popular amongst many amateur filmmakers.’23 This was not the case in Yugoslavia (nor Poland with its hundreds of cine clubs), though in its particular national context, cine-­amateurism was increasingly seen as a stepping stone towards professional industry work. This is perhaps also in part due to a strong tradition of institutionalising cine club culture in Yugoslavia, which often walked hand in hand with various industries – not just that of the cinema.24 This also goes for Poland, as documented on the website ‘Enthusiasts archive’, where cine clubs were often located within factories, presenting a tantalising case study through which to explore intersections between industrialisation, economics, politics, labour and amateur artistry in a socialist context.25 Shand notes that there is what he calls a ‘wider tension within amateur film culture: the desire to make a film that is technically accomplished is frequently undermined by poor execution of certain scenes.’26 This generality, or tension, seems not to be apparent in the amateur film work of Miletic – and the numerous national and international awards he won perhaps bear out such an assertion. As suggested in the volume dedicated to him, ‘Miletic was an amateur only where financial means were concerned, which he knew how to hide thanks to his skills.’27 Miletic worked at a high, confident level and his fluent use of trick photography and other processes, along with his apparent ease in melding and moving between various genres, often located his cine-­ amateurism at levels above those which even some professional cinéastes were able to accomplish in Yugoslavia during the same era. Near the conclusion of his journal article ‘Theorizing amateur cinema’, Shand states, ‘The aesthetic history of amateur cinema is now waiting to be written.’28 With that goal in mind, we can now turn to a close formal analysis of the amateur films of Oktavijan Miletic. ­230

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Nocturnal Affairs and Other Fictions Les Affaires du Consul Dorgen was made by Miletic in 1933, its origins perhaps somewhat obscured by its French title. It is interesting to note that, on numerous occasions, Miletic made such use of foreign languages in his films, such as the German titles used in the film Nocturno (1935), which will be analysed subsequently. In the case of Les Affaires du Consul Dorgen, titling the film in French may have been a result of the fact that the film was sent to the Third International Amateur Film Competition in Paris, as a competition entry from the cine section of the Zagreb Photo Club. Miletic shot the film in the 9.5mm small-­gauge format characteristic of much amateur cinema of the time, working consciously in the genre of the psychological thriller, popular across the continent in mainstream cinemas. The story concerns a seducer of women and mass murderer named Consul Dorgen (played by Ivan Alpi-­Rauch), who is hunted down by a Detective Larsen (Šime Marov). Dorgen has been taking out life insurance policies on women and then hypnotising them into committing suicide. Detective Larsen is pulled into the case because his sister is one of Dorgen’s victims, while Dorgen’s own niece, Maya, becomes his unlikely accomplice. This film demonstrates the further development of a genre hybridity that often marked the work of Miletic. In this context, the tendency can be seen as part of the compensatory nature of amateur film involving a critique of commercial cinema, and of a search for a form that can speak to the often-­ contradictory desires of the cine enthusiast, caught between attachment to a vulgar or imperfect aesthetic and ambitions towards a sacred one. Hybridising frequently marks a disruption of traditional norms, but in the case of Miletic, this incorporates no coincident political resistance. The subtitle of Les Affaires du Consul Dorgen simply describes it as a ‘criminal drama in two acts’, although there is also a supernatural, horrific element to the film, Consul Dorgen being portrayed as a monster of sorts with the uncanny power to control minds through vision and the use of his eyes. The genre pastiche on display in this film and others by Miletic defines his work as modernist and progressive for this particular era. This elision of boundaries also characterises the wider career of Miletic, and suggests an ease in moving from project to project while utilising a diverse range of expressive modes. Consul Dorgen opens with the production company logo for ‘Oktavian Film’. Though, during this amateur phase of his career he was a member of the Zagreb Photo Club and its cine section, Miletic effectively worked as his own producer and did not credit the club in his works. It is probable that he received no material support from the club in producing his films, but rather ideological encouragement and also distribution assistance in sending his films out for exhibition in festivals both at home and abroad. The opening images of the film are close-­ups of spinning car wheels, inter-­ cut with the nervous, clasped hands of Detective Larsen. This brief syncopated 231

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montage sets the pattern for what becomes a very expressive film in terms of editing, also foreshadowing other uses of rapid inter-­cutting, such as those introduced when Dorgen initiates his psychic attacks on his various victims. The attacks are visualised via close-­ups of his piercing eyes, alternated with images of his victims. It can be said that eyes are a structuring motif of the film, and in Les Affaires du Consul Dorgen Miletic creates multiple layers of thematic depth through his careful orchestration of gazes. When Larsen stumbles upon one of Dorgen’s latest victims, with her dying breath she mumbles that ‘the eyes, the eyes’ forced her to take her own life. Dorgen is symbolised by his powerful eyes and the monocle that he wears in one of them (as well as the cane he uses to support himself). When his niece Maya arrives to visit him, she first sneaks up behind him and covers his eyes in a joking manner, which is a subtle play on the fact that she will be the one that ultimately evades his powerful spell and also the one who will kill him. Miletic often uses heavy expressionism in his cinematography. This can be exemplified in a scene in which Larsen sneaks into the office Dorgen uses as a front, in order to find evidence of malfeasance. He cloaks himself in shadow as he creeps into the room, and in this brief scene it feels as if we have entered the world of film noir with its many detectives sliding through the darkness, brandishing guns and following the trails of cold-­blooded killers. Miletic was definitely ahead of his time in this sense, as both this film, and the later Nocturno, prefigure the world of noir that would materialise in American cinema a decade later.29 As Shand states in his article, ‘Amateur films made according to the cine-­club model can provide examples of an authorship that has more in common with the Hollywood studio system than it does with avant-­garde film or the home movie,’ and Miletic frequently illustrates this proposition extremely well.30 Here Shand’s previously stated ambiguity characterising the amateur mode resurfaces, as, even though this statement is to a large extent correct, many cine clubs in Yugoslavia and also in Poland made no efforts to suppress individual authorship, and often produced films that were more in line with an avant-­garde aesthetic, despite their factory methods and perhaps limited financial means. Of course, this slippage had political motivations in socialist contexts, as avant-­garde cinema was considered too abstract to sustain a cogent oppositional critique, and therefore it could be encouraged as a ‘radical’ liberated practice that was safe for the dominant order (if this avant-­garde practice would not be attacked as bourgeois for similar reasons of political expediency). Furthermore, when one speaks of the classical Hollywood studio system, one often recognises certain house styles. As elsewhere, Yugoslavian cine clubs tended to be heterogeneous in their output, although particular clubs developed their own stylistic ‘signatures’ and recognisable visual ­consistencies across films. The climax and conclusion of Consul Dorgen are unique, in the sense that Miletic seemed to be very comfortable evading genre tropes and breaking with ­232

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clichés and conventions. Just when Larsen thinks he has Dorgen right where he wants him, in the act of assaulting his latest victim, and holds a gun on him, he is overcome by two of Dorgen’s henchmen and quickly finds himself their prisoner. Dorgen begins a psychic attack on Larsen and manipulates him into writing a suicide note, also putting his own gun into his hand in an attempt to force him to shoot himself. At this moment, the masculine hero of the film finds himself helpless and in extreme danger. Just in the nick of time, Maya appears with a gun and shoots Dorgen in the head, instantly killing him and breaking his spell on Larsen. Maya appears as an avenging angel, even wearing a trench coat that associates her with the clothes of a detective. She has usurped Larsen’s (traditional patriarchal) role in the narrative, functioning not as the subject of a murderous and controlling gaze but rather as a saviour, an active agent. Larsen is the one that actually finds himself the target of the male gaze in this climax, and the sexualised shifts and reversals in this sequence lend themselves to a more complex reading of the signifiers at play within Miletic’s film. Consul Dorgen won the second prize at the aforementioned Paris festival. Of particular note is the fact that, in this iteration of the festival, the pioneering inventor of the cinematograph, Louis Lumière, served as jury president. This has often been noted as a point of immense pride in the domestic literature detailing the career of Miletic. However, Miletic would enjoy much more success and acclaim, both internationally and domestically, with his film Nocturno. Nocturno was produced in 1935 and is described in its credits as an ‘Oktavian Film’. Again, the star was Šime Marov, Miletic’s leading player in numerous productions. On this occasion, Marov plays P. Cornelius, a travelling salesman with an appetite for detective novels and crime thrillers. One night, he happens upon a strange house and believes himself to be caught up in one of the horrific tales of terror that he so admires. Nocturno makes use of German titles, though there is no evidence that the film screened at any German festivals. The use of the German language is probably a hangover from the dominant culture that ruled over Miletic’s home country, while it was within the sphere of influence of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire. Again, the opening credits announce Miletic’s production as a ‘film novel’ and literature can be thought of as the springboard for the film’s plot and characterisation. We are introduced to Cornelius as he eagerly devours a novel, with numerous other pieces of pulp fiction strewn about on the table in front of him. The titles of these crime novels, with pictures of guns and detectives decorating their covers, are written in both German and French. This content seems to create an inter-­textual reference to the film Les Affaires du Consul Dorgen, as well as other detective thrillers made by Miletic. In his fantasies, Cornelius probably fancies himself a sleuth, similar to the character of Detective Larsen in the earlier film. In fact, during this opening segment, Cornelius begins to let his imagination run wild as he reads, and we see him recreating various scenes from these 233

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10.3  One of the earliest awards won by Miletic during his stellar amateur filmmaking phase, incorporating the signature of jury president Louis Lumière.

books in his mind, inserting himself into the roles of some of the fictional characters. Miletic visualises this dream sequence in a furious montage of images that details murders and other crimes, all rendered in Expressionist-­ style chiaroscuro patterns of light and shadow.31 As alluded to in the title of the film, the line between dreams and waking hours is blurred. These altered states of consciousness refer back to Consul Dorgen and its use of hypnosis, in addition to evoking Miletic’s first amateur success on the international circuit, the film Ah, Bješe Samo San (1930). The detective mystery/thriller genre is utilised here, as often in the work of Miletic, as a site for hybridisation with other generic modes of expression. Nocturno also takes the form of a horror film. Cornelius journeys by car through a rainy night, suffers a mechanical breakdown, and finds himself at a mysterious house straight out of a haunted mansion feature. Again, this melding of the two genres prefigures that which characterised the classic film noir, as its visual pattern was descended not only from German expressionism, but also from its American forerunners, especially Universal Studios’ horror film cycle of the 1930s. In Miletic’s film, Cornelius knocks on the door and an evil-­looking caretaker opens it, bathed in unnatural shadows from the direct light source of the gas lamp in his hands below. Cornelius offers to pay for a room for the night and the caretaker accepts, leading him up the dark stairs ­234

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to his bed. While walking up the stairs, Cornelius sees another man sitting in front of a fire, also bathed in exaggerated shadows. They look at each other and he recognises the face of one of the characters he imagined from his novels, which makes the already nervous Cornelius even more frightened. When he enters his room, Cornelius begins seeing (or imagining) apparitions and hearing strange noises from downstairs. Not sure if this is a dream or a waking nightmare, he sneaks his way down the stairs and overhears the caretaker talking with the other man. They discuss how they need to bury a body in the morning, and Cornelius, with his overactive imagination, immediately presumes himself to be the unlucky corpse. He rushes upstairs and escapes through the bedroom window into the dark night. However, the next day, when he leads a policeman to what he believes is the scene of a crime, they see the two men burying a dog instead of a human being. Cornelius is left feeling embarrassed and the film ends on his look of shame. Nocturno features a less elaborate narrative than Consul Dorgen and its editing scheme is much simpler and more straightforward. This film also sees Miletic experimenting with exaggerated lighting effects, and can be regarded as something of a primer for his future career as a professional cinematographer. Nocturno was the final film that Miletic shot in the 9.5mm format, which means that, to all intents and purposes, this was his last amateur film and it serves as a closing statement for this particular stage of his career. Miletic would move into the circles of professional filmmaking from this point on, shooting film reports for foreign producers, and also the occasional short fiction film. One example of these professional short subjects is the romantic comedy film Šešir (The Hat, 1936), which was produced by Zora Film on 35mm and was also Miletic’s first sound picture. Nocturno was a resounding success for Miletic, winning first prize at the 1935 All-­Slavs Film Competition in Zagreb, the same year in which Zagreb Ciné-­amateur Club was founded, with Dr Maksimilijan Paspa elected as its first president and Miletic as first vice-­president. By 1936, Nocturno was in competition at the Venice Biennale in the Fourth International Review of Film Art, a gathering that would eventually transform itself into the venerable Venice Film Festival. Miletic won a silver medal for his picture, which amounted to a de facto best short film award, and also a best amateur film award. The president of the jury that year was Giuseppe Volpi, founder of the festival and president of the Biennale. After World War Two and the founding of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, an inaugural Amateur Film Festival was held in Zagreb in 1954. Nocturno ostensibly won the award for best film at the festival – almost twenty years after it was produced, although clearly this was in recognition of Miletic’s  longstanding importance to the history of amateur filmmaking in the country. Miletic also won a golden plaque at the same festival as a distinguished veteran of amateur film, and later that year, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary celebrations to mark the beginning of the (Socialist) 235

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10.4  Perhaps the earliest and most important international prize won by any Yugoslav filmmaker, at the oldest and longest-running film festival in the world.

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Yugoslav film industry, Miletic was given a diploma for active work in Yugoslav cinema, and a silver plaque for his work in advancing domestic film. In 1965, at the twentieth anniversary celebrations of Yugoslav film, Nocturno was awarded a golden plaque, identifying its status as a successful work of domestic cinema. The top functionaries of the Yugoslav film industry had plainly not forgotten about Miletic, and still considered his amateur films to be on a par with the greatest cinematic achievements that the country had ever produced. This expresses, perhaps, the particular importance of amateur film within the history of Yugoslav cinema, as an artistic model to be followed by its professional counterparts alike. In 1968, Miletic was honoured with the Vladimir Nazor Award for lifetime achievement in Yugoslav cinema, the first recipient of the prize, given by the Croatian Ministry of Culture for excellence in the arts. By this point, he had been making films for almost fifty years, while collaborating with several generations of Yugoslav film artists. As described in the announcement of the award, though, he was celebrated as the first Yugoslav film artist to achieve worldwide success and, as such, a founding father of a national film history.32 This lasting legacy rests, in fact, largely on the strength of his amateur canon, a quite remarkable achievement and one that arguably makes Miletic rather unique among his peers in cine club networks worldwide. As a key factor in the work of legitimising amateur film in Yugoslavia, Miletic therefore represents an indispensable resource more internationally for those aiming to codify this area of academic inquiry, and concerned to locate the place of amateur practice within more comprehensive accounts of national cinema history. Miletic directed his final film in 1978 and died in 1987, though his memory has lived on to the present day. The Croatian Association of Film Critics gives an annual award as part of the Days of Croatian Film festival. This award is named in his honour: the Oktavijan. Conclusions Amateur film in Yugoslavia has a complex history that is intertwined with the evolution of the mainstream film industry, as many amateur cinéastes eventually graduated to the ranks of the professionals. Miletic was the first film artist in Yugoslavia to enjoy international success, in terms of both his amateur and his professional film output. The tradition of amateur film in Yugoslavia, particularly pre-­war amateur film, is still ripe for discovery and analysis, and scholars embarking on this work, one will encounter a national film culture that has significant contributions to make to the formative history of European avant-­garde practices, as the case of Miletic demonstrates. Films clubs date back to the early 1920s in the territory of Yugoslavia. However, the golden age of club culture and alternative film expression begins in the post-­war era of socialist Yugoslavia, climaxing in the 1960s amid the general flowering of European modernism in film. Due in part to the work 237

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of Miletic, Croatia in particular had a very strong tradition to draw upon when this alternative film culture began expanding and diversifying. Names like Mihovil Pansini and Tomislav Gotovac, still awaiting wider international recognition, are indebted to the groundwork that Miletic and his peers laid. These are the inheritors of an ‘advanced’ amateurism that pushed the boundaries of film form in visionary ways and, like Miletic, they too deserve close investigation. When one thinks of Croatia and the history of amateur film culture, one thinks of the radical and oppositional notion of ‘anti-­film’, created by Pansini as an aesthetic conceptual negation of prevailing filmic practices, both amateur and professional. One also thinks of GEFF (Genre Film Festival), a notorious festival established in the 1960s in Zagreb in celebration of underground film and other vanguard film movements, usually of a small-­gauge nature. One thinks of Gotovac and his unclassifiable performance art, in addition to his pioneering experiments in structural film. Perhaps no other statement better expresses the love inherent in amateur film and filmmakers than Gotovac’s well-­known mantra that ‘Everything is film. When I open my eyes I see a film.’ This is the exaggerated eros of film as a way of life and as a consuming obsession. When one thinks of Croatia and the history of amateur film culture, of Yugoslavia also, and the history of professional film in the region, one must memorialise Oktavijan Miletic and allow him to assume his rightful place among the most distinguished figures of the medium. This chapter is an attempt to realise just such an aim. Notes   1. Ante Peterlic and Vjekoslav Majcen (eds), Oktavijan Miletic´ (Zagreb: Hrvatski državni arhiv/Hrvatska kinoteka, 2000), p. 226.   2. Ibid., p. 14.   3. Ibid., p. 226.   4. http://www.sci.fi/~animato (accessed on 18 February 2012).   5. Ante Peterlic and Vjekoslav Majcen (eds), Oktavijan Miletic´, p. 160.   6. The title ‘master of amateur film’ was an honour bestowed on certain accomplished individuals by Zagreb Ciné-­club. Miletic was honoured with this designation in 1967.   7. Ryan Shand, ‘Theorizing amateur cinema: limitations and possibilities’, The Moving Image, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2008, p. 52.   8. Pierre Bourdieu, with Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-­Claude Chamboredon and Dominique Schnapper, Photography: A Middle-­Brow Art (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), p. 9.   9. Patricia R. Zimmermann, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington-­Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. ix. 10. See, for instance, Greg DeCuir, Yugoslav Black Wave: Polemical Cinema from 1963–72 in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Belgrade: Film Center Serbia, 2011). 11. Julio García Espinosa, ‘For an imperfect cinema’, Jump Cut, No. 20, 1979, pp. 24–6.

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12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Zimmermann, Reel Families, p. x. 16. Ante Peterlic and Vjekoslav Majcen (eds), Oktavijan Miletic´, p. 223. 17. Sebastian Cichocki, ‘Leisure time and liberated time’ at http://www.enthusiastsar chive.net/en/index_en.html (accessed on 19 February 2012). 18. Pierre Bourdieu, with Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-­Claude Chamboredon and Dominique Schnapper, Photography: A Middle-­Brow Art (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), pp. 39–45. 19. Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-­Garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919–1939 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), p. 91. 20. Ryan Shand, ‘Theorizing amateur cinema’, p. 46. 21. Ryan Shand, Amateur Cinema: History, Theory, and Genre (1930–80), unpublished PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2007, p. 74. 22. Duško Popovic (ed.), Kinoklub Zagreb 1928./2003./Zagreb ciné-­club 1928/2003 (Zagreb: Hrvatski filmski savez / Kino klub Zagreb, 2003), pp. 54–5. 23. Ryan Shand, Amateur Cinema: History, Theory, and Genre (1930–80), p. 94. 24. See, for instance, Greg DeCuir, ‘Yugoslav ciné-­enthusiasm: ciné-­club culture and the institutionalization of amateur filmmaking in the territory of Yugoslavia from 1924–68’, Romanian Review of Political Sciences and International Relations, Vol. VIII, No. 2, 2011, pp. 36–49. 25. http://www.enthusiastsarchive.net/ (accessed 23 February 2012) 26. Ryan Shand, Amateur Cinema: History, Theory, and Genre (1930–80), p. 246. 27. Ante Peterlic and Vjekoslav Majcen (eds), Oktavijan Miletic´, p. 223. 28. Ryan Shand, ‘Theorizing amateur cinema’, p. 57. 29. Many influential noir stylists like Otto Preminger, Michael Curtiz and John Alton were Austrian and Austro-­Hungarian émigrés – a national heritage that also influenced Miletic in his formative years as an assistant. 30. Ryan Shand, ‘Theorizing amateur cinema’, p. 57. 31. One unique image shows a hidden figure in the dark with monstrous hands and long fingers, as he sneaks up behind a victim and prepares to strangle him. This brief shot seems to makes reference to the classic German Expressionist horror film Nosferatu (1922) by F. W. Murnau. The shot is perhaps also an outtake from Miletic’s film Davljenje/Strangling (1927), a sketch about a killer clown that sneaks up on a woman and strangles her. 32. ‘Obrazloženje za “nagradu Vladimir Nazor” Oktavijanu Mileticu/Announcing Oktavijan Miletic for the “Vladimir Nazor Award”’, Filmska kultura, No. 62, 1968, pp. 66–7.

Filmography Ah, Bješe Samo San (Oh, It Was Only a Dream, Oktavijan Miletic, 1930) 9.5mm, 5 mins, black and white, silent. Faust (Oktavijan Miletic, 1934) 9.5mm, 5 mins, black and white, silent. Kralj Tohu Wabohu je Gladan (King Tohu Wabohu is Hungry, Oktavijan Miletic, 1930) 9.5mm, 6 mins, black and white, silent. Les Affaires du Consul Dorgen (The Affairs of Consul Dorgen, Oktavijan Miletic, 1933) 9.5mm, 18 mins, black and white, silent. Mr. Crockefeller (Oktavijan Miletic, 1927–31) 9.5mm, 6 mins, black and white, silent. Nocturno (Oktavijan Miletic, 1935) 9.5mm, 10 mins, black and white, silent.

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Smrt Maharadže od Daj mi Mira (The Death of the ‘Leave-­me-­be’ Maharajah, Oktavijan Miletic, 1927) 9.5mm, 5 mins, black and white, silent. Miletic’s films may be accessed online at: http://www.europafilmtreasures.eu/films/film_archive/Hrvatska_Kinoteka_-­_Hrvatski_ Dr%C5%BEavni_Arhiv-­21–0.htm See also the ‘Polish amateur cinema from 1962–89’ website: http://www.enthusiasts­ archive.net/

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11. THE AESTHETIC OF THE POSSIBLE:­ THE GREEN COCKATOO AS BRICOLAGE OF HETEROGENEOUS TRADITIONS SIEGFRIED MATTL AND VRÄÄTH ÖHNER

The ‘Green Cockatoo’ nightclub looks like a typical establishment of ill repute. A life-­size poster adorns the entrance, on which is depicted a dancing ‘apache’ couple.1 Seedy characters loiter with menacing looks; the owner, who goes by the name of Ling Chang, is introduced as a fence, and his patrons as denizens of an urban underworld, populated by petty crooks and harlots. Alcohol, card games, fortune-­telling, racketeering and a general bent for violence pervade the scene. There is, however, a pure soul in this shady world, who is forced to ‘learn things the hard way’, as an inter-­title informs the viewer: namely, Kitty, the foster child of the owner, who is quickly revealed as prospective heir to a great fortune. Her ignorance of the inheritance makes her vulnerable to a dual intrigue: while her foster father hopes to keep the fortune for himself by marrying Kitty off to the first available suitor, there is also a threatening figure named ‘Red Jim’, a regular at the Green Cockatoo, who is interested in her solely for her money. Her salvation comes from the unlikeliest of places: in the form of two vagrants named Jonny and Tommy, whom destiny has brought together and into the Green Cockatoo. When Red Jim demands that Kitty dance naked for him, Jonny steps in; a fight ensues and Jonny emerges the victor. He proposes to meet Kitty in the Prater, the Viennese amusement park, the following day. Only one thing clearly now stands in the way of an idyllic future together for the couple: namely, the resolution of the impending intrigue, which (and how it could be otherwise?), after a series of imbroglios and breathtaking pursuits, is resolved happily.

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11.1  Jonny and Kitty in front of the Green Cockatoo club.

Sources and Treatment The production of the 1932 amateur ‘feature’ described here, shot on 9.5mm cine film by a group of small traders is, like that of its fictional protagonists, a story of ambition, courage and perhaps a little improvidence. Der grüne Kakadu (The Green Cockatoo) is not just any title; it is the name of a play by Arthur Schnitzler, at the time of the film’s production one of the most renowned writers in Austria. It was not merely the fact that taking up a work of this literary calibre presented an artistic risk in itself, and that critics had previously viciously lambasted the play at the time of its performance in the Vienna Burgtheater. Schnitzler’s The Green Cockatoo had been plagued by scandal and controversy throughout its lifespan; immediately following its premiere in 1899, the Burgtheater dropped the play at the behest of no less a person than a member of the Austrian royal family. Following threats, lawsuits and resignations, the play was revived, although by 1920 the work had only seen one more performance, this time in the Deutsche Volkstheater on 14 October 1905. If theatres already had difficulties providing audiences with suitable one-­act pieces at the best of times, The Green Cockatoo only compounded the problem with its openly political concerns. Schnitzler, a lifelong target of censorship and protest by the Viennese bourgeoisie due to his scathing and liberal observations on sexuality, created in The Green Cockatoo a veritable farce in which two powerful components of Viennese ­244

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public life were pitted against one another: on the one hand, the reactionary aristocracy, opposed to any and all political reforms; on the other, the theatre-­ makers and star ensembles. Such conflict has often been read as politically consequential. In the view of novelist and journalist Stefan Zweig, and later of political theorist Hannah Arendt, this clash eventually came to dominate the public sphere in this period, and dissimulated the wane of political liberalism in the Habsburg monarchy. Perhaps from sensitivity to his immediate context, Schnitzler sets his grotesque drama in Paris on the eve of the revolution, where night after night the aristocrats visit the sordid nightclub, despite the crude treatment they receive from the venue’s owner. There they listen with amusement to the incendiary and bloodthirsty speeches made by the criminal cliques that form the bulk of the Cockatoo’s patronage. What these decadent aristocrats are oblivious to, or what some of them sense but refuse to acknowledge in order to prolong their thrill, is the fabrication of the entire scenario: the criminals are actually members of a theatrical troupe, enlisted by the owner to support the venue’s financial livelihood. The owner is, in fact, their manager gone broke, who none the less clings to the prospect of a better future. All too soon, however, the mock revolution turns serious, as the ‘sans culottes’ storm the Green Cockatoo and drag all those present, both nobles and thespians, off to the gallows and guillotine. In contrast to the play’s storyline, the film took a completely different approach. Where Schnitzler’s grotesquerie placed social class struggle at the centre of his polemic, the film brings the promise of personal fulfilment to the fore, a strategy much favoured by the popular entertainment media of the day – dime novels, serials, radio and film – in their various shapes and forms. And for good reason: the play’s readily comprehensible narrative structure offers the film, in particular the silent film, the possibility of creating dramatic effects on levels beside strictly narrative ones. Not only did its plot lend itself to remodelling with reference to preceding genres, but it also suggested the possibility of contemporary avant-­garde treatment. Emerging as a site drawing together the situation comedy and the chases of silent classics by the likes of Buster Keaton or Charles Chaplin, with the semi-­documentary collages of action scenes and social reporting, the paradigm for which was work in the ‘New Objectivity’ style represented in a film such as Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1930), the film can fairly be described as a bricolage of heterogeneous traditions. Stylistic as well as generic hybridity would come to characterise the film, which would also anticipate certain modes of expression, particularly with regard to the deliberate use of the hand-­held camera that only came to prominence after the Second World War, in the context of various movements in realism, from Italian Neorealism to American Direct Camera. The visual framing of the above-­mentioned bar brawl scene illustrates well the aesthetic ambivalence that characterises Der grüne Kakadu, as it both draws from the past and anticipates the future. Before the fight begins, we see a close-­up of Jonny’s hand freeing Kitty’s from the grip of Red Jim. From this 245

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11.2  Kitty and Ling Chang inside the Green Cockatoo club.

close-­up we are taken back to a wide-­shot of the scene: Jonny gets up from the table at which he was sitting with Kitty and fixes his gaze on his rival. While the next two frames give a frontal view of the menacing faces of the adversaries, the image stream returns to a wide-­angle shot as soon as the fight breaks out. If, up to this point the film follows the usual editorial logic of the classical silent movie, as the fight progresses, the camera begins to take on a life of its own; it joins in the action, first offering a low-­angle view of the fighters wrestling on the floor, followed quickly by a shot from a more raised elevation. Almost in passing, the camera registers details that not only serve to determine the outcome of the fight – as when Ling Chang pulls a knife and Tommy hinders him from using it – but also lend the scene a distinct intensity. Repeatedly, the camera pans across the faces of those hovering around the brawl, and in this way, conveys visually the palpable atmosphere of the commotion that is, in turn, fuelled by the shouts of the onlookers and the blows of the fighters. If one considers the deliberate use of the hand-­held camera as the salient aesthetic feature of the film – apart from the fight scene it is prominently used in a ‘Phantom Ride’ sequence in the Prater amusement park, and later during a wild motorcycle chase – then one may inquire as to what extent Der grüne Kakadu stands as a singular example in the development of aesthetic forms in the realm of fictional amateur films. By drawing a comparison with these forms, establishing how contemporary amateur film discourse served to disseminate them, and finally, how the filmmakers put them to use, the film’s relative ­246

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typicality may perhaps be clarified. In this context, it should be noted that Der grüne Kakadu was produced at a time in which Austrian trade, industry and amateur film clubs alike were working towards establishing the amateur film as an alternative, or perhaps ‘extension’, to amateur photography. Although a few years apart, there was therefore a similar development taking place in Austria, to those observed in the United States by Patricia Zimmermann, in Germany by Martina Roepke, and in Switzerland by Alexandra Schneider. In Austria, as elsewhere, the story is one of marginalisation; with the introduction of small-­gauge cine film and the comparatively light and manageable cameras and projectors, the groundwork for a massive distribution of amateur film was clearly laid down technologically, but was simultaneously cut off from meaningful intervention into public culture by professional sales and distribution companies.2 The first amateur cinema was thus defined initially as a home cinema and as a leisure activity – a ‘sport’, as it was termed by ­contemporaries – whose role was to preserve fond memories of family life (the birth of children, holidays, annual festivities); a second amateur cinema would follow, seeking a serious exploration of different art forms and forming the basis for a filmic avant-­garde, but none the less representing a similar confinement. As a feature-­length amateur motion picture, Der grüne Kakadu would fall into neither one nor the other of these categories. Its distinctive characteristic is rather the self-­conscious imitation of the commercial cinema of the recent past. As such an imitation, Der grüne Kakadu is not easily comparable to other examples handed down through Austrian film history, whose amateur component is only now beginning to emerge. Some basic references are known, however: in 1927, a formal association of amateur filmmakers was founded, known as the KdKÖ (the ‘Klub der Kino-­Amateure Österreichs’), which, by all accounts, was already in the process of producing two fictional club films by 1928 (Fahrende Leut, made on standard gauge, and Unter Mordverdacht, shot on 9.5mm stock).3 However, it is not known whether these film projects ever saw the light of day, whether they followed genre formats as purposefully as did Der grüne Kakadu, or if they reached similar running times. There seems to be evidence for the claim that there were feature-­length films contemporary with Der grüne Kakadu and of a similar kind. In the period between 1928 and 1931 – that is, after Austria had expanded its amateur film base, but before sound film had fully made its entry into cinemas, regular articles appeared in popular magazines such as the Illustrierte Wochenpost (Illustrated Weekly Post) that spoke of the fantastic possibilities open to every man, thanks to small-­gauge, of a meteoric rise to success in the commercial film industry. Most, however, also struck notes of caution, often in the same breath admonishing their readers for undertaking such ventures without the prerequisite amounts of time, money, talent, persistence and willingness to take risks.4 Even if such articles were written in order to regulate the imaginative potential attached to the spreading of a modern myth, it cannot be denied that, in the period before the arrival of the sound film, it was possible for the 247

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amateur filmmaker, at least in principle, to compete on an equal footing with the professional production companies of the time.5 The reasons are threefold: firstly, in the sense that one’s own film work was viewed as a kind of proof of qualification for the subsequent move into the professional production sphere;6 secondly, within the development of new spheres of activity for amateur filmmakers (even after the establishment of sound film, there were magazine articles that underscored the benefit of cine film in areas such as education, recreation or ergonomics);7 and finally, in the sense of participation within a parallel ‘recreational’ space, characterised by what Ryan Shand calls the ‘community mode’ of filmmaking: ‘This formulation addresses and acknowledges the limited public exhibition context enjoyed by these filmmakers, without implying that they are simply home moviemakers, or attempting entry into the mass mode.’8 From a social and cultural perspective on history, it is this last ‘recreational’ form of competition with professional cinema that now offers one of the most fascinating and fruitful aspects in the study of amateur filmmaking. As Gilles Deleuze has pointed out, it represents a form of collective production that eschews the abstract notion of compensation as a prevailing economic principle: a skilled worker in the watch-­making industry demands he be paid for his labour as a watch-­maker, but refuses to be paid for his work as an amateur filmmaker, which he calls his ‘hobby’; and yet, the two images, of the assembly line in the watch factory and the editing room in the making of a film, betray similar traits, such that one could even confuse one for the other. Even so, says the watch-­maker, there is a great ­difference in the love and generosity of these two acts.9 The ‘difference’ is far from absolute, however. Even in its hobbyist ‘community mode’, the ‘recreational’ competition with professional cinema involves some form of (symbolic) recognition, thereby recalling the abstract notion of compensation. One need only think of the myriad contests punctuating amateur cine culture on a local, national or even international level with their public rituals of evaluation, or of the recurring stories in magazines in which, during an evening of films at a club, an amateur film is congratulated for the remarkable level of quality displayed, which could seemingly hold its own in the professional industry. At the same time, the existence of a film like Der grüne Kakadu reflects an investment of work, time, love and a generosity that asks for nothing in return besides the making of the film itself. Before its rediscovery in the Austrian Museum of Film, Der grüne Kakadu had enjoyed few screenings beyond those organised in a local or family context. Neither were the group of small traders responsible for the production of the film a part of an amateur film club; nor, by all accounts, was the film shown in any contests.10 In other words, from a purely economic standpoint, this outwardly irrational ­248

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over-­expenditure of creative energies and material resources must find its rationale in the unfolding of small-­scale, socio-­cultural and topographically traceable communal activities, marginal even to the already peripheral sphere of organised amateur filmmaking. Communal Activities and Community Figures Der grüne Kakadu was produced by a group that called itself, quite simply, the Film Club. The central figure, occupying the roles of both director and main actor in the film (as ‘Jonny’), was Franz Hohenberger, the son of a widowed chimney sweep and proprietress of the house at Odoakergasse 13 in Vienna-­Ottakring, within whose inner courtyard most of the scenes of Der grüne Kakadu were filmed. Greta Glattauer, playing the part of Kitty, was the daughter of a family of café owners; Charly Amerling, who initially came up with the idea for the film, was the son of a goldsmith. Othmar ‘Tommy’ Völkl, taking on the part of the more comic of the two vagrants and also working as film editor, was the son of a head waiter; Adi Schickel, the cameraman, was the son of a public school headmaster. Joseph Funiak, referred to in the opening credits as the ‘Photo-­Advisor’, owned a chemist’s shop, and presumably provided the raw materials for the film at reasonable prices. L. Sudolak, A. Scheda and I. Schreckenberger, likewise listed in the opening credits, were the sons of a master carpenter, a postal clerk and a nursery owner, respectively. Sudolak, whose father ran a carpenter’s workshop on Odoakergasse 7, was responsible for designing the set. The professional or familial circumstances of the club’s remaining members are uncertain at this stage. Evidence of a tight-­ knit feeling of community between those mentioned, however, is convincing enough to confirm folkloric accounts, according to which the Film Club is said to have sprung from a neighbourhood community. Amerling and Sudolak lived at Odoakergasse 7, Julius Scheibe, ‘Red Jim’, at number 9, Hohenberger and Schreckenberger at number 13. The Café Glattauer was located on Thaliastrasse, on the corner of Montleartstrasse, near Funiak’s chemist’s and Scheda’s flat, which, like Völkel’s at Arnethgasse 85, was only a few minutes’ walk from the Odoakergasse house. According to the inherited narrative, the Film Club was one branch of a wider enterprise, which organised theatre performances and related recreational and evening socials, amongst other things.11 This larger ‘Sport Club’ was not a formally declared institution, however, with statutes and elected bodies, but more of an informal union of people in their early twenties shaping their leisure activities together, whose communal base was the Odoakergasse in Ottakring. Prior to Der grüne Kakadu, Franz Hohenberger and the group had already made two short films. The first effort was a burlesque in the style of the early ‘cinema of attractions’: pranksters smear soap on to the bow of a violin player. Amid laughter from the audience, who are in on the joke, he cannot seem to explain to them why his violin will not work (unfortunately, other than 249

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the oral testimony of Franz Hohenberger, no records of this film survive). The second film was entitled Die Geheimnisvolle Macht (The Mysterious Power), and was probably made around 1929–30. Clearly influenced by the popular German cinema of the early 1920s, it centred around occult psychology; a dedicated private detective (Franz Hohenberger) manages to solve a series of mysterious accidents, perpetrated by a hypnotist who, assuming the form of a headless bogeyman, causes his victims to black out. The locations are the Liebhartstal in Vienna-­Ottakring and the edges of the Wienerwald that reach into that area. After Der grüne Kakadu, Franz Hohenberger took part in one other short film by his friend Josef Funiak, entitled Das Gestörte Liebesglück (loosely translatable as Thwarted Courtship) and shot around 1933, in which he plays an unwelcome guest who interrupts the romantic assignation of a friend, by means of a relentless tirade. The title and plot of Franz Hohenberger’s second film, Die Geheimnisvolle Macht, provide a revealing reference point for the characterisations and narrative style of Der grüne Kakadu. Both trace the work of Harry Piel, a German director and actor eminently successful in the 1920s and 1930s, but long since forgotten.12 Between 1920 and 1921, Piel had shot a trilogy entitled Der Reiter ohne Kopf (The Headless Horseman), whose second part not only bore the same title as Franz Hohenberger’s film Die Geheimnisvolle Macht, but also told the same story of a headless monster and a supernaturally endowed criminal, who manipulates his victims by means of telepathic hypnosis. Franz Hohenberger, having been born in 1908, would have seen this film either as a young boy or on the occasion of its re-­release, just as he would have seen the 1926 Achtung Harry! Augen auf! (Watch Out Harry! Keep Your Eyes Open!), in which Piel plays a dashing reporter working on a series of articles under the title ‘6 Wochen unter den Apachen’ (‘6 Weeks with the Apaches’), and who joins a group of pimps to cover the story. The recurring character of the fearless daredevil (be it in the favoured role of the detective, circus artist, reporter or adventurer) played by Piel, seems to have been the inspiration for the vagrant Jonny in Der grüne Kakadu, although other influences are tangible. The figure seems also to be somewhat of a take on Charlie Chaplin’s ‘Tramp’, who – in The Vagabond (1916), for instance – slips similarly into the role of the ‘bold knight’ who goes out to save a damsel-­in-­distress kidnapped by gypsies. However, Jonny shows too much faith in his own strength and cleverness for such a comparison to hold securely. He is capable not only of beating Red Jim in a fist fight, but does not shy away from the risks involved in capturing Ling Chang, Kitty’s foster father; when Ling Chang shoots Red Jim in a row over Kitty’s dowry, and subsequently tries to escape unnoticed, it is Jonny who – first on a motorcycle then on foot – takes up the chase. Even though Ling Chang is armed and fires repeatedly upon Jonny, the latter succeeds in chasing his adversary down in the end. Jonny’s determined performance thus reminds us less of the series of defence mechanisms that Chaplin’s ‘Tramp’ employs in reaction to the impositions of a ­250

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11.3  Ling Chang shoots at Jonny during the chase.

‘modernising’ world, and aligns itself more with the criteria that Piel sets forth in 1922 with respect to his future role, on the occasion of a screenplay contest: ‘The plot should display a series of life-­threatening and suspenseful situations that, in order to be overcome, demand from the protagonist, played by Harry Piel, a courage, an undauntedness, a strength or an extraordinary athletic ability, capable of defying death itself.’13 Against this backdrop, the reference to Piel as a ‘Sensationsdarsteller’ (stuntman) helps explain the distinction between a vagabond and a vagrant, which the film sets out to explore from the early scenes in which Jonny and Tommy first meet on a dusty country road. Whereas Tommy, the vagabond, remains a remote and somewhat awkward after-­image of Chaplin’s ‘Tramp’ throughout the film, Jonny takes on a new role no later than the second scene, in which both of them find a new set of clothes in the bushes on the side of the road. He transforms himself into what will become a very specific archetype of the modern film hero: the man next door, who nevertheless has extraordinary abilities at his disposal. In contrast to the figure of the vagabond, who in the popular cinema of the day invariably signalled a comic role, it would seem that the term ‘vagrant’ represented for Franz Hohenberger a credible way to distinguish the figure of Jonny from both the comic nature of the vagabond, and the conformity of the ‘average man’. Jonny’s introduction as a ‘vagrant’, then, is intended to portray the character of the modern hero not by a reference to his origins or his status, but through his tangible ability to overcome adversity in 251

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whatever form it may arise. In defining a hero solely by virtue of his actions, Der grüne Kakadu offers an early index of a new form of popular entertainment culture, which Franz Hohenberger and his collaborators came to see as their own, and which amateur film practice clearly helps to forge. Territorialising Desire Scrutinising each individual figure and topos in detail, one realises that Der grüne Kakadu is a fantastic bricolage of serial novels, urban myths, crime and sport films, technical attractions, star portraits and folk tales. It is not hard to imagine how the members of the Film Club were influenced by B-­novels like Peter Porr, originally the serialised story of a terrifically strong Viennese (!) seafarer and adventurer, who travelled on the high seas in the Far East, where he was threatened by Chinese pirates and other uncivilised bands. From these sorts of novels and from the resonant, multilingual names of their protagonists there arose a blend of local and transnational storylines, that invited a playful use of the phantasms of popular culture, involving both an ironic treatment of yearnings for distant and exotic lands and imaginary escape from the routines of everyday life. In the Illustrierte Wochenpost (Illustrated Weekly Post), which published the Peter Porr stories, the Film Club members might well have stumbled upon articles that, in a droll manner, managed to combine references to Vienna, the Parisian ‘Apaches’ and contemporary theatre all in one contribution. According to one such account in the Wochenpost, a Viennese businessman winds up in an ‘Apache’ bar. The next morning, he finds a note in his trouser pocket that informs him that someone has been hired to kill him. He goes to the police and, under some pretext, gets himself arrested. After two days in jail, he comes to find out that the ‘Apaches’ were actually harmless actors and that he had accidentally walked into the shooting of a film.14 ‘Apaches’ in pimp bars and criminal establishments, typified by ‘Jonny’ and ‘Tommy’, also found their accomplices in the pages of notorious newspapers like Die Neue Wiener Nachtwelt (The New Vienna Nightlife), which ran its business half on the back of sensationalist articles on prostitution and drug trafficking in Ottakring and Leopoldstadt, and half from the proceeds of extortion.15 Through its sensationalising of Vienna’s abysmal nightlife, the tabloid was only perpetuating what the ‘classics’ of the so-­called ‘social reporting’ had, however, begun, and that which continues to this day: namely, capturing the ‘criminal act’ in its social and physical aspect, and popularising it as a genuine paradigm for popular perceptions of the city.16 In this context, fiction and reality, knowledge and the parody of knowledge, and indexes of desire fluctuate, generating countless little melodramas, which, in turn, go on to circulate throughout mass culture. One example of this might be the short story ‘Die Greta Garbo von Ottakring’ – a story about a prospective medical doctor that has to finance her studies by working in a nightclub. Even a trivial text such as this one was able to acquire meaning, in so far as it was able to borrow ­252

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from G. W. Pabst and his filming of Die Freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925), starring Greta Garbo, Werner Kraus and Asta Nielsen – a canonical film marking the rise of German cinema’s celebrated ‘New Objectivity’ in the wake of its Expressionist era.17 The clearest expression of the local and community-­orientated nature of Der grüne Kakadu production can be found in the Prater scenes, filmed in Vienna’s famous parklands. The visit to the Prater by Kitty and Jonny ends, as previously mentioned, with the declaration of love that is integral to the storyline, and which determines the broader plot of the film. However, the intention of this sequence is also to ‘territorialise’ the notion of desire in all its facets, an interest that is intrinsic to the experience of the film. This is clear in the introduction of the parallel montage that shapes the assembly of the scene. As we watch Kitty and Jonny making their way through the legendary Prater amusement park, we also see Tommy waiting for Jonny’s return, passing time at a makeshift shooting gallery, and in front of a swing in the Ottakringer Liebhartstal. From the standpoint of the viewer’s curiosity, the disparity between the sophisticated Prater park in Leopoldstadt and the modest outskirts of the city is diminished by this juxtaposition. Tommy’s slapstick shenanigans, his bodily contortions and his great drunken rioting, as well as the respect that he demands in his inebriated state, are no less attractively filmed than the elegance with which Jonny accompanies his future bride on the rides of the Prater park. In both instances, it is the combination of the hand-­held camera and the ‘Phantom Ride’ device that brings out the subjective element within locations of communal experience. The filmmakers in this way reclaim the virtues of the ‘simple’ folk, the urban locales and their myths, as opposed to the defining power of tradition, art and tourism. In other words, they display the pride with which a certain Viennese quarter is claimed as one’s own, and set it in stark contrast to the ­communities of other quarters. The Prater is an obvious choice for the rendezvous, yet it is one that does not come without risks, precisely because it is the quintessential cinematic location of Vienna. The artistic skill of the filmmaker is therefore measured in terms of his depiction of the Prater. Of the countless films that have raised the Prater to the status of a quasi-­protagonist, Rupert Julian/Erich von Stroheim’s Merry-­ Go-­Round (1923), The Case of Lena Smith (1929) by Josef von Sternberg, and Paul Fejo’s Sonnenstrahl (Ray of Sunshine, 1933) are but three of international renown. With its proto-­cinematographic, optical and mechanical attractions (house of mirrors, fast photography, mutoscope; scenic railways, roller-­ coasters, cake-­walk steps, autodrome, flying carousels) on the one hand, and its cultural topoi (settings of social and ethnic diversity, erotic flairs and sexual appetite) on the other, the Prater was the ‘natural’ setting for Viennese films, but precisely for this reason demanded a certain cinematic ‘surplus’. The film medium seemingly felt called upon to convey at once a mytho-­poetic statement of the fluidity of boundaries, and a spatial specification associated with the location, illustrated time and again through the different narrative approaches 253

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11.4  At the makeshift shooting gallery in the Ottakringer Liebhartstal, Vienna.

employed. The art of the film lay in the depiction of a ‘delirious space’, to bring about a certain feeling of letting oneself go, carried by the viewer’s own curiosity, a pleasant giddiness, a controlled exposure to the oscillation of different objects and bodies and their dazzling plays of light. Josef von Sternberg, in The Case of Lena Smith, expressed just such desire, with distortions and cross-­fadings ‘held’ so long that they begin to appear as double exposures; with fog and mirror effects; with tracking shots and a variety of adjustments to the picture. In the words of Frieda Grafes: These are (Sternberg’s) means of animating the dead space between the lens and the objects: foremost, the moving camera, but also smoke, rain, mist, steam . . . bars, grids, veils made of streaks of falling rain and rearing waves . . . creating grilles over the images by means of paper streamers.18 The sophistication of commercial studio production, however, encouraged a focus on the cultural significance of the Prater. Here, the now-­extinct world of the ‘folkloric’ Prater from before the Great War predominated, the world of fairground booths and magicians, the sleight-­of-­hand games, and the dancing halls and cafés, in which army officers, the Jewish petty bourgeoisie and Slovak maid servants congregated and mingled. Contemporary films like Fejo’s Sonnenstrahl also clung, though, to the film image of the dream state, the busy ­254

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scenes of the carnivals and the kingdom of masks, as Stroheim termed them.19 Der grüne Kakadu, by contrast, reveals itself to be something altogether more critical; the itinerary of technical attractions through the Prater takes us, first to the scenic railway, to the toboggan, then to the ghost train, and finally to the car test-­drive, relishing the sensations of modernity. In the absence of elaborate equipment, the amateur processing returns the spectator to the pure fascination of movement that characterised earlier works. The mechanical attractions do not seem to have lost any of their effectiveness on camera. A series of ‘phantom rides’ dominate the sequence, made twice as appealing through the repeated use of the hand-­held camera, whose images literally throw the viewer from the viewpoint of the track, and therefore from the ride itself. The baseless association of this shot, the relationship of temporal succession irrelevant to the story itself, creates a purely sensorial space of corporeality. The Prater, as filmed for Der grüne Kakadu, is not about a rhetorical seduction. The constant alternation between medium and long shots and subjective camerawork that characterises the sequence; complex image arrangements involving high-­and low-­angle shots; the recurrent breaks in the activity of the protagonists with images of the freak-­show stalls, as well direct glances into the camera: all work to bring out a subjectivity distinct from the one in the above-­mentioned films. It is no longer the naïve fortune-­seekers and infamous artists of disguise that are subjected to the power of a transgressive space. The constant shift between vantage points is far more a testament to the proficiency of the young amateur filmmakers in handling the game of illusions and disillusions. This first generation of ambitious amateurs are not taken in by the modern play of lights, nor by the magician’s tricks or the barker’s rhetoric, although this generation is not sceptical enough to resist the temptation of these attractions entirely. What the Prater scenes of Der grüne Kakadu offer us in their exploration of the topoi of the ‘Praterfilm’ genre is, more specifically, an insight into the shift from rapturous superstition to an ‘objective’, discerning approach to mass culture, revealing what Siegfried Kracauer observed to be the potential for a new intermediary group of people, free from the identities imposed by class, work and profession.20 Conclusions The Prater scene reaches its climax with Kitty and Jonny’s ride in the open ‘Opel-­Bahn’ car, a short-­lived attraction atypical of the Prater park.21 The transformation of the ‘vagrant’ into a gentleman driver reveals to us, not merely diegetically, the film’s striking familiarity with the modern age (coded via boxing, motor sports, bars and illustrated magazines). This scene distils, as it were, the tendency of Der grüne Kakadu to portray personal happiness, as was the wont of the entertainment forms of the day, not as the result of foolish coincidences, grotesque masquerades or twists of fate, but as a result of a drawing on solid physical skill, technical competence and a self-­belief that rises 255

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above all fears of personal risk. There is one way in which this project could be said to fail, however: in its wish for advancement, be it from the career-­oriented individual or the disciplinarian collective. It is precisely this which casts light on two competing ‘modern’ currents in Viennese studio film, both of which serve as an optimistic response to the crisis of the times and eschew the nostalgia for the hegemony of Viennese cinema: namely, the ‘Kaufhauskomödie’ (department store comedy) and the social democratic propaganda film.22 These two utopias of ‘advancement’ are alien to the protagonists of Der grüne Kakadu. With its quality of disinterest, as exemplified in the pair of vagrants, Jonny and Tommy, the amateur filmmaker pulls off a paradoxical feat, that of catering to the chief cultural figures and topoi of the Viennese context, while at the same time discrediting them. Hence, a different kind of ‘game within a game’ from the one seen in Arthur Schnitzler’s ‘The Green Cockatoo’ is explored. Indeed, most avid filmgoers would no longer have recognised his play, but considering their notorious predilection for fast cars and buffets with vending machines, they probably would have enjoyed the movie.23 Notes   1. In Paris at the turn of the nineteenth century, the term ‘Apache’ was used to define the ‘outsiders’ living beyond the margins of middle-­class society, such as youth gangs, pimps, criminals and anarchists. Apart from the tacit codes of conduct specific to their milieu, the ‘Apaches’ could be recognised by their style of dancing, characterised not by a set of prescribed steps but by pantomimed dance moves inspired by the music of the ‘habanera’ and the tango. Although, in Paris, the term ‘Apache’ went out of use after World War One, it remained common in the vaudeville and film productions of the time and spread abroad, thanks to the sensationalism of the tabloid press. Cf. Joachim Schlör, Nachts in der grossen Stadt. Paris, Berlin, London 1840–1930 (Munich: Dtv Sachbuch, 1994).   2. Cf. Patricia Zimmermann, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Martina Roepke, Privat-­ Vorstellung: Heimkino in Deutschland vor 1945 (Hildesheim, Zurich and New York: Georg Olms, 2006); Alexandra Schneider, Die Stars sind wir. Heimkino als filmische Praxis (Marburg: Schüren, 2004).   3. Cf. Anonymous, ‘Aus der Klubtätigkeit des Klubs der Kino-­Amateure Österreichs’, Photo-­Sport, September 1928, p. 15.   4. For example: Anon., ‘Wie kommt man zum Film?’ (‘How to get to the movies?’), Illustrierte Wochenpost, 27 April 1928, S. 7; Anon., ‘Wie sie zum Film kamen. Bekenntnisse bekannter Filmstars’ (‘How they came to the movies. Confessions of famous movie stars’), Illustrierte Wochenpost, 4 May 1928, S. 6; Anon., ‘Geschäfte im Kaffeehaus. Die Heimstätten der Wiener Filmleute’ (‘Business in the cafe: The homes of the Viennese film community’), Illustrierte Wochenpost, 18 May 1928, S. 7; Anon., ‘Was kostet ein Film?’ (‘What does a movie cost?’), Illustrierte Wochenpost, 13 July 1928, S. 7.   5. Thereafter, this opportunity was all but lost, for until the introduction of the magnetic tape recording in the 1950s, sound film projectors only existed for the relatively more expensive 16mm film. Franz Hohenberger, who experimented extensively with magnetic tape recording during work on his Super-­8 home movies, opted instead for a ‘live’ piano accompaniment for The Green Cockatoo

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at performances given to family and friends. An adaptation of this musical accompaniment now exists, performed by Manfred Hohenberger as a recording of his performance in the Austrian Film Museum in June 2010.   6. To this day, the KdKÖ proudly publishes a list (albeit brief) of members that were successful in the professional sphere on its website. Cf. kdkoe.nwy.at/profi.html (accessed 17 May 2012).   7. As an early example of essays along similar lines of argumentation, cf. ‘Die Amateurkinematographie im Dienste des sportlichen Trainings’, Photo-­Sport, April 1927, pp. 9–11. Therein one could read that ‘amateur cinematography, accessible to every man, is ever expanding its sphere of influence,’ and that it is of great importance, especially for the sport of football: ‘the course of each match can be watched anew by the team in the comfort of their club house, projected onto a screen, where all the decisions taken by the referee can be clearly reviewed, every “foul” can be checked and every “goal” can be celebrated afresh or contested. All the mistakes of the team become apparent, and as one can learn from one’s mistakes, hopefully these can then be prevented in the future.’   8. Ryan Shand, ‘Theorizing Amateur Cinema: Limitations and Possibilities’, The Moving Image, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2008, p. 53.   9. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Drei Fragen zu six fois deux (Godard)’, in his Unterhandlungen 1972–1990 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), p. 60. 10. However, contemporary sources indicate that the film was shown on 10 January 1935, in the club rooms of the KdKÖ. Cf. Mitteilungen des Klubs der Kino-­ Amateure Österreichs, Vienna, February 1935, S. 2. 11. The Green Cockatoo photo album, compiled by Franz Hohenberger, actually contains a picture of a game of skittles. 12. Between 1912 and 1955, the ‘dynamite director’ and ‘stuntman’ Harry Piel shot over one hundred films, in which, beginning with Der Grosse Coup (1919), he consistently took the leading role. His most prolific period, which also happened to be his most successful, was between 1919 and 1938. The extent of his popularity is revealed not least by the fact that the figure of Harry Piel – next to that of Sherlock Holmes, Buffalo Bill and Klaus Störtebeker – was, from 1920 onwards, a hero of the serial dime novels in the Leipzig Speka-­Verlag. Cf. Matias Bleckman, Harry Piel. Ein Kino-­Mythos und seine Zeit (Düsseldorf: Stadt Filmmuseum, 1992). 13. Ibid., p. 143. 14. Cf. Illustrierte Wochenpost, 6 March 1931, p. 4. These relatively dated urban legends have since been modernised in the article ‘Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht’ (‘The man who looked for his murderer’). 15. The systematic denunciation of Viennese cafés as stomping grounds for gangsters may have had the aim of coercing local proprietors to make contributions to the newspaper, since it dedicated itself exclusively to the ‘underworld’. In their own way, the stereotypes depicted in the stories of the press could also be seen as trendsetting, especially if read as grotesques and ending up in the annals of ‘laughing culture’. Take, for instance, Die Neue Wiener Nachtwelt, 7 August 1926, ‘Jonny Firnsh, der Internationale Hochstapler’ (‘Jonny Firnsh, the International Conman’), where, in the midst of a deadly fight between two gangsters – Jonny Firnsh and ‘Black Tomy’, an ‘unwritten law’ of the underworld forbids the onlookers from interfering. Even without a direct reference to the fight in The Green Cockatoo, such messages make up an essential part of the ‘environmental culture’ of the film. 16. For the production of the myths of Viennese social reportage around 1900, see Werner Michael Schwarz, Magarethe Szeless and Lisa Wögenstein (eds), Ganz unten. Die Entdeckung des Elends (Vienna: Brandstatter, 2007). 17. Illustrierte Wochenpost, 23 January 1931, p. 2. With respect to the more fluid

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boundaries between high and popular culture it is significant that Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle was originally published as a serial story in the Berlin fashion magazine, Die Dame (The Lady). In addition, the ambitious efforts of modern Viennese writers – Schnitzler, Salten, Hofmannsthal, among others – to acquire contracts with the expanding film industry as screenwriters should be noted. 18. The erotic relationship between officers and maidservants became the basis for countless feature newspaper articles and stories around the Prater. They were intrinsic to films like Pratermizzi (Gustav Ucicky, 1926; now lost), Die kleine Veronika (Robert Land, 1930) and Vorstadtvariété (Werner Hochbaum, 1935), as well as the above-­mentioned films by Stroheim and Sternberg, and were responsible for the creation of a genre in its own right. For detail, see Frieda Grafes in Christian Dewald, ‘Nicht Kunst, sondern Leben: Der Wiener Prater als Schauplatz des Österreichischen Films’, in Christian Dewald and Werner Michael Schwarz (eds), Prater Kino Welt. Der Wiener Prater und die Geschichte des Kinos (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2005), p. 141. 19. Cf. Siegfried Mattl, ‘In der fluiden Stadt: Sonnenstrahl und die Produktion anderer Räume im Roten Wien’, in Elisabeth Büttner (ed.), Die Welt macht Film (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2004), p. 156. 20. See Siegfried Kracauer, Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), p. 50. 21. The ‘Opel-­Bahn’ was a publicity campaign by the renowned German car-­maker. For detail, see Stefan Poser, ‘Glücksmaschinen oder Mechanismen des gestörten Gleichgewichts? Technik auf dem Jahrmarkt’, in Sacha Szabo (ed.), Kultur des Vergnügens. Kirmes und Freizeitparks, Schausteller und Fahrgeschäfte. Facetten nicht-­alltäglicher Orte (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009), pp. 112–13. Under the supervision of a qualified instructor, those interested in purchasing a small car intended for the less affluent buyer could give it a test drive. This lent the Prater Opel-­Bahn a rare economic quality, whereas it was typical for the Prater to adapt traditional rides like the carousel to new technologies. The Prater operators would simply switch the existing installations for new ones, such as the old horse carriages for the new airplane models. 22. These terms refer to a series of Viennese films made by German emigrants, which are set in the department store and advertising milieu, and whose protagonists achieve their aims through dexterity and persuasive rhetoric; and to social democratic propaganda films, which present individual success as inextricably linked to behaviour in keeping with the norm and in the interests of the party. See Vrääth Öhner, ‘Die vom 17er Haus. A film for the Viennese regional elections on April 24, 1932’, in Christian Dewald (ed.), Arbeiterkino: Linke Filmkultur der Ersten Republik (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2007), p. 77; Siegfried Mattl, ‘Ein Schuss Mondanität: Die Phantasmagorie eines “amerikanischen” Wien im Schlagerfilm der 1930er Jahre’, in Christian Dewald, Michael Loebenstein and Werner Michael Schwarz (eds), Wien im Film. Stadtbilder aus 100 Jahren (Vienna: Czernin, 2010), p. 86. 23. See Stephan Kurz and Michael Rohrwasser (eds), ‘A. ist manchmal wie ein kleines Kind’, Clara Katharina Pollaczek und Arthur Schnitzler gehen ins Kino (forthcoming).

Filmography Achtung Harry! Augen auf! (Watch Out Harry! Keep Your Eyes Open!, Harry Piel, 1926) 35mm, 119 mins, black and white, silent. The Case of Lena Smith (Josef von Sternberg, 1929) 35mm, 4 mins (extant fragment), black and white, silent.

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Das Gestörte Liebesglück (Thwarted Courtship, Josef Funiak, 1933), 16mm, duration unknown, black and white, silent. Der grüne Kakadu (The Green Cockatoo, Franz Hohenberger, 1932) 9.5mm, 68 mins, black and white, silent. Der Reiter ohne Kopf, 2. Teil: Die geheimnisvolle Macht (The Headless Horseman, Part 2: The Mysterious Power, Harry Piel, 1920) 35mm, 95 mins, black and white, silent. Die Freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, 1925) 35mm, 125 mins, black and white, silent. Die Geheimnisvolle Macht (The Mysterious Power, Franz Hohenberger, 1929–30) 9.5mm, 13 mins, black and white, silent. Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, Curt and Robert Siodmak, 1930) 35mm, 74 mins, black and white, sound. Merry-­Go-­Round (Rupert Julian, Erich von Stroheim, 1923) 35mm, 110 mins, black and white, silent. Sonnenstrahl (Ray of Sunshine, Paul Fejos, 1933) 35mm, 87 mins, black and white, mono. The Vagabond (Charles Chaplin, 1916) 35mm, 24 mins, black and white, silent. Achtung Harry! Augen auf!, Die geheimnisvolle Macht and Der Reiter ohne Kopf, 2. Teil: Die geheimnisvolle Macht are retained by the Austrian Film Museum, Heiligenstädter Straße 175, 1190 Vienna, Austria; tel.: +43/1/370 46 71; http://www. filmmuseum.at/en; email: [email protected] Parts of Der grüne Kakadu are available online at: www.stadtfilm-­wien.at

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12. THE FRAGILE MAGIC OF THE HOME: AMATEUR DOMESTIC COMEDIES AND THE INTIMATE GEOGRAPHY OF CHILDHOOD KAREN LURY

This chapter sets out to establish the formal qualities and the significance of a specific genre of amateur film fiction, or perhaps more correctly, a sub-­genre of amateur filmmaking: the domestic comedy. It is properly a sub-­genre, since the larger category it sits within, and one more readily recognisable to the wider community of amateur filmmakers, is the ‘family film’. This genre has an established history, is extensively discussed and described in British publications such as the magazine Amateur Cine World, and has more recently also been addressed in academic literature emerging around the study of small-­gauge filmmaking.1 As Ian Goode suggests, the family film conceivably includes all those films made in the home (or on holiday) that employ the family and friends of the filmmaker. In that sense, the genre might seem to be akin to the larger grouping typically understood as the ‘home movie’. In practice, however, there are a large number of such films that attempt to do much more than act as a family record. As Goode explains, Amateur Cine World frequently urged its readership to: break away from simply recording the events of family life, by using the location of the home as a suggestive setting, fabricating incident as a stimulus to action, and treating the family as potential cast members to construct ‘artificial’ narratives.2 Thus many family films and certainly the domestic comedy are not ‘home movies’ (actualities) in a traditional sense, but rather fabrications (fictions). None the less, in many of the films, the cast and settings employed are real, ­260

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with the characters on screen played by the wives, sons and daughters of the filmmaker, whilst the settings for the films are often the filmmaker’s own home and/or garden. Such films were initially exhibited to friends and family, or more publicly at festivals or in competition, and are now archived; with such a provenance, they pose particular problems of interpretation.3 They are ‘made up’ but, at the same time, the films record actual homes, and incidentally capture the period-­specific detail of clothes, toys, vehicles and architecture. Indeed, as Goode points out, even at the time of their production, there was considerable debate as to the peculiar status (and the disturbing affect) of these films. This chapter takes on the challenge of the ‘something other’ about the domestic comedy as a fabricated family film, and suggests ways in which the staged reality of these films offers some insight into the strange relations, or the ‘fragile magic’ of the home. These concerns are approached via a preliminary exploration of the ways in which the everyday relations between parents and children, domestic servants, interior architecture, objects and furnishings are exposed and defamiliarised in this genre. The Domestic Comedy The earliest of the films discussed in this chapter were made in the 1930s, and as such they pre-­date the generic model that they will be aligned with most closely: namely, the television sitcom. There is no suggestion, therefore, that the amateur filmmakers discussed below consciously drew on the television sitcom as their model. Rather, it is assumed that the close alliance between the amateur domestic comedy and the television domestic comedy (which perhaps is most evident in films and programmes made during the 1950s and 1960s) is due to the fact that both forms drawn on a number of earlier related fictions. Available precedents include radio soap operas, film melodramas and family-­ oriented comedies, as well as popular children’s literature produced and widely distributed from the 1930s onwards. The specific conventions of the television domestic comedy that are drawn on and allied here with a number of amateur fiction films were first established by Horace Newcomb in his book, TV: The Most Popular Art. As the author makes clear, the televised domestic comedy is also a sub-­genre of a larger category: in this case, the television situation comedy. Newcomb’s argument concerns a number of American television programmes, many of them, like the amateur films explored here, originating in the 1950s, including series such as Father Knows Best (1954–60), My Three Sons (1960–72), Leave it to Beaver (1957–63) and The Jimmy Stewart Show (1971–2). Newcomb first details the narrative form of the television situation comedy, and describes how it depicts a recurring situation or location (often a workplace or an institution), and a cast of characters who then re-­appear in each episode. The plot is established by a ‘complication’ (an event, such as a lost lottery ticket) and then furthered by ‘confusion’ (such as, for instance, the attempts by a character to retrieve the ticket). There is always a resolution 261

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(the ticket is found or lost again), and the characters and the situation return to their initial equilibrium, ready to begin once more, in the following episode. In the domestic comedy, this basic plot structure – complication followed by confusion – is retained but is now situated explicitly in a family home, usually populated by one or more parental figures, children and, frequently, animals. It is the relations between these people and what Newcomb calls the ‘special reality’ of the depicted home environment that distinguishes the domestic comedy from the sitcom, with its more public fictional worlds. Newcomb ­suggests, for example, that: There is no way for the central character in a sitcom to enter a grocery store without precipitating some sort of comic action. The world of the domestic comedy is a world that creates, by contrast, the illusion of being lived in rather than acted in, and consequently, there is a sense of involvement. To some degree it is this involvement that creates a seriousness even in the midst of exceptionally funny events.4 In fact, many of the amateur films that might be considered as domestic comedies are, possibly for economic reasons and the limited technical ability of the cast, more often driven by incident rather than character development. However, because the actors are, in many instances, playing themselves in an environment and with objects and people that they are intimately familiar with (their own parents, their own toys, their own pets and their own homes), there is a continual sense that this is a world that is ‘lived in’ rather than ‘acted in’. The amateur status of the films means that the ‘seriousness’ Newcomb identifies as lurking within the domestic comedy is also present, as there are sequences in many of the films where certain events may operate as a re-­enactment or even a rehearsal of what was – or may be – a real incident. For example, in Frank Marshall’s Early Birds (1956), a baby (Marshall’s own grandson) makes a precarious journey down a steep flight of stairs. The peril of this baby on the stairs is funny but it is also alarming – more serious – because the viewer knows that, despite its evident narrative fabrication, it is also a real baby attempting to climb down real stairs. It is, therefore, precisely the previously outlined problem of the staged family film – the question as to whether it is or is not a record of real events – that amplifies our interest, but also our concern. Equally, in films such as Marshall’s What a Night! (1939), Our Angel Children (1938) and Hustle of Spring (1941), domestic servants appear.5 The portrayal of their trials and tribulations (accidental breakages, minor floods, bothersome children and secret liaisons) are awarded an extra frisson – or a seriousness – through our knowledge that the family and filmmaker actually employed servants. In these films, however benignly or whimsically, real relations of power are represented and acknowledged. One interesting example of this can be seen in Marshall’s film Just One Thing ­262

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12.1  The baby – the filmmaker’s own grandson – begins his precarious descent down the stairs in Early Birds (1956).

After Another! (1936). In this instance, Marshall’s children (Muriel and Nairn) play a series of adult roles: Muriel plays the mistress of the house, as well as the cook and the maid, while Nairn plays the chauffeur and the gardener. The complication of the film is that the maid and the gardener are conducting an illicit affair that is subsequently discovered by the mistress. Confusion ensues (involving a dog and a cat, the general irritability of the cook, and her uncertain relationship with the chauffeur) before all the servants are apparently ‘turned off’ and the mistress is left, abandoned by all but the dog and the cat, on the steps of her house.6 What is particularly intriguing about this film, aside from the charming performances of the children, is that it speaks explicitly of power relations between master and servant, and implicitly of other more intimate relations between the servants, as well as between the children and the servants. In her historical study of domestic architecture and middle-­class life, Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-­Class Families in England 1850–1910, Jane Hamlett comments extensively on the close relationship between the servants and children in middle-­class homes in the early part of the twentieth century. This was very often a consequence of their spatial proximity; the children, like the servants, were normally sequestered to particular spaces within the middle-­class house, where entry to specific rooms, such as the living room and parents’ bedroom, would be restricted. In such circumstances, in terms of their necessary interaction (the children’s feeding, bathing and dressing), the children were likely to spend more time with the servants than they did with the other adults in the house. Hamlett suggests that ‘children knew far more about the servants’ clandestine assignations than the parents, because the back gate was clearly visible from the nursery window.’7 Hamlett also describes how this intimacy occasionally served to unite the 263

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12.2  Halfway up the stairs: Muriel and Nairn (Marshall’s own children) watch with glee as a series of disasters unfold in What a Night! (1939).

servants and children into a play of resistance toward their older relations or masters: Agnes Maud Douton in A Book of Seven Seals (1928) describes the life of two sisters who grew up in a Chelsea vicarage, in which the children dressed in the clothes of the grandmother and aunt, and paraded before the servants in the kitchen, imitating their relatives for the servants’ amusement.8 Just One Thing After Another! might therefore be seen to reflect this close relationship, although here it is the servants who are being imitated and potentially mocked. None the less, the conclusion of the film, in which the lazy and snooty mistress is left without any domestic help, is suggestive of the potential alliance between children and servants in the middle-­class home. Similarly, in What a Night!, the children, unlike the anxious parents, are completely unperturbed by the mysterious stranger who lurks outside the house, very likely because their position in relation to the events – they are sitting on the stairs, whereas their parents are secluded in the living room – means that they can see that the man is actually their maid’s boyfriend and not the dangerous armed robber their parents are anticipating. Indeed, in the conclusion to this film, the children deliberately add to the confusion, again by dressing up – they pretend to be the robber, using their father’s hat and a toy gun – successfully forcing their terrified mother into giving up her jewellery before their ruse is discovered by their father. Meanwhile, and unbeknownst to the parents, we see the maid and her boyfriend enjoying a cosy cup of tea together in the kitchen. ­264

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The Significance of Love As Newcomb suggests, despite the potential seriousness or tensions of the relationships between members of the household in the domestic comedy, the underlying context for the various conflicts in the domestic comedy is that of love. He states: The real basis for the domestic comedy is a sense of deep personal love among the members of the family. Essential to such families is a sense of groupness, of interdependence. The interdependence is impossible without a strong sense of role definition. Members of families in domestic comedies know who they are.9 As a number of historians have observed, one of the defining characteristics of the development of the middle-­class family over the twentieth century was a shift from a broadly disciplinary model of child care, in which the authority of the adult is unquestioned and there is a distinct separation between parents and children, to a more child-­centred model, where the bonds of affection bring the family together as a group and children are granted greater agency.10 Writing on the home movies of a prolific Dutch amateur filmmaker (the father of the Schendstok family, who made a large number of films between 1932 and 1978), Susan Aasman observes that his films demonstrate this tendency and argues further that ‘the most remarkable aspect of modern twentieth century family life was the love-­oriented approach that became an important feature of modern child-­rearing practice.’11 While Aasman’s essay concentrates on the production and content of the home movie (the films she discusses are more akin to records than dramatised fabrications of the filmmaker’s family life), her conclusions about the fluctuating position of the amateur filmmaker as both director and (in this instance) as a father are significant. One essential connection, of course, between the position of the filmmaker as an amateur and as a loving family member is that the love expressed in this relationship is made parallel to, or articulated via, the ‘love’ of the amateur for the activity of filmmaking – that is, the amateur is a filmmaker who makes the film for love not commercial gain.12 Equally, in terms of the narrative structure of the films, it is also love – that code of fairness and duty of care that is believed to underpin bourgeois family relationships – that undoubtedly dictates the ‘happy endings’ to many of these films. These happy endings, in films such as A Hit and a Miss (1954) and Crabbit Granny (1953), show the children not just as a nuisance but as going on to ‘save the day’, in the same spirit as the adventures portrayed in Enid Blyton’s popular series of children’s books, such as The Famous Five (1942–62) or The Secret Seven (1949–63). Or, as in Golly’s Party (1952), where the ‘happy ending’ of the film is realised when the child is, ultimately and safely, simply tucked up in her own bed. Yet the significance or the quality of love, as it is expressed in these films, 265

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rests not just in their status as propaganda for a particular kind of middle-­ class family morality. An often-­puzzling but frequently enchanting effect of these films is the way in which ordinary actions (brushing a dog, bathing a baby, putting a little sister to bed or the simple observation of a young child dressing) seemingly generate an affective pull, or a kind of sense memory, that can recall the feel and the weight of objects, of the childish difficulty in holding, dressing, walking and negotiating the architecture of the home. In Iain Dunnachie’s Busy Afternoon (1950), the action comprises no more than a little girl playing in her garden; she makes sandcastles, plays on a slide, then carefully bathes and dresses her baby doll. Similarly, in Robert H. Paterson’s Golly’s Party, another slightly older little girl sets up a tea party for her doll and teddy bears, and is visited by a couple of her friends and their dolls. There are no real complications here to orchestrate the plots and the focus therefore, as Newcomb suggests, is on the development of the characters rather than on the progress of the action. None the less, the busy-­ness and considerable charm of the little girl in the former film (complete with blonde ringlets and attractive, sturdy gait) are manifested by the care she apparently takes in her actions and the patience with which they are depicted. The attractiveness of the film and the adherence to the centrality of the child are established by the exclusive and close focus on the little girl, and the way in which events are filmed from her eye level. From this intimate perspective, we are able to witness her evident confidence and pleasure in her play and, at one point, her struggle with the fastenings of the clothes as she undresses the baby doll. She is therefore being observed by the camera operator with what would seem to be delight and fascination (which suggests affection), but it is also possible to see, at the back of many of the shots, the lower half of a seated female figure in the garden who, while similarly ‘busy’ with a domestic task (sewing), is presumably also watching over the little girl as she plays. The apparently incidental presence of this figure consolidates the way in which the little girl is situated in an idealised nexus of familial care. The fact that she is imitating a series of stereotypical maternal/feminine activities is suggestive of her own probable admiration for this model of femininity, but it also, as Newcomb suggests in relation to the domestic comedy, determines and defines her understanding of her role, both as a child and (presumably) as a future wife and mother. The uncertain fictional status of such films may serve to unsettle readings. In Golly’s Party, the ‘teddy bear’s picnic’ – the eponymous music plays over the images – might serve as a kind of ironic commentary on an adult social event. The little girl’s friends come in their best dresses and one of them, rather eccentrically, brings her little dog in a pram. Yet the elaborate ‘set-­up’ for the play, which involves the little girl waking up in her bed, getting dressed, arranging the party in the garden and then finally getting undressed, putting on her pyjamas, saying her prayers and going back to bed, suggests that the event is to be taken at face value – as ‘serious’. Indeed, the otherwise redundant ­266

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appearance of two adults, apparently the little girl’s mother and father, who separately undertake to tidy up the garden after the party (in theatrical terminology, it could be said that they ‘strike the set’), also adds weight to the sense that the little girl’s world within the ‘world of the home’ is treated with respect and love by her adult guardians. Of course, it is also a carefully controlled environment in which the little girl is ‘playing nicely’ and enacting an idealised model of childhood. The affective pull of Golly’s Party is organised not just by the display of intimate family relationships, however, but also by the material nature of objects (the toys, furniture, clothes) that similarly demonstrate a context in which expressions of love and care apparently predominate. Love is evident, for instance, in the gentle hold and touch of the girl as she dresses the hand-­ knitted, lanky ‘Golly’ doll, as it is placed at the head of the picnic table. Similarly, love or indulgence is implied by the time given over (or indeed the film used) to present the little girl’s dressing and undressing. The child is clearly as much a ‘treasured possession’ to the filmmaker as the doll is to her (with both the love and the control that this implies). Of particular note is the little girl’s alarm clock, which, when ringing, is made to appear as if it is hopping from side to side in the same way that objects are frequently animated (that is, they appear to come to life) in cartoon series such as Felix the Cat (1919–36) or in numerous Walt Disney films. The alarm clock is clearly a child’s model and, by awarding it particular attention, the filmmaker refers perhaps to the child’s experience of watching similar films – thus making the moment of importance to the child but also symptomatic, once again, of the ‘happy’ and bourgeois childhood the little girl is apparently both ‘having’ and, within the film, performing. The clock’s animated appearance thus pays tribute to its owner’s privilege and her special relation to it as a possession, namely, as an object that belongs to her alone. This brief sequence might also be seen to reflect the way in which, during play, inanimate objects (such as dolls and teddy bears) are awarded liveliness and agency by the child who is playing with them. This description from Amateur Cine World of a ‘Highly Commended’ (and Lizars Trophy-­winning) film entered in the 1952 Institute of Amateur Cinematographers (IAC) competition, entitled The Mice Will Play and made by F. B. Sykes, indicates that this kind of affective moment (and the representation of the sensuousness materiality of objects) are often fundamental to the successful amateur domestic comedy: The photography is incisive (plenty of close shots), an eye for pictorial effect is evident and there is a marked feeling for cutting. The result has vigour and variety through careful technique (we particularly like the shot of the 5-­year-­old lugging off his brother’s shoes, an alarmingly complicated and painful process viewed with calm detachment by the sufferer) and the fruits of great patience.13 267

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12.3  Frank Marshall’s grandson tumbles into the family kitchen in Early Birds (1956).

Here, a potentially banal sequence in which the older brother helps his younger brother in a struggle with his shoes, is not seen as incidental to the film but as one of its key attractions. As Aasman states of the movies she explores – and arguably within the domestic comedy too – these films offer privileged access to a world where: walking, falling and getting on your feet again is a heroic struggle, where every move is a victory. That is the theme . . . and its narrative is symbolic for the modern affectionate child-­centred ideal.14 The Importance of ‘Physical Objects’ One of the recurring pleasures in viewing a number of amateur domestic comedies kept by the Scottish Screen Archive is that many of the films have often been made by the same filmmaker over a considerable number of years, thus making it possible to spot the re-­appearance of familiar architecture, objects and toys as they are pictured from different points of view, and at different points in time. This would include the toy car owned by Nairn Marshall (as it appears in Just One Thing After Another! and Our Angel Children), or the distinctive rabbit slippers owned by Marshall’s grandson and seen in Early ­268

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Birds and Tree for Two (1957), as well as the frequent re-­appearance of the kitchen cupboards, lounge furnishings and distinctive Chinese design of the rug in the hall of the family villa. Undoubtedly, many of the films discussed so far (made between the 1930s and 1960s) now seem open to a nostalgic reading, and it is difficult not to over-­invest in the details of the period incidentally captured by the filmmaker. Often, it is the sensuously material quality of these details – the texture of brushed cotton pyjamas, the shininess of the wooden panels of the doors and the smooth lino of kitchen floors – that are particularly fascinating and touching. However, it is evident from contemporary commentary on amateur films made in the 1950s that the materiality of objects and architecture – the physical imposition and spatial organisation of doors, windows, sinks, stairs and beds – presented both an opportunity and certain complications to the filmmakers themselves. The following description from Amateur Cine World is of an award-­winning domestic comedy, Never a Cross Word (1951), made by the Sale Cine Society: The first part of the film is a trifle slow, principally because of an insistence on coming and going through doors – an emphasis which few amateur film plays seem to avoid. Characters come and go in professional films, too, but in these entrances and exits are not so noticeable because the rooms are larger or the camera crew have more room for manoeuvring – or because there are not so many of them!15 An ‘insistence on coming and going through doors’ is a formal operation of the farce and therefore, perhaps, to be expected in this comedic genre. Yet here it is an annoyance, with the ‘coming and going’ of the characters slowing down rather than accelerating the action. As the writer suggests, it is very likely that this was an effect of production, of filming in the actual and probably relatively small rooms owned by the filmmakers, and by the crowding of the film crew into these confined spaces. However, what the observation also exposes is the potentially uncanny effect of domestic architecture itself. To employ Freud’s definition of the term, the uncanny may emerge as an effect produced when the familiar is made unfamiliar or – in German – ‘unheimlich’, also translatable as ‘unhomely’. In these films, the filmmakers’ homes are made strange as their otherwise ordinary divisions, borders and architecture – the walls, doors, windows and corridors – are re-­presented, or their functions complicated, by their use in a fiction that both is and is not real. That this was an effect recognised by the filmmakers is made evident in the pages of Amateur Cine World. In the second of a series of articles concerning the production of the amateur family film, Gordon Davies, in a column titled ‘It’s hard to be natural’, explains: The trouble is that there is a tendency to attach too much importance to physical objects such as doors. Amateur actors so often betray their fear that the door might not close or the lamp switch on, and by a kind 269

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of desperate self-­identification with these objects draw a quite disproportionate attention to them. In everyday life you simply do not notice the lampshade when you press the switch, nor does the door become a formidable object.16 Davies connects the surprising difficulty in managing these objects to the actors’ self-­consciousness, and to the fact that everyday actions are so difficult to reproduce ‘naturally’ in front of the camera. Yet it is possible to speculate that the effect is not determined solely by the inadequacy of the performers, but through an unanticipated or implicit recognition of the animated qualities of the bourgeois interior itself. In her article, ‘Scampering sofas and “skuttling” tables: The entertaining interior’, Patricia Pringle discusses a history of fictional representations of the modern interior and just such animated qualities. Although her discussion focuses on texts and performances produced in the nineteenth century (such as elaborate theatrical illusions in which living-­ room sets come alive, and the vitality of the interior in the novels of Charles Dickens), she also refers to the development of ‘trick films’ and the enchanted interiors of the ‘haunted hotel’ as a recurring trope in the early cinema of the twentieth century. Of these forms she argues: the comic spirit, with its ability to address the complex emotions, desires and anxieties about the things that matter to a society in each epoch, has continued to develop the trope of awkward relations between humans and perverse objects. Hope that our furniture will be kind to us and apprehensions that it might refuse us its sympathy are often expressed through humorous representations of it as animate, from the slapstick of battles with unwieldy deckchairs to the more subtle intransigence of a wheezing chair seat in the world of Jacques Tati.17 Many amateur domestic comedies do seem to borrow directly from this tradition. For instance, the Marshall films Mower Madness (1939) and Hustle of Spring both depict domestic objects (a lawnmower and floor polisher, respectively) that seemingly act autonomously and with malicious intent. However, as Pringle suggests, a more nuanced understanding of this ambivalent relationship (between interior and individual) might recognise that the anxieties manifested in such films do not stem solely from the sense in which the ‘safe haven’ of the home is threatened by malevolent external forces. Of course, in many of the films, external (or hidden) forces are apparently at work: for instance, in Hustle of Spring, it is Nairn Marshall playing tricks behind his mother’s back; and in Mower Madness, it is an apparently supernatural agency that possesses the lawnmower (although this is, in the end, revealed to be a fantastic dream). However, Pringle argues that this anxiety and fascination with the interior – in films, performances and literature – reflect the increasing importance of the bourgeois domestic interior in the nineteenth and twentieth ­270

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centuries as it becomes both ‘a spatial location and manifestation of thought, image, and belief about the self in relation to the world’.18 This means that the interior is much more than a neutral ‘backdrop’ for its inhabitants but rather a ‘manifestation’ that articulates and responds to individual dreams, desires and senses of self. Pringle adds suggestively here to an earlier argument developed by Charles Rice in The Emergence of the Interior, in which he details (with reference to the work of a number of writers including Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud and Ernst Bloch) the way in which the modern bourgeois domestic interior could be said to be characteristically ‘doubled’. At once both a real physical location with specific dimensions, the interior also exists for Rice as an ‘image’, a two-­dimensional and symbolic representation that expresses the social and emotional relationships of its inhabitants and their interaction with the outside world. In that sense, the interior is recognised as a significant agent in the construction of a modern, self-­conscious subjectivity, in which questions of taste, décor and the choice of objects are understood to relate specifically to the conception of the ‘interiority’ of the subject in the late nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries: The interior thus emerged with significance as a physical, three-­ dimensional space, as well as an image, whether it be a two-­dimensional representation such as a painting, a print in a portfolio of decoration, or a flat back-­drop that could conjure up an interior as a theatrical scene. This image-­based sense also encompasses a reverie or imaginal picture . . . one which could transform an existing spatial interior into something other. Significantly, doubleness involves the interdependence between image and space, with neither sense being primary.19 This sense of the ‘doubleness’ of the interior is one of the key effects of the amateur domestic comedy since the process of filming transforms the real space of the filmmaker’s home into an image. Thus the production and exhibition of the amateur domestic comedy exposes or realises the inherently doubled nature of the interior, with particular emphasis. This leads to an uncanny effect where the home is depicted as a comfortable haven from the outside world and, simultaneously, vulnerable and open to invasion via its various openings (windows and doors) and inhabited by potentially malevolent objects. Of the films discussed so far, it is perhaps What a Night! that employs this sense of doubleness and this uncanny effect most explicitly. The film is very much a domestic comedy, but its evident debt to the radio ‘thriller’ (and its associated elements of masked villains, guns and stolen jewellery) amplifies the potentially alarming aspects of the doubled interior. This means that, despite the parents’ apparent security in the comfort of their living room, they become increasingly jittery about a number of possibilities – armed robbery, accidental poisoning, a lurking stranger – that threaten to usurp their quiet evening by the fire. Of 271

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particular interest is the way in which much of this anxiety is provoked by the act of looking, whether this involves reading alarming reports in the evening newspaper, or over-­reacting to the sensational cover of a detective novel, or simply looking out of windows. The importance of looking is further emphasised by the inclusion of an unusual ‘zoom in’ as the father reads, over the mother’s shoulder, the story from the newspaper concerning the presence of an armed robber in their neighbourhood. Entirely appropriately, one of the most significant domestic objects in the film is a mirror, seen hanging in the hall. We first register the mirror as the maid, collecting the evening newspaper, pauses on her way from the hall into the living room to primp her hair. This apparently mundane instance of self-­grooming makes visible the way in which doubling plays out within the narrative itself – not just in relation to the uncanny aspects of the mise-­en-­ scène, in which the home is a stage too, but also in the way that the different couples – master/mistress, boyfriend/maid, son/daughter – interact in the story itself. The object’s importance in the film is confirmed when, mysteriously, it later crashes to the floor, startling the mother and father and obliging the irritated maid to clear up the mess. Kneeling down to sweep up the shattered fragments of the mirror, she looks up through the glass panels of the inner front door of the house and recognises that her boyfriend is hovering about outside. Just previous to this sequence, there is a point-­of-­view shot from the perspective of this boyfriend, who is in the driveway trying, as inconspicuously as possible, to attract her attention. In this carefully composed shot, the camera is thus filming from the exterior of the house, and looking in from the dark of the evening into the lighted hallway. This captures the maid (who can be seen sweeping up the broken mirror) so that she is artfully framed, an effect enhanced by the architecture of the door lintel and the 1930s ‘Art Deco’ design of the glass panels of the front door itself. This shot is attractive but it is also alarming, recalling the conventions of the suspense and horror film genres in which such point-­of-­view shots usually alert the viewer to the hidden presence of villains or monsters as they spy on their unsuspecting victims. The crash of the mirror also serves to wake the two children of the household, who, as indicated earlier, creep down from their bedroom to a position on the stairs where they can witness the mayhem and go on to create further confusion. As a decorative object that makes the domestic interior it reflects into an image, the use of the mirror here as a frame within a frame (as the maid and hallway behind her are reflected), and then as a pivotal element of the narrative, reinforces the doubled quality of the Marshall’s house as being at once a stage (or an image) and a real space that is lived in by the family. Conclusions As should be evident, a recurring feature of the amateur domestic comedy is its focus on the presence and activity of the children in the home. My conclusions ­272

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12.4  A mysterious stranger lurks outside the family home as the maid clears up the broken mirror in What a Night! (1939).

consider how the previous discussion of the internal architecture of the home, such as doors, windows and stairs, as well as the doubled quality of the bourgeois interior accrue a particular resonance within this genre in relation to the figure of the child. The title for this chapter comes from a foreword, written by Howard Eiland for his translation of Walter Benjamin’s series of autobiographical musings concerning the critic’s childhood and his childhood home, a comfortable middle-­class house: Berlin Childhood around 1900. Benjamin’s sensitivity to the ambivalent qualities of commodities, objects and the mundane artefacts of modern life is well known.20 In this short book, however, Benjamin’s memories of his childhood home, the servants, his toys and books reveal the existence of a peculiarly intimate relationship between the bourgeois domestic interior and the child. This relationship refers directly to both the comic and the more serious concerns that underpin the amateur domestic comedy. Eiland suggests that, in Benjamin’s rememberings: the child is initiated into the secret life of ordinary objects, often the most minuscule. He derives fugitive knowledge from the rattling of the rolled-­up window blinds or the rustling of branches that brush up against the house. He mingles with the iridescent colours of a soap bubble rising to the ceiling, or with the band of blue running around the upper part of two porcelain basins deceptively illuminated by the moonlight in his bedroom. The child builds his nest in the depths of the everyday, secure and hidden in the fragile magic of the ‘home’.21 This is an unabashedly romantic conception of the relationship between the child and the home, and one that echoes Gaston Bachelard’s poetic model of a geography of childhood, where the home becomes both a context in 273

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which the child dreams and a ‘dream house’, a site of fantasy and desire.22 The notion of the ‘secret life of ordinary objects’ and the belief in a ‘fugitive knowledge’ that only the child has access to, is expressed by many of the amateur films considered here, whether this is represented as a force for good (where the children try to help) or ill (when the children deliberately make a mess and play tricks behind their parents’ backs). In T. H. Thoms’s Feather Christmas (1958), for example, two older boys attempt to help their sleeping mother as their little sister first steals from her mother’s handbag, and then makes a mess of her face and clothes as she devours the chocolate that was hidden inside. The boys take their little sister through a laborious bath and bedtime routine during which she is alternatively obedient (submitting to her scrubbing in the bath) and naughty (after the bath, she runs naked down a corridor.) In the end, having successfully put their sister into her cot, they bring their mother upstairs to observe their helpful endeavours; unfortunately, the little girl has meanwhile discovered a hole in her pillow and has made the feathers from this pillow ‘snow’, thereby covering her bedroom carpet. Unsurprisingly, as this is a domestic comedy, all is forgiven and the little girl is evidently so charming that both the brothers and the mother are obliged to laugh at her antics. In contrast, in Marshall’s Our Angel Children, Muriel and Nairn Marshall set about a number of deliberately malign adventures (dancing a jig that causes a lampshade to smash and initiating a flood in the laundry, as well as finally fooling about dangerously in their father’s car) that serve to demonstrate how easy it is for the child to upset the ‘fragile magic’ of the home. In all of the films featuring children, the actual child’s naughty or exemplary behaviour will have been sanctioned and encouraged by the filmmaker (who is often the father) and this can frequently be glimpsed via the moments on screen when the child can be seen looking for reassurance through the lens of the camera at the filmmaker. None the less, the pervasive recurrence and plausibility of the events depicted in the amateur domestic comedy acknowledge the child’s fluctuating status in relation to the bourgeois home. In some of the films, the child functions almost as if he or she is a treasured household possession (one of the charming and animated objects that make up the ideal home), whereas in others, they are depicted as a potential threat to that same fantasy (as an undisciplined and uniquely knowledgeable intruder). In fact, some of this ambivalence is captured by Benjamin himself, and many of the short essays that make up Berlin Childhood are much more discomfiting than Eiland’s commentary implies. In one of these short fragments, ‘Hiding Places’, Benjamin’s description of the child’s intimate knowledge of the domestic interior interprets the relationship of the child to the home in a surprisingly disturbing, indeed an uncanny, way: The child who stands behind the doorway curtain himself becomes something white that flutters, a ghost. The dining table under which he has ­274

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crawled turns him into a wooden idol of the temple; its carved legs are four pillars. And behind a door, he is himself the door, is decked out in it like a weighty mask and, as sorcerer, will cast a spell on all who enter unawares.23 As a genre, therefore, the amateur domestic comedy, which continually presents a doubled bourgeois interior that is at once enchanted and enchanting, may be identified not just by the restricted conditions of its production and the apparently limited ambitions of its plots. Rather, by responding to both its delicate charm and its often surprisingly uncanny effects, it is possible to uncover a variety of dedicated fascinations, hidden relations, uncomfortable alliances, perilous adventures and on-­going anxieties that make up the twentieth-­century, middle-­class home. Notes   1. See Ian Goode, ‘Locating the family film: the critics, the competition and the archive’, in Ian Craven (ed.), Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema (Newcastle-­upon-­Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 182–208; Julia Noordegraaf and Elvira Pouw, ‘Extended family films: home movies in the state-­ sponsored archive’, The Moving Image, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2009, pp. 83–103; and Valerie Vignaux, ‘Is cinema child’s play? The family films of Clotilde Muller-­ Libeski’, in Sonja Kmec and Viviane Thill (eds), Private Eyes and the Public Gaze: The Manipulation and Valorisation of Amateur Images (Amsterdam: Kliomedia, 2009), pp. 53–9.   2. Ian Goode, ‘Locating the family film’, p. 188.   3. Most of the films discussed in this chapter were presumably screened privately at home and/or exhibited at public events such as the Scottish Amateur Film Festival, or circulated via national tours as one of the annual ‘Ten Best’ films, selected by the magazine Amateur Cine World. For further details of such public exposure, see Ruth Washbrook, ‘Innovation on a shoestring: The films and filmmakers of the Scottish Amateur Film Festival’, in Ian Craven (ed.), Movies on Home Ground, pp. 36–65. In addition, in a transcript of an interview conducted for the BBC Scotland television programme Scotland on Film in 2004, one filmmaker’s daughter (Muriel Lewis, nee Marshall, daughter of the filmmaker Frank Marshall) recalls that screenings of her father’s films were organised during the Second World War at the Marshall family home, with friends and family attending to raise money for charity. Scottish Screen Archive Ref: 11/1/515.   4. Horace Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art (New York: Doubleday, 1974), pp. 46–7.   5. Several of Frank Marshall’s films, including the domestic comedies Early Birds, Our Angel Children, What a Night! and Holidays Hurrah! (1940), are available to view via the Scottish Screen Archive’s online catalogue, available at: http://ssa.nls. uk/   6. The house is the Marshall family home, a large detached villa, built specifically for Frank M. Marshall, between 1934 and 1935. It is situated in the affluent southern suburb of Whitecraigs, near Glasgow in western Scotland.   7. Jane Hamlett, Material Relation: Domestic Interiors and Middle-­Class Families in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 118.   8. Ibid.   9. Horace Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art, p. 48.

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10. See, for instance, Harry Hendrick, Children, Childhood and English Society 1880–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and, in particular, the chapter, ‘Parent–child relationships’, pp. 16–39. 11. Susan Aasman, ‘Home movies: a new technology, a new duty, a new cultural practice’, in Sonja Kmec and Viviane Thill (eds), Private Eyes and the Public Gaze, p. 48. 12. For a more detailed discussion relating to the question of the amateur as a ‘lover’ in relation to the filmmaking process, see Ian Craven, ‘A Very Fishy Tale: The curious case of amateur subjectivity’, in Ian Craven (ed.), Movies on Home Ground, pp. 1–36. 13. Anon., ‘Thrills and laughs in a good bunch of competition films’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 16, No. 12, 1953, pp. 1230–2. 14. Aasman, ‘Home movies: a new technology’, p. 48. 15. Anon., ‘A survey of the Ten Best entry’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1952, pp. 31–8, 74–5. 16. Gordon Davies, ‘It’s hard to be natural!’, Amateur Cine World, Vol. 16, No. 9, 1953, pp. 921–2. 17. Patricia Pringle, ‘Scampering sofas and “skuttling” tables: the entertaining ­interior’, Interiors, Vol. 1, No. 3, 2010, pp. 219–44, quotation appears p. 237. 18. Ibid., p. 224. 19. Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 2. 20. Aside from a number of much-­cited essays, the recent translation of and increasing academic commentary concerning Benjamin’s unfinished ‘history of modern life’ – namely, ‘The Arcades Project’ – is significant here. See, for instance, Susan Buck Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Massachussetts Institute of Technology Press, 1991). 21. Howard Eiland, ‘Translator’s foreward’, in Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (London: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. xiv–xv. 22. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reveries: Childhood, Language and the Cosmos (Boston: Beacon, 1969), and for commentary, see Chris Philo, ‘“To go back up the side hill”: Memories, imagination and reveries of childhood’, Children’s Geographies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2003, pp. 7–24, and Owain Jones, ‘True geography quickly forgotten, giving away to an adult-­imagined universe: Approaching the otherness of childhood’, Children’s Geographies, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2008, pp. 195–212. 23. Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood, p. 99.

Filmography A Hit and a Miss (T. H. Thoms, 1954) 16mm, 11.29 mins, colour, silent. Busy Afternoon (Ian Dunnachie, 1950), 16mm, 7.00 mins, colour, silent. Crabbit Granny (Enrico Cocozza, 1953) 16mm, 10.00 mins, black and white, sound. Early Birds (Frank Marshall, 1956) 16mm, 12.01 mins, colour, silent. Feather Christmas (T. H. Thoms, 1958) 16mm, 10.47 mins, colour, silent. Golly’s Party (Robert H. Paterson, 1952) 16mm, 9.12 mins, colour, silent. Holidays Hurrah! (Frank Marshall, 1940), 16mm, 16 mins, black and white, silent. Hustle of Spring (Frank Marshall, 1941) 16mm, 17.35 mins, black and white, silent. Just One Thing After Another! (Frank Marshall, 1936) 16mm, 9.42 mins, black and white / colour, silent. The Mice Will Play (F. B. Sykes, 1952) 8mm, 12 mins, colour, silent. Mower Madness (Frank Marshall, 1939) 16mm, 13.39 mins, black and white, silent. Never a Cross Word (Sale Cine Society, 1951) 16mm, 20 mins, black and white, sound.

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Our Angel Children (Frank Marshall, 1938) 16mm, 14.17 mins, black and white, silent. Tree for Two (Frank Marshall, 1957) 16mm, 8.58 mins, colour, silent. What a Night! (Frank Marshall, 1939) 16mm, 11.50 mins, black and white, silent. A significant collection of Frank Marshall’s films, including the domestic comedies Early Birds, Our Angel Children, What a Night! and Holidays Hurrah! (1940), are available to view via the Scottish Screen Archive’s online catalogue, available at: http:// ssa.nls.uk/, which contains details of numerous other titles.

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A giant blob of murderous energy, sparring teenagers, romance and road races, murder and mayhem, all set against the backdrop of 1950s Americana. The science-­fiction enthusiast might mistakenly associate such a description with a ‘classic’ cult movie such as The Blob (1958), but rather than this early outing for a young Steve McQueen, these scenes in fact come from Keep Watching the Skies, a 1975 amateur remake, shot entirely on location in Northern Ireland by brothers Roy and Noel Spence. In the 1970s, twin brothers Roy and Noel Spence made a career move that was to prove momentous for cine culture in Northern Ireland, deciding to give up their jobs as teachers and devote more time to their various cine-­related hobbies.1 Since then, the Spences have become celebrated figures throughout Ireland, recognised for their significant contributions to amateur cinema, both through their work in film production and through their creation of some remarkable screening venues, bespoke movie theatres recycling furnishings and related ephemera from closed commerical cinemas, to create a truly amateur exhibition sphere.2 So sustained a level of participation is indicative of close family ties. The Spences make a perfect filmic team; while Roy directs and produces, Noel writes (short stories, poetry, screenplays, music) and sometimes acts in the productions. Both brothers spend a great deal of time on creating sets, props and costumes, and have even produced two training DVDs, dealing with ‘no-­budget’ special effects and make-­up, as well as running workshops for budding filmmakers. Such a range of film-­related activities more than justifies the designation ‘cinephile’, whilst helping to redefine the term with a peculiarly amateur reference, and suggests a number of avenues for potential research. This chapter focuses on the Spences’ articulation of amateur ideologies with the protocols of ‘cult’ cinema, the inspirations and improvisations of the ­278

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B-­movie, and the formative social and political contexts of Northern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’ of the 1970s and 1980s. By developing a synthetic analysis of the Spences’ output from these perspectives, the chapter suggests that an attention to their participation illustrates strongly ‘connective’ aspects of amateur cine culture often marginalised by its construction as a version of an ‘independent’ cinema practice. What emerges from scrutiny of the Spence brothers and their work is, rather, a sense of involvement in a self-­generating and sustaining ‘movement’, and of filmmaking as both a leisure refuge from the contradictions and often-­compromising politics of the public sphere, and an acknowledgement of ceaseless admiration and attachment. Cult Amateur Cinema Attention to the Spences seems to confirm four characteristics of cult cinema, as defined by Mathijs and Mendik.3 Firstly, in terms of the anatomy of their work: cult films are often associated with elements of innovation, and the Spences’ self-­taught approach to filmmaking involved many imaginative and intricate problem-­solving techniques in relation to sets and special effects. Secondly, from the perspective of political economy: the Spences prided themselves on their ‘no-­budget’ approach to filmmaking, refusing any potential commercialisation of their work, which enabled them to retain complete authorial control over their productions. Thirdly, in terms of consumption: the Spences operate as producers and exhibitors of their work – producing material inspired by cult films, which is screened in fetishised, reconstructed cinema spaces that are remarkable in terms of their architectural aesthetics and an often-­remarked-­upon internal ambience. In interview, Noel specifically recounts how these spaces have been described to him ‘as cinema graveyards . . . because they are full of all the dead pieces of deceased cinemas’.4 These ghostly but utopian spaces pay homage to the movie palaces in which the original 1950s films were screened. Finally, in relation to cultural status – the way in which a cult film can comment on its time or region: the Spences provide simultaneously a yearning for better times and a dissection of the darkest facets of the human character at a stage in Northern Ireland that saw a range of human tragedies unfold at the height of the ‘Troubles’. The Spences’ tribute to cinema is thus multifaceted, fuelled by cult fandom, underground culture, and a celebration of past cinemas, whilst offering a critical response to the social and cultural contexts of the present. Images of their exhibition venues picture only the outward forms of a nostalgic longing that haunts the work of the Spence brothers at deeper levels. While Roy states, ‘For me, life stopped in 1960. Your adolescent years are your most impressionable. It’s all about nostalgia, what you remember as a teenager. It’s a kind of longing,’ Noel has written a number of poems recounting the culture and lifestyle of the 1950s, such as ‘Back Number’, in which the poet confesses: 279

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13.1  Interior of Noel Spence’s ‘Tudor’ cinema, featuring reclaimed furnishings and memorabilia from ‘deceased’ cinemas throughout Ireland.

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With me it’s like I’m on a phone, A clear long distance recall line; Four pennies in, press button B, I’m through to 1959.5 Noel has also published two volumes of short stories, Secrets and Lies and Luck: Twenty Short Stories, and listens to 1950s music played on a vintage jukebox for inspiration while he writes.6 This is no coincidence, since the brothers spend much of their time screening films in venues fabricating a tangible atmosphere of film history and recreating imagined aspects of the (mostly American) past. In a twenty-­first century rife with globalisation, it is fascinating to observe the romantic attachment the Spences have constructed to American counter-­culture. This nostalgia is also reminiscent of a longing for the imagined security of the post-­war boom years, which appears in the films of the 1950s. There is certainly a melancholic aspect to the Spences’ filmic yearning, which is sensed strongly in their own filmmaking, and which can also be identified in the landscapes and cityscapes of the commercial science-­fiction and noir-­ish cinema that seems to inspire it, in which, as Martin McLoone has suggested, ‘the prevailing mood is one of metaphysical angst and alienation, a world in which modernity itself seems to have corrupted individual behaviour and at the same time dissipated all hope of community and home.’7 The Spences’ cinema thus uses fantasy spaces (both cinematic and exhibition) to suppress the antagonistic present, and to evoke an imagined pre-­conflict golden era, beyond contradiction and struggle. From such perspectives, the 1950s is constructed as a fantasy world that is definitively ‘pre-­Troubles’ and also coincides with the Spences’ idyllic teenage years. Just as fantasy can be used to support ideological reasoning that is flawed, the construction of this golden era is problematic in more local terms, since it was a time when tensions about civil rights were bubbling under the surface in Northern Ireland (and, indeed, in the real American spaces that are invoked as locations in the Spences’ filmmaking).8 In the introduction to Noel’s volume of poetry Bluebells in a Jar, J. E. McKelvey writes: In retrospect, no time seems more remote than that postwar period of the Great American Dream, its boundless optimism and sense of promise. Noel Spence’s poetry lovingly salutes the iconography of that Technicolour age, its throbbing jukeboxes and raucous glitz, the scowling rebellion of youth against complacent age. He characteristically laments the passing of not only the tangible artefacts of the period, but the loss of confidence and hope that underlies our more circumspect present.9 This regression back to the Spences’ idyllic teenagehood points towards a sense of identity that the brothers sought to recapture when they opted out of conventional working life. Rejecting the standards of the capitalist consumerist 281

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cycle of working/spending, after giving up jobs that dampened their creativity, the brothers have come close to realising an image of truly amateur practice, seemingly unhindered in their pursuit of their filmic hobbies. Noel’s poem ‘The Executives’ perfectly encapsulates the brothers’ attitudes towards the mindless functioning of the conventional capitalist workforce, as it evokes the nature of the ‘tiresome workings-­out’ of endless meetings in which the chattering masses compete for meaningless promotions. The poem ends: All could have learned a lesson from my brother. His point of view for me is now a creed; The wise man is the one who doesn’t bother.10 The sentiments here testify to the Spences’ decidedly ‘cult-­like’ celebration of alternative creativity over corporate culture and practice, both in relation to working practices generally and filmmaking in particular. Equally evocative is the Spences’ distrust of modern media, their dislike of twenty-­first-­century filmic and televisual respresentations, celebrity culture and the ‘cunning, punning tabloid press’.11 In this sense, the Spences are not only ‘cult’ practitioners but also counter-­cultural voices. They reject the political economy associated with the working practices and consumerist tendencies of twenty-­ first-­century life, tendencies they see as reflected and propagated by modern media. The Spences’ relationship to cinematic culture as amateurs provides them with a platform from which to engage with counter-­cultural activity through consumption, production and exhibition of ‘alternative’ cultural products alongside the rejection of certain working practices and modern mass cultural expression. Both brothers ‘bother’ a great deal about their filmmaking and make bids for a decidedly dedicated amateurism. What emerges from the Spences’ alternative and cult-­like canon is a (not uncritical) homage to the thriller, horror and sci-­fi genres, laced with a cinephiliac celebration of underground film culture more generally. While Patrick Luciano has suggested that the sci-­fi genre in particular inspires in its audience ‘wonder and hope, aspiration and ideals’, there is a more specific sense here that the Spences are imbued with these qualities while they are working.12 Indeed, if they, as many amateurs, make films they want to see, their connection to their work is simultaneously as both producer and audience. If, as Mark Jancovich proposes, there is an opposition within approaches to ‘cult’ texts between the formalist (concerned with identifying cult aesthetics in textual style) and the sociological (concerned with audiences and reception), then the Spence brothers’ practice easily accommodates these competing scholarly approaches.13 It is precisely because of their work’s amateur status, perhaps, that it is able to address these critical agendas, with its explorations of film style and technique effectively inseparable from the cultivation of its particular relationship with its spectators. One of the Spences’ most significant activities involves the running of the Chowder Club, established to provide screenings for enthusiasts of the sci-­fi ­282

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13.2  Roy Spence’s ‘Excelsior’ cinema and regular meeting place of the Chowder Club.

and horror genres, who must sit a series of tests in order to become members. Indeed, the Chowder Club operates as a perfect celebration of both cult cinema and the work of the Spence brothers, defining itself as a viewing space reserved for films that are alternative to mainstream cinema, whose spectatorship confers senses of cultural distinction on their audiences; in Jancovich’s terms, ‘it is by presenting themselves as oppositional that cult audiences are able to confer value upon both themselves and the films around which they congregate.’14 The Chowder Club’s test for new members offers precisely this opportunity ‘to distinguish a “real” fan from a cultural interloper or ‘tourist’ . . . in order to protect and add value to their viewing position’.15 Like much cult activity, that of the Spence brothers involves elements of distinct cultural display. Both Noel and Roy frequently reference their prolific knowledge of commercially and independently produced sci-­fi and horror films, in describing and placing their own work. They also cite distinct stylistic 283

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traditions in explaining their fascinations: German Expressionism, in particular, is regarded as highly influential, and echoes of films such as Nosferatu (1922) and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) are apparent in both their set design and their frequent narrative focus on the monstrous. Such tendencies can be traced from their earliest efforts, and are well demonstrated in The House of Doctor Jekyll (1962) and The Tomb of Frankenstein (1964), both typically amateur homages to cherished professional inter-­texts, whose reduced technical resources contribute much of value to their curious effects. Shot ‘mute’, the lack of dialogue in both films, for example, focuses the viewer’s attention firmly on the chiaroscuro of their atmospheric images. Certainly, these early works demonstrate an already remarkable filmic proficiency, with their impressive visuals and attention to period and genre detail. Similar traits can, however, be observed in subsequent films with dialogue, including Wolves of Darkness (1966), also shot in black and white, and incorporating abstract artistic visuals structured by contrasting sequences of dark and light, and The Testament of Caleb Meeke (1969), which explores the story of a young man who inherits ‘a legacy of witchcraft and demonology’, as outlined in the Spences’ description of the film on a recently produced DVD cover.16 Broad signatory patterns can be drawn in relation to the visual style explored in the Spences’ ouptut; dark shadowy horrors with an avant-­garde inflection produced in the 1960s evolve into sci-­fi-­related material in the 1970s, which in turn give way to more conventional realist narratives in the 1980s, and a series of documentaries and training DVDs, produced from the 1990s onwards. Authors as well as genres are inspirational; the Spences cite cult directors Ed Wood and Roger Corman as particular influences on their work, and there are clear parallels to be drawn between the latter’s repertoire of ‘traditionally low-­budget films’, with ‘sets that might tax audience credulity’, and their own amateur efforts, which frequently seem marked by similar failures of realisation.17 Other references seem more perverse; the notorious director Ed Wood is celebrated more specifically for the ‘camp’ and supposed low-­quality nature of his work, which, for the Spences, none the less gains an association with authenticities lacking in more ‘polished’ production.18 As cinemas of ‘austerity’, improvising, reworking and refunctioning their sources, along with their ‘sub-­standard’ nature, such production is perhaps evocative of the conditions of much amateur production and invites identification with that sector. At the same time, the Spences’ work is clearly aspirational. Most of the brothers’ output is filmed on 16mm Ektachrome or Kodachrome stock, with a Bolex H16 RX, a ‘top-­end’ camera much favoured by semi-­professionals. Editing in camera to avoid subsequent splicing is certainly often favoured, although complex assembly of their footage is frequently apparent in finished films. As with Corman’s work, ‘repertory’ playing develops a distinct sense of community through and with the films, and a familiar range of amateur actors appear in successive Spence movies. In practice, the Holywood Players, a County Down amateur drama group, frequently supplied performers; Norman Smith appears ­284

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with great aplomb in the sci-­fi pictures Homunculus (1977) and The Wishing Stone (1978), as well as a drama-­documentary about dairy production, Along the Milky Way (1979), and Brady’s Bargain (1983), a film that evokes much of the clichéd Irishness of Robert Stevenson’s Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959). After appearing as Mr Sullivan in Homunculus, local artist Rowel Friers provided the set design for The Magic Man (1984), and also appeared as the film’s main character, Mesmerus, who tours rural Ireland with his wife, Esmerelda, providing magic and mind-­reading shows, activating and reclaiming stereotypical associations between the Irish and the occult and magical. Clearly, the Spences enjoyed working on several projects with the same actors – contributing to the ‘collective’ feel of the work produced, representing a ‘scaled down version of commercial cinema’, with narrative structures that largely respect the classical paradigms of mainstream commercial filmmaking.19 1950s B-­movies It is clear that the Spences are inspired not just by directors like Corman and Wood, but by the B-­movie phenomenon more generally. The B-­movie has become a retrospective Hollywood institution. Initially designed to utilise sets built for larger-­budget fare and to precede their glossier ‘A’ counterparts at the centre of the cinema programme, B-­movies have garnered cult status in the decades following their peak years in the 1950s. With their sci-­fi flavouring and occasional noir aesthetics, these films were dark and melodramatic, generating a tangible sense of tension, not least due to their rushed production schedules and often nocturnal shooting timetables. Their subject matter dealt frequently with alien invasion, as in I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) and Teenagers from Outer Space (1959); genetic engineering or experiments gone wrong, as in The Fly (1958) and I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957); and strange creatures and forces, as in The Blob (1958) and Creature from the Haunted Sea (1960). Many commentators have drawn attention to an undercurrent running through these films that is related to war, whether recognising the traces of post-­war disillusionment, or the rising fear of nuclear annihilation associated with deepening Cold War tensions. In Teenagers from Outer Space, alien invader Derek challenges his colleagues’ cold attitude towards human and animal life on earth, evoking the dehumanised nature of his own race: DEREK: Our people? We live like parts of a machine. We don’t know our fathers or mothers, we’re raised in cubicles. The sick and the old are put to death. THOR: It is the one and only way to maintain the supreme race. Clear parallels are drawn here with Hitler’s Aryan super-­race and the genocidal devastation of the holocaust, which are extended through the film. Derek, 285

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part of an alien exploration mission, is introduced to 1950s American culture through Betty Morgan. The calculating nature of the alien ‘supreme race’, seeking to conquer and rule earth, is contrasted with the kindness of Betty and her grandfather and their ordered and comfortable existence. The post-­war message here, very close to explicit articulation, is one that offers American family life as an antidote to the ravages of global political conflict. In similar vein, speeches in Corman’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (1956) and Wise’s It Conquered the World (1951) may appear to evoke anti-­war sentiments, calling for peace and solidarity, whilst functioning metaphorically to warn of the dangers of communism and possible nuclear warfare. Reading from more psychoanalytic perspectives, these sci-­fi films embody the return of the repressed, glorifying in the illicit impulses of the id and staging a celebration of death, or perhaps more appropriately, as Patrick Luciano suggests, a ‘perverse celebration of the conquest of the fear of death’.20 In a collective way (and Luciano suggests that the monsters and aliens associated with the sci-­fi film operate as projections of the collective unconscious), the genre allows the audience to assuage fears of what the worst elements of society are capable of enacting on the rest, when those (unrepressed) groups rebel against the civilising forces of social virtue. Sci-­fi B-­movies and alien invasion films often appear as a natural offshoot from the horror genre, with which they share certain traits. Vivian Sobchak suggests that the science-­fiction film evolved from the traditional horror movie, which she argues was ‘technologised’ to suit audience appetites for a modernised version of the genre.21 To this end, the sci-­fi film combines elements including futuristic or extraterrestrial settings, with character communities that consist of scientists, aliens and space travellers. ‘Flashy’ special effects frequently contribute to a particular visual style, and there is often a battle between humans and technology, nature and science. More recent scholarship argues that science-­fiction films ‘can be read as explorations of the fate of humanity in a world often depicted as increasingly dominated by the products of science, technology and rationality’, very much the domains traversed by the films to be considered here.22 In science-­fiction, the general filmic tendency towards exploring the nature of human existance somehow becomes even more acute, whilst the concentration on alien life forms offers countless opportunities to construct and interrogate the dangerous ‘other’ and, indeed, the process of othering, and even to ‘offer in many cases an imaginary way of resolving problems that may be impossible to resolve in reality’.23 The Spence brothers clearly relish the metaphorical potential of the science-­ fiction genre, and its tropes connect easily with their distrust of modern technology, and its proliferation of generic cultural products for contemporary mass consumption. In a characteristically amateur gesture, however, their work simultaneously acknowledges indebtedness to just such cultural production. Within the overall output, there are distinct echoes of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and of the credit sequence of the original Star ­286

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Trek (1966–9) series, in the galactic opening shots of the Spences’ Phase One (1981), which follows an exploratory trip to Earth made by an alien race. The aliens presented in this film, as in many of the Spences’ movies, draw on much of the iconography associated with Roswell and the B-­movie canon, as well as the large-­brained psychic race introduced in Star Trek’s 1965 pilot episode entitled ‘The Cage’, later re-­edited to form two episodes in the main series retitled as ‘The Menagerie’. The tall, ghostly alien figure with an elongated head and limbs appears throughout the Spences’ work, whose costumes, props and alien paraphernalia were painstakingly fashioned by the Spences themselves, several examples of which may now be seen on display in Roy’s ‘Excelsior’ cinema. Phase One is part of the Spences’ more ‘technologised’ output, but retains a marked sense of attachment to place, which contributes much to the feel of the narrative. Many of the Spence films employ the Irish landscape as both fictional location and metaphor for various very actual power struggles. Landscape also serves in the contrasting construction of pre-­ and post-­apocalyptic scenarios. In several cases, a catastrophic event changes the nature of the landscape and upsets the social order, at least temporarily. The status quo is often associated with cultural spaces (dancehalls, jukebox cafés, cinemas), whilst its disruption occurs in open spaces, often associated with the more unpredictable forces of ‘Mother Nature’. Many of the films are set, at least in part, in woodlands or open countryside, including Wolves of Darkness, The Testament of Caleb Meeke, The Shadow Over Flatwoods (1973), Keep Watching the Skies, Earth Probe (1975), The Wishing Stone, The Drumlin (1980) and The Magic Man. Landscape plays an important part in the narrative in each of these cases. The shape of the hilly Northern Ireland countryside becomes the ‘MacGuffin’ of The Drumlin; The Wishing Stone is set in the countryside and relies on the ‘redneck’ nature of its main characters for story development; Earth Probe centres on a geologist investigating a mountainous area; the dangerous blob in Keep Watching the Skies is pulled out of a forest lake and released from its container by a local fisherman. As Michael McCluskey asserts, amateur material ‘can not only help to untangle issues of preservation and consumption in contemporary discourses of landscape, but also can reveal processes of control over physical and mental space and over national resource and national identity’.24 The Spence brothers’ fiction films confirm that such potential extends productively well beyond the film of ‘record’ into the realm of the amateur fiction film. In mainstream filmmaking, the pattern throughout the twentieth century was to depict Ireland topographically in two ways – either as an idealised rural idyll, as in John Ford’s The Quiet Man (1952) or as the site of dangerous conflict, as can be seen in Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947). A sense of associating the land with the chaotic, unpredictable and feminine qualities of a ‘Mother Nature’ or ‘Mother Ireland’ figure was also often apparent, while city spaces were more frequently associated with more masculine ideals of industry and progress. The representation of landscape is also particularly significant in 287

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relation to debates and conflict over ‘ownership’ of land in twentieth-­century Ireland, and this chapter’s final section explores the use of Northern Ireland as a location, masquerading as 1950s America, whilst also bringing to the screen a more contemporary and immediately detectable locale. Traces of Contemporary Conflict and an Aesthetic Shift Roger Corman once suggested that ‘you reflect what you see around you’, whilst Gary Morris extrapolates the idea that the artist ‘refashions the world as either an ideal image or a “real” one, that is, as he sees and experiences it’.25 There are elements of both tendencies in the work of the Spence brothers, which fashions, on the one hand, an Americanised Ireland that testifies to the power of cultural imperialism and growing tendencies towards globalisation, and on the other, depicts scenes of rubble, blasts and conflict that clearly evoke all-­too-­real images of daily life in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s. Representational anxieties are perhaps also traceable in the longer-­term evolution of the brothers’ aesthetics. In the early 1970s, the Spences’ filmmaking moved away from a visual style that had previously been preoccupied with the hallmarks of 1920s German Expressionism (a tendency especially evident in their 1960s output), towards a celebration of traits more associated with 1950s B-­movie culture. Several films might be introduced to illustrate this transition, although one picture, made by the brothers in 1971, bridges the divide between the two phases in both its content and visual aesthetics. The Beast of Druids’ Hill (1971) opens with a sequence depicting a particularly disturbing ancient ceremony. To assuage the anger of a beast, which cannot be seen but can be heard ominously growling in the backgroud, a group of hooded ‘druids’ dressed in white robes sacrifice one of the party in a vicious stabbing ritual. The viewer is then transported forwards to contemporary times, where a quarry worker unwittingly disturbs the sleeping beast. A close-­up on the worker’s eye, peering through a gap in a cracked and rocky surface, creates echoes of Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou (1929), and indeed the film evokes the same sense of unease induced in audiences of such surrealist work. Disorientation is compounded by series of abstract images that give way to shots of a séance. Apparent normality returns, however, as a man disembarks from a bus, enters a house and begins reading. This momentary sense of equilibrium is disrupted again as the man, shown sleeping in his bed, begins to dream of a faceless figure decidedly reminiscent of the proprietor of the 21 Club, depicted in the dream sequence designed by Dalí for Alfred Hitchcock’s noir-­ish psychoanalytic thriller Spellbound (1945). The unidentifiable figure surveys a rocky landscape that begins to erupt. The man wakens abruptly, with flashbacks to his dream. The next sequence includes shots of two men fighting and a young woman walking towards the camera with an entranced expression. We see her body fall from a cliff and the next shots show a number of bodies strewn across a rocky beach. A night train ­288

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runs along a mountain track; its operator peers through its window to view a gelatinous mass on the tracks, which the train then crashes into (a large monstrous creature that will be replicated in Keep Watching the Skies). There are further disorienting and inexplicable shots of a train journey, a man hanging from a tree, a car crash and another pagan ritual. This time, the hooded figures are dressed in black robes and the ultimate sarifice is the bearded man, whose dreams we have witnessed. The film ends on an ambiguous note: the last shot is of the victim opening his eyes with relief, as if he has been dreaming. After a second, his face contorts with pain and rolls away from the camera. An inter-­ title reads: ‘Down through the ages seek among thine own kind, ye followers of wisdom, for the blood that will assuage the Beast of the Hill . . . Borellus.’ Such a summary confirms The Beast of Druids’ Hill as one of the Spences’ most avant-­garde films, and it touches on a range of pertinent themes: ideological and religious conditioning (the pagan ritual), sectarianism (in the inexplicable way victims are chosen for the stabbing rituals), civil rights (the man hanging from the tree evokes images of lynching associated with racial attacks in America and the hooded figures clearly evoke the iconography of the Ku Klux Klan) and the disruption to the social order of terrifying events (by the interruption of ‘normal, day-­to-­day’ activities by the occult). The ambiguous ending is a pessimistic evocation of an uncertain future. Keep Watching the Skies opens with the following explanation: ‘This film is intended as a tribute to the American horror-­film cycle of the late 1950s, of which the producer is a great admirer.’ Interestingly, Noel defines the film as a ‘tribute’ rather than a copy of The Blob, and while the film is not a direct remake, there are strong similarities, referring the spectator to the earlier film that has served as its basis.26 The opening credits are conspicuously accompanied by a theme tune of the same name. Other inter-­texts are manifest: ‘Keep watching the skies!’ is the final warning given in The Thing from Another World (1951), and a poster of that film can be observed in the background of the opening scene, where a group of teenagers have gathered in the Aurora cinema for ‘Sci-­fi Night’. The actors cultivate faux-­American accents and use slang from the 1950s. Later, drive-­in movies are referenced when Johnny watches Earth vs the Spider (1958) and The Screaming Skull (1958) from his car with his girlfriend Sue. In plot terms, the film is appropriately schematic, charting the arrival of a giant mass of destructive energy and following its chaotic path, before the protagonist launches a deadly attack on the offending monster. The climax of the blob’s destruction occurs when it breaks through the walls of the railhouse, overwhelming the hop taking place within, and destroying images of 1950s icons like Elvis Presley, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. A hand-­held camera captures the swirling dancers and subsequent chaos. The scenes that follow evoke catastrophic images reminiscent of the aftermath of a bomb blast. Shots of body parts in the rubble and victims being pulled from the wreckage, with the sounds of sirens in the background, are similar to the BBC’s coverage of the aftermath of the Guildford and Birmingham pub blasts (October and 289

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November 1974), which occurred just months before the film was made. At a time of increasing tension and insecurity about Northern Ireland’s future, the film would clearly have generated a powerful effect, involving a certain component of recognition. The early 1970s had been conflict-­ridden and uncertain – 1972 was defined as ‘the most bloody year of the troubles’, with 470 deaths and over 1,800 bombs planted – and the film needs now to be understood in the social and political context in which it was made. Films like The Beast of Druids’ Hill and Keep Watching the Skies take on huge significance, given the extraordinary nature of life for citizens of Northern Ireland at this time, and illustrate the implication of amateur filmmaking with these larger cultural and political narratives. Another film that has, perhaps, similarly political association, given its context, is Homunculus (1977), which likewise appropriates pre-­exising forms, this time the by now conventionalised narrative traits of a 1950s B-­movie. Inheritances are made explicit, as it opens with the celebratory line, ‘Thank you, Mr Corman,’ and pays homage to the stars of I Was a Teenage Werewolf, through its principal characters, suggestively named Larry Landon and Beverly Lime (Michael Landon and Yvonne Lime had played the leads in Samuel Arkoff’s original Teenage Werewolf picture). The film centres on a student search for Viking relics in a remote part of the Irish countryside. Instead of discovering ancient artefacts, however, the students unearth a buried spaceship, disturbing its alien occupant and triggering the kind of narrative of depersonalisation evident in films like It Came from Outer Space (1953) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), in which characters are ‘possessed’ by alien life-­forms. Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska suggest that this type of invasion narrative ‘can be taken as a displaced comment on the nature of the supposed threat represented by the “inhuman” regimentation of communism’,27 and also speculate that these narratives may have echoed concerns about American suburban conformity and complacency. In the case of Homunculus, the alien invader’s hypnosis of the local people could also be read metaphorically as concern about the way in which certain politicians stirred up mindless sectarianism (or at least attempted to tap into bigoted sentiments) in the electorate during the 1970s, while more contemporary viewers might relate the film to concerns about the obsessive consumerism and thoughtless consumption evoked by twenty-­first-­century media. The Spences’ cultural politics, considered earlier, seem especially evident here: there are echoes in Homunculus of human susceptibility to the messages propagated by the purveyors of political or cultural propaganda. In the film, the alien invader manages to hypnotise the local people, who follow him, trance-­like, from the local pub, many with spades and tools slung over their shoulders, while Landon and his sidekick Sullivan watch from the sidelines. When Landon suggests they must be hypnotised and asks Sullivan ‘what are we going to do?’, he observes that Sullivan, too, has fallen into a trance. When Landon attempts to ‘rescue’ his friend from his hypnosis, Sullivan murmurs, ­290

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13.3  Locals hypnotised by an alien intruder in Homunculus (1977).

by way of explanation: ‘the strength of his mind, you might say, overpowered me.’ Even after being warned of the dangers posed by the invader, Sullivan still falls under his spell. When the source of the invader’s power (his spaceship) is attacked, he begins wailing, removing a button from his space suit, at which point the locals are returned to consciousness, as the alien writhes in pain on the ground. Whilst the procession of the ‘overpowered’ evokes scenes from The Wicker Man (1973), it is also pertinent to note that the year Homunculus was made (1977) was also the year of the second Ulster Workers’ Strike, when employees followed calls by Democratic Unionist Party leader Ian Paisley to down tools to protest against government security policies and demand the return of a majority rule government in Northern Ireland.28 Mass protest had been a recurrent feature of the preceding years, and there were also echoes here of similar strikes in 1974, which ultimately led to the collapse of the Sunningdale power-­sharing agreement. For a viewer aware of this context, it would not be difficult to draw local reference from the otherwise generic scenes presented in this film. The workers in Homunculus follow the alien invader to what would surely be their destruction, whilst it could be argued that the workers in Northern Ireland who supported the strikes (particularly in 1974) effectively derailed the peace process. The fact that there is a trance-­like lack of foresight shown by the characters in Homunculus also parallels a poignant obliviousness to the years of violence and conflict that were still to come for the people of Northern Ireland. 291

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Conclusions What makes the sci-­fi work of the Spence brothers stand out from much other amateur material produced in Northern Ireland is not only its focus on narrative filmmaking, but also the traces of conflict etched across these moving images. Within their on-­going dialogue with commercial cinema, they introduce many of the tropes found in professional representations of Ireland on screen: conflict, trauma, division, madness. What is different between the amateur perspective and the professional take here, however, is that violence and trauma are fetishised, and thereby made safe through a lens inflected with the cinematic associations with the genres of sci-­fi and horror. Much in the same way that escalating Cold War tensions were etched into the narrative and visual aesthetics of many 1950s B-­movies, the Spence brothers’ films bear the psychic traces of the violent turmoil of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’. The work of the Spence brothers thus has a dual function: it is reflective of the rising tensions and widespread violence in Northern Ireland, and it is also an exploration of the nature of living in a contemporary confict zone, in which themes of apocalyptic events, corruption, in particular of authority figures, greed, murder, genetic experimentation, destruction of the landscape, potential colonisation, and the backwardness of human nature (shown as under-­developed in relation to alien life-­forms) are ever present. At the same time, there is also a nostalgia for the music, fashion and culture of the 1950s – significantly, one of the few decades in twentieth-­century Irish history that was more stable – a sense, in hindsight, of a ‘golden age’ of calm before the coming storm. While the Spence brothers have no overtly political agenda (Roy states that ‘the path down the film line was a complete divergence away from the political situation . . . we chose more of a fantasy, a romanticised path away from the ‘Troubles’. We were never interested in the political side of things at all’), it is interesting to trace their relationship to the political, particularly given that they were making films about a contentious time in American history (with the rise of consumer culture and Cold War tensions) at the height of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland.29 Roy suggests ‘most of our early work is derivative, but I make no apology for that, we were just trying to recreate what we saw in commerical cinema,’ and there is a clear celebration of the movie-­making the Spence brothers enjoyed watching. It is particularly significant, however, that their nostalgic exploration of the golden era of the 1950s coincides with the beginning of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, a time when escapism from current affairs was a much-­needed antidote to the rising levels of violence and sectarian sentiment. If, as King and Krzywinska suggest, science-­fiction acts as ‘a powerful cultural barometer of our times’,30 the 1950s B-­movie variant represented the historical context in which it was made with particular precision, whilst offering audiences a chance to escape from increasing Cold War tensions in the ‘real world’, in favour of a negotiation with the cultural landscape of these tensions ­292

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13.4  Audiences await their destruction in Keep Watching the Skies (1975).

on screen. The cinema of the Spence brothers operates in a similar way, with the mode of fiction helping to secure the necessary displacement of the audience. With limited resources but remarkable imagination, the brothers construct utopian screening spaces that transport their audiences from the politically charged environment in which they live and work and offer them a means of escape, but also a mechanism whereby they can subliminally ‘work through’ the issues presented by the conflict-­tainted society in which they reside. Thus 293

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the function of a Spence viewing experience is two-­fold: it is simultaneously a leisure-­time means of escape, and also a mechanism for understanding the darker facets of human behaviour at work in a zone of conflict. The elusive past has great value for the Spences in this project, since it constitutes a fantasy time that cannot ultimately be relived. This fantasy space can stage or recreate the horrors of the present in a disguised fashion (with allusions to the horrors of alien invasion operating as a metaphor for the ‘Troubles’) as a psychical, social and political coping mechanism, but the lived experiences of a 1950s childhood cannot be revisited and it is this intangibility that becomes valuable, desirable, elusive. As Noel states, ‘an item lost/is prized more then than when it’s found . . . the present’s superseded by the past.’31 The regressive nature of the Spences’ work displaces current conflict, which can then be dealt with through metaphor, and also expresses a desire to recreate a time that is now out of reach. As a genre, science-­fiction can be seen as both an expression of the social concerns of the society in which it was produced and a process within which these concerns might be negotiated.32 In this sense, there is an optimism in the sci-­fi films produced by the Spences in the 1970s, which is less palpable in the explorations of subversive human behaviour that they depict in the 1980s, a period during which the on-­going ‘Troubles’ were taking a severe toll on the people of Northern Ireland. Martin McLoone has argued that the ways in which Belfast has been represented and reconfigured in commercial cinema can be read metaphorically as a representation of pre-­/post-­conflict and ‘peace process’ Northern Ireland.33 Reading the topographies of amateur cinema in this way can equally offer insights into the way in which filmmakers and their audiences sought to make sense of the political space they inhabited in the same way that Carl Jung asserts any generation will attempt to assuage psychic malaise caused by events and surroundings by creating and consuming myths and cultural products.34 Like many other amateur filmmakers, the Spences borrow and recycle such ‘myths and cultural products’ from professional sources, claiming and enhancing their power to ‘assuage’. What is significant about the Spence brothers’ output, more specifically, is that its amateur origins sustain it in its ambition to be cult, counter-­cultural and underground – the ‘unofficial’ cultural response to the unfolding political events in contemporary Northern Ireland. Certainly the Spences have been particularly inspirational figures in the Irish cinema landscape, and their exhibition activities have given much pleasure to cinephiles both local and from farther afield, as well as providing sites for the preservation of a great deal of valuable ephemera and memorabilia reclaimed from the cinematic scrapheap. It is not surprising to discover that the brothers won several prizes for amateur filmmaking in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, winning the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers’ ‘Ten Best’ award four times and beating a wide range of international competition in the process. Appropriately enough, these proved ‘gala’ occasions, with the brothers ­294

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receiving their trophies from Joan Collins, James Stewart and Glenda Jackson. As well as the Spence brothers’ imprint on local cinephiles, sci-­fi enthusiasts and fellow amateur filmmakers, their recognition within wider cultures continues to grow. Popular Bangor-­based ‘indie’ band Two Door Cinema Club, for example, took their name from a mispronunciation of Noel’s ‘Tudor’ cinema, and a new prize has recently been introduced to the Belfast Film Festival: the Spence Brothers Independent Spirit Award.35 What is outlined here, above all, is a sense of amateur camaraderie – a sharing of knowledge accumulated, and a sense of reaching out to a broader community of non-­professional filmmakers. Beyond its metaphorical and ‘therapeutic’ function in a political sense, their work becomes a celebration of the cinema they enjoy on their terms, an amateur exploration of filmmaking, nostalgia and the culture connected with their shared past. Scholarship often stresses that the word ‘amateur’ derives from an act of love.36 Clearly, from this perspective, the Spences’ body of work is the embodiment of the highest ideals of amateur practice – to celebrate and interrogate a time and culture, to learn, to practise, to imitate, to produce and, crucially, to share with others. If the sci-­fi film, through its extrapolation of ideas from the natural and historical world, ‘affirms human potential and aspiration’, the work of the Spences thus doubly fulfils this function in both their cult-­like creativity and their rejection of conventional cultural and working patterns, celebrating instead the ­alternative, underground and counter-­cultural.37 Notes   1. The documentary Movie Mavericks (Notasuch Films for BBC Northern Ireland, directed by Vincent Kinnaird, transmitted 31 October 2005) profiled the work of the Spence brothers.   2. These venues are small and extremely atmospheric: Roy’s cinema, the ‘Excelsior’, seats just twenty-­five, while Noel’s larger ‘Tudor’ cinema has a capacity of sixty-­ six, also providing a home for memorabilia from twelve different Irish cinemas in locations from Dublin to Ballymoney. Both venues are locations for frequent screenings for groups keen to recapture the cinemagoing magic of the past. When it opened in 1974, with a screening of Them! (1954), Noel had named the ‘Tudor’ after a cinema in Bangor that he attended as a schoolboy. As well as kitting out these two cinemas in their home town of Comber, County Down, the brothers have also built customised cinemas in garages and sheds for cinephiles in Ireland and further afield. As Len Ball noted in a 1995 article in the Comber Community News, when the town’s commercial cinema closed in October 1984, the ‘noble and courageous Tudor’ continued as a local tribute to the cinemagoing past (http:// comberhistory.com/chs%20cinema.htm).   3. Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (eds), The Cult Film Reader (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 2008), p. 1.   4. From an interview with Ciara Chambers, conducted 22 July 2011.   5. Noel Spence, ‘Back Number’, in his Bluebells in a Jar (Belfast: Universities Press, 2006), p. 6.   6. Noel Spence, Secrets (Comber: Oswica, 1999); Noel Spence, Lies and Luck: Twenty Short Stories (Comber: Oswica, 2004).

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  7. Martin McLoone, Film, Media and Popular Culture in Ireland: Cityscapes, Landscapes, Soundscapes (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2008), p. 51.   8. See Robert Porter’s discussion of Slavoj Žižek’s ideology theory in Ideology: Contemporary Social, Political and Cultural Theory (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006), pp. 52–71.   9. J. E. McKelvey, ‘Introduction’ to Bluebells in a Jar, p. 3. 10. Noel Spence, ‘The Executives’, Bluebells in a Jar, p. 29. 11. Noel Spence, ‘Irritations’, Bluebells in a Jar, p. 38. 12. Patrick Luciano, Them or Us: Archetypal Interpretations of Fifties Alien Invasion Films (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 15. 13. Mark Jancovich, Antonio Lázaro-­Reboll, Julian Stringer and Andrew Willis, ‘Cult fictions: cult movies, subcultural capital and the production of cultural distinctions’, in Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (eds), The Cult Film Reader, pp. 149–62. 14. Mark Jancovich, et al., Defining Cult Movies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 2. 15. Ibid., p. 10. 16. The title evokes Fritz Lang’s horror classic, The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933). 17. Gary Morris, Roger Corman (Boston: Twayne, 1985), p. 6. 18. Susan Sontag defines the essence of camp as ‘its love – of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration’ and describes how the appraisal of camp has taken the form of a cult since ‘camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation – not judgment’. With this definition, the work of the Spences, in their celebration of the work of Ed Wood, is both a celebration of the camp nature of his filmmaking while an attempt to embody similar qualities in their own work. Sontag’s essay, ‘Notes on “camp”’ (first published 1966), is reprinted in Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (eds), The Cult Film Reader, pp. 41–52. 19. J. Matthews, ‘Famous monsters of film’, The Vacuum, No. 1 (Belfast: Factotum, 2001). This article can be accessed at: http://www.thevacuum.org.uk/issues/ issues0120/issue01/is01artspebro.html 20. Patrick Luciano, Them or Us, p. 5. 21. Vivian Sobchak, Screening Space: The American Science-­Fiction Film (New York: Ungar, 1987), p. 29. 22. Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, Science-­Fiction Cinema: From Outerspace to Cyberspace (London: Wallflower, 2000), pp. 11–12. 23. Ibid., p. 12. 24. Michael McCluskey, ‘Amateur Film and the Interwar English Countryside’, in Nandanna Bose and Lee Grieveson (eds), Using Moving Image Archives (Nottingham: Scope, 2010), p. 7, available at: http://www.scope.nottingham. ac.uk/archive 25. Gary Morris, Roger Corman, p. 6. 26. From an interview with Ciara Chambers, conducted 22 July 2011. 27. Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, Science-­Fiction Cinema, p. 6. 28. Paul Bew and Gordon Gillespie, Northern Ireland: A Chronology of the Troubles: 1968–1999 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1999), pp. 121–2. 29. From an interview with Ciara Chambers, conducted 22 July 2011. 30. Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, Science-­Fiction Cinema, p. 1. 31. Noel Spence, ‘Inverse Proportion’, in Bluebells in a Jar, p. 37. 32. Ibid., p. 2. 33. Martin McLoone, ‘Topographies of terror and taste’, in Film, Media and Popular Culture, pp. 51–67. 34. Patrick Luciano, Them or Us, p. 82, describes how this process is exemplified in Jung’s Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, ‘a work that suggests that UFO sightings were the spiritual balance needed to compensate for

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cold war tensions’. The science-­fiction film thus becomes an extension of this process of creating symbols that assuage fears arising out of the epoch in which it is produced. 35. F. Meredith, ‘Moving Pictures’, The Irish Times, 11 June 2011. 36. Peter Forgacs, ‘Wittgenstein Tractatus: Personal reflections in home movies’, in Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmermann (eds), Mining the Home Movie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 47–58. 37. Patrick Luciano, Them or Us, p. 15.

Filmography Along the Milky Way (1979) 16mm, 13 mins, colour, sound. The Beast of Druids Hill (1971) 16mm, 21 mins, black and white, sound. Brady’s Bargain (1983) 16mm, 22 mins, colour, sound. The Drumlin (1980) 16mm, 20 mins, colour, sound. Earth Probe (1975) 16mm, 13 mins, colour, sound. Homunculus (1977) 16mm, 32 mins, colour, sound. The House of Dr Jekyll (1962) 16mm, 5 mins, black and white, silent. Keep Watching the Skies (1975) 16mm, 18 mins, colour, sound. The Magic Man (1984) 16mm, 24 mins, colour, sound. Phase One (1981) 16mm, 5 mins, colour, sound. The Shadow Over Flatwoods (1973) 16mm, 20 mins, colour, sound. The Testament of Caleb Meeke (1969) 8mm, 20 mins, black and white, sound. The Tomb of Frankenstein (1964) 8mm, 21 mins, black and white, silent. The Wishing Stone (1978) 16mm, 26 mins, colour, sound. Wolves of Darkness (1966) 8mm, 20 mins, black and white, silent. From the films listed above, Homunculus and Brady’s Bargain are available for viewing in sites that house Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive. A list of viewing sites is available at www.digitalfilmarchive.net. The other films are currently only available by accessing the Spence brothers’ private archive. The filmography above, which lists films referred to in this chapter, represents only a small amount of their prolific output.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Ciara Chambers is Lecturer in Film Studies and a staff member of the Centre for Media Research at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland. She has contributed chapters to the anthologies National Cinemas and World Cinema (Four Courts, 2006) and Irish Films, Global Cinema (Four Courts, 2007), whilst her article publications have appeared in the Journal of Film Preservation. John Cook is Professor in Media at the Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland. He has published extensively on the work of Peter Watkins and made special features contributions to the DVD releases of the director’s films. Chapters on the director’s work are included in the anthologies L’Insurrection médiatique: médias, histoire et documentaire dans le cinéma de Peter Watkins (University of Bordeaux, 2010) and The Media in Scotland (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), and recent journal articles have appeared in Critical Studies in Television and the Journal of Science Fiction Film and Television. He is a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of British Cinema and Television and the Journal of Screenwriting, and serves on the Advisory Board of Scriptwriter magazine. Ian Craven is Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. His research interests include Australian cinema, film and television technology and British amateur cinema. Edited publications include Australian Popular Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Australian Cinema in the 1990s (Frank Cass, 2001) and Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema (Cambridge Scholars, 2009). Recent articles have appeared in journals including Antipodes, Studies in Australasian Cinema, Continuum and the Journal of Media Practice. He is currently researching and writing a monograph history of British amateur filmmaking, 1920–80. Greg DeCuir Jr is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade, Serbia. His writing has appeared in Cinéaste, Jump Cut, Studies in ­298

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Eastern European Cinema, KinoKultura and other international publications. His book, Yugoslav Black Wave: Polemical Cinema from 1963–72 in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, was released by Film Center Serbia in 2011. He is a member of NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies) and the Academic Ciné-­club (Belgrade), and has been employed as selector/programmer for the Alternative Film and Video Festival in Belgrade. Francis Dyson is a postgraduate student in Film Studies at the University of East Anglia, England, where he is researching British amateur cinema. He completed a Masters degree in Film with Film Archiving at the university in 2008, prior to commencing his PhD in 2009. By way of a case study of the London-­based cine club, Ace Movies, his thesis examines the organisation and activities of the first generation of amateur cine clubs in the United Kingdom. He has a particular interest in the early cine club sector in London. Guy Edmonds is an archivist and film restorer, who publishes and lectures in the fields of film technology and amateur film and home movies. During the Dutch national project ‘Images for the Future’, he used both digital and analogue techniques to restore over 250 films, including a significant number of amateur works. He has worked at the Cinema Museum in London, Christie’s Camera and Photographic auctions, and the EYE Film Institute Netherlands. Since 2004, he has organised Home Movie Days in London and Amsterdam. He is a committee member of the Stichting Amateurfilm, and committee member and Preservation Officer of the British cine club, Group 9.5. He has written on home movies and amateur film for the academic journal Film History and the magazine Skrien, and ­contributes regularly to the Stichting Amateurfilm magazine and website. Lila Foster is a PhD candidate at the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, where she is developing her project entitled ‘Brazilian Amateur Cinema: History and Inventory’. The work entails a mapping of amateur production found in archives, as well as retrieving filmic materials that are not yet deposited in archival institutions. Her MD dissertation was dedicated to a collection of home movies from the Cinemateca Brasileira, where she worked as a researcher and cataloguer from 2007 to 2009. During 2010, she completed a six-­month internship in film preservation and curatorship at Haghefilm laboratories, located in Amsterdam. Brian Hoyle is Lecturer in English at the University of Dundee, Scotland. Research interests centre on British art cinema; film’s relation to opera and music; literary adaptation; and Japanese cinema. Chapters have been contributed to Ken Russell: Re-­Viewing Britain’s Last Mannerist (Scarecrow, 2009) and European Intertexts: Women’s Writing in Europe (Peter Lang, 2005); recent articles have appeared in Studies in Documentary Film, The Journal 299

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of British Cinema and Television and Senses of Cinema. He is currently completing a monograph on the films of John Boorman (for Scarecrow) and researching articles on Ken Russell and the Pre-­Raphaelites, music in the films of Powell and Pressburger, and Benjamin Britten’s work at the BBC. Mats Jönsson is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Lund University, Sweden. He has participated in a range of recent research projects, including ‘Swedish Film and the Welfare State’ (2006–9) and ‘Swedish Advertising in Press and Film 1930–1960’ (2010–11); he is currently employed half-­time as Head of Information and editor within the European Union-­financed Centre for Scandinavian Studies Copenhagen–Lund. He is co-­author (with Cecilia Mörner) of Självbilder, Filmer från Västmanland (Swedish Film Institute, 2006) and co-­editor (with Patrik Lundell) of Media and Monarchy in Sweden (Nordicom, 2009), and (with Erik Hedling and Olof Hedling) of Regional Aesthetics: Locating Swedish Media (National Library of Sweden, 2010); articles have appeared in Scandia, Film Studies Journal, Filmhäftet and many other journals. Karen Lury is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. She recently completed a monograph, The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairytales (I. B. Tauris, 2010), and is currently developing her interests in children and film, and exploring the way in which children appear in, and increasingly produce, film and video for themselves. Earlier research centred on television studies, resulting in her books, Interpreting Television (Hodder Arnold, 2005) and British Youth Television: Cynicism and Enchantment (Oxford University Press, 2001). She is an editor of the journal, Screen, a contributing editor to the journal Critical Studies in Television, and Principal Investigator of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-­funded ‘Children and the Amateur Media’ project, based at the University of Glasgow. Siegfried Mattl is Head of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Society in Vienna, Austria, and Lecturer in Cultural and Contemporary History at Vienna University and the University of Music and Performative Arts, Vienna. His research interests include modern Vienna, media and media technologies, and urbanism, and he has written extensively in these areas. Recent co-­edited publications include Contested Images: Film, History, and Politics in the Work of Jacques Rancière (Turia & Kant, 2010) and a chapter contribution to the anthology Wien im Film: Stadtbilder aus 100 Jahren (Czernin, 2010). He is Editor of the journal Contemporary History, a Board member of the Austrian Society for Contemporary History, and a Member of the editorial boards of Zeitgeschichte, Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften and International Review of Social History. He was a recent manager of the research projects ‘Film Stadt Wien’ and ‘Amateur Film Archaeology’.

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Vrääth Öhner is Key Researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Society in Vienna, Austria, where his current responsibilities include a project on amateur film archaeology. He is author of Europa-­ Bilder. Querschnitte: Band 18 (Studien, 2005), co-­author (with Helmut Weihsmann and Marc Ries) of Cinetecture: Film, Architektur, Moderne (PVS Verleger, 2008) and co-­editor (with Anders Engberg-­Pedersen, Michael Huffmaster and Eric Nordhausen) of Das Geständnis und seine Instanzen: Zur Bedeutungsverschiebung des Geständnisses im Prozess der Moderne (Turia and Kant, 2011), and recently contributed to the anthology Wien im Film. Stadtbilder aus 100 Jahren (Czernin, 2010). Martina Roepke is Lecturer in Film and Media Studies at the VU University, Amsterdam, Netherlands, specialising in German amateur cinema during the inter-­war period. Her published work in the field includes the monograph Privat-­Vorstellung. Heimkino in Deutschland vor 1945 (Georg Olms, 2006), chapter contributions to the anthologies Early Film: Distribution (John Libbey, 2007) and Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland (Reclam, 2005), and related articles in Film History and Nieuwsbrief Smalfilmmuseum. She currently teaches courses on new media and the organisation and cultural values of the audio-­visual archive, and also offers classes in more formal film analysis. Ryan Shand is Research Assistant on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-­funded project ‘Children and Amateur Media in Scotland’, based at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He completed his PhD, entitled ‘Amateur Cinema: History, Theory, and Genre (1930–80)’, at the University of Glasgow, and has contributed chapters to the recent anthologies Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema (Cambridge Scholars, 2009) and The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections (Palgrave, 2010); article publications have appeared in The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists and The Drouth. Maria Vinogradova is a PhD candidate in Cinema Studies at New York University, United States. Her primary academic interest lies in the study of the history and culture of amateur and small-­gauge cinema. Current research focuses on Soviet amateur cinema from the standpoint of cultural studies and the wider history of cinema, and involves archival research around films that were once very well known in the Soviet amateur community, but remain virtually undiscovered by film scholars. She studied journalism and photography at St Petersburg University, holds an MSc in Theory, Criticism and the History of Art, Design and Architecture from the Pratt Institute, and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in 2006–8.

301

Index

Aarts, Gé, 47 Ace Movies, 17–18, 125–43 acquisition, 14, 33, 37–40, 42–6, 51, 52–3n adaptation, 18, 21–2, 110, 133, 145–6, 150–1, 155–60, 176, 224, 257n advertising, 5, 19, 59, 66, 90, 108, 170, 187, 204 aesthetics, 20, 55–6, 64, 67, 93–5, 95–6, 106, 112, 132, 155, 168, 184, 189, 196, 209, 221, 227, 279, 282, 292 Amateur Cine World, 15, 60, 125, 135, 138, 186, 191, 212, 260, 269 Amateur Films, 128, 130 Amateur Movie Maker, 15, 21, 57–61, 70, 212, 215 Amelia and the Angel, 20–1, 186, 201–2, 206–8, 209–18 animation, 19, 47, 126, 164, 172–4, 267, 270 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 104 ‘Apache’ culture, 243, 252, 256n archive sector, 14, 34 Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia (Bologna), 40, 53n Associação Brasileira Cinematográficos (Association of Brazilian Cinematography), 169 audiences, 3, 92, 158, 192–3, 215, 244, 282–3, 288, 292–3 auteur, 66, 115, 145, 151, 153, 160

­302

avant-garde, 22, 33, 42, 65–6, 92–5, 99, 111–12, 114, 118, 133, 160, 167, 225, 228–9, 232, 237, 245, 247, 284, 289 awards see prizes Bäckström, Helmer, 107–8 Baeckström, Gerd, 109–11, 114, 117, 120n Bálasz, Béla, 94 Balcon, Michael, 213–14 Bareto Filho, Sergio, 167–8 Be Kind Rewind, 42 Beast of Druids’ Hill, 288–90 Beisiegel, Leslie, 56–7, 62, 71 Beloff, Zoe, 42 Benjamin, Walter, 273–5 Benson, Harold, 71, 73, 75 Bernadotte, Lennart, 108, 110 Bogatyryov, Evgeniı˘, 149 Bottom of The Barrel, 5 Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 225, 228 Brazilian cinema, 165–7, 179n British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 20, 115, 183–4, 186, 189, 196, 194, 201, 204, 211, 217 British Federation of Film Societies, 81n, 204 British Film Institute (BFI), 21, 203, 211 distribution, 57, 186, 215–16 Experimental Film Fund, 203, 206, 210, 213, 216 National Archive, 39, 44, 52n Busy Afternoon, 266

index

Caldasso, João Carlos, 19, 164, 174–8 camp sensibility, 284, 296n Captain Zip, 44 Carleton, Ben, 127, 134, 140 Carroll, Noël, 8, 10 Castel, Robert, 6, 11–12, 17, 20 catalogues, 34–6, 43, 46, 51, 56, 212 Catholic Film Institute, 21, 208, 215 Chalfen, Richard, 84–5, 88 Chekhov, Anton, 147, 150, 156–7 Christie, Agatha, 9 cine clubs, 6, 9–12, 15–17, 19, 61, 126n, 147, 164, 167–9, 174, 211, 228–30, 282–3 Cinearte, 19, 167, 169 cinema naïveté, 84–6, 100 Cinema Quarterly, 19 cinéma vérité, 19, 116, 126 Close Up, 19, 126 Cocozza, Enrico, 15, 20, 70–1, 73–6 Cocteau, Jean, 20, 75, 81n, 204, 210 Coming Shortly, 5 Companhia Vera Cruz (Brazil), 169 competitions, 7, 11, 14, 58, 108–10, 112, 125, 127, 147, 168, 171–2, 178, 231, 248, 261, 267 international, 102–3, 108–10, 224, 225, 231, 235, 294 ‘Ten Best’, 25–6n, 125, 135, 186–7, 189, 212–13, 267, 275n, 294 see also festivals contests see competitions crafting, 86, 95–7, 99, 225 cross-over, 19, 21, 45, 137, 160, 185–6, 203, 217, 222 Culloden, 183, 188, 193, 196 cult cinema, 23, 184, 278–9, 282–5, 294–5 Currie, Gregory, 2–3, 7–8, 12–13, 16, 20 David, 109 Deleuze, Gilles, 248 Delirium, 131, 133 Depressed, 102–4, 108, 115, 117

Diary of An Unknown Soldier, 20, 189–93 documentary, 2, 16, 18, 24n, 65–6, 71, 76, 93–5, 99–100, 103, 116, 131–6, 144, 148, 154, 160, 172, 183–4, 189, 193, 196, 203–4, 213, 217, 230, 245, 285 Drama in de Wildernis (Drama in the Wilderness), 48–50 Driftwood, 130, 131, 133 Dust Fever, 189–90 Dvoryanskoe gnezdo (Nest of Gentry), 157 Dyadya Vanya (Uncle Vanya), 157 Een Vreemde Vogel (A Strange Bird), 45 8mm Movie Maker and Cine Camera, 68 Eine Nacht und ein Morgen (A Night and a Morning), 16, 86–8, 96–9 End, 6, 26n English, James, 7 Errands, 42 Eskell, Mauno, 16, 102–3, 108, 113, 117 Espinosa, Julio García, 21, 227–8 Exercise Movie, 15, 57–64, 66–73, 76, 78n, 79n exhibition, 19, 56, 81n, 88–91, 129, 160, 165–6, 171, 179n, 213, 225, 248, 271, 278–9, 282, 294 EYE Film Institute Netherlands, 14, 35–6, 40–1, 43–4, 52 family films, 15, 22–3, 36–7, 50, 83–8, 90–2, 94, 98–100, 260–75 Feather Christmas, 274 festivals, 42, 147–8, 170, 178, 215, 225, 229, 233, 235–8, 295; see also competitions fictionality, 3–4, 28n, 74–5, 77 Field of Red, 188–9 Filmfront (Swedish journal), 112, 120n Films and Filming, 212–14 Fishing Trip, 42 Flores, Moacyr, 164, 173–4, 178 Forgotten Faces, 20, 189, 191–2, 194

303

index

FOTO: Tidskrift för foto och film i Skandinavien (PHOTO: Periodical for Scandinavian Photo and Film), 108–11 Foto-Cine Clube Gaúcho, 19, 164–5, 170, 172, 178 Foto-Clube Bandeirante, 19, 169 Fowler, Maurice, 134, 137 free cinema, 203–4, 210, 213, 217 Freeman, Leslie, 61, 63, 67, 69–70 Freud’s Dreamland, 42 Furtado, Nelson, 164, 171–3, 178 genre, 18, 23, 35, 131, 157, 247, 261, 282, 294 definition, 37, 46, 165 hybridity, 223, 230–1, 234, 245 sub-genre, 15, 260 types, 43, 47, 49, 145, 150, 183, 231, 234, 255, 282, 286, 294 German Amateur League, 91 Glanvill, Brian, 61–2, 67–70 Golly’s Party, 265–7 Gondry, Michel, 42 Grängesberg (archive for non-theatrical films, Sweden), 102, 105 Green Cockatoo, 22, 243–7, 249–55 Grishin, Iuriı˘, 18, 144–61 Groschopp, Richard, 94, 96–7 Grove, Elliot, 15 Heath, Stephen, 74 Hengist, Pedrotto, 174 Hinkel-Pevsner, Ruth, 42 hobby filmmakers, 76, 146, 159 literature, 5, 57, 68, 86, 113, 130 Hohenberger, Franz, 249–52 homage, 66, 151, 279, 282, 290 home cinema, 41, 90–2, 95–6, 247 mode, 36, 65, 84, 152, 260–1 Movie Day, 14, 46–7, 53–4n movies, 5, 23, 36–8, 40, 42, 44, 46, 50–1, 83–4, 91, 118, 136, 167, 232, 260 Home Movies and Home Talkies, 136 Homunculus, 285, 290–1

­304

Hughes, Horace, 128–30 Huis van Alijn (Ghent), 38 incident picture, 15, 61–2, 72, 77, 260, 262 Institute for Sound and Vision (Netherlands), 37, 43 Institute of Amateur Cinematographers (UK), 39, 60, 186, 267, 294 International League of the Independent Film, 92 Io Bacchoi (Oh, Bacchantes), 36, 45–7 It Happened Here, 1, 187, 194–5 IuG-Film, 18, 144–51, 194–5 Jewish Amateur Film Society, 130 Jung, Carl Gustav, 13, 294 Jurgens, A. G., 48–9 Just One Thing After Another!, 263–8 Kärlekens lön (Wages of Love), 102, 104, 115, 117–18 Keep Watching the Skies, 24, 278, 289–90, 293 Kerstverhaal (Christmas Story), 37 Klub der Kino-Amateure Österreichs (KdKÖ), 247 Knights on Bikes, 202–3, 206–7 Krabbé, Jeroen, 46–7 Kris, 128, 131 Kuball, Michael, 85 kulturnost, 145, 157–60 Lange, Hellmuth, 15, 91–2, 96 Leister, David, 41–2, 53n leisure, 3, 6, 11, 56, 61, 86, 96, 106, 114, 154, 179, 213, 247–9, 279, 294 Les affaires du Consul Dorgen (The Affairs of Consul Dorgen), 221, 231–2 local collecting, 40 community, 18, 148–50, 160, 167, 253 content, 39, 159, 172, 178, 291 culture, 14, 19, 144, 178 history, 56, 102, 160, 166, 178

index



identity, 19, 146, 159, 162n, 291 locations, 23, 25n, 75, 146, 160 newspapers, 19, 166, 171 production, 168 records, 37, 39, 65, 131 societies and organisations, 19, 38, 107, 108, 144, 146–8, 158, 184 Luciano, Patrick, 282, 286, 296 McLaren, Norman, 21, 213 make-believe, 2–3, 8, 16, 19, 23, 107 manuals, 2–3, 16, 36, 49, 50, 60, 65, 70, 81, 83, 90–2, 95–6, 167–8 Marionettes, 125, 131–6, 140n, 142n Marshall, Frank, 262, 270 Metamorfoser (Metamorphosis), 112 Miletic, Oktavijan, 21, 221–35, 237–8 Miracle, 127, 131–2, 138 mise en phase, 4–5, 9, 17 Model Welfare State (Sweden), 105, 111 Moholy-Nagy, László, 101n Moscow State Institute of Culture, 149 Movie Maker, 23 music, 42, 116, 144, 146–7, 150, 152, 155, 158, 210–11, 256n, 266, 278, 281, 292 Na Dache (At the Dacha), 147 National Board of Film Premium (Sweden), 112 National Society of Sweden’s Amateur Filmmakers, 108, 110, 112, 120n nationalism, 166 Nature of Fiction, 2–3 Netherlands Filmmuseum, 40, 43 Neues Sehen (new style photography), 93 Newcomb, Horace, 23, 261–2, 265–6 Nijgh, Lennaert, 45–6, 53 Nocturne, 150–1, 154–5 Nocturno, 221, 231–5, 237 Northwest Film Archive (Manchester), 39 nostalgia, 24, 157, 256, 279, 281, 292, 295 November, 109–10

O Caso da Joalheria (The Jewellery Store Robbery), 19, 164, 174–6, 178 O padre nu (The Naked Priest), 19, 164, 176–8 Odin, Roger, 4–5, 9, 17, 84–5, 165–6 Our Angel Children, 262, 268, 274 På 6: våningen (On the 6th Floor), 102, 104, 114, 117 parody, 22, 25n, 92, 205, 223, 228, 252 pastiche, 5, 22, 210, 221, 231 Peep Show, 20, 202–10 performance, 45, 87–8, 97–8, 100, 133, 146, 150, 201, 208–9, 215, 238, 244, 249–50, 270 Petrol, 15, 71–7 Piel, Harry, 250–1, 257n Planet Film Society, 61 poetics, 28n, 66, 79n, 93–4, 97, 133, 204, 224 Polinka Saks, 149, 151–3, 156–9 Praterfilm, 253–5, 258n prizes, 6–7, 10, 21, 46, 102–6, 109–10, 114, 116, 147–8, 209, 224–5, 233, 235–7, 295 professional careers, 20, 94, 183, 226 inter-texts, 221, 284 practice, 5, 8, 16, 20, 38, 58, 68 sphere, 33, 184, 186, 189, 191, 195–6, 203 standards, 118, 159 status, 20–1, 50, 61, 95, 98, 166, 202 styles, 6–7, 61, 66, 69, 158, 172, 194 radio coverage, 78n, 79n, 80n drama, 18, 145–6, 152, 156–9, 245, 261, 271 service, 70, 114 reconstruction, 183–7, 193, 196 recycling, 42, 66, 278, 284 Reid, Archie, 68 Reis, Leo, 112

305

index

Remember, 40–1, 51 reworking see recycling Rökk, Marika, 16, 98–9 Rose, Tony, 15, 20, 57–8, 61, 65–7, 70, 72–4, 79n, 192, 194, 196, 209, 211, 215 Russell, Ken, 20–1, 186, 201–11, 214–19 Sakura, 125, 131–2, 135 Schnapper, Dominique, 6, 11–12, 17, 20 Schnitzler, Arthur, 22, 244–5 science-fiction (sci-fi), 47, 278, 282–6, 289, 292–5, 298 scriptwriting, 110 sectoral style, 15, 56, 63–4, 66–9, 70–3, 75–7 See It Now (CBS television series), 115 Sennett, Richard, 86 Sewell, George H., 15, 49, 59–68, 70–3, 79n Sjöman, Vilgot, 116 Smalfilmaren (Swedish journal), 108, 110, 118 Smalfilmmuseum (Netherlands), 37, 43–4 Special Inquiry (BBC television series), 115 Spence brothers (Roy and Noel), 23, 278–9, 282–4, 286–8, 292–5 Spigel, Lynn, 88–90 Strasser, Alex, 15, 83–4, 92–7 Stüler, Alexander, 94 Sunny Afternoon, 131, 135–6 Swedish Cultural Board (Sound Section), 114 technology, 17, 50, 59, 61, 86, 89–90, 95, 126, 150, 166, 169, 286 digital, 46, 56, 66, 102, 145, 150

­306

improvisation of, 146–7, 172 limitations of, 77n, 168, 177 sound, 6, 48, 150, 155, 156n, 168, 171, 205, 247–8 television, 19, 20, 38, 44, 77, 79n, 88, 103, 114–15, 158–60, 183–7, 196–7, 197n, 198n, 215, 261 Three Floors Up, 131, 133 Todorov, Tzevtan, 66 Troell, Jan, 116 Tsvety Zapozdalye (Belated Flowers), 148–9, 151–2, 156, 159 Tysta gator (Quiet Streets), 102–4, 115–17 UFA (Universum Film Aktien Gesellschaft), 16, 98–9 Union Internationale du Cinéma d’Amateurs (UNICA), 16, 19, 110, 170, 221, 225 von Sternberg, Josef, 253–4 War Game, 183–7, 196 Watkins, Peter, 19–20, 183–96 Web, 20, 187–9 What A Night!, 262, 264, 271–3 Widerberg, Bo, 116 Winner Takes All, 6–7, 9–14 women as subjects, 16, 55, 103, 104, 114–17 cine club members, 6, 10–11, 27n filmmakers, 109, 135, 214 Workshop for Film (Sweden), 111 World Film News, 129 Zagreb Cine Club, 21, 221, 225, 235 Zagreb Photo Club, 21, 228–31 Ze Komen (They Are Coming), 46–8 Zimmermann, Patricia, 85, 105–6, 145, 156, 225, 228