Materializing Memories: Dispositifs, Generations, Amateurs 9781501333231, 9781501333262, 9781501333255

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Materializing Memories

Materializing Memories Dispositifs, Generations, Amateurs Edited by Susan Aasman, Andreas Fickers, and Joseph Wachelder

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America, 2018 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Susan Aasman, Andreas Fickers, and Joseph Wachelder and the contributors, 2018 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image © Arthur Siegel / Getty images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3323-1 PB: 978-1-5013-6222-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3325-5 eBook: 978-1-5013-3324-8 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS



Acknowledgments  vii Introduction  1 Susan Aasman, Andreas Fickers, Joseph Wachelder

Part I  Dispositifs 1 Amateur Technologies of Memory, Dispositifs, and Communication Spaces  19 Roger Odin 2 Hybrid Histories: Historicizing the Home Movie Dispositif  35 Tim van der Heijden 3 The Emergence of Early Artists’ Video in Europe and the USA and its Relationship to Broadcast TV  51 Chris Meigh-Andrews 4 Materiality, Practices, Problematizations: What Kind of Dispositif Are Media?  67 Markus Stauff 5 How to Grasp Historical Media Dispositifs in Practice?  85 Andreas Fickers

Part II  Generations 6 Belated Screenings of Home Movies: Biographical Storytelling and Generational Referencing  103 Joseph Wachelder

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7 The Social Construction of Generations in a Media Society: The Case of Postwar West Germany  121 Benjamin Möckel 8 “Generation Channel 36”: Pirated VHS Tapes and Remembering the Polish People’s Republic in the Age of P2P Networks  137 Mirosław Filiciak 9 Becoming YouTube’s Grandad: Media, Age, and Generation in a Virtual Community  151 Susan Aasman

Part III  Amateurs 10 Amateurs: Naïve Artists or Everyday Experts?  169 Patrice Flichy 11 Charting Changing Amateur Production Practices: Testimonials of Moviemaking Enthusiasts  185 Ryan Shand 12 Home Mode, Community Mode, Counter Mode: Three Functional Modalities for Coming to Terms with Amateur Media Practices  203 Tom Slootweg 13 “Something More”: The Analysis of Visual Gestalting in Amateur Films  217 Danièle Wecker List of Contributors  233 Bibliography  237 Index  261

Acknowledgments

Each time we reach out to our mobile phone and make a picture or a video of our daily lives, our friends and family, or a cherished object, we are in the middle of a mediated memory practice. Making memories using amateur media technologies have become ubiquitous. The same applies for the circulation of these sounds and images via various digital media platforms, apps and cloud services. We share these digital representations with friends via Facebook, YouTube or WhatsApp or store them safely in the cloud. The wish to understand the cultural and social implications of the proliferation of mediated memory practices from a long term historical perspective lies at the heart of Materializing Memories: Dispositifs, Generations, Amateurs. By combining three central concepts with theoretical reflections and case studies, we hope to provide an historical and systematic framework for analysing the cultural and social dynamics of mediated memory practices. This volume is the outcome of a collaboration, that started formally in January 2012 when the research project Changing Platforms of Ritualized Memory Practices: The Cultural Dynamics of Home Movies was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Researchers from Maastricht University, the University of Groningen and later on the Université de Luxembourg explored more than hundred years of home movie making. Right from the start, two museums were engaged. The Limburgs Museum (Venlo, Netherlands) and Museum House of Alijn (Ghent, Belgium) were partners in outreach activities. Frank Holthuizen, assisted by project member Tim van der Heijden, curated the exhibition “A century of home cinema: from projector to smartphone” in the Limburgs Museum. Jasper Rigole and Edwin Carels curated two exhibitions about “Homeless Movies” in Museum House of Alijn. We are grateful for the many fruitful exchanges; it was great to have you in our team. Throughout the project, many exchanges with scholars, archivists, and artists from different fields helped to develop our main ideas. Diverse activities, such as workshops, discussions, interviews, experiments, made this research project a very special endeavor. We would like to thank our partners in co-organizing workshops: the Institut für Landeskunde und Regionalgeschichte Bonn for “How to keep our audiovisual memories save?” (2013); the University of Luxembourg for “Dispositif” (2014); the Haus der Wissenschaft in Bremen for “Media Generations” (2014); and

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Maastricht University for “Amateurs and/as Experts” (2014). The many colleagues that participated in these workshops offered numerous inspirations and critical thoughts that had a lasting impact on how our research developed. The University of Groningen kindly hosted the conference “Changing platforms of Ritualized Memory Practices” in 2015. The support of archives turned out indispensable. We express our gratitude to The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Limburgs Film en Video Archief, Groninger Archieven, Huis van Alijn, and the Internet Archive. A special word of thanks to the many individuals who put us into contact with their collections of home movies, cameras, projectors, film manuals, etc. Without their help, we would not have been able to do our research. We would like to thank the contributors of this edited volume for focusing on the concepts we proposed. Tom Slootweg and Tim van der Heijden turned out dedicated and creative PhD candidates. They not only put full effort in their own research, but also in the many activities and diverse outputs of the project as well. The project blog, among others, testifies to this. Thanks to Tim and Tom, academic collaboration and shared research interests became a wonderful and rewarding experience. We cherish our materialized memories. Finally, this book benefited greatly from the elaborate comments by the anonymous reviewers. It could not have been made without our copy-editor Ton Brouwers, and the great support from our publisher Bloomsbury. Susan, Andreas and Joseph (March 2018)

Introduction Susan Aasman, Andreas Fickers, and Joseph Wachelder

This volume explores the cultural role and significance of amateur mediated memory practices, with a strong focus on home movies, yet not an exclusive one, and we do so from a longue durée perspective. Home movie practices originated in the early part of the twentieth century as a privileged activity of a small elite from well-­to-do families. The domestication of such practices ran parallel to the institutionalization of amateur film in general (Van der Heijden 2018). As a result, amateur films, home movies, and family films are sometimes used as interchangeable categories that may refer to overlapping collections of films. Some scholars, such as Roger Odin (this volume), argue that for some time home movies and family films could almost be equated. Others, such as Danièle Wecker (this volume), highlight typical differences in subject, style, and aesthetics in amateur collections, leading to the conclusion that the home movie comprised more genres than the family film. From an institutional point of view, amateur film practices and home movie film making increasingly diverged, giving rise to widely different reactions to the introduction of video (Slootweg this volume). Today, when it comes to staying in touch with relatives, families, or friends, one can choose from a multitude of devices to make, share, and store mediated memories. The repertoires of hitherto separate communication and recording technologies have converged into numerous digital media platforms. Every year, it seems, new genres and technologies become fashionable: video diaries, Facebook live streams, or snapchat videos. The memory function may thereby be subordinated to other functions, such as the immediate experience of sharing. This has various implications regarding content and audience. In most cases, for example, peer-­to-peer videos are no longer restricted to family (kinship) relationships. If we characterize user-­generated

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content as an amateur practice, does this still pertain to the realm of home moviemaking? Practices of on-­going reuse raise similar concerns. “Private” videos uploaded on YouTube can be repurposed, disseminated, and remixed by users who are neither the original authors nor the original owners of this material. In this volume, we argue that, to grasp the cultural dynamics of mediated memory practices, we need a multidimensional conceptual approach that can support historical analyses in theoretically sophisticated ways. To this end, we organized the contributions to this collection around three concepts that serve as main analytical lenses: “dispositifs,” “generations,” and “amateurs.” Put briefly, the concept of dispositif can be used productively for investigating the various interrelations between texts, material (technological) affordances, and the social/cultural context from a pragmatic point of view. The concept of generations helps us to historicize user groups and specific technologies over time. The concept of amateurs allows us to build on historically and sociologically established understandings of mediated memory practices by situating specific user groups among a range of such groups, including professionals.

Conceptual framework A discussion of a concrete case may show the relevance, suitability, and complementarity of these three concepts for analyzing materializing memories: an art project instigated by House of Alijn Museum in Ghent (Belgium) and curated by Edwin Carels.1 This art project called Homeless Movies took place in Ghent from mid-October 2016 until mid-January 2017. It was linked to the NWO-funded research project “Changing Platforms of Ritualized Memory Practices: The Cultural Dynamics of Home Movies,” initiated by the editors of this volume. The Ghent art project, however, was a completely independent effort, to which the following artists contributed: Mekhitar Garabedian, Eva Giolo, Katrin Kamrau, Jasper Rigole, Meggy Rustamova, and Lisa Spilliaert. The perceptive traveler arriving at Ghent-Sint Pieters by train, will be surprised when seeing the central hall of this railway station. This station, which dates from 1913, was built for that year’s World Fair. The various paintings on the central hall’s walls and ceilings go back to those days. Of course, there are many new additions, some of which have meanwhile become obsolete. The photo booth may serve as an example (cf. Fig. 0.1). Once a handy provision, in the age of smartphones the urgent need for photos from such a booth has rapidly decreased. Less than twenty meters away, a quite similar contrivance was installed temporarily, to display Homeless Movies. The booth provided room for one or two visitors who could sit on a tiny bench, at a distance of some sixty centimeters from a

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FIGURE 0.1  Railway Station Ghent-Sint Pieters, ©Michel Devijver.

small screen. Like a photo booth, the space could be closed with a curtain. The exhibition’s curator was interested in investigating what would happen when home movies are deprived from their comfortable and familiar screening and viewing conditions. Home movies were deliberately turned into “homeless” movies; they were placed in the anonymity of the city, in a temporary booth with a small screen displaying a video. In other words, the screening circumstances of films in a family’s living room were exchanged for a different dispositif. Home movies were thus rendered “homeless,” as it were. To accentuate connections with the homeless, the other small booths temporarily placed elsewhere in the city of Ghent were painted in a cardboard color, without turning this into a fetish though (Edwin Carels, pers. comm., April 24, 2017). The changed dispositif of the homeless movies was accompanied by an adaptation of the film text. The small bench of the homeless booth was hardly comfortable. Moreover, the urban context did not encourage casual passers-­by to engage in a long viewing session. The city’s noise and turmoil in fact directly undermined the audibility of the film sound. The curator, Edwin Carels, had proposed that the invited artists should produce a film of some three minutes, referring to the original length of a film reel. Their films should be based on the 300 hours of home movies in the collection of the House of Alijn Museum. Not all artists invited, however, felt comfortable with this idea. As Mekhitar Garabedian pointed out (in an interview with Joseph Wachelder), he felt somewhat lost in all the available materials as he

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started investigating the House of Alijn Museum’s archive. The mass of assembled materials he found there overwhelmed him, which prompted him to reflect on the status of the museum’s archive. What did it represent? What did it contain? And, more importantly, what was left out? The last question became more prominent, also because as an artist Garabedian usually relied on documentary materials he had photographed or filmed in his immediate environment (Garabedian 2011). He began to realize that people like him and his family were absent in the House of Alijn Museum’s archive. Garabedian was born in Aleppo (Syria), but his parents have an Armenian background and they lived in Beirut and Aleppo, among other places, before moving to Ghent. As he explains: I have long been preoccupied in my own works with documenting certain traditions that are still around but that are on the verge of vanishing, as well as with the question of how one generation deals with the past in comparison to the previous one, regarding both cultural traditions and traumatic events in Armenian, or Lebanese or Syrian histories. Taken together, these things made it interesting to offer something from my own archive to the House of Alijn archive instead of working with its material. pers. comm., April 24, 2017 Garabedian pointed out that he had a special interest in generations to understand how the past continues to inform the present: This has to do with diaspora; there is always a here and an elsewhere. You are always simultaneously here and in part elsewhere: this elsewhere can be some other place in a physical sense, but it can also refer to another time of course, for example pre-­civil war Beirut, which does no longer exist, but which is still present in the memory of my parents. The same holds for Aleppo: it doesn’t exist anymore, but lively, dazzling Aleppo is still there of course in my father’s memory. At the same time, all of this has to do with the notion of “hauntology,” being haunted by a past, as discussed by, among others, Derrida. The trauma of the catastrophe of 1915 continues to determine and haunt the Armenian community across the world in the present-­day. This haunting reveals itself in a political-­historical way, but it may also return in a Proustian way. A personal memory that you thought you had forgotten, but that suddenly comes to the surface. You are tying your shoelaces and suddenly you think of your deceased grandmother, to borrow an example from Proust. pers. comm., April 24, 2017 For Mekhitar Garabedian generational succession in his family connects his personal life to historical events. His present is informed by collective

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FIGURE 0.2  Mekhitar Garabedian: Nora (Gentbrugge, 2000), Laurice & Nora (Gentbrugge, 2010), Nora (Gentbrugge, 2016). 2016, video, audio, 4m 17s, with Nora and Laurice Karaguezian. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Albert Baronian.

memories. The video film that he contributed to Homeless Movies—Nora (Gentbrugge, 2000), Laurice & Nora (Gentbrugge, 2010), Nora (Gentbrugge, 2016)—shows his mother, Nora, and his grandmother, Laurice, preparing the traditional dish sarma in the familiar living room annex kitchen. The artist recorded the original videos to document the familiar, the traditional as it survived in the present. In the interview both Garabedian and Carels paid tribute to the late Chantal Akerman. The former explains that her untimely, self-­chosen death interfered with his preparations for the video. The passing away of his grandmother, in the same year, provided relevant context to his film as well. The video contributed by Garabedian to Homeless Movies reveals another engagement with generations: he employed different equipment. The oldest video was shot on Hi8, the second on DVCAM, the last one on HD video using an SLR camera. Next to the changes in the family’s home, clothes, and the ways of preparing sarma, the aesthetics and perceptual qualities of the videos also changed. When asked whether the change of equipment was a deliberate choice, Garabedian indicated he was not interested in technological

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gadgets. He simply used “the medium available then,” as “a kind of upgrade toward the next one” (pers. comm., April 24, 2017). Edwin Carels draws a parallel to explain why technology is often not a deliberate choice: The question about technology is a little like the question about which phone do you use. You always use the last one you bought. The other one you still have; you do not discard it right away. That technology, the presence of technology, is something that you almost cannot escape and that you quite randomly adapt to. pers. comm., April 24, 2017 Technologies seem to appear in succession, albeit deliberately selected or unwittingly appropriated. In other words, technological generations and natural generations share the characteristic of sequentiality. In today’s world, however, technologies are developed at a high pace, constantly challenging the succession of natural generations (cf. Aasman this volume). The concept of generations emerged in the Ghent Homeless Movies project in yet a third way: to designate user generations. In the interview, Carels pointed out that he was not looking to invite artists who were familiar with Super 8. Most home movies in the House of Alijn collection stem from those “golden years” of the home movie. Carels was particularly interested in the contributions of younger people, the “video generation”: The House of Alijn had to have trust in my rules and criteria. I started from them. I was not going to invite people over fifty, but members of the video generation, who are not automatically from the Super 8 era. I was going to ask people who do not all have local Ghent and white roots, but who actually are in a cultural interzone, in between two cultures. All of these were my rules of play. The House of Alijn was okay with it as a matter of principle. To let it be relevant to our day and age. I do not go back to the golden era of home movies. Today we find ourselves in quite another era. That distance has to be made tangible. pers. comm., April 24, 2017 As this commentary suggests, generations are employed to situate different types of users in time. This brings us to the third analytical lens: amateurs. By starting from this concept, specific user groups come into view characterized by their (alleged) competencies, interests, or ways of organization, rather than by the technologies employed. There is a fundamental contrast of course between amateurs and professionals. Here, too, curator Carels made unorthodox choices for the Homeless Movies project. He did not invite professional filmmakers, because he felt that home movies are not primarily films (cf. Odin this volume). As Carels explained:

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One of the additional rules was that it should involve people who do not see themselves as filmmakers. Because when you ask a filmmaker to a make a film, you get a film. In the sense of that then you get more often a kind of psychology, a plot, an ending, and a structure, which is actually at odds with home movies. By definition, home movies involve people who do not film as professionally or who do not know the world of film well. If people are too self-­conscious in dealing with the rules of film, you no longer have a home movie. And, as a result, you get people from media art, in particular visual artists, photography, but in a way everyone today appears to work with moving images. pers. comm., April 24, 2017 Carels’s criteria for selecting participants produced surprising results. One of the artists, Katrin Kamrau, had never made a movie before. Like Mekhitar Garabedian, she was overwhelmed by the House of Alijn’s archive, but she dealt with it in quite a different way. Her first encounter with the House of Alijn collection was the catalog—and she stuck with it. Kamrau was fascinated by the keywords: “Why these keywords and no others? Why these keywords and does it have meaning to me, being East-German?” (Edwin Carels, pers. comm., April 24, 2017). In her video, relevant staff from the House of Alijn read the keywords aloud in Dutch; the translation of the entries in French, German, and English is given on a black screen. Only in three cases when no adequate translation was available, a short film fragment was shown, with historical footage of local festivities (such as “Gentse Feesten” and “Gentse Floralieën”). Meanwhile, Kamrau addressed the local and the global, the specific and the universal, in the thesaurus. Like Garabedian, Kamrau showed a fascination for the transcultural context— one that is both hidden and disclosed in home movies (cf. Erll 2011).

Situating the volume The various contributions to this volume depart from a longue durée perspective on home movie practices, but the arguments presented do not necessarily pursue historical study in a strict sense. Dealing with (new) technologies of memory also calls for engagement with highly theorized fields, such as media studies, memory studies, science and technology studies (STS), cultural analysis, and phenomenologically-­inspired reception studies. Although the authors pay much attention to contextualization from these different intellectual backgrounds and perspectives, their contributions share a common framework by addressing practices of use, user configurations, and relevant media landscapes. The materialization of memories involves practices in which media-­related or media-­generated materials are employed for the inscription, processing, or

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expression of memories. We start from a broad conception of media. Scratches on the skin produced by (in)voluntary encounters with sharp points or the scars produced by diseases can serve as a basis for personal memories and affecting interactions with others (Caillois 2003; Hansen 2006). Commonly, however, media are conceived in a technological sense, while new media technologies are expected to bring new affordances. Recording, archiving, and communication practices can differ widely, depending on the media employed (Van House and Churchill 2008). Multi-­mediatization, or the current omnipresence of various media, has created communication forums in which media, memories, and the present are intricately interwoven (Van der Heijden 2018; Hepp, Hjarvard and Lundby 2015; Deacon and Stanyer 2015; Hepp 2013; Hoskins 2009). Of course, media facilitate materialized memory practices. Yet media themselves have become an important part of memories, leading to phenomena as “technostalgia” (Van der Heijden 2015; Pinch and Reinecke 2009; Fickers 2009a; Braun 2009). Both media and memories connect past and present, in different yet connected ways (Van Dijck 2004). From the outset, therefore, we do not delineate “memory” in great detail, neither as regards to specific media used (Garde-Hansen, Hoskins and Reading 2009), nor with respect to individual or collective memories. On the one hand, media are part of a landscape: media exist next to each other, interact, remediate each other, or converge (Keightley and Pickering 2014). On the other hand, mediated memories are understood as personal cultural memories, highlighting the reciprocal relationship between individual memory practices and cultural frameworks (Van Dijck 2004). Given their shared interest in practices of use, user configurations, and media landscapes, the various contributions depart from studying mediated memory practices on a meso-­level. In his analysis of different uses of dispositifs, Markus Stauff distinguishes between a macro and a micro scale. Both have specific affordances and risks, as historians of technology have argued over the last two decades. To account for transitions in technology and society, a long-­term perspective is imperative. Long-­term analyses, however, are inclined toward teleological narratives that can inhibit technological determinism. In this light, individual case studies are better suited to show that actors matter and that historical processes are by definition open to unexpected changes and alternative developments. Because this raises the challenge of how to incorporate structural factors, scholars such as Thomas Misa (1994) have advocated the significance of meso-­ studies. Other scholars have argued for the need of multi-­level, structuration types of theories (Geels and Schot 2007). This volume will reveal different positions along that spectrum as well. When it comes to memory studies, Pickering and Keightley (2016, 39–40) situate the meso-­level in between individual memories (micro-­level) and national or transnational memory transmission (macro-­level), as comprising the intersubjective exchange of memories, related to multiple social groups to which individuals belong. The

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concept of personal cultural memories as suggested by Van Dijck (2004) is targeting reciprocal interactions between the individual and cultural frameworks. The meso-­levels as defined by Misa (1994) and Pickering and Keightley (2016) complement each other, the former situating the analysis on an intermediate societal and temporal scale, while the latter addresses intersubjective exchanges in memory practices. If most contributions in this volume depart from a study of mediated memory practices on both meso-­ levels, some do not rule out the importance of level shifts.

Three lenses, one focus By taking the complex history of home movies as a starting point, this volume aims to offer a sophisticated historical understanding of technologically mediated, mostly ritualized memory practices (Aasman 2004; 2007), from the early beginnings during the fin-­de-siècle until the present day. In our view, the concepts of dispositifs, generations, and amateurs are highly useful for analyzing the historical development and particular cultural significance of mediated memory practices over the last century. As analytical lenses, each concept reveals different facets or dimensions of the complex interrelationship between technology, media, and its users. Therefore, this volume comprises three sections, each dedicated to one of the concepts in particular. Every section has a double aim: to achieve conceptual clarity and to demonstrate how historians and scholars in STS, media, and cultural memory apply the concept under scrutiny in their analysis of specific mediated memory practices. We would like to emphasize that our three concepts—dispositifs, generations, and amateurs—serve us as analytical lenses, and that each one of them has its specific affordances and limitations. Playing with the metaphor of lenses, we think of theoretical concepts as analytical glasses that allow us to see some phenomena very sharply and clearly while necessarily leaving other things out of focus. But in exploring the past as an unknown territory, a larger toolkit of various analytical instruments will enable a more comprehensive understanding of complex phenomena. By combining different lenses with varying depths of sharpness yet focused on one specific object of study, it becomes possible to develop multiple analytical perspectives aimed at uncovering the many layers of meaning attached to our object of study. Combining the analytical lenses of dispositifs, generations, and amateurs, we conduct both synchronic and diachronic analyses of practices intimately related to the use of technologies of memory. Maintaining the metaphor of a camera, the lenses don’t change the focus— rather, they help to highlight relevant aspects from the context. The first section of the book focuses on the concept of dispositifs and aims to underscore the entanglement of mediated memory practices. As with

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many academic terms, dispositif is used differently in different texts. But more than many other terms, “dispositif ” lost much of its strength through its international circulation and translation. In its original French context, the notion is a much more casual word than in English (and most other languages). Having legal, military, and technical connotations, it refers to all forms of disposing, arranging, coordinating, or aligning. A number of authors, most notably Foucault, added a more conceptual, theoretical twist, somewhat akin to the way “environment” has been introduced as a concept in cultural and media studies. Some connotations of “dispositif” got lost in the international discussion, because of its inconsistent translation as, for example, apparatus, system, construct, device, deployment, and mechanism. The oft-­used term “apparatus” mainly underscores “the ‘mechanical side’ of the term and less the aspect of a specific ‘disposition,’ both in the sense of ‘arrangement’ and ‘tendency’ ” (Kessler 2007). Ironically, then, the technical character of the term often got lost, while its substitute (“apparatus”) may in fact hyperbolize the technicality of the dispositif.2 The concept of dispositif highlights that the textual dimension of film is intimately connected to specific social and cultural constellations, which build on material and technological affordances. On top of that, by referring to “dispositifs” in the plural, we put forward that its explanatory power is of a comparative nature. By contrasting the filmic memory practices of an elite employing 16 mm film, with contemporary ubiquitous sharing practices of youngsters, two different dispositifs are pitted against each other. Small wonder, then, that the concept of dispositif is notorious for its essentializing nature. This has been countered in numerous scholarly attempts, which suggest considering the concept of dispositif as a pragmatic or heuristic tool (Kessler 2007; 2011; Albéra and Tortajada 2015). This volume builds on this approach in media studies. We employ the concept of dispositifs to exemplify and contrast dominant media practices in a multi-­dimensional analytical framework by systematically reflecting on the interdependencies between the materiality, the content (text), and the perception of media technologies in use. However, by highlighting the merits of dispositifs, we also acknowledge its limitations. To account for the subtle and gradual dynamics of, for instance, filmic memory practices over time, we argue that historians need supplementary concepts. The notion of generations proves to be both an obvious and challenging ingredient in our conceptual design. Dealing with mediated memory practices naturally invokes a sense of generations, albeit mostly in mundane terms. The possibility to produce footage of one’s children and document their growing up was an important driving force behind the increasing popularity of family film. We suggest, however, that in this context the relevance of generations goes beyond this commonsense usage. The interpretation of generations as cohorts, determined by specific circumstances, is widely shared among sociologists, if contested (Jureit and Wildt 2005).

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Recently, the concept of generations has attracted attention from media scholars as well. The alleged existence of “digital natives” has fostered research into the effects of acquainting young children with new technologies. Some media scholars consider media technologies as instrumental in molding generations, much like the role of political and economic circumstances in analyses from the 1960s and 1970s (Buckingham and Willett 2006). More recently, more historically-­oriented, process-­oriented approaches are being developed. The introduction of the concept of “generationality” testifies to this (Reulecke 2010). In general, process-­oriented approaches of generations pay tribute to constructivist and narrative historical approaches of generations (Berghoff et  al. 2013; Bohnenkamp, Manning, and Silies 2009). Historians have shown that collective narration and identity construction, referring to generations, often occur ex post. In those cases, generational attributions can suggest a re-­interpretation of history or prompt change. Möckel’s contribution to this volume may serve as an excellent example. Against this backdrop, it becomes increasingly problematic to treat media generations as age cohorts. Consequently, different process-­oriented conceptualizations of generations have been proposed. Hepp, Berg, and Roitsch (2017) reserve the processual approach for media generations. Wachelder (2016) suggests a remediation approach to generations, distin­ guishing between the mechanisms of immediate generation, immediate regeneration, and hypermediate regeneration. His basic assumption is that generational belongings can be adapted in the course of life. The different mechanisms refer to different appeals on generational identities. Stakeholders can exploit generational subscriptions differently. For instance, retailers and manufacturers frequently refer to new generations to promote sales of their equipment. The second section of the book will address such alternative uses of the concept of generations. Although the concept of generation is hardly a new intellectual concern, it still requires rigorous intellectual scaffolding, especially in its conjoint addressing of media, memory, and technology studies. The third section of the volume is dedicated to the concept of amateurs and refers to specific user groups not driven by the norms, codes, or attitudes of commercial and/or professional practices. How amateurs subscribe to a specific sense of self in relation to others is investigated. Although home movies are highly individual and bound to families or peers, these practices tend to be informed by alleged collective behavior. The informal or explicit subscription to a specific user group creates coherence among likeminded practitioners as it opposes others. For instance, the practice of producing and screening home movies is considered to be part of the realm of amateurs, which is often related to, yet distinct from, professional practices. Of course, the definition of an amateur is subject to change over time, especially from an historical perspective. Moreover, from a synchronous perspective, several distinct normative and descriptive definitions can exist side by side.

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Both the (alleged) subscription to specific relevant groups and the gradual change of their constituency, connotations, and memberships feed the historical research of mediated memory practices. What kind of (contextual) knowledge and expertise do amateurs have, and on what aspects do they build? In periods of transition, the relationships between amateurs, professionals, laymen, and experts are much more complex and intermingled than these user categories tend to suggest. By zooming in on cases of different groups of amateur users in specific moments of media transition and media continuation, this section explores whether and when conceptualizations of historical actors—as “users,” “amateurs,” “experts,” “producers,” “consumers,” “produser,” or “prosumer”—are helpful or, in contrast, perhaps misleading. By studying the dynamics among groups of users of a sense of (not) belonging, the book offers a cultural perspective on media technologies in use—an angle often neglected in social constructivists’ accounts of technological artifacts. The predispositions that scholars attribute, often implicitly, to users discursively co-­constructing specific types of users, we argue, need to be carefully de-­constructed.

Exploring and exploiting dispositifs, generations, and amateurs The implementation of the three core concepts in the various contributions lead us into different directions. Three salient observations stand out:

Scale matters Departing from the meso-­level in relation to memory practices, some contributions address interconnections with individual memories and/or national memories. In particular, the case studies dealing with generations seem to elicit such transitions in scale. For the post-Second World War period, Benjamin Möckel shows how distinguishing between media-­generations helps us to understand the dynamic interplay between distinct collective identities, also on the national level. Constructivist psychological approaches to autobiographical memory support Wachelder’s conversation analysis of belated screenings. Moreover, he argues that transitions in scale—especially when technologies or technological artifacts are involved—are part and parcel of lay conversations recalling memories or addressing past events or situations. On a socio-­technical scale of analysis, Filiciak’s contribution, focusing on pirated VHS tapes in Poland and their role in remembering the People’s Republic of Poland in P2P networks, demonstrates the impact of local contexts and the materiality of specific objects in transgressing dualistic distinctions as between legal and illegal, formal and informal, amateur and

INTRODUCTION

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professional. Yet he also refers to the transnational phenomenon of pirate modernity to explain the local manifestations of “generation Channel 36.”

Periods of transition In combination, the concepts of dispositifs, generations, and amateurs provide a strong foundation for the analysis of the longue durée. Multiple dispositifs allow for making comparisons and distinctions over time, as Odin’s chapter wonderfully shows. The same applies to distinctions between generations. By contrast, Patrice Flichy, Tim van der Heijden, and Ryan Shand, among others, reveal how the concept of amateurs supports the creation of specific collective identities that connect them over time. To study periods of transition, however, our three concepts cannot be employed in a straightforward manner. Chris Meigh-Andrews and Tom Slootweg enrich their analyses of the introduction of amateur video practices by invoking intermedial aspects, in particular the role of professional broadcast TV. Next, they add specificity on the actors’ side, by drawing a connection with either avant-­garde artist’s practices (Meigh-Andrews) or by distinguishing between different modes of operation. Slootweg compares and contrasts the home mode with the club and counter mode. Distinguishing between these modes allows one to pay explicit attention to differences in the institutionalization of user practices. Danièle Wecker, employing a different conceptualization of modes than Slootweg, argues that some scholars erroneously conflate the dispositif of home movies with family films. Based on a textual analysis of a corpus of home movies, she distinguishes three different types of home movies, which are fundamentally connected by a phenomenologically founded strife for “becoming.” All chapters in the section dedicated to generations depart from a constructivist, processual, or narrativist approach of generations. Susan Aasman discusses how in the case of “Geriatric 1927, The Grandad of YouTube,” new media were not the privilege of youngsters. Elderly people can appropriate new technologies, and even become a prominent member of new media generation. This suggests a truly processual account of generations. Wachelder (2016) extended this processual approach to media generations into a conceptualization of generations employing a remediation perspective. His conversation analysis of belated screenings shows that conversational partners are mostly probing whether references to generations or collective memories make sense with the interlocutors. This is in line with Benjamin Möckel’s suggestion to abandon the idea that generations constitute communities of experience. He argues that generations function primarily as communities of remembrance. The concept of the amateur has taken on different and new meanings in the digital era. Patrice Flichy highlights individual struggles in current amateurism,

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at the expense of previous connections with collective identities, which are discussed in Shand’s and Slootweg’s contributions. Current amateurism, Flichy argues, is connected with acquiring skills and their open dissemination.

Conceptual renewal and methodological innovations The ambivalences as regards the fruitfulness of the concepts of dispositifs, generations, and amateurs have yielded suggestions for innovation, on a conceptual, theoretical, and methodological level. A number of innovations have already been addressed in the previous sections. Here we will dwell in particular on those renewals that highlight the dynamic drives in or behind the concepts, instead of considering them as static entities. With regard to dispositifs, Tim van der Heijden puts forward the radical suggestion to take hybrids much more seriously in media studies. Distinguishing between hybridities in technologies, discourses, and practices, Van der Heijden argues, can help to dissect the complex interplay in and between mediated memory practices: hybrids should become the default position for historical analysis with respect to technologies, practices, and discourses. Van der Heijden seems to suggest that the explanans and explanandum in historical reasoning should change positions. Homogenized mediated memory practices are in need of explanation, not the many heterogeneous and hybrid ones. This ties in with Markus Stauff’s analysis of current media dispositifs, which, in his view, are characterized no longer by a particular constellation of technologies and practices, but by the rationalities that drive their constant transformation. The unease with rather static, cohort-­oriented sociological analyses of mediated media practices runs as a common theme through all contributions dealing with generations. Over the last fifteen years, media experiences have become an important element of generational classification. Aasman’s chapter puts forward the much more recent insight that generational assignation is a process that goes on at different stages of life. Benjamin Möckel emphasizes that generational ascriptions often take place ex post, turning generations from “experience communities” into “communities of remembrance.” The media technology that was used to collect, narrate, store, and screen personal memories can become part of a generational belonging. Wachelder argues that generations are communities of both experience and remembrance. The ubiquitous and popular use of the notion of generation builds on the succession of natural generations and learning effects in the “formative” period, also in relation to media use. Contrarily, throughout their respective lifetimes, users are continuously challenged to reconsider their generational belonging, instigated, among others, by manufacturers and marketers constantly aiming to sell technological “progress.” What makes “generations” such an attractive concept, also for lay persons, is its affordance of switching the unit of analysis.

INTRODUCTION

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This may entail moving from a person’s memory to collective memories or switching from a specific technological artifact to the development of a technology in general. Generational ascriptions can be considered as proposals to collective identities, referring to collective memories, which can be accepted or denied. Material aspects frequently surfaced in the chapters dealing with dispositifs and amateurs as well. Shand highlights the enthusiasm for technologies and equipment that many amateurs share. Fickers proposes an experimental approach to historical media practices and a pragmatic turn in the study of historical media dipositifs. The experimental hands-­on approach he presents is combined with a self-­reflective and phenomenological analysis to get closer to the sensuous experience of mediated memory practices. He proposes to enrich the study of mediated memories with a playful, sensuous perspective. The twentieth century, but also the early decades of this century, provided ample possibilities for leisure practices, in which continuously new technologies were appropriated. This book will show how the concepts of dispositifs, generations, and amateurs in studying the complex interrelationship between technology, society, and culture can be made productive, in different ways, zeroing in on mediated memories.

Films Nora (Gentbrugge, 2000); Laurice & Nora (Gentbrugge, 2010); and Nora (Gentbrugge, 2016). Dir. Garabedian, Mekhitar. Video. Ghent: House of Alijn Museum, 2016. https://vimeo.com/204015062.

Notes 1 Joseph Wachelder interviewed Edwin Carels and Mekhitar Garabedian in Ghent, April 24, 2017. A full transcript of the interview, in Dutch, is available on request. Please note that the interviewer did not explicitly refer to the concepts of dispositif, generation, or amateur. We express our utmost gratitude to both interviewees for their kind cooperation and sharing their insights with us. 2 This paragraph greatly benefited from input provided by Markus Stauff.

PART ONE

Dispositifs

1 Amateur Technologies of Memory, Dispositifs, and Communication Spaces Roger Odin

And soon, mechanically, dispirited by the dreary day and the prospect of a depressing tomorrow, I raised a spoonful of tea in which I had soaked a morsel of madeleine to my lips. But at the very moment the sip with the crumbs of madeleine reached my palate, I trembled, feeling something extraordinary happening in me. I was overcome by a wonderful feeling of delight, without any idea of what had caused it. . . . And suddenly I remembered. It was that taste. That taste of a small piece of madeleine Aunt Léonie had given me that Sunday morning in Combray (because on Sundays I never went out before mass). I had gone up to her room to say good morning, and that piece of madeleine had been soaked in her herbal tea. PROUST 1954, 45

We are inside the communication space of family memories.1 Marcel Proust is using what I call the private mode of meaning production:2 such a feeling is produced intimately, with the hero going deep down inside himself, in search of what evokes a memory. The madeleine is what triggered the memory, but not the whole madeleine. Proust subsequently describes that it was not the madeleine’s physical appearance (“seeing the small madeleine

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didn’t remind me of anything”), but its smell and taste that conjured up the memory: when nothing remains of a distant past, after people have died, after things have been destroyed, the only things that remain in our minds are smell and taste, frail but long-­lasting, immaterial, persistent and faithful. Like souls, they wait and hope, on the ruins of everything else, staunchly holding that immense edifice of remembrance in their almost impalpable droplets. PROUST 1954, 45 These two elements are the operator3 of our memories, but we cannot speak of a dispositif: the madeleine is an involuntary operator. A dispositif, at least in the sense that I use it, is an intentional operator, a structure with a set of components (often technical) linked together in a specific context, including the users, and subjecting them to a well-­defined type of behavior (Albéra and Tortajada 2011, 27ff). If one accepts this definition, a grave is a dispositif in which the headstone, statue, plaque, inscriptions, etc. form a whole (the grave), i.e., a space around which we are invited to come together to pay tribute to those no longer with us. Since time immemorial, the communication space of family memories has always featured several different dispositifs: graves, chapels, sculptures, perfume jars (Frère 2012), oratories,4 medals, painted portraits, jewelery, medallions, a glass cloche containing small objects (a lock of hair, a menu, figurines representing a wedding couple, etc.), letters, postcards, sound recordings (on tape, disk, or film), photos on the wall or mantelpiece (cf. Mary 1999), family photo albums, furniture, and the family home itself. In the view of Anne Muxel (1996), a house can be several things at once: an archaeological memory, a memory of certain rituals, a frame of reference. In this contribution I explore the functioning of family memory dispositifs that use movie technology. Let me first make three introductory remarks. First, in a great number of cases, theorists speak of the filmmaking dispositif. In particular, the scholarship on the early days of cinema has taught us, however, that it is necessary to construct several dispositifs in order to account for the diversity of cinematic experiences (Kessler 2011). This observation also applies to videos and even more so to digital media. Secondly, in the late 1970s, Jean-Louis Baudry made a distinction between what he called the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus, a term covering the whole filmmaking equipment and processes needed to produce and screen a film (i.e., the camera, film reels, film strip, its development and editing, the sound work, projector, screen), and the dispositive, which only applies to the screening (film theater or darkened room, projector, screen, and audience) (Baudry 1978, 31). Ever since, analyses of the cinema dispositif have tended

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to take into account the film’s screening dispositif only. Although this theoretical position may have its relevance, I will adopt another one that fits better with my approach in terms of communication spaces. Specifically, I suggest making a distinction between the production dispositif (at work inside the communication space of production) and the screening dispositif (at work inside the reception space). While it is obvious that both are generally interlinked, we will see that this is not always the case, and that each has its own function. I will also look at two further sets of dispositifs involving diffusion and archiving. Thirdly, we need to take into account the fact that the same dispositif may function differently depending on the communication space: the functioning of a neighborhood theater will differ from that of an art house theater or a blockbuster movie theater in downtown Paris. Similarly, there is a difference between a movie theater in Paris and one in India or Africa. At the end of an article on the imaginary signifier, Christian Metz argued in this respect that his account applied solely to “one ethnography of the filmic state, among others remaining to be done” (1977, 170). In line with the need for “historical pragmatics,” as argued by Frank Kessler (2011, 22ff), I will construct three communication spaces: the traditional family and the home movie (a period starting with the birth of filmmaking and going up to the 1980s); the new family, television, and home videos (ending in the 2000s); and finally, the current period in which family structures are changing and we are seeing a transition to digital media and smart devices. Let me emphasize that even when viewed from a historical perspective, these spaces remain theoretical constructions; they stick to a certain line, simplifying and neglecting the intersections and superimpositions manifested in reality. Their function is not to describe, but to allow questions to be posed: in this sense, they are heuristic tools. Each of these spaces will be constructed as a set of constraints governing our relationship to family memories; the focus will be put on analyzing the dispositifs and the types of memories produced. I will also look at whether taking films of the family is always meant to create a memory. Finally, I address what happens to home movies in the age of videos, and to home movies and videos in the digital age, while also considering the persistent presence of still photography.

The traditional family and the home movie The dispositif used for making a home movie is centered on the camera and its obligatory complement, the film reels, while sometimes a tripod and a light meter are also used. If viewing the camera as the core of the cinema dispositif may seem obvious, some cinema dispositifs exist that do not use a camera, as the drawn-­on-film technique perfected by Norman MacLaren, the found footage films made at the editing table, and, more generally, a

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large proportion of today’s digital films in which the camera is replaced by the computer. From a technical perspective, the home movie dispositif has quite a few constraints: the reels had a maximum capacity of four-­and-a-­half minutes and as the camera was spring-­driven, shots could only last a maximum of twenty-­five seconds (until the arrival of video, around 1980). Until 1965 and the arrival of the Super 8, on each occasion the light had to be measured to determine the proper exposure, and as the film was not very sensitive, it was difficult to shoot inside (additional lighting needed). In most cases, home movies were not edited, but a movie viewer and a film-­splicer could be used to attach two films end-­to-end; the worst shots could then be cut out, or a title added, but this generally exceeded the ambitions of the home movie-­maker. The presence of a film camera brings with it certain consequences: the social relationship between the person behind the camera and the people in front of it is asymmetrical. In the extremely normalized hierarchy of a traditional family, it is generally the father who holds the camera. Home movies taken by women are very rare. Kodak’s attempt to give its Super 8 films a feminine format was a complete flop: “In June 1966,” wrote Bernard Germain, “the advertising campaign one year after the launch of the Super 8 abandoned the idea of giving women an active role . . . in an area hitherto viewed as macho, technological and ‘professional’ ” (1999, 186). The most obvious sign of this is the virtually complete absence of fathers on the films; and when the father is there, we get the feeling that he has been arranging the scene and that he is anxiously watching over the filming (via a sign of his hand or head, he dictates what has to be filmed). From the very outset, the home movie appears to be gender-­biased, with the films reflecting what the father wants to see. The role of the father is to be seen in its institutional context: he is not doing the filming as a mere operator but as the representative of the family institution. As claimed by Alain Bergala, he is “under the supervision of the Symbolic” (1999, 114). We can say of the home movie what Pierre Bourdieu says of the family photo: “Nothing can be photographed except what has to be photographed” (1965, 44–5). The home movie acts as a selective memory. Only moments of happiness are recorded, the result being that a home movie constructs a euphoric memory. It would be erroneous, however, to believe that cameras are only used in a family context as a way of passing on family memories. Just after purchasing the camera, we play around with it, getting to know all its possibilities (the presence of a host of gadgets is one of the features of amateur cameras): we are inside a playful and ludic mode of communication. Moreover, Guisepina Sapio (2015) has demonstrated that, at family reunions, a camera acts as a relation-­building device, a go-­between, rather than as a memory recorder. Here we find ourselves in the communication space of interpersonal relations.

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We also take films to be part of the present, as explained by Christine Ulivucci (even though her book is about photography, what she says also applies to films): “as soon as we press the shutter-­release button, we become part of time and space, we are present at the event.” Underlining the distance separating this act from any act of memory, she goes on to say: “The power of this act is such that in some cases it is not even necessary to develop the photos” (2014, 19). In this context, psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron has argued: “When the senso-­moto-emotional process of symbolization at play in taking the shot is sufficient, there is no real need for the actual image” (1996, 29). Indeed, it is not uncommon, when going through the personal effects of someone who has died, to find undeveloped film reels. In all such cases, the shots taken aim to write one’s own history rather than to record a memory; we find ourselves, in other words, in the communication space of personal construction. We also take shots of new things that happen to us: if the first child features in a lot of films, the second one is represented a lot less and any further children may hardly be represented at all. Similarly, we also tend to take a lot of pictures while on holidays. Finally, we sometimes make a film with the intention of entering the cinema communication space, much like an amateur filmmaker, and this involves scene-­setting, framing, and editing, with the aim of achieving a “cinema” effect rather than merely recording events for family posterity. Eventually, all these productions end up in the family memory store. The dispositif used to screen the home movie is very similar to the one used in a movie theater: a darkened room, a screen, a projector, and film reels. But there are also many differences. First of all, we are not in a (movie) theater but at home, in the dining or living room. Moreover, the dispositif is set up by family members in many ways as a ritual: the curtains have to be drawn, the chairs arranged, and the projector and screen installed. Finally, the actual screening is also in the hands of a family member, generally the father. Screening a home movie is thus a complex operation and always an event in family life (especially as one had to wait several weeks before the reels came back from being developed). Looked at it this way, the screening of the home movie perfectly matches the traditional family and its love of ceremonies. At the same time, this set-­up bears the whole weight of the family institution, becoming an instrument thereof. As for the film itself, we need to understand that due to technical constraints, the lack of know-­how on the part of the person doing the filming, and the constraints weighing down on him on account of the family institution, it provides little in the way of satisfying our desire for memories: mere scraps of events, all very much stereotyped (nothing resembles a home movie more than another home movie). Relatively weak in terms of representation, the home movie acts as a stimulator: its screening triggers the memory process at two levels. First, it initiates a process of collective construction of family memories, something

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Martha Langford (2001, 20) refers to as an oral filmic performance, because much is said while screening a home movie, fueling our quest for memories. Second, it triggers a process of individual recollection. There is a great difference between these two processes: whereby the first is consensual and positive, the second can often be bitter, arousing old grudges, buried conflicts, the anger found deep down inside family members and chewed over a thousand times. Looking at the pictures of my brother and me playing on the beach, I remember how nasty my brother could be to me and how jealous I was of all the attention he got from my mother. Obviously, nothing of this is articulated during the screening. Faced with such hidden and often traumatic memories deep down inside of us, home movies play the role of a memory shield protecting family unity. At this level, one is clearly in what Joël Candau (2009) refers to as the metamemory: each family member recalls his own memories, extracting what can be put into words without hurting the rest of the family. This all leads to a narrative based on the elements recalled by each family member. This collective construction does not just have the function of sweeping things under the carpet, but can, in the words of Alison Landsberg (1995, 175), become prosthetic: “By prosthetic memories I mean memories which do not come from a person’s lived experience in any strict sense” (see also Landsberg 2004). One example highlighted by Landsberg involves the replicants in Blade Runner, the 1982 movie by Ridley Scott, and their inculcated memories. In the view of Landsberg, the media have fundamentally changed what we believe to be our personal experience, transforming us all into replicants. To sum up, what is at work when screening a home movie is nothing less than an operation aimed at substituting our personal memories by constructed collective memories. The fact that we are directly involved in this construction gives us a feeling of shared memories, a feeling which, in the words of Candau, is very much illusory: “We often confuse the fact of saying, writing or thinking that we are sharing memories or experiences with the idea that anything said, written down or thought takes account of a real shared memory. In short, we confuse discourse with what it is supposed to describe.” Yet this confusion has a very important social function, enhancing in our individual consciences the feeling of belonging to a community (Candau 2009, 7). Collective memories thus become a myth, i.e., performative memories, memories for the future, with an exact ideological function: preserving the Family as a social structure.

The new family, television, and home videos The new family is characterized by less clearly defined roles and structures that are less hierarchical, more extroverted, and generally come with fewer

MEMORY, DISPOSITIFS, AND COMMUNICATION SPACES

FIGURE 1.1  Postcard showing the traditional family projecting home movies.

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constraints. The new dispositifs (a camcorder, magnetic tapes, video recorders, and the television set) are less restrictive and so well adapted to these new circumstances that they soon caused the home movie’s demise, giving rise to the emergence of a completely different relationship to family memories. At the production level, one could now film as long as one wanted, without having to bother about setting up the camera as everything was now automatic. One could start filming anything and everything, without caring about the family consequences. The home video features family life as it is, including its happy moments, but also all its pettiness, all those moments of rivalry and conflict that will always occur in any group (Moran 2002). The introduction of sound further propelled this development. As it is much more difficult to control sound than pictures, in particular sounds outside the scope of the camera’s lens (camcorders are equipped with an omnidirectional microphone recording everything), these new productions include previously unthinkable things, such as words one would have preferred to forget, unpleasant remarks, and arguments (in shots showing children playing with building blocks, you can hear the parents quarreling). Difficult situations in life, illness, and even death are also taped without hesitation. Unlike film reels, however, tapes can be deleted. A single tape may be used several times to save money. Shots taken previously are erased, in many cases without even having looked at them. This in fact underscores the low value attached to this medium in terms of supporting memories, even if deletion sometimes creates great tension within a family. In Family Viewing (1987), Atom Egoyan has depicted this kind of situation: the son discovered that his father had deleted the shots of the two of them in order to take shots of himself making love to his new mistress. Far from the euphoric and consensual memories conjured up by the home movie, video-­ created memories are often dysphoric and conflictual. With video, the job of taking the shots is explicitly assigned to a Subject who speaks without restraint, as the symbolic constraints that governed the traditional family have since disappeared or at least greatly diminished. In the home movie, the point of view was institutional, not chosen by the Subject; by contrast, the choice of the point of view is now claimed by the person holding the recording device (we can speak of an “EGO point of view”). This is manifested by the fact that the person behind the camera speaks while taking the shots, commenting on what he is shooting, calling out to the people he is filming, and sometimes even provoking them. Importantly, Alice Cati (2009, 115) observed in this respect that with home movies, the operator’s body was part of the dispositif. In my view, this observation applies even more to the video dispositif, precisely because of this recording of the “grain of the voice” of the person taking the shots. With speech now featured, we are no longer seeing a film of the family but a film on the family: a form of testimonial.5 Moreover, contrary to what happened previously, all family members use the camcorder, while the different points

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of view on tapes will depend on whether the shots were taken by the father, the mother, or one of the children. Split between different enunciators, memories became multifaceted. But the main change is elsewhere, I believe: the camcorder produces its effects in the present, rather than from a memory-­driven perspective. If we saw a similar thing occur with the film camera already, the dominant feature here is what is taking place in front of the lens: as the filmmaker is part of the event (i.e., a stakeholder in the inter-­relational system) and is well aware of it, he feels obliged to take account of the spatial and temporal continuity of the filmed event. Driven by a compulsion to keep on filming, he tries to indefinitely prolong the relationship with the others, a relationship presented to him by the camcorder’s screen which, in contrast with a camera’s viewfinder, makes possible filming without losing visual contact. Serge Tisseron (1996, 28) views this movement as the “senso-­moto-emotional process of the event symbolization.”6 As there is no longer any technical limitation governing the length of the film, interminable shots are taken, not intended for viewing, but having a function the moment they are taken. Instead of being a memory operator, a camcorder is thus rather a psychological dispositif to inscribe oneself inside an event. As a consequence, home videos are viewed less frequently than home movies. This is quite a paradox, as it is a lot easier to screen a video than a home movie. Nevertheless, the cassettes tend to pile up in cupboards without being viewed, and even when viewed, it is seldom in front of the whole family: the children refuse to take part, to their parents’ great displeasure. The result of all this is that the collective memory-­constructing function of the home movie, one of its main ideological features, has simply disappeared. Moreover, far from welding the family together, screening becomes a source of conflict between parents and children, creating a gap between the generation of the parents, who seek to uphold viewing as a family event, and their children, who clearly have nothing to do with something they consider belonging to a bygone age, and even see it as a manipulative attempt of their parents to regain power and forcibly (insidiously) push them into the template of the traditional family. Moreover, cassettes are very rarely viewed in their entirety, as the recordings generally exhaust the patience of those watching them. This new generation of dispositifs also offers the possibility of navigating through the tape at will, with the remote control giving the spectator power over the duration and form of screening. Accordingly, a process of selective memory has come into play, one that strongly differs from the one experienced with home movies: everyone can now select what he or she wants to see and even, using the rewind button, watch certain scenes several times. The pause button allows us to stop the screening, grab a beer, check the roast in the oven, or make a phone call. The ceremonious intensity experienced when screening a home movie is very much lost. Screening is no longer done on a

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dedicated screen but instead on the television screen that is used every day for watching news, shows, sports, and so on. Firmly part of everyday life, any memory relationship ends up being desecrated, banalized, and tends to be replaced by our relationship to the TV set. The fact that people no longer have any qualms about sending sequences showing the most ridiculous moments of family life to Vidéo Gag7 is striking proof of this evolution. Home videos are no longer seen as agents of family memories but as part of the TV flow, a flow aimed at TV viewers, which is what family members have now become. In brief, the specificity of this new space of communication informs a decreased demand for family memories and an increase in practices based either on personal memory construction or on a relationship to television. And even when such a demand exists, it is expressed in a (subjective, dysphoric, conflictual) form that is in stark contrast with the home movie tradition (at least in its collective dimension). But what has happened to all those reels of film now replaced by video cassettes? The reels still exist, piled up in cupboards, sometimes carefully classified and labeled, but most often stored in old shoe boxes. Even if we can no longer view them—the projector doesn’t work anymore—they very rarely get thrown away. Quite the contrary, they are generally carefully kept as they have a symbolic function, marking the permanency of family life from one generation to the next (like the African masks found at the bottom of dark grottoes) Indeed, one can speak of a magic memory here. Yet there is a further form of permanency involving home movies, a psychological permanency. Although home movie technology has disappeared, the interrelated experience lives on inside those who worked or grew up with it. This experience has a powerful effect on family members, children in particular. Although such memories long remained hidden, they are now emerging in texts8 and, above all, in films made by a son or a daughter remaking their father’s films, which has even become a trend in art colleges. These films show the importance of the trauma created by the home movie at the time of both production and viewing. In another report, I examined one of these productions (A Song of Air, Merilee Bennett 1987), which appears to settle family accounts and offer a psychoanalytical cure (Odin 2008). In re-­appropriating films made by her father to produce her own discourse, through cutting them, remaking them, even modifying the images themselves (slow-­motion, freeze shots, shot decompositions), Merilee regains control over her past life, by reconstructing it. The intention here is more psychological than an effort to generate memories. The result is a third form of home movie permanency. Disassembled and subsequently reassembled in a different form, the eminently private home movie is given a new lease on life in a public space as an artistic production— one that functions as a counter-­memory agent, showing the hidden face (traumatic, coercive) of the home movie (and of the family).

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New family developments and the transition to digital and smart devices Families have continued to evolve, and today many rather look like a patchwork family, its members scattered to all four corners of the world. Parental bonds have become less important, and we now speak of the “chosen” family. At the same time, we are seeing an upsurge of dispositifs for taking films. Photo cameras have become much smaller and most allow users to take video sequences. On-­board cameras are now available in mobile phones and tablets. We could add drones to this list: now easily affordable, they are more a game dispositif than a dispositif for family memory-­making, even if examples of home video sequences taken by drones exist. On digital media, films and tapes have given way to files. Viewing is generally done on the device’s screen or on a computer screen. Two new dispositifs need to be added: diffusion dispositifs, either face-­to-face (e.g., Bluetooth) or remote (via the internet), and archiving dispositifs: hard disks, CDs and DVDs, memory cards, Cloud storage, etc. I will focus my analysis on the mobile phone, the device most used and most representative of all the above-­mentioned ones. As legend has it, the reasons for first adding a camera to a telephone, back in 1977, were related to a family situation: IT specialist Philippe Kahn wanted to send his family and friends the photo of his first child (Allard 2009, 5–6). A mobile phone hosts a range of dispositifs—for taking snapshots, viewing, sending, receiving, and archiving images—in a single device, one that goes with me everywhere in my pocket. Memory-­creating dispositifs were never before so tied to an individual. Although each family generally possessed just one camera or camcorder, each member now has his or her own mobile phone, a device which is a personal and even intimate object (it is sometimes described as an alter ego). Whereas the home movie represented the voice of the family and the home video could host several subjects, the mobile phone involves a radical move toward individualizing memory production. The family-­memory-­creating dispositifs are gone and they have been replaced by personal dispositifs for creating personal memories, a mere fraction of which concern the family (the others pertaining to the individual’s life at work, at home, and with friends). Each family now finds itself faced with a range of memory-­creating dispositifs, which record how each member sees his or her relations with the family, dependent on his or her personal history, including its various limitations, prejudices, and obsessions. The crisis of collective family memory, which started with the emergence of video technology, has culminated with the rise of the mobile phone. At the same time, family pictures have never been shared at such a grand scale as today. Being able to take photos and videos and view them with one and the same device, such sharing takes place first and foremost during the

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event (or immediately afterwards): for instance, at family get-­togethers, all family members will gather around the phone to look at the pictures, or the phone will be passed around. We are now in the era of immediate memory. In fact, what we are doing is no longer remembering things but reliving them. The shots, rather than having a representational function, serve as agents helping us to reconstruct reality; i.e., giving increased consistency to an experience by enhancing it with pictures and looking at it from different points of view. In many cases, viewing becomes an exchange, with videos transferred via Bluetooth. And as the mobile telephone is a smart device, the videos can also be shared remotely, via the internet and social media, with distant family members but also with “friends” and even the “public” (to use the Facebook categories). In other words, we are witnessing an unprecedented move toward family pictures being publicized. How one relates to these pictures depends on who looks at them: while they maintain their memorycreating function with family members and sometimes with friends, the relational function often prevails, and, with the public, they are open to other interpretations: comparative (one compares them with what happens in one’s own family), documentary (what is life like in such or such circumstances?), or even fun ones (they make people laugh, people laugh at them). One might wonder whether putting family pictures online is based not just on a desire for “extimacy,” as described by Serge Tisseron (2001), but also on a wish to contribute to building an eternal memory—as if we have the feeling that when thousands of people see these photos they will exist forever, the public space serving as a sort of guarantee for eternity. Spaces like the Cloud fulfil a similar function, although based on an entirely different idea—if not a diametrically opposed one. Being technical and neutral, these memory spaces seem totally disconnected from everything human and mortal and, as such, eternal. This is not true of course: we are in the mythical sphere, but that is precisely what makes such spaces so attractive. This desire for eternal memories goes hand-­in-hand with a total memory fantasy. As we always have our phone with us, we never stop taking pictures, wanting to capture all we experience. But this goes beyond a desire to create memories: in such a situation, taking a photo becomes a mode of life, with the world being viewed in a frame. Elsewhere, I argued that this development may be described as a process of aesthetizing our relation to the world (Odin 2016a). Ultimately, whatever motivated us to take the pictures, we end up with thousands of files and a full memory card, confronting us with the save-­ordelete decision. In previous eras, the question of archiving hardly arose, as the number of films or even videos was low and easy to store. But the incredible proliferation of these intangible digital files is creating a totally different problem: all of us must now become an archivist (Odin 2014a), scratching our heads in the face of these processes (selection, classification,

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ranking, categorization) that will enable us to not lose track of our recordings and to avoid the risk of a saturated memory (to use the title of the book by Régine Robin (2003)). An excess of memories puts our memory at risk. But what happened to all those video cassettes and films made in previous spaces of communication? One thing is certain, video cassettes are less preserved than films. To explain this asymmetric treatment, we can put forward three reasons. First, a video tape doesn’t actually show anything, whereas a film is in itself a series of photos that one can actually see. Secondly, a video tape is a desecrated object, whereas film reels benefit from the aura of being “cinema” (even if the people who make these films never claim to be part of the cinema space). Finally, films tell us of an older time than videos. Films ensure a transgenerational link, as well as document family life (Ulivucci 2014, 49). Families are now becoming interested in viewing those films hitherto stored in a forgotten corner of the house. As they no longer have a projector, they turn to local archives that are more than pleased to encourage this development, which also leads to the films being deposited there. The families involved have a dual interest in depositing the films: first, by transferring the films to a DVD, the archive makes it possible for families to view them again. Secondly, such archiving is a way of boosting, in the words of Jean-Noël Retière (2003), one’s “native capital” (i.e., boosting one’s feeling of belonging to a space and to a community), as well as receiving gratitude for contributing to a symbolic surplus value. On

FIGURE 1.2  Young woman using mobile phone as archive.

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becoming public property via such local archives, home movies change status, becoming historical documents available for use in documentaries, TV programs, or art installations.

The permanency of still photography According to historians Tom Gunning (2001) and Martin Loiperdinger (1996), what the Lumière brothers had in mind when they invented film was upscaling instantaneous photography (creating something better than the famous blue-­label film which, because of its sensitivity, allowed people to photograph without posing), a technology aimed at improving family photography, with movement “giving life” to those represented.9 Evidently, however, films have not replaced photographs. This can be illustrated by taking an overall look at the three communication spaces discussed earlier. In the space of home movies, still photography was ever-­present in families, with framed photos on the walls or the mantelpiece, in albums, in wallets, or even in people’s heads: photography haunted the home movie to the point where one could speak of a “hangover from still photography” (Hove 2014). Teaching manuals complained about it, deploring the fact that those who take films do so too often, as if they were taking pictures: pauses, glances at the camera, group photos, a lack of continuity and narrativity. I personally see in this way of filming not so much a skill deficit but rather a symptom: everything happens as if the people making the home movie are subconsciously aware that still photography better matches this communication space than film-­ making. We see the same bad conscience on the part of the companies manufacturing the movie cameras. Curiously, in their ads, they always underlined the fact that their camera could also be used to take photos. Jacques Bogopolsky, the inventor of the Bol camera (1923), even offered buyers a pack allowing users to enlarge the photos, print them, and thus create a “lovely family album.” In the same vein, one could, together with his Pathé Baby, purchase a cone enabling photos to be transferred directly to paper from the projector. The firm also offered a service for enlarging and printing photos. The equipment needed for home movies was much more difficult to use than that for taking family photos. Staging the Home Movie Dispositif, an archaeological media show at the 9th Orphan Film Symposium at the Amsterdam EYE Film Institute,10 revealed in a humorous way that transforming one’s living room into a film theater is no trivial affair. Manufacturers were aware of these difficulties and tried to come up with a solution, offering projectors with a built-­in screen, but these were a total flop. Apart from the high cost, the main reason was, in my view, the loss of the ritual character, which added social and ideological value to the home movie screening for the family as an institution.

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In contrast to home movies, home videos were very much different to still photography in their style of taking shots. They were much closer to the television documentaries upon which they were implicitly modeled (given that videos were also watched on TV sets). Nevertheless, videos, despite the simplicity of making them, did not displace family photographs. As videos remained linked to the TV set (without which they had no value), photos were able to put across memories in any place and at any time (and even immediately, in the case of Polaroid cameras). The majority of the above-­mentioned arguments for explaining why photos are still around seem to have become invalid with the arrival of the mobile phone. This new dispositif makes it very simple for us to shoot films and to view them right away or at any time, in any place, because we always have the device in our pocket or within easy reach. As highlighted by Alice Cati, mobile phones respond to the demand to have films as readily available as photographs, a demand that could not be satisfied by previous technologies (Cati 2009, 38–40). However, photos have never been so present as today on our mobile phones, which suggests a reason for the prevalence of still photography linked not with technology but with the very nature of still photos and films. For André Gunthert, the advantage of still photography is basically “its greater fluidity compared to videos which are dragged down by the number of files, uploading time and format constraints” (2015, 136). It seems to me that these technical reasons only apply to long professional videos, but less so to home-­made videos, which tend to be quite short. Moreover, just one click on our mobile phone allows us to go up and down between a photo and video on the same device. For this reason, I would instead put forward a communicational motivation for the continued appeal of photographs: although one can click through the photos very quickly or spend a lot of time looking at a single photo, a video defines its own viewing duration and is thus more restrictive for those watching it. It is also restrictive from another angle: it imposes a narrative (even if reduced to its simplest expression) which hardly gives the viewer the chance to let personal memories arise. A photo, by contrast, precisely because it is still, allows such personal reflection. Furthermore, videos have not supplanted paper photographs. Although hundreds of photos and videos are available at a click on one’s mobile phone, we will still slip a family photo into our wallets and we still like to hold a photo in our hands or even make up a printed album of digital photos (the many scrapbooking websites bear witness to the popularity of this practice). Apart from the problem of archiving digital pictures (whether videos or still photos),11 the main reason why we still cherish paper photos has to do with their object quality. In still photography, the image is an object, while a video de-­materializes the images (the roll of film, the film reels, the tapes or cassettes are the objects, but not the images themselves).

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As Edgar Morin noted in his Le cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire, videos, in contrast to still photography, are “impalpable, fleeting”; they “are not rooted and do not have this materiality allowing that affective crystallization” indispensable to every memory-­related object: in short, they suffer from a deficit in terms of fetishism (Morin 1965, 33). In the communication space of memories, still photography is here to stay!

Notes 1 For an introduction to this approach in terms of communication spaces, see Odin (2011). 2 For some comments on the private mode, see Odin (2011, 89). 3 About this notion, see Odin (2011, 89). 4 There is a very good collection in the Ouro Preto Oratory Museum. 5 For more on testimonials, cf. Odin (2011, 98). 6 Although Tisseron discusses photographs, his observations apply even more to videos. 7 Vidéo Gag was the French adaptation of the American television show “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” presented by Jean Bardin and broadcasted on the national channel TF1 between 1990 and 2008. 8 Marie Cardinal (1975, 150–1) explains how as a small child she was traumatized by her father who filmed her making “number one, please,” the family code words for to pee. 9 Not much later, the Lumière brothers turned their attention to cinema as entertainment likely to attract the interest of wider audiences. 10 Concept and performance: Andreas Fickers, Susan Aasman, Guy Edmonds, Tom Slootweg, Tim van der Heijden. Stage director: Marjan Sonke. Cinematography: Charlotte Storm van ‘s Gravesande, Montage: Tim van der Heijden. 11 “When you’ve got paper photos, you’ve also got the negatives. They’ll last a lifetime. That’s a problem with digital images. If something goes wrong, you’ve lost everything,” as one family member put it, as quoted by Irène Jonas (2007, 106).

2 Hybrid Histories: Historicizing the Home Movie Dispositif Tim van der Heijden

Introduction Over the years, various generations have documented and materialized their family memories on film, video, and digital media. While the making and screening of home movies used to be a rather exclusive hobby practiced only by an elite, this has changed considerably when compared to today’s ubiquitous (online) sharing cultures. After the invention of the film camera at the end of the nineteenth century, amateur photographers and technical hobbyists in particular became fascinated by the technical wonder of the moving image. The releases of Pathé’s 9.5 mm and Kodak’s 16 mm and 8 mm “small-­gauges” in the 1920s and 1930s heralded a standardization of amateur film equipment (Zimmermann 1995; Kattelle 2000). Yet it would take until the late 1950s and 1960s before amateur filmmaking really turned into a middle-­class family memory practice and domestic ritual (Aasman 2004). Lighter, smaller, and cheaper film cameras led to a popularization of home movie practices, especially after the release of user-­friendly Super 8 film cameras in the mid-1960s. With the arrival of consumer video technologies in the 1970s and 1980s, home movies spread more widely and also the contexts and possibilities of display changed (Moran 2002; Slootweg 2018). The videocassette recorder became part of the household media ensemble, and the television set gradually replaced the film projector as a

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screening apparatus. Video technologies generated a new sense of immediacy with their extended recording time, their ability to record sound and image synchronously, and their possibility to instantly replay or erase recordings afterwards. Subsequently, with the mass dissemination of digital recording technologies in the late 1990s and 2000s, home movie practices were no longer bound by the private or domestic domains, but entered the public spaces of diverse online and social media platforms (Aasman 2014). These transformations in home movie practices in the course of nearly a century raise the question of how changes from film via video to digital media as technologies of family memory production and dissemination have shaped new forms of home moviemaking and screening as twentieth-­century memory practices, and how to analyze this changing relationship between media technologies and memory practices from a long-­term historical perspective. In media historiography, there have generally been two approaches to historicize past media technologies and their practices: media history and media archaeology. Traditionally, historians have approached media changes from a linear and often teleological perspective (Hubbell 1942). Although recent approaches consider the historical development of media technologies as a more complex, dynamic, and not necessarily technology-­driven process (Bolter and Grusin 1999; Thorburn and Jenkins 2003), in which, moreover, various stages can be distinguished (Gaudreault and Marion 2002), media historians are generally interested in historical changes and, therefore, often maintain a diachronic perspective on how media technologies and practices develop over time. Media archaeologists, on the other hand, often adopt a synchronic perspective. Demonstrating a penchant for sharply delineating their field from media history, media archaeologists are interested less in constructing historical narratives out of technological changes than in the telling of heterogeneous, parallel, forgotten, or alternative histories (Parikka 2012a, 12–13; cf. Ernst 2011; Huhtamo and Parikka 2011; Elsaesser 2004). In short, whereas media historians often take in a diachronic perspective and use narratives of continuity and discontinuity to reconstruct past media technologies and their practices, media archaeologists rather maintain a synchronic perspective in (re)constructing alternative media histories. This chapter aims to explore and propose a third approach to media historiography, which departs from the notion of “hybridity”: the inter­ mingling and co-­existence of old and new media technologies, user practices, and discourses as evolving in an ongoing process. Building on some of the empirical and conceptual results of my research on the cultural and historical dynamics of the home movie as a twentieth-­century family memory practice (Van der Heijden 2018), I address the question of how thinking in terms of hybridity and hybridization may add to historical and archaeological approaches to media historiography. Specifically, I develop the argument that a “hybrid media historiography” enables one to grasp the complex

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interrelations and dynamics between media technologies, user practices, and discourses in more precise and comprehensive ways by maintaining both a diachronic and synchronic perspective in studying media transitions. Drawing on recent pragmatic re-­conceptualizations of the dispositif concept, furthermore, this chapter aims to explore how the notion of hybridity may be productive for identifying not only the succession of different constellations of media technologies, content, and perception over time, but also their interrelations and mutual interactions, if not their transformations. First, I will discuss how one can historicize the so-­called home movie dispositif from a longue durée perspective by investigating four transitions in the home movie as a twentieth-­century family memory practice. By looking specifically at the transition from amateur film to home video, which gradually constituted a new home movie dispositif in the 1970s and 1980s, I will underline the heuristic potential of hybridity as analytical lens in media historical research. I identify three forms of hybridity: hybrid technologies, hybrid practices, and hybrid discourses. In the concluding section, I reflect on the relation between hybridity, intermediality, and media transitions. The question of how a hybrid approach to media historiography complements historical and archaeological approaches informs the discussion of how thinking in terms of hybridity and hybridization adds to non-­essentialist re-­conceptualizations of the dispositif concept in media historical research.

Historicizing the home movie dispositif Exploring more than a century of family memory practices—spanning the whole period from the invention of the film camera in the late nineteenth century, the introduction of 9.5 mm, 16 mm, 8 mm “small-­gauges” and Super 8 cassette-­film technologies for amateurs, via home video to digital media technologies—one can historicize the so-­called “home movie dispositif.” This entails examination of the interrelations between the materiality of film, video, and digital media as media technologies (material dimension); their mediated content, narrative and aesthetic forms (textual dimension); and the changing meanings of home movies in their social and cultural contexts of use (perceptual dimension). This use of the dispositif concept relates to recent re-­conceptualizations, in which the concept was interpreted and deployed pragmatically as a heuristic and multidimensional tool in media historical research (Hickethier 1997; Kessler 2007; Masson 2011; Röther 2012; Fickers 2014; Albéra and Tortajada 2015). As pointed out by film historian Frank Kessler (2007) in his unpublished seminar paper “Notes on Dispositif,” the dispositif concept emerged in French post-­structuralism during the late 1970s, most notably in the work of Jean-Louis Baudry (1978) and Michael Foucault (1990 [1976]).

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It formed the basis of Baudry’s “apparatus theory,” which provided a new way of thinking about cinema in which the cinematographic effect (l’effet cinema) cannot be seen apart from the technological means and mechanisms by and through which it is constituted. Although Baudry’s writings were innovative at the time for addressing the material and spatial dimensions of the cinematic experience, his theoretical reflections on the cinematic dispositif can be criticized for maintaining a rather essentialist or trans-­ historical approach to film history by foregrounding cinema’s classical narrative form and theatrical viewing setting (Kessler 2007, 12). In recent scholarship, consequently, the concept of dispositif was interpreted and deployed as a heuristic and pragmatic tool to analyze cinema as well as other media as a “system of relations,” in which the materiality of a medium, the content it mediates and the perception or symbolic meanings it conveys have been approached as “mutually inclusive” (Fickers 2014, 46). Several historians have thereby emphasized the concept’s intrinsic temporal and historical dimensions. As argued by the French film scholar Jacques Aumont (1990, 147): “there is no dispositif outside of history” (“il n’y a pas de dispositif hors de l’histoire”) (in Kessler 2007, 12).1 As Kessler explained: “[a]t different moments in history, a medium can produce a specific and (temporarily) dominating configuration of technology, text, and spectatorship. An analysis of these configurations could thus serve as a heuristic tool for the study of how the function and the functioning of media undergo historical changes” (2007, 15). Or as media historian Andreas Fickers stated in his article on the historical dispositif of communication technologies: “Historicizing media dispositifs . . . could serve as a heuristic tool for the changing functions of technologies and to investigate the constant renegotiation of their meanings and functions in varying consumption environments” (2014, 46–7). In other words, pragmatic implementations of the dispositif concept in media historical research allow for the analysis of different uses of the same text produced or disseminated by different technologies in different contexts of use. Watching a film in a cinema is experienced differently, for instance, compared to watching it in a classroom, at home on television, or on a smartphone (Odin 1995, 2014b, 2016b). As the meaning of the text depends on the context in which the medium is used and the functions and functioning of a medium (e.g., cinema, television, smartphone) are subject to change as well, Kessler argued that instead of writing a history of a given medium, it is actually more accurate to describe the history of media as a “history of dispositifs” (2007, 16).

Periods of transition Researching the cultural and historical dynamics of the home movie as a twentieth-­century family memory practice, we can distinguish between five

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historical home movie dispositifs: (1) kinematography dispositifs, (2) small-­ gauge dispositifs, (3) Super 8 dispositifs, (4) home video dispositifs, and (5) digital media dispositifs. Each of these historical home movie dispositifs is characterized by a specific and temporarily dominating constellation of media technology, content and perception. Small-­gauge dispositifs, for instance, are characterized by the use of 9.5 mm, 16 mm, and 8 mm film technologies (technology); static, soundless, and black-­and-white or color imagery (content); and large-­screen projection in the living room (perception). Home video dispositifs, by contrast, are characterized by the use of home video systems like VHS and Betamax (technology), the synchronous recording and screening of sound and image, as well as extended recording time (content), and the instant replay of the video recordings on the television set (perception). For historicizing the changing means and meanings of home moviemaking and screening, we need to analyze these five historical home movie dispositifs in relation to each other, rather than in isolation. Consequently, four historical periods of transition can be distinguished, each heralded by the arrival of a new amateur media technology: 1 The arrival of 9.5 mm, 16 mm, and 8 mm “small-­gauge” film technologies in the 1920s and 1930s. 2 The arrival of Super 8 and Single 8 “cassette-­film” technologies in the 1960s. 3 The arrival of home video technologies in the 1970s and 1980s. 4 The arrival of digital media technologies in the 1990s and 2000s. The long-­term historical perspective allows us to draw some general conclusions on changes in home movie practices over time. While people have continued to record their family holidays, birthday parties, and children’s first steps and growing-­up, it is obvious that today’s ubiquitous (online) sharing cultures are fundamentally different from those filmic memory practices of the early twentieth century. In the course of a century, the making and screening of home movies pertains to processes of democratization (evolving from an exclusive practice to a popular one), memory staging (from private and domestic to public forms and contexts of use), and generational shifting in technology usage (from an exclusive parental domain to one in which also youngsters are involved). Although such general conclusions may provide an insightful overview of various long-­term historical changes in home moviemaking and screening as family memory practices, my analysis gives rise to more nuanced views as well. While popular discourses on digital user platforms and social media like YouTube often describe the shift from private to public contexts of use as occurring in parallel with the digital age, the screening of amateur films was never a domestic practice exclusively. Already in the 1920s and 1930s, for instance, various amateur cine-­clubs provided a public venue for amateur

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filmmakers to screen their self-­made moving images to a larger audience. The focus on periods of transition is not only useful for indicating long-­term historical changes, but reveals many developments within these transformations as well. By identifying and reflecting on some of them, my argument in fact highlights the actual complexity and “messiness” of media history and historians’ preoccupation with constructing narratives of change and discontinuity, rather than highlighting also the things that happen “in between.”

Hybridity and its heuristic potential If we acknowledge the complexity in periods of transition, how, then, can we study media changes in more precise and comprehensive ways? In the following, I will argue that the notion of hybridity provides a promising departure point for analyzing media transitions from both a diachronic and synchronic perspective. As such, it offers an alternative to historical and archaeological approaches to media historiography. The notion of hybridity is well-­grounded in the social sciences and was deployed more recently as a concept in the humanities (Kraidy 2005; Manovich 2007; Burke 2009; Chadwick 2013). In The Hybrid Media System, political scientist and communication scholar Andrew Chadwick argued in relation to the rapid diffusion of new media technologies in political communication that: Hybridity offers a powerful mode of thinking . . . because it foregrounds complexity, interdependence, and transition. Hybrid thinking rejects simple dichotomies, nudging us away from “either/or” patterns of thought and toward “not only, but also” patterns of thought. It draws attention to flux, in betweenness, the interstitial, and the liminal. It reveals how older and newer media logics . . . blend, overlap, intermesh, and coevolve. 2013, 3–4 In the field of media studies, the notion of hybridity was used in particular to analyze the increased interrelations and co-­existence of various media in the digital age. New media scholar Lev Manovich, for instance, argued that the 1990s were characterized by a “hybrid revolution,” in which different media like cinema, photography, animation, computer graphics, and typography were increasingly combined or juxtaposed. Looking at the visual language and aesthetics of digital media productions like music video clips, television commercials, feature films, and web-­based videos, Manovich concluded that “by the end of the decade, the ‘pure’ moving-­image media became an exception and hybrid media became the norm” (2007, 1). The long-­term historical perspective on home movie practices allowed me to see, in hindsight, that hybridity and its various degrees or levels of

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hybridization not only exist in the digital age, as suggested by Manovich, but can actually be found in all periods of transition. Chadwick, too, noted that “all media systems are, to greater or lesser extents, and for greater or lesser periods, hybrid media systems, but this hybridity is often overlooked” (2013, 24). This claim can even be further specified by looking at different manifestations or forms of hybridity that can be distinguished in periods of transition: hybrid technologies, hybrid practices, and hybrid discourses. •

Hybrid technologies: occur when at least two different media technologies merge or co-­exist in one specific apparatus. • Hybrid practices: occur when users appropriate a new media technology with the older medium as frame of reference. • Hybrid discourses: occur when an old terminology is used to describe a new technology, its users and/or user practices. To elucidate how these three forms of hybridity can become manifest in periods of media transition, I will now focus on the transition from amateur film to home video dispositifs as one of the four periods of transition that I distinguish.2 The case serves to explore the heuristic potential of hybridity as a concept and how it may provide an alternative yet constructive starting-­point for studying media transitions from both a diachronic and synchronic perspective.

Transitions in home movie dispositifs: from film to video The transition from film to video dispositifs in home moviemaking and screening implied a highly intermedial period of transition. Unlike film, which as a recording medium was based on a photomechanical carrier, video was an electromagnetic medium. This means that it makes use of magnetic tape for the “electronic transfer of signals” (Spielmann 2010, 1). Because of the electromagnetic basis of video technology, video corresponds materially and technically to other media technologies, such as television (which also constructs and transmits images and sounds electronically) and the tape recorder (which also makes use of magnetic tape as a material carrier). Television particularly was central to the development of video as an amateur medium, both practically and discursively. The increased popularization of television as a domestic screening medium from the 1960s onwards set the stage for the development of video as domestic technology and practice: initially in the form of a recorder for the recording of television programs, and later also in combination with a camera for making video recordings oneself. During video’s early phase of development as a medium in the 1950s, so long before the first consumer electronics were introduced and entered the domestic sphere, the term “video”

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was even used synonymously with television—as a way to distinguish it from radio as a medium. In Video Revolutions: A Short History of Video, media scholar Michael Z. Newman argued that video as a technological medium has historically always been related to other media technologies and practices, and can therefore be best understood relationally; that is “according to how it is constituted through its complementarity or distinction to other media within a wider ecology of technologies, representations, and meanings” (2014, 3). Video’s intrinsic intermediality, which was also highlighted by other video scholars and historians like Roy Armes (1988), James M. Moran (2002), and Yvonne Spielmann (2010), made it subject to various forms of hybridity and hybridization in its historical development as domestic recording technology and amateur medium. One can distinguish between three stages in video’s historical development. The first stage, running from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, characterizes video’s appearance as amateur and domestic medium. In these years, video technologies were used mainly for the recording of television programs, although some additional portable sets were released that allowed for the making of own video recordings as well.3 As an amateur medium, video would at best be complementary to film by then. The second stage, running from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, is characterized by the emergence of various mutually competitive home video systems, like Sony’s Betamax, JVC’s VHS, and Philips’ Video2000, which heralded an explosive growth of video as a recording medium. With the arrival of the camcorder—the integration of video camera and recorder—and increased use of consumer video technologies from the mid-1980s onwards, video gradually developed into a recording medium of its own. Video’s transformations and intrinsic—yet altering—intermedial relations made video subject to an increased co-­existence and intermingling with other media technologies in amateur recording and screening practices. The increased hybridization in the transition from film to video can be exemplified employing the three aforementioned forms of hybridity.

Hybrid practices, technologies, and discourses Hybrid practices: tele-­recording Hybrid practices occur when users appropriate a new media technology with the older medium as frame of reference. A good example of a hybrid practice that emerged in the transition from film to video dispositifs, is “tele-­ recording”: the practice of recording television images with a film camera. Tele-­recording practices emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, along with the arrival and popularization of television as a household screening medium. The new medium inspired amateur filmmakers to make recordings of their television screens; a practice that was stimulated by the amateur film

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magazines. In May 1950, the Dutch amateur film magazine Het Veerwerk announces: Just imagine! With your [film] camera, you find yourself basically in the same spot as the television camera. Whatever will happen anywhere in the country, the television camera is first in line to record it. In case you have a television receiver, you will be able to see this camera’s images in your living room. So now you are first in line, too! And you can film these bright images . . . with your own small-­gauge camera. 91 The description illustrates how not so much video, which as a medium was used mainly by television professionals in these years, but the changing media landscape and specifically the arrival of television initially brought about a change in amateur film practices. As a domestic screening medium, in other words, the arrival of television not only led to new imaginaries but also stimulated new amateur recording practices before the release of the first home video technologies. As an example of a hybrid practice, tele-­recording anticipates a function that was soon to be realized by the video recorder as a domestic recording technology: the direct recording of television programs on magnetic videotape. While the first consumer videotape recorders (VTRs) were released in the early 1960s (e.g., the Ampex VR-1500), the practice of recording television programs at home with a video recorder became more common after the release of various consumer videocassette recorders (VCRs), like the Philips N1500 (1972), and home video systems, like Sony’s Betamax, JVC’s VHS (Video Home System), and Philips’ Video2000, in the 1970s and 1980s. The practice of recording television programs and their later replay—for which besides a video recorder also a broadcast receiver or tuner and programmable clock were needed—now became known as “time-­shifting” (Levy 1983, 1989; cf. Cubitt 1991). Compared to former tele-­recording practices with the amateur film camera, the video recorder rendered previous technical and practical problems obsolete, like the so-­called “bar” that appeared on the film image as a result of the diverging speed of the television image (transmitted in 25 frames per second) and the speed of the film camera (varying between 12, 16, 18, and 24 frames per second).4 Merging film and video recording practices, tele-­ recording, so became a hybrid practice in retrospect.

Hybrid technologies: Polavision and other hybrid screening devices Besides hybrid practices, the transition from amateur film to home video is also characterized by the release of various hybrid technologies. These occur

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when at least two different media technologies merge or co-­exist in one specific apparatus. During the late 1960s and 1970s, various hybrid screening devices were released, which merged or combined the materiality of film with the “modern” screening possibilities of television as household medium. Examples of such devices that enabled the “direct projection” of amateur films on the television set, include the Braun Paximat Cine 8, the Canon Canovision, the Nordmende Spectra-Vision, the Eumig R2000 projector, the Kodak Supermatic film video player, and the Polaroid Polavision (see Vorst 1969; N.N. 1973; Benéder 1974; N.N. 1977b). Some of these hybrid screening systems processed films electronically, while others made use of the original film perforation mechanism instead. The Canovision, for example, was developed by the Japanese photography manufacturer Canon as a film projector in the shape of a television device. By indirectly projecting a light beam from the lens on a large mirror, the enlarged film image was projected on the backside of the screen. The alleged advantages of such hybrid screening devices were their immediacy and ease of use. In relation to the Nordmende Spectra-Vision system, which technically worked like a 16 mm and 35 mm film scanner, Frits Bernard and Gert Ebeling (1971) wrote in their video handbook “Video at Home” (Video Thuis): The film amateur can thus view his self-­made films on his television screen instead of on a projection screening. . . . The advantage is that he does not have to set up a projector and projection screen, as he currently has to do. Neither does he have to darken the room or wait until it is dark with this system, because he displays his films on his television device. 103–4 One of the most striking examples of hybrid technologies that emerged in the transition from film to video dispositifs was the Polaroid Polavision. Not only technologically or functionally, but also discursively it intermingled and merged film and video technologies in one hybrid media ensemble, consisting of “a lightweight camera, a cassette containing a revolutionary new film, and a ‘player’ ” (Kattelle 2000, 187). Released in 1977, in line with Polaroid’s by then highly-­popular instant photography system, Polavision was advertised as the first camera projection system for “instant small-­gauge printing” (N.N. 1977a, 1). In the amateur film magazines, it was described as a “new medium that is incomparable to small-­gauge or video” (N.N. 1977b, 9) or even as “neither small-­gauge nor video” (Gessel 1980, 16–17). Nevertheless, Polavision was evidently connected to both media. Technically, it worked by means of a special two-­reel color cassette-­film, which was exposed through a plastic prism in the camera. The camera resembled the shape of a Fuji Single 8 camera, which also worked with cassette-­film. Although the special color film that was used inside the Polavision cassette was identical in width and perforation to Kodak’s Super 8 cassette-­film, it

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FIGURE 2.1  Canovision and Polavision as hybrid screening devices in the transition from amateur film to home video dispositifs. Sources: Smalfilm 36, no. 2 (February 1969): 19; and Smalfilmen als Hobby 6, no. 8 (August 1978): 10.

was remarkably enough called “tape.” The film was automatically and instantly developed afterwards and projected by the player, which had about the same size and design of a television set (Kattelle 2000, 188). Intermingling or merging the materiality of (cassette-)film with home video’s immediacy and ease of use in (television) screening practices, Polavision clearly embodied the transition from film to video dispositifs on many levels. While neither Polavision nor any of the other hybrid screening devices became very successful eventually, they reveal how the amateur film industry was trying to respond to the increasingly changing media landscape at the time—characterized by the introduction of various media technologies, such as television, the tape recorder, Super/Single 8 cassette-­film systems, and home video. This shift also reflects the desire of users to combine film-­based recording and screening practices with television’s “ease of use” in the years just before the release of various home video systems. The idea of watching movies on the television set, which would eventually become the norm during the 1980s and 1990s, clearly appealed to the imagination already in the years before. The examples reveal, then, how the transition from amateur film to home video dispositifs was preceded as well as accompanied by an increased co-­existence and intermingling of technological apparatuses and user practices.

Hybrid discourses: from “tape recorder for film” to “vilmmaking” On the discursive level, the transition from amateur film to home video dispositifs was also subject to hybridization in various ways. Hybrid

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discourses occur when an old terminology is used to describe a new technology, its users, and/or user practices. In fact, most terminology concerning video as a medium can be qualified as hybrid, because of video’s intrinsic material and functional relations to other media (cf. Armes 1988; Moran 2002; Spielmann 2010; Newman 2014). Already in the early 1950s, when video recording experiments took place in broadcast television industries, video technologies were regularly described in terms of other media. In these years, the amateur film magazines for instance wrote about the emergence of the “tape recorder for film” and “electronic cinematography” in reference to the new electromagnetic medium (see N.N. 1954; Kosman 1954). Video technologies and their usages were discursively framed especially in relation to the medium of television. Amateur film magazines, for example, frequently referred to the video camera as a “television camera” and described the making of home videos as the registration of “personal programs” (Woudstra 1964, 9; Benéder 1971). Video discourses became more related to the domain of (amateur) film during the 1980s, after the release of the camcorder as amateur recording technology and increased use of home video technologies and systems, such as Betamax, VHS, and Video2000. Whereas video recording technologies and their affordances of extended recording time, synchronous sound recording, and instant replay were initially perceived as complementary to the amateur film camera, they transformed into an alternative or even a threat to filmmaking as an amateur and family memory practice during these years. Along with this shift from television to film as a point of reference, various hybrid discourses emerged in which video technologies, users, and user practices were described in filmic terms. Users of the video camera or camcorder, for instance, were called “videographers” (videografen), “video filmmakers” (videofilmers), “video-­ists” (video-­isten), “(amateur-) videasts” or “videots” (videoten), while video user practices were referred to as “videoing” (vervideoot), “vilmmaking” (vilmen), “video filmmaking” (videofilmen), and “videomaking” (videograferen).5 Each of these terms came with different meanings and associations. The term “videast,” for instance, was often used in relation to professional or specialized video users. The term “videographer” denoted serious amateurs who explored the creative potential of video as a medium, while “videofilmer” referred to the more casual users who appropriated the video camera merely as a registration tool. Finally, the term “videots” was used more generally to describe the new group of video users, although in the early 1980s it was used especially as a conjunction of the words “video” and “idiot” to mock the advance of video users in amateur cine-­clubs (cf. Slootweg 2018). The wide variety of terms and meanings reveals the uncertainty or unfamiliarity among (potential) users or user groups as to how to approach the electromagnetic medium and their practices. It is indicative for the discussions in amateur film magazines and cine-­clubs on whether video as audiovisual

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FIGURE 2.2  “Video versus film,” a cartoon by Jan van Weeszenberg from 1988. Source: AV Amateurfilmer 6, no. 1 (February 1988): 3.

registration medium could match film as a creative amateur medium. From the late 1980s onwards, when video gradually developed into an amateur recording medium of its own, such dualistic propositions on the debate “film versus video” were replaced by more neutral or even positive ones. Film and video, for example, became more and more described as “audiovisual media.”6 Up to that point as terms they are used almost interchangeably—regardless of their formerly distinct material or technological differences. Hybrid discourses, in that sense, not only characterize discursive shifts and changing meanings or use of terminology in specific periods of transition, but also reflect how discourses may co-­exist or even converge in time.

Conclusions One of the objectives of this chapter has been to explore the heuristic potential of hybridity as an analytical tool in media historical research; for example, in studying the changing relationship between technologies of memory production and dissemination (film, video, digital media) and home moviemaking and screening as twentieth-­century family memory practices. Although I have focused on the transition from amateur film to home video dispositifs as a case, it should be noted that hybridity can actually be found in all periods of transition. A long-­term historical perspective makes it possible to distinguish between various forms of hybridity, both diachronically and synchronically. Significantly, my analysis of hybrid technologies, practices, and discourses shows how in periods of transition one or more dimensions of different home movie dispositifs are likely to co-­exist. In the case of Polavision, for example, the material dimension of the amateur film dispositif (i.e., celluloid film as

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media carrier) was juxtaposed with the perceptual dimension of the home video dispositif (i.e., the television set as screening apparatus). While most hybrid technologies appeared to present themselves in what Gaudreault and Marion have called the phase of development between a medium’s “first” and “second” birth (2002, 14), hybrid discourses and practices were constructed in transitory phases either before the emergence of a new medium (e.g., tele-­ recording) or afterwards (e.g., “tape recorder for film,” “vilmmaking”). A second, interrelated reflection is that hybridity strongly draws on intermediality. Hybridity, more specifically, is either constructed diachronically or synchronically in relation to other media technologies. In reference to Yvonne Spielmann’s notion of “intermedia” (2001), film and media scholar Jihoon Kim even suggests that intermediality “is grounded in the interrelated ontological conditions of media technologies, namely, the diachronic and synchronic hybridizations of historically existing media” (2016, 41). Kim’s differentiation between diachronic hybridization, meaning the interrelations between new and past media technologies, and synchronic hybridization, meaning the co-­existence of different media technologies within a given time (24–7), is fruitful for explicating how different media dispositifs can interrelate and co-­exist in and between different periods of time. Examples of diachronic hybridization in the transition from amateur film to home video dispositifs include hybrid discourses like the “tape recorder for film” and “vilmmaking,” in which old media technologies or practices resonate in new ones. Hybrid screening technologies like Polavision can be seen as examples of synchronic hybridization, because they are based on the co-­existence of film and video as media technologies within a specific time period. At the same time, Polavision can also be analyzed as an example of diachronic hybridization, depending on whether video as interrelated medium is perceived as co-­existent (synchronic) or succeeding (diachronic). It makes clear that while both diachronic and synchronic forms of hybridization appear in periods of transition, their heuristic distinction cannot be seen in isolation of the object of analysis. This last observation brings us to the final point, namely that what qualifies as a hybrid—whether a technology, practice, or discourse—may actually change or fluctuate throughout time. In other words, hybrids are not only fundamentally intermedial (interrelated to other media), but also transformable (i.e., changing in status or form). Video, as a medium, serves as a good example. While some users may have initially perceived it as a hybrid technology, merging the functionality of the amateur film camera with the materiality of the magnetic tape recorder and screening possibilities of the television set, this changed as soon as video developed into a recording medium of its own. The examples of hybrid practices (e.g., tele-­recording) and hybrid discourses (e.g., “tape recorder for film”) have shown how this can work the other way around as well: what was initially seen as new or innovative can become hybrid in the light of further technological developments. In other words, what is initially or retrospectively seen as a hybrid may eventually become part of a new dispositif.

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Thinking in terms of hybridity subsequently enforces a radical re-­ conceptualization of the notion of dispositif. This applies not only in regard to Baudry’s essentialist implementation of the concept in the 1970s, used to better comprehend the identity of cinema as a medium by thinking together various interrelated dimensions of the cinematic experience, but even regarding the pragmatic implementation and non-­essentialist use of the concept, in which multiple dispositifs elucidate each other on the basis of their mutual differences in constellations of technology, content, and perception. A hybrid media historiography, alternatively, proposes a truly process-­oriented approach to media history in which the synchronic and diachronic relations of media technologies, mediated practices, and discourses are analyzed in terms of their constant (re)constitution and perpetual state of development. Instead of reflecting on dominant constellations of technology, content, and perception in which users operate and interact, a hybrid media historiography takes hybridity as the norm by acknowledging that everything is “always already” in transition. Consequently, a hybrid media historiography invites us to rethink media histories beyond the traditional frameworks of change and continuity, and alternatively approach them as a history of mixed or “hybrid dispositifs.” In such approach, hybridity is perceived no longer as an exception or marginal phenomenon, but rather as the only constant factor in media historical development. Unlike “traditional” media historical and media archaeological approaches, which maintain either a diachronic or synchronic perspective, a hybrid media historiography embraces both a diachronic and a synchronic perspective in order to study and analyze how media technologies, user practices, and discourses succeed each other in time (diachronic), while constantly referring to or interacting with each other at the same time (synchronic). Such a hybrid approach to media historiography may actually allow for grasping the recurring long-­term dynamics and continuous tension between continuity and discontinuity that is at the heart of various levels of analysis—technology, practice, and discourse—in more precise and comprehensive ways. As a consequence, instead of reducing the long-­term history of the home movie as a family memory practice to its dominant changes from film via video to digital media as technologies of family memory production and dissemination, this approach opens up a perspective that acknowledges the complexity of media technologies, discourses, and practices in their permanent state of transition.

Primary sources Benéder, Ernest D.P. 1971. “Video in opmars.” Cineshot 1 (10): 1–3. Benéder, Ernest D.P. 1974. “Firato ’74. Van Super-8 tot kleurenbuis.” Cineshot 4 (10): 7–8, 14.

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Bernard, Frits, and Gert Ebeling. 1971. Video thuis. Amsterdam/Wageningen: Foton Publishing. Gessel, Ruud van. 1980. “Polavision, video of film?” Filmbeeld 6 (9): 16–17. Kooy, Aad. 1980. “Op amateurgebied zullen film en video hun eigen leven leiden.” Filmbeeld 6 (2): 30–1. Kosman, Hans. 1954. “Gaan we electrisch filmen? Magneetband in plaats van film.” Het Veerwerk 21 (7): 148–9. Kuijk, J. van. 1952. “Over het filmen van het televisiescherm.” Het Veerwerk 19 (2): 27–8. Maanen, Rob van. 1987. “Standpunt.” Smalfilm Hobbyblad 5 (1): 4. N.N. 1954. “Tape-­recorders nu ook voor film?” Het Veerwerk 21 (2): 31. N.N. 1973. “Video afspeelapparatuur voor Super 8.” Cineshot 3 (9): 6. N.N. 1977a. “Polaroid: direkt-­klaar smalfilm.” Smalfilmen als Hobby 5 (6): 1. N.N. 1977b. “Polaroid stelt Polavision voor.” Smalfilmen als Hobby 5 (7): 9. Redactie. 1950. “Wie maakt de eerste smalfilm van televisie-­uitzendingen?” Het Veerwerk 17 (5): 91. Sonsbeek, Jos van. 1985. “Symposium film of video.” Smalfilm Hobbyblad 3 (6): 261–5. Stichting Filmgroep “De Lage Landen”. 1987. “Het nieuwe jasje.” Smalfilm Hobbyblad 5 (6): 1. Suurhoff, Ton, and Jan Volland. 1980. “Hans van Nierop: ‘Film kijken is echt nog steeds kermisvermaak’ [Amateurfilmers in de NOVA-arena].” Filmbeeld 6 (11): 10–14. Vorst, Jan. 1969. “Canovision 8 [Apparatuur beoordeling].” Smalfilm 36 (2): 19. Woudstra, Cor. 1964. “Beeld-­op-de-­band nu veel goedkoper. Grote mogelijkheden voor de Philips video-­recorder EL 3400.” Smalfilm 31 (10): 8–10.

Notes 1 All non-English citations are translated by the author. 2 I use “amateur film” here as an umbrella term, which includes both 9.5 mm, 16 mm, and 8 mm “small-­gauge” and Super 8 film technologies. The term “home video” refers to analogue video only, so not to digital video technologies. 3 For a case study on the Sony “Video Rover” Portapak, one of the first portable video sets that were released in the late-1960s, see Slootweg (2016). 4 For a discussion, see for instance Kuijk (1952). 5 See for example, Kooy (1980); Suurhoff and Volland (1980); Sonsbeek (1985); Maanen (1987). 6 See for example, Stichting Filmgroep “De Lage Landen” (1987).

3 The Emergence of Early Artists’ Video in Europe and the USA and its Relationship to Broadcast TV Chris Meigh-Andrews

This chapter explores how some early artists working with video in Europe and the USA explored the alternative potentials of a broadcast medium that at the time had become almost completely controlled and professionalized. With the advent of low-­cost and initially inferior quality equipment, designed primarily for the consumer and amateur markets, artists developed and pioneered new aesthetic and political strategies to critique, subvert, and expand traditional approaches to the TV medium. In my book A History of Video Art (2014), I trace the development of artists’ video in relation to the evolution and availability of video technology for artists and alternative/oppositional practitioners. This approach is one of numerous ways of discussing and understanding the development of the genre, and to some it is contentious as it privileges an attitude that could be considered “technologically determinist.” However, the unique technological principles of video recording, in my view, provide a valuable insight into the way the medium fostered new aesthetic potentials for art practice which went beyond merely providing a set of newly available techniques. As Ina Blom has argued in her essay “The Autobiography of Video: Outline for a Revisionist Account of Early Video Art” (2013), with its continuously flowing “live” signal, video recording can be understood as a manifestation of memory practice: Video and digital technologies are not understood as image technologies based on optical principles but as time-­technologies whose ability to

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contract and distribute temporal material within an unfolding now-­time could be seen to share certain rudimentary features within the functioning of human memory. 276 In her essay, Blom draws on a Bergsonian concept which defines perception as a constituent aspect of the material world, rather than a specific property of the human mind. According to Bergson, the human sensorium can be understood as an interface between the fluid movement of matter. Thus, for Bergson, memory can be defined in temporal terms—not a storage system as in an archive of permanently preserved units and objects, but a temporary delay between action and reaction. Blom argues that video foregrounds the mechanism of memory, “the technical condition under which the past is conserved in the present.” There is a parallel between video technology’s ability to manipulate and contract time which can be understood as a form of thought: “video . . . produces a reflection on new forms of social memory whose ramifications have to be thought beyond the framework of machine memory in the more limited sense of the term” (281). The relationship between the development of video technology and the way that artists sought to explore its unique inherent properties is part of a wider understanding of the importance and power of television as a medium and its social significance. The emergence of an oppositional relationship to broadcast TV is both important and unique to the art form. At this early phase in the development of artists’ video as a distinct genre, this counter-­ cultural attitude helped to clarify its purpose, as well as defining its theoretical and aesthetic identity. The reason for this early and defiant political stance by artists is at least partially linked to issues of access to the means of production and issues relating to the dissemination of artists’ video tapes. Not only was broadcast TV unsuitable and inappropriate for many of the ideas and approaches developed and adopted by artists who took up video, the technology was new and different, facilitating and requiring the development of new approaches and attitudes to the presentation, dissemination, and viewing of the electronic moving image. The new portable equipment was designed to be (relatively) lightweight, portable, and easy to operate, and required minimal technical training or support. This was in marked contrast to the television broadcast equipment of the day, which required substantial technical and engineering backup and highly-­trained personnel to operate, maintain, and put together the program content. An understanding of the significance of this early period in the development of artists’ video is important because of the way it has influenced the perception of the cultural impact and value of the genre, its innovative approach and subversive power, as well as its limitations and marginalized position for both artists and audiences of subsequent generations. The early formative

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years during which artists’ video was characterized as “oppositional,” counter-­ cultural, and antithetic to broadcast television left a legacy for several decades, which has only recently been superseded with the rise of multi-­screen installation and digital convergence. The reputation of artists’ video as “difficult” and at best only relevant to a small minority with specialist interests was established and sustained by ideas that emerged during this formative period. Conversely, because of the “alternative” approach many artists were made to work with the medium during the late 1960s and 1970s when video art first emerged as a distinct genre, artists working in Europe and the United States developed a range of approaches and attitudes to the new medium, which helped to establish a radical alternative voice in the videosphere and paved the way for a new and more innovative broadcast television landscape. However, the very earliest examples of video art appeared before the development of low-­cost portable video recorders. Instead, the birth of artists’ video occurred as a result of a direct response to the television receiver as an important cultural and domestic object. Both the German artist Wolf Vostell and the Korean artist Nam June Paik exhibited a series of modified TV sets in the early 1960s. In TV de-Collage (1961), German artist Wolf Vostell distorted the TV image using random interference to the broadcast images of television receivers installed in a Paris department store. TV de-Collage employed a reversal of the more conventional collage techniques of erasing, removing and tearing off elements of texts, images and information to reveal and create new combinations. In TV de-Collage Vostell sought to extend this approach to include television imagery, deliberately positioning his televisions in a public space in contrast to their more familiar domestic setting. Nam June Paik’s first solo exhibition was at Rolf Jahrling’s Galerie Parnass, in Wuppertal, Germany, during March 1963. For several months before this exhibition, Paik had been secretly experimenting with television sets in an attic space rented separately from his main studio. Paik felt this secrecy was necessary because he was particularly wary of criticism, and nervous that other artists would prematurely take up his ideas. Working occasionally with an electronics engineer, he set to work modifying the circuitry of a number of television receivers—literally making “prepared” televisions, perhaps inspired by John Cage’s prepared pianos. Nam June Paik’s “Exposition of Music-Electronic Television” is an important event in any history of the genre and is widely acknowledged as the first exhibition to present television as a medium for art. Paik’s work is significant in that it engaged directly with the available (and accessible) technology, challenging the established “one-­way” process of broadcast television via a series of individual technical manipulations. Both Paik and Vostell were associated with the “anti-­art” Fluxus group and shared many of its concerns, fascinated by the possibilities of blurring the boundaries between art and everyday life and adopting “Dadaesque”

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confrontational strategies. They were also both influenced by the ideas of the American composer John Cage who made use of chance, randomness, and indeterminacy in the process of making art. Typical for many artists at the time was a critical view of broadcast television, a communication channel still in its infancy at the time, but already regarded as a monolithic and centrally controlled medium for marketing and official propaganda. In contrast to the Fluxus notion of attacking TV, other artists were more interested in reaching the wider public via the broadcast medium. The very earliest “television art” was broadcast in Germany at the end of the 1960s by the filmmaker Gerry Schum, who created his pioneering Television Gallery (the Fernsehgalerie) to broadcast a series of works made for TV entitled “Land Art.” This series included Walking a Straight Ten Mile Line Forward and Back by the British artist Richard Long, 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective by the Dutchman Jan Dibbets, and A Hole in the Sea by Barry Flanagan. Schum’s pioneering TV program “Land Art” was broadcast in Berlin on April 15, 1969, at 10:40 p.m. This innovative early broadcast was followed up on November 18 of the same year when Schum’s TV Gallery transmitted Keith Arnatt’s TV ProjectSelf Burial as a television intervention on WDR II. Schum had conceived of the broadcasting of art work via his TV Gallery as autonomous art events. Schum’s intention was to show “only art objects,” with no explanation, convinced that artists should develop an approach in which a new kind of art object was directly communicable via broadcast TV. Keith Arnatt’s Self Burial was originally a set of nine photographs called The Disappearance of the Artist. Arnatt subsequently developed this work into a TV project in which each of the nine images would appear very briefly in the middle of a normal TV broadcast. Arnatt had originally approached the BBC in the UK, which after initially being interested had declined the project. When Arnatt later met Gerry Schum in London they discussed the idea and Schum arranged to have the work broadcast on WDR in Cologne. Self Burial was broadcast over eight consecutive nights at 8:15 and 9:15 p.m., when normal programs were briefly interrupted and two images from the series were flashed onto the screen without any prior warning or introduction. Initially, the interventions were for a duration of two-­and-a-­ half seconds, but from October 13 they were increased to four seconds. On the final day of the project, Arnatt was interviewed on the German arts magazine TV program “Spectrum” to discuss the work, his explanation interrupted by his own images. In the same year, Schum commissioned the Dutch artist Jan Dibbets to produce TV as a Fireplace, for which Dibbets made a video recording of a log fire burning in a hearth. Schum saw the artistic potential for television broadcast and, with that in mind, arranged for WDR3 to broadcast TV as a Fireplace on the last eight evenings of December 1969. At the time these transmissions were not accompanied by any mention of the artist or the

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artistic character of the broadcast, although subsequently Dibbets and Schum made a statement about the way in which television had taken over the central role in our lives that the open hearth had once occupied. By broadcasting images of the fire, they hoped to transport their “passive” audience back to the pre-­television era. Gerry Schum had formulated a number of ideas about the potential relationship between broadcast television and the new developments in contemporary art at the time. In a statement about the significance of his TV broadcasts, Schum declared: We no longer perceive the work of art as a painting or sculpture not connected with the artist. On television, the artist can reduce his work to an attitude, a simple gesture, referring to his concept. The work of art is conveyed as a unity of concept, visualization, and the artist who provides the idea. WEVERS et al. 2003 Schum had understood the unexplored potential of the works that artists such as Dibbets, Long, Arnatt, and others were making and their suitability for an entirely new approach to the experience of art. He sought out artists who could “make art especially for TV,” realizing that television broadcasting could provide the missing temporal element to process-­based art, removing the material “art object” and freeing up the spectator to a direct encounter with the work. Apart from these experiments in which the power of broadcast television was used to package art works and broadcast them directly to a domestic audience, other artists sought ways to open the broadcast airwaves more directly. In 1969, the British political activist and video artist John Hopkins (known to the video community as “Hoppy”) persuaded Sony UK to make an extended loan of a portapak and playback kit. With this and some additional video equipment provided by John Lennon, Hopkins established a radical video production group called “TVX,” which he characterized as “a reckless experimental group of video people.”1 Writing in the May 1976 edition of Studio International, which was dedicated to Video Art, Hopkins and his collaborator Sue Hall began their article “The Metasoftware of Video” with a direct and fundamental question: “Video exists. Therefore the next thing to ask is what can one do with it?” (1976, 260). In this short article which discusses the potential of video for social and political change using concepts drawn largely from communications theory, the video portapak is identified as “the basic means of the individual decentralisation of TV technology.” For Hopkins and Hall, video represented a field of largely unexplored potential. Their article identified significant characteristics inherent in the technology such as:

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Decentralisation, flexibility, immediacy of playback, speed of light transmission, global transmission pathways, input to two of the senses— these are characteristics not yet shared by any other medium. 260 Although neither Hall nor Hopkins considered themselves artists, they had a clear view of the value and significance of video made by artists. Quoting from the selected works of Mao Tse Tung, their article ends with a direct challenge to artists who aspired to work with video technology: Why should art be the domain of the few and not the many? Shouldn’t democratisation of culture, and in our case the liberation of communications technology for public access, be an integral part of our actual art activity? We demand the unity of technology, art and politics; the unity of information, meaning and effect. 264 Around this time, Hopkins also published a regular column in The International Times, the style and tone of which sums up his attitude to broadcast TV and his enthusiasm for the potentially liberating power of portable video, demonstrating a marked distinction from established and accepted professional notions about the medium and its capabilities and potential: Tonight’s topic is VIDEO . . . Here it is at last: you can make your own TV and it’s so easy to operate anyone can do it. All that crap about directors, producers, camera crews—forget it. 264 During 1969, Hopkins had visited the United States and made a survey of the American experimental and independent video scene, returning to the UK with renewed enthusiasm for the potential of what he termed “low-­ gauge” video. The following year, TVX was commissioned by BBC Television to produce a number of pilot experimental video programs, two of which were broadcast. In the years that followed, Hopkins continued to campaign for the broadcast of half-­inch video, achieving some initial success against a very hostile status-­quo. For Hopkins, the issue of low-­gauge broadcasting was linked to editorial control. This relationship between accessible formats and radical content was central to his interest in video as a tool for cultural and social change. As an example of the way in which Hopkins and Hall’s approach was stigmatized by the TV industry, I want to mention an example of the technique for which they were criticized: so-­called (by broadcasters of the time) “hose piping,” a way of handling the camera as if it were a

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microphone—making a feature of the fluid and free movement possible with a single camera video portapak, combined with little post-­production or editing, as opposed to the accepted and established “professional” standards of the day. It was not just the low-­gauge video format and image quality that was deemed “unprofessional” by broadcasters, technicians, engineers, etc., but also the way in which the video images and sound were produced, as well as the style and treatment and even the subject matter of the work. In that early period the link between video art and television was crucial, as there was no viable alternative means of disseminating television images. This issue brought about an inevitable clash with the established TV industry professionals and their rigid technical standards of image and sound quality control, as well as notions of what content was acceptable for broadcast to the public. All this naturally had a dampening impact on the potential for artists’ video to be presented on television. Reporting on the state of video art in Britain in 1974, the critic and commentator Edward Lucie-Smith presented a gloomy and parochial picture: . . . the technical sophistication of “official” television, by which I mean the product of the big networks—has tended to discourage personal experiment in a number of subtle ways. For example, while the artist still hoped to gain access to the BBC or one of the independent television companies, it hardly seemed worth it to use the comparatively crude equipment available to him outside. In addition, he soon discovered that, if he offered material he had made himself, on 1/4 inch or 1/2 inch tape, this would almost inevitably be rejected as “technically unacceptable” for transmission. LUCIE-SMITH 1977, 187 In those early years, when there were no really viable alternatives for the dissemination of their work, television became the cultural and institutional opponent for many video artists. Technically superior and with access to mass audiences, it was perceived by many artists as monopolistic and unimaginative. For the most part, artists saw the broadcast television of the day as the purveyor of visual experiences that were the antithesis of art. Similarly, television and video art was seen by many broadcasters and audiences alike as antagonistic, or at best, incompatible. From the point of view of the industry, artists’ video was perceived as hopelessly amateur— aimless and undisciplined and lacking in both relevant content or technical quality. Writing in the 1970s, video artist and writer Mick Hartney (1996, 22–3) asserted that TV “seduces rather than assaults.” In an attempt to outline the early British context of the time, Hartney examined the implied “symmetry of empowerment” implicit in Nam June Paik’s frequently quoted slogan that

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“TV has been attacking us all our lives, now we can attack it back!” in relation to one which suggested that with the advent of low-­cost accessible video technology it would be possible to mount a kind of counter-­attack to broadcast TV. Hartney identified artists and independent video-­makers working outside television as a diverse but specialized interest group. However, the “we” of Nam June Paik’s implied united retaliative artists and independents were in fact often blatantly opposed to each other’s intentions and viewpoints. There was a clearly identifiable discursive tension between artists interested in the development of formal concerns and socio-­political activists, despite their superficially united front in the fight for recognition and broadcast airtime. Although this often antagonistic relationship between video art and broadcast television was significant, it was by no means the only issue, but one of a number of interrelated factors to be taken into account in relation to the development of artists’ video. As in the United States, the European video art scene arose out of a combination of factors which included the development of accessible video technology, initially seen as developed for the amateur and advanced hobbyist, the concerns of minimal and conceptual art, the sensibilities and preoccupations of the so-­called “underground” political movement and the model of experimental/avant-­garde cinema and music. In 1971, the sculptor and filmmaker David Hall broadcast TV Pieces on Scottish Television (STV) during the Edinburgh Festival. Screened unannounced between regular evening programming, these pioneering works were intended to create a break in the flow of the viewer’s potential relationship to his/her television receiver.2 Although these television interventions were shot on film, they were made specifically for the TV context, to be shown on “the box” and take account of the specific properties of television as an object within the domestic environment. Hall’s interest in video initially sprang from an interest in reaching a different kind of audience from the gallery-­going public.3 In an entirely consistent manner, Hall’s TV Pieces adopted a formal approach that was specific to the medium of television. TV Pieces were clearly intended for the broadcast context, and Hall claimed that they were not works of art, but an attempt to draw the viewer’s attention to the nature of the broadcast experience. Hall’s This is a Video Monitor (1974) was built from a systematically degenerated repeating sequence of a close-­up of a woman’s face and voice as she describes the technical functions and principles of the television display on which she appears. The tape was remade for the 1976 BBC “Arena Art & Design” broadcast as This is a Television Receiver, when the face and voice of the woman was replaced by the familiar and iconic representation of newscaster Richard Baker. Shot in color in a BBC TV studio, this tape has become perhaps Hall’s best-­known work, symbolic of a whole generation of video artworks made in the UK in the mid 1970s and indicative of the complex relationship between broadcast TV and artists’ video.

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In an important sense, the development of video art as a distinct medium, one which was neither broadcast TV nor an immersive cinematic experience, was borne out of the role of many artists’ intrinsically “outsider” and, arguably, non-­professional approach to the electronic moving image and its potential as a means of communication and expression. On the other hand, some artists sought ways to expand the possibilities and potentials of broadcast television. The pioneering video artist Nam June Paik, considered by many to be the “father” of artists’ video, had a vision of broadcast TV as an immense canvas, or, perhaps more accurately, as a kind of electronic palette that could be used to mix images and cultural ideas the way that painters mixed their colors. In 1969, during a period as video artist in residence at WGBH TV in Boston, Paik had the opportunity and the means to build a device for the control and manipulation of the television image. Frustrated and daunted by the experience of trying to create work within a conventional TV studio environment with its array of specialized machines and delineated technical functions and processes with the full complement of attendant operators and personnel, Paik sought to create an instrument capable of providing direct control over the television image to match its live instantaneous broadcast capabilities and potentials. Working with Japanese electronic engineer Shuya Abe, Paik developed what he referred to as his “anti-­machine machine,” a compact video coloriser/switcher. This device, dubbed the PaikAbe Video Synthesizer, had its TV debut at 9:00 p.m. on August 1, 1970, with the live four-­hour broadcast of Video Commune—The Beatles from Beginning to End on WGBH, channel 44. Paik’s TV program was an exuberant and colorful four-­hour long broadcast performance of densely layered and slowly shifting images to accompany a Beatles soundtrack. (Paik had previously discovered that WGBH had a licensing agreement that gave them rights to air all The Beatles’ songs.) Blended and mixed with the image-­processed video and Beatles music were clips from a variety of sources including pre-­recorded tape of Japanese television programs and TV commercials (in Japanese, with no subtitles!), extracts from The Beatles’ films A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, and documentation of the musician Charlotte Moorman’s cello performances. On the sound track at various times throughout the four-­hour program a narrator explained the nature of this experimental broadcast: “This is participation TV,” the voice declared, encouraging the audience to play with the dials of their television set, adjusting brightness and color. Viewers limited to black-­and-white sets were also encouraged to become involved by “distorting [their] picture with a strong magnet.” All audiences were urged to “do your own thing and treat it like electronic wallpaper.”4 Undoubtedly, the viewers who tuned in to WGBH on that day in August 1970 would never have experienced anything like it! Apart from the regular TV studio personnel, members of the general public were also invited into the studio to participate in the operation of the

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synthesizer and by providing imagery—fulfilling one of Paik’s aspirations for his anti-­machine, taking the first step toward a day when “ordinary citizens” might participate directly in the making and controlling of TV images (Branson Gill 1992). This was just the first of Paik’s several broadcast experiments. Global Groove (1973) was his radical manifesto on global communications in a media-­saturated world rendered as an electronic collage, a sound and image pastiche that attempted to subvert the language of broadcast television. Paik subjected this trans-­cultural, inter-­textual content to an exuberant, stream-­of-consciousness onslaught of disruptive editing and technological devices, including audio and video synthesis, colorization, ironic juxtapositions, temporal shifts, and layering—a controlled chaos that suggested a hallucinatory romp through the channels of a global TV. In 1984, just over a decade after the broadcast of Global Groove, Paik produced the even more ambitious Good Morning, Mr. Orwell. He was keen to demonstrate satellite TV’s ability to provide an intercontinental exchange of culture combining both high art and entertainment elements. A live broadcast shared between WNET TV in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris and connecting with broadcasters in Germany and South Korea, the transmission reached a worldwide audience of over ten million people. The broadcast carried forward the ideas and aspirations of Global Groove by expanding the original concept to embrace the possibilities of satellite transmission in real-­time. It seems likely that the development of Nam June Paik’s video synthesizer at the end the 1970s was at least partly inspired by two even earlier broadcast television experiments in Sweden. In September 1966, Ture Sjölander and Bror Wikström broadcast Time, a thirty-­minute transmission of electronically manipulated paintings on national Swedish television. Sjölander and Wikström had worked with TV broadcast engineer Bengt Modin to construct a temporary video image synthesizer, which was used to distort and transform video line scan rasters by applying tones from waveform generators. A year later, Sjölander teamed up with Lars Weck, and using a similar technological process, produced Monument, a program of electronically manipulated monochrome images of famous people and cultural icons including the Mona Lisa, Charlie Chaplin, The Beatles, Adolph Hitler, and Pablo Picasso. This program was broadcast to a potential audience of over 150 million people in France, Italy, Sweden, Germany, and Switzerland in 1968, as well as later in the USA. An encounter with the challenges and technical constraints of television broadcasting was a significant influence on the subsequent work of British video artist Peter Donebauer. In 1974, Donebauer was commissioned by BBC television to produce Entering, a videotape for broadcast on Second House, an arts magazine program. Because the BBC had no portable video recording equipment at the time, the work was transmitted via an outside broadcast microwave link from the TV studio at the Royal College of Art,

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where Donebauer was a post-­graduate student. This experience of the flexibility and ephemerality of the television broadcast signal had a deep effect on Donebauer’s sense of the medium and on the subsequent development of his work: Putting the signal down a wire somehow seems logical, but having it disembodied before it was recorded and then transmitting it back and forth across eight million people profoundly affected my sense of the medium . . . it made me realise that the signal was everything. The signal is completely ethereal—it has no substance. . . . The fact that it’s transmittable is a very peculiar aspect. Getting and staying closer to that sense of magic and wonder was very important.5 This experience of the video signal as paramount led directly to the development of the Videokalos Image Processor, Donebauer’s own video synthesizer. After leaving art school and with only occasional funding, Donebauer had found it increasingly difficult to continue working in the way he had become accustomed to. His solution was the development of a video image-­processing tool, analogous to a sound mixer, but to be used “live,” like a musical instrument. In contrast to the powerful influence of broadcast television on artists’ video, some artists brought their professional skills from other media into

FIGURE 3.1  Peter Donebauer during BBC live transmission, 1974. Courtesy of the artist.

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their work with video. For example, the Icelandic video artist Steina, originally trained as a classical violinist, explored the potential of the video picture signal and its relationship to sound recording in her seminal early work Violin Power. For Steina Vasulka and her husband and long-­time collaborator Woody, this sound /picture relationship was a key idea. For them video was first and foremost a “time construct.” In an interview I had with the Vasulkas in 2000, Steina explained: It was the signal, and the signal was unified. The audio could be video and the video could be audio. The signal could be somewhere “outside” and then interpreted as an audio stream or a video stream. It was very consuming for us, and we have stuck to it. . . . Video always came with an audio track, and you had to explicitly ignore it not to have it.6 The American artist Peter Campus was at home in the TV studio environment because of his “day job” working as a floor manager in a broadcast TV studio. When offered a residency at the New Television Workshop at WGBH in Boston, he adopted techniques from the confrontational aspects of performance art to blend with the new technological potential of the medium. Although designed to be shown on TV, his video work Three Transitions (1973) was made to be screened within a programmed television format where the potential audience had been primed to expect the possible surprises of a new aesthetic and cultural experience—albeit within an arts program slot as part of a conventional TV broadcast flow. In Television Delivers People, sculptor Richard Serra and his collaborator Carlotta Fay Schoolman made use of the TV medium to present political ideas critical of the broadcast medium itself—critiquing the relationship between the commercial broadcast system and its exploitation of the viewer as a consumer of the program content and of the TV apparatus itself. In this work, the artists were observers/commentators working with a medium not associated with the fine art aesthetic of painting, sculpture, etc. Serra and Schoolman deliberately drew on the accepted appearance and visual conventions of “professional” cable station formats. They made use of electronically-­generated text captions, canned music etc., to critique (and invert) the one-­way flow of TV content and the delivery of the viewer to the advertiser. In Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978), Dara Birnbaum re-­edited the US TV broadcast program Wonder Woman to create an ironic comment on the blatant sexism of conventional TV programming. Birnbaum used repletion and fragmentation to produce a subversion of the “professional” TV material to highlight and critique the gender stereotypes of the day. Tamara Krikorian’s video tape Vanitas (1976) draws on traditions derived from nineteenth-­century French painting on the one hand and performance

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FIGURE 3.2  Peter Campus, Three Transitions, 1974. Courtesy of the artist.

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art on the other, but the work also referred to and commented on the ephemeral nature of the broadcast TV image and the role of the artist as a consumer of television images, which incidentally features images of the BBC newscaster Richard Baker, the presenter who appears in David Hall’s 1976 BBC remake of This is a Television Monitor. In his writing and in his single screen video work the Polish video artist and film-­maker Jozef Robakowski was particularly concerned to distance himself from broadcast television, in his essay “Video Art: A Chance to Approach Reality,” written in 1976, he claimed: Video art is entirely incompatible with the utilitarian character of television; it is the artistic movement, which through its dependence denounces the mechanism of the manipulation of other people.7 In this essay, Robakowski sought to make a clear distinction between broadcast television and video, regarding the two categories to be in complete opposition despite their technical similarities: Television . . . the most evocative tool for reflecting reality . . . [is a medium that] was immediately assigned the function of the mass expression of the wishes of those who control this miraculous 20th-­ century invention. Video art is the opposition, undermining the utilitarian nature of television as an institution; it is an artistic movement that, through its independence, lays bare the mechanisms of manipulating other people and pressuring them by telling them how to live.8 In my own early video work, such as Continuum (1978) and The Viewer’s Receptive Capacity (1978–9), both made in collaboration with the filmmaker Gabrielle Bown, this interrelationship between the artist, the television box, the audience, and the communication system of which TV was a constituent part was an important and central concern. These works are examples of a “second generation” video artist who was attempting to come to terms with his training to work within the industry as a television professional while at the same time being aware of the work of pioneering artists seeking to develop a new language for the medium from outside the industry. The relationship between artists’ video and broadcast television is complex and dynamic and the influences on both can clearly be traced and tracked. The significance of this two-­way exchange is an important factor in the development of the video art and the key to an understanding of the origins and evolution of the art form. During the 1970s, many artists sought innovative ways to work with video, drawing on the unique and specific properties and potentials the new medium offered. They found themselves within what often seemed an oppositional position to the professional and established standards of broadcast television for technical as well as political and aesthetic reasons.

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Some artists wanted to find ways to have their work broadcast on television in order to reach new audiences, while others wanted to break down the barriers between the audience and the producers in order to democratize the perceived hierarchical one-­way flow of TV content to the masses. Still others argued that broadcast television as the antithesis of the medium, understanding the potential for an almost utopian revolution in the way in which the electronic image could be perceived. In so doing, they inadvertently opened up new possibilities for the medium which challenged the accepted standards and norms of conventional and established TV program content and contributed to a broadening and more varied content and format. Simultaneously, a new and distinctive moving image art-­form emerged and flourished to take its place alongside experimental/avant-­garde cinema.

Notes 1 See http://www.meigh-­andrews.com/writings/interviews/sue-­hall-johnhopkins 2 Hall’s TV Pieces were shot on 16 mm film because video was not considered practicable for broadcast by the television engineers at STV. 3 See http://www.meigh-­andrews.com/writings/interviews/david-­hall 4 See http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/NTW/FA/TITLES/Video347.HTML 5 See http://www.meigh-­andrews.com/writings/interviews/peterdonebauer 6 See http://www.meigh-­andrews.com/writings/interviews/woody-­steinavasulka 7 Józef Robakowski, quoted by Ryszard Kluszczynski in “New Poland—New Video” (“Some Reflections on Polish Video Art Since 1989”). See http://www. translocation.at 8 Józef Robakowski, quoted by Lukasz Rondudda, in “Subversive Strategies in the Media Arts: Józef Robakowski’s Found Footage and Video Scratch.” See http://video.wrocenter.pl

4 Materiality, Practices, Problematizations: What Kind of Dispositif Are Media?1 Markus Stauff

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-­environmental. McLUHAN AND FIORE 1967, 93

While all media result from the complex interplay of technologies, aesthetic forms, and practices, the older media—film and television—seem to be more stable and rigid constellations that provide much less room for variation or individual user practices. On the digital side, however, amateurs’ idiosyncratic use of technology and the rather ephemeral connections between technologies and practices (which used to be a dynamic on the fringes of established media) seem to have become a key element of all media. To adequately analyze this heightened heterogeneity and the constantly changing interrelations of media’s building blocks, new concepts have been suggested in media studies, such as configuration, ecology, assemblage, and platform. One of the older concepts which are said to be inappropriate to the current situation is the notion of the dispositif, which has often been applied to describe how film and television shaped historically specific modes of perception through their specific arrangements of material elements and

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practices. As argued by film scholar Thomas Elsaesser, this concept was productive in analyzing the “counterintuitive associations, heterogeneous networks, and non-­convergent connections,” which enable media’s cultural function, and also to identify “common denominators between and across media.” Nevertheless, he is one of many voices who consider the concept to be limited to older media since “it fails to fully account for what we think is the complexity of the present situation” (Elsaesser 2016, 105). In the following I want to counter this common claim and argue that the dispositif remains an important tool for critical analysis of the current media transformations, especially their entanglement with power relations. Replacing the concept would be premature for at least three reasons: (1) Instead of taking for granted the dichotomy between film and television as rigid and restraining constellations (dispositifs) on the one hand and new media as dynamic assemblages (non-dispositifs) on the other, we need to analyze how both old and new media entangle standardization and transformation, practices, and materialities. (2) While alternative, allegedly more dynamic, concepts such as ecology and assemblage tend to naturalize heterogeneity and affirm the contemporary ideology of constant transformation, the concept of the dispositif systematically directs our attention to the question of power. It thus allows us to analyze how the constant changes to the heterogeneous media constellation are driven by the unequal distribution of agency and visibility. (3) The dispositif concept focuses on the question of power, yet it doesn’t claim that power results from the rigidness and restraining effects of a standardized constellation alone. Just like the concept of the assemblage it maps and formalizes the elements contributing to a medium’s impact without a prior judgment of these elements. Yet it goes beyond the assemblage by focusing on the emergence of internal hierarchies and differentiations. To develop the analytical potential of the dispositif concept for media analysis, I will first briefly discuss the competing and currently more favored concepts of environment, ecology, and assemblage. Aside from highlighting what they share with the concept of dispositif, I will show how and why they tend masking the question of power. Next, I will critically discuss the two most dominant applications of the concept in media studies so far: the cinema as an illusion-­producing machinery (similar to Plato’s cave) and media as forms of surveillance (similar to Bentham’s/ Foucault’s panopticon). Both approaches highlight important aspects of dispositif analysis, yet they also contribute to a restricted understanding of the term. Finally, I will argue that approaching the dispositif not as a material constellation but as a problematization allows us to analyze media as complex and heterogeneous ensembles that become powerful not by restraining but by taking advantage of heterogeneity, practices, and constant transformation.

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Environment/Ecology Over the past decades, concepts like environment, ecology, and assemblage have been used to highlight the heterogeneous and transforming character of media. The common denominator of these concepts (also present in the dispositif) is the claim that media, while being heterogeneous and transformational, shape culture (social relations, subjectivities, forms of communication) far beyond the content they transmit, namely through their intense and inseparable entanglement with human perceptions and practices. Most famously, the Canadian literary and media scholar Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s claimed that “the medium is the message.” To start an investigation into these actual messages of the media (beyond their content), McLuhan introduced the notion of environment to highlight the following four aspects of media’s impact on culture. First he claimed that media technologies have become an essential, pervasive, and mostly invisible (or naturalized) “man-­made social environment” (McLuhan 1994, 98), just like the geology and climate of the places where we live. Second, the term “environment” also implies that media—like an ecology consisting of weather, plants, animals, bacteria, and so on—form a complex set of interrelated dynamics. Our ways of perceiving, communicating, and thinking are thus shaped by a constellation of media and the broader “cultural matrix within which the particular medium operates” (11). Third, the notion of environment allowed McLuhan to describe the dynamic transformation of media. Working from a somewhat simplified and scientifically outdated understanding, he argued that just like the human nervous system and the natural environment would always strive for an equilibrium, man-­made organizations would strive for the same (e.g., McLuhan 1994, 43, 98). Each new invention would therefore provoke a reorganization of the entire constellation, establishing “a new balance among our technologically extended faculties” (126). Finally, since we live in a media environment like fish in water, the notion of environment highlights the challenges of gaining insights into the media, but also its urgency: “Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments” (McLuhan and Fiore 1967, 26). McLuhan explicitly mentions the amateur, next to the artist, as a figure whose practices deviate from the established ones, which allows them to gain such knowledge of the environment (93). McLuhan’s arguments were an important reference when Neil Postman established the media-­ecology approach in the 1980s to highlight the hidden factors that shape media as a complex set of elements which gets mainly “taken for granted, accepted as natural” (Postman 1986, 79). This focus on the interplay of heterogeneous elements which produce historically specific, yet culturally persistent forms of perception and experience is a shared concern of media ecology and dispositif theory.

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The appropriation of the terms “environment” and “ecology” in media studies resembles the earlier use of such concepts in sociology. Already in the 1920s the Chicago School described communities and urban life in particular as “ecologies.” By appropriating the term from biology, sociologists sought to raise the scientific authority of their discipline. For the Chicago School, the application of the concept also promised to support the creation of a humane environment by reflecting on the complex interactions between individuals and groups, between artifacts, cultural customs, and natural resources. Media (e.g., newspapers) available to communities played an important part in this approach (Wahl-Jorgensen 2016). Interestingly, and contrary to dispositif theory as I will argue, those who adopt environment/ecology approaches conceive of knowledge about the (otherwise “naturalized” or “black-­boxed”) environment as emancipatory: understanding media as an environment and thus enabling the intentional (re)arrangement of their elements is considered to be a moment of enlightenment. There is a certain irony to such use of biological concepts. Although they are used to critically analyze the taken-­for-grantedness—the “naturalization”—of the complex, technical, and mediated world we live in, these terms themselves still participate in naturalizing media technologies. At least in the work of McLuhan and Postman, the media ecology concept accounts for social and cultural practices only in a very abstract manner, leaving no room for conflicts and hierarchies. Nowadays, the concept is often used to describe the interrelations between multiple platforms, genres, and institutions shaping the content (especially the news) available to a specific region (e.g., Pew Research Center 2010) or to highlight that new media figure as environments that do not determine behavior but rather allow for the development of new (political) practices (e.g., Shirky 2011, 32). The concept is used in a broad and metaphorical way, for example to replace older notions like news or media industry, which are not considered appropriate for covering the complexity of contemporary information distribution (Anderson 2013). While McLuhan’s idea of equilibrium is no longer pursued, his (and Postman’s) take on media as environments in which humans (have to) live is an important reference point in media studies. So far, scholars have paid little attention to how different groups, practices, and economies have contributed very differently to the emergence and transformation of this environment (Malm 2015). Although there are productive appropriations of this concept that include power (e.g., Stengers 2013), “environment” often appears to suggest that all human beings inside a specific media setting are affected equally. The fact that different media constellations unequally distribute the agency of different groups and individuals is rarely analyzed. In Jane Bennett’s concept of ecology, for example, the entanglement of practices and things is highlighted to sensitize us to its general vulnerability—yet it never appears as internally fractured, hierarchical, and uneven (Bennett 2010). While transformation is

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a major characteristic of any ecology, the dominant forces behind this transformation, according to the biological model, are arbitrary variation, selection, reproduction (and “equilibrium”), but not strategies, rationalities, and interventions, which are, as we will see, the major forces of a dispositif.

Assemblages A more radical approach to media ecology is articulated by authors who take issue with Neil Postman’s human-­centered (and often technophobic) perspective. These scholars are interested in how the interconnections between human practices and technical procedures, after having achieved a certain level of consistency, allow for the emergence of all forms of interaction and vitality—human or not (Parikka 2005). These studies no longer focus on media as environments for human beings, but on the unexpected creativity emerging from the materially heterogeneous elements of media systems, especially digital, networked, mobile ones. These authors do not use the term ecology for its biological implications, but rather “to indicate the massive and dynamic interrelation of processes and objects, beings and things, patterns and matter” (Fuller 2005, 2). This understanding of ecology comes very close to the concept of “assemblage” (often as a translation of the French agencement), which as a fashionable competitor of dispositif aims to describe the heterogeneity and transformability of contemporary technologies. As a term, “assemblage” was introduced fundamentally to rethink what the world, and in particular what we call society, consists of, and how both world and society are organized (for an overview, see e.g., Latour 2005; Marcus and Saka 2006; DeLanda 2013; Acuto and Curtis 2014; Bousquet 2014). Instead of taking for granted the existence (and clear identity) of entities like society (or related concepts like the state, the global, capitalism, and organization), the use of the concept of assemblage urges one to detail exactly which elements and procedures (things, natural dynamics, human practices, technologies etc.) are building interrelations with each other and thereby changing each other’s function and agency. Assemblage theory “seeks to replace such abstractions with concrete histories of the processes by which entities are formed and made to endure” (Acuto and Curtis 2014, 7). Applying the concept to media studies, “assemblage” describes media as transitional constellations which emerge from interrelations between practices, technologies, economies, and organizations that, temporarily, shape (and stabilize) each other and thereby share a common productivity. Their constitutive heterogeneity and their openness to new interconnections necessarily provoke frictions, changes, and transformations. Contrary to McLuhan and Postman’s notion of environments, assemblages are not considered to surround (and shape) practices. Instead they result from the

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entanglement of technologies, politics, and practices. Within the assemblage, the practices of amateurs and artists are seen as reorganizations of always open and transitory constellations, rather than as sudden revelations of its otherwise inaccessible structure. This makes the concept of assemblage well adapted to analyze a media landscape in which the smartphone has reshaped the internet, social-­media platforms and location systems have reshaped the smartphone and the internet, and streaming services or games consoles constantly re-­organize the relevance of the television screen and its domestic setting (e.g., Bousquet 2014; Bucher 2013; Langlois 2012; Rizzo 2015). Such an approach, however, as is true of approaches based on the concepts of ecology and environment, does not provide a more explicit analysis of the power effects of media. This is not to suggest that this would be impossible using these concepts, but the strategic potential and the hierarchies involved in assemblages’ emergence and especially their ongoing transformation often remain a supplementary instead of an integral aspect of media assemblage studies. Furthermore, they fail to analyze how different assemblages are strategically connected with each other and distribute significant building blocks into different contexts. Home movies or computer consoles, for example, take advantage of, and restructure, the dominant gender relationships shaping the domestic sphere. These gender relationships involve a dynamic, which gets spread and re-­articulated across a vast number of assemblages that are thereby connected. There is, however, a great deal of overlap between the concepts of assemblage and dispositif. One of the most quoted definitions of dispositif (or “apparatus” in this translation) by Michel Foucault could just as well describe an assemblage: What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architec­ tural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. Secondly, what I am trying to identify in this apparatus is precisely the nature of the connection that can exist between these heterogeneous elements. Thus, a particular discourse can figure at one time as the programme of an institution, and at another it can function as a means of justifying or masking a practice which itself remains silent, or as a secondary re-­interpretation of this practice, opening out for it a new field of rationality. In short, between these elements, whether discursive or non-­discursive, there is a sort of interplay of shifts of position and modifications of function which can also vary very widely. Thirdly, I understand by the term “apparatus” a sort of—shall we say—

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formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need. The apparatus thus has a dominant strategic function. FOUCAULT 1980, 194 Just like an assemblage, a dispositif thus consists of heterogeneous elements that are both material and immaterial, and it is mainly defined by the specific relations between the elements. As these relations can change, they can thereby bestow one and the same element with a different quality and a different role from one moment to the next. It is mainly the third aspect Foucault mentions here, the strategic function, that might distinguish dispositif from assemblage. Rabinow therefore suggests to define dispositifs as “forms composed of heterogeneous elements that have been stabilized and set to work in multiple domains,” and an assemblage as a more “experimental matrix” of elements “comparatively effervescent, disappearing in years or decades rather than centuries” (Rabinow 2003, 55 and 56, quoted by Walters 2012, 87). It has also been argued that a dispositif can be conceived as a specific sub-­type of assemblage that is more stable, more strictly organized than other assemblages—“more prone to (in the sense of anticipating, provoking, achieving and consolidating) re-­territorialisation, striation, scaling and governing” (Legg 2011, 131). Yet I believe that in particular in media studies the concept of dispositif would be more helpful for a systematical analysis of the roles of power and knowledge in heterogeneous media than that of assemblage. The former will allow one to pay special attention to the strategic element in the emergence of media. Some constellations become consistent because they enable some entities (humans, organizations, etc.) to arrange things, to achieve knowledge, and thereby to intervene into reality. Like “milieu” (to replace the environment with a related term used by Foucault), “dispositif” is not just geared to the emergence of practices, but it allows for shaping, conducting, and governing them (Foucault 2007, 35f). It focuses on the imbalances within an assemblage that characterize its productivity. While valorizing human and non-­human elements in similar ways, the notion of dispositif also enables one to ask how human beings are equipped with historically specific subjectivities—ways of conceptualizing and enacting their own being in addition to a general human agency. Adding to the bottom-­up analysis made possible by relying on the term “assemblages,” the concept of dispositif aims at broader cultural diagnosis, making it possible to analyze the more general dynamics that allow some assemblages to become successful over others (Tellmann 2010, 298). In media studies, however, the dispositif has become a synonym for the spatial and material rigidity of a particular assemblage. Before I will introduce an alternative approach (using Foucault’s analysis of sexuality), the next two sections will discuss the two main models for such a concept of

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the dispositif which contributed to such a highly productive yet eventually limiting (and misunderstood) static concept of dispositif: Plato’s famous cave and Bentham’s panopticon.

Dispositif 1: the cinema as cave—positioning the spectator Dispositif (or “apparatus”) was first used in media studies to help describe the impact of media as resulting not from one feature of the medium (e.g., the visual quality of the filmic image) but from the spatial arrangement of its heterogeneous elements. From a McLuhanian (“the medium is the message”) perspective, the so-­called apparatus theory2 of the 1970s turned away from the stories and the styles of individual films and toward the ways cinema organizes perception and creates a coherent ideology—ways of understanding one’s own relation toward the world—by placing different elements into a solid set of relations. The technology of the camera guarantees that all representations of space on the screen follow the rule of linear perspective (Stam 2000, 137) and thus address the individual viewer as the original point of view (Baudry 1974, 41). The movie theater positions the spectator in a fixed chair in a darkened room with a fixed line of vision to a screen that shows images emerging from a projector which is hidden behind the audience. The spectators are decidedly addressed as subjects: they experience the images as a consistent world, one that unfolds before their very eyes, a distanced yet absorbing act of observation. It is not the individual film, but the entire cinema constellation that thus creates an “impression of reality” or a “reality effect”: “It is the apparatus that creates the illusion, and not the degree of fidelity with the Real” (Baudry 1976, 110). This argument was underlined by comparing cinema to other constellations in which visual forms get their effect from spatial arrangements and the “suspension of mobility” (Baudry 1974, 45). Sigmund Freud’s analysis of dreaming and Jacques Lacan’s analysis of the mirror stage (in which a baby sitting on its mother’s arm will recognize itself in the mirror for the first time and elatedly perceive itself as a powerful, individual entity) have both been used as analogies for the cinematic dispositif. Another prominent reference point has been Plato’s parable of a cave in which chained people confuse the shadows on the wall with reality. Like the cave, the dispositif of cinema creates an artificial situation in which we cannot but perceive the images in front of us as reality—one caveat being that no one spends their entire life inside a movie theater. Theories that center on the notion of apparatus have often been criticized for ignoring the broader context of cinema and audience members’ diverse social backgrounds. Bruno Latour more generally criticized the too-­simple

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distinction between illusion and reality (or, in his case, between social life and pure science) implied in most references to Plato’s cave (Latour 2004, 11ff) and also in the original discussion of cinema as dispositif. More recent takes on the dispositif as a particular arrangement of technologies, bodies, and visualities (or of machinery, spectator, and representations (Albéra and Tortajada 2010)) have therefore downplayed the idea that such a constellation automatically creates a consistent ideological worldview. They still use the dispositif to reflect on the different elements that actually constitute and distinguish individual media, equipping each with specific perceptual qualities. The differences between watching a film in a movie theater, as part of a museum installation, or on a TV set can productively be described as resulting from different dispositifs which, through their material arrangement, create different temporal and spatial preconditions for the aesthetic experience (e.g., Hanich 2014, 346). In the case of television, for example, the domestic space is just as much a constitutive feature as the dark movie theater in the case of film. In most Western societies and for the bigger part of its history, people have watched TV in a familiar setting alongside other activities. For this reason, the endless flow of its programming, activated by the flick of a switch, has been interlaced with everyday routines (household chores, relaxation after work, holidays) and with gender hierarchies (male and female genres, who picks the channel, who prepares dinner). Many TV programs were aesthetically adapted to such forms of distracted and domestic viewing (e.g., direct address in news and talk shows, narrative redundancies in soap operas, or commercial breaks with heightened sound volume). While the material ensemble of TV clearly is more heterogeneous and more flexible than that of cinema, its dispositif still highlights this entanglement of technology, social setting, and stylistic features. “Emphasis shifts therefore to interdependencies at particular sites and to a site’s imbrication in and value for an arrangement (in French, a dispositif [. . .])” (Hay 2001, 212). Moreover, paying attention to how spaces and practices, bodies, and technologies get entangled in different constellations throughout the history of a medium allows one to question its alleged identity across time and across different cultures and practices—which is often taken for granted too easily. With this in mind, amateur cinema or home movies can be studied not as simply less elaborate forms of moviemaking, but as separate dispositifs. Early cinema, too, arranged its technical and social elements very differently than the movie theater generally described in apparatus theory: Instead of rows of silent, docile spectators sitting in the dark, an unruly crowd gathered around very visible machinery, viewing short films which, instead of developing a coherent narrative, often displayed a series of visual attractions instead. This “cinema of attraction” can be identified as a cinema dispositif that was in place before the now dominant movie experience and that continues to exist alongside of it (Kessler 2006, 61ff).

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Dispositif 2: Media as panopticons—uneven distribution of visibility If Plato’s allegory of the cave was a crucial reference for the understanding of cinema as a dispositif, the key reference for the wider application of the dispositif concept in media studies is the panopticon, or rather Michel Foucault’s analysis of this late eighteenth-­century architectural structure designed by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham for application in prisons, schools, or factories. In his book on the historical transformation of discipline and punishment (1991), Foucault argues that the panopticon establishes power relations through the arrangement of bodies and the uneven distribution of visibility. People (inmates, workers, pupils) are isolated and positioned around a center from which a person (e.g., the warden) can monitor everyone while remaining invisible. The isolated subjects thus become objects of knowledge (it is easy to compare them and record their development from day to day), yet they also internalize the gaze: because they do not know when exactly they are monitored, they have to behave as though constantly observed. Like Plato’s model of the cave, this analysis shows how the material ordering of space, bodies, and light (or “lines of visibility”) automatically (that is, independently from any individual’s intentions) creates a specific reality. While Plato’s model is very much about illusion (and the apparatus theory about ideology), Foucault’s analysis highlights how the arrangement produces an unequal distribution of power which is based on (and reproduces) historically specific forms of knowledge. A dispositif, according to Foucault, is an arrangement of heterogeneous elements that distinguishes between positions which allow disposing (to regulate and to arrange objects and behavior by gaining knowledge) and positions which become objects of such disposing (Link 2007). As the main example for the panopticon is a prison, it is no surprise that the concept has most frantically been applied in the field of surveillance studies, where it serves as “a common theoretical and polemical point of departure” (Elmer 2012, 21). Camera surveillance is regularly described as a new and generalized form of panopticon, since the public installment of CCTV systems signals to everybody that they are watched from some invisible control center. The public museum (Bennett 1995), sports stadium (Eichberg 1995; Bale 1993), slaughterhouse (Thierman 2010), or police mugshots and portrait photography (Sekula 1986) have all been analyzed as such machineries that order practices through the arrangement of bodies and visual forms. Film and television audiences are also constantly classified to adapt content and branding strategies through consumer research (Gandy 1990, 168). As argued by Ien Ang, “its core mechanism, and ultimate ambition, is control through visibility” (1991, 70). The dispositif as panopticon thus highlights how all

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media (not only the ones specialized in surveillance) establish unequal visibility and allow for monitoring and classification of, but also intervention into, the practices of media users by disposing entities (political, commercial, philanthropic etc.). The examples presented here might suffice to summarize the potential but also the shortcomings of what one might call the panoptic dispositif—a near endless variety of research comparing specific media constellations to the panopticon, either outlining similarities or stressing differences. On the positive side, this approach provoked productive discussions on how different media constellations produce uneven visibility and distribute disposing and disposed positions in complex and specific ways. From such a perspective, a broad variety of media can be scrutinized for the way they produce knowledge about practices (while simultaneously changing them) through their spatial arrangements, visibilities, and interrelations with other cultural practices. Taking up a classical dichotomy, the question is neither “what do people do with media?” nor “what do media do to people?” but rather “how do media enable certain objects and practices to be known and shaped by certain entities?”

Misunderstanding the dispositif Still, it can be argued that the panopticon is “unhelpfully overused” (Lyon 2007, 47) as a model to analyze media power, and not only in surveillance studies. William Walters even delivered a diagnosis of what he termed panopticitis, “the tendency of researchers to find the practices of surveillance and (self-)discipline lurking in all sorts of unexpected places” (2012, 52). It might be a symptom of this panopticitis, that the notion of dispositif was often reduced to a clearly delineated and stable material constellation. Taking the actual prison building (or Plato’s cave) as a key reference, the effects of the dispositif are ascribed to the immobilization of the body, the architectural division of space, and the asymmetric lines of vision. While these comparisons shone a very helpful light on the material aspects of media dispositifs, they also provoked a too-­simple causal connection between the spatial characteristics of a medium and its effects (Barnett 1999). In a way, the concept of dispositif became a victim of its own success, as analyzing the uneven forms of visibility produced by a material arrangement proved to be such a productive approach that other aspects of the concept were neglected. Focusing on the topological aspects of the dispositif proved to be very helpful with two things: asking what elements have to come together to give a medium cultural and ideological impact, and describing the automated, non-­intentional, but uneven distribution of power and agency that results from a material arrangement of technologies, bodies, and visibilities. Yet limiting the concept of the dispositif to its topological aspects seems

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less suitable for something that is especially important for understanding the current media landscape, namely analyzing flexible and constantly transforming constellations in which creative and surprising practices (instead of docile bodies) contribute to the power effects of the machinery. With only the cave and the panopticon as references to what a dispositif should look like, any flexibility immediately looks like a weakening of the constellation’s power. As a result, the heterogeneous spatial arrangement of television comes across less as a dispositif than the rigid organization of elements in the movie theater. And the dynamic forms of dataveillance and lateral surveillance also seem much less like dispositifs than the clearly panoptic CCTV cameras. Put simply, in media studies the dispositif was mostly used to underline the repressive effects of power through which media confine visibility and practices. This is in line with some recent more theoretical elaborations of the concept (e.g., Agamben 2009), in which dispositifs “quickly become mechanisms of entrapment” (Legg 2011, 130). No wonder, then, that a number of authors find the dispositif concept “overtly restrictive” (Elsaesser 2016, 130f) or too static (Callon 2004), and therefore call for alternative concepts like assemblage or ecology to account for practices and transformability as features of socio-­technological constellations. In Foucault’s writings, however, the dispositif was actually used to develop a non-­repressive, “productive” notion of power analyzing how power produces behavior instead of only prohibiting or limiting it. Already in Discipline and Punish, the spatial distribution of material elements in no way serves as the key feature of the dispositif. Rather than being limited to one particular building, the panopticon is described as a “diagram of a mechanism of power” (Foucault 1991, 205). Adding to the material disposition of objects, bodies, and lines of sight, Foucault considers the panopticon a dispositif not only because (a) it established a rationality of arranging things and people that extended beyond the prison and was adapted for schools, hospitals, barracks and so on, but also because (b) it was constantly reformed, adapted, and criticized, and because (c) it had a productive effect for overall society in a particular historical moment (by “responding to an urgent need,” as Foucault specified in the three-­part definition of the dispositif quoted at length in the section on assemblage above). A dispositif should thus not be understood as a template or a mold that forms everything according to its own spatial and material characteristics; rather it is a diagram that channels, maps, and organizes movements. Thus its effects might just as much consist of a particular transformation of the machinery, or even of resistance against it (Foucault 1975). I would like to argue, then, that the concept of dispositif is still very necessary in media studies because alternative concepts such as assemblage and media ecology do not sufficiently deal with the uneven distribution of practices; both of them consider transformation to be more of a given than

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something that is entangled in a power-­knowledge relationship. Yet to make the concept of dispositif applicable to analyzing the current media landscape, we need to go beyond the very restrictive notion of dispositif developed in reference to the cave and the panopticon. Below, I will mainly focus on Foucault’s work to outline a concept of dispositif that makes it possible for us to analyze practices and transformations.

Dispositif 3: the problematization of media and the power of transformation Challenging the narrow (and misunderstood) panoptic concept of the dispositif, a number of scholars have underlined that the strategic potential of the heterogeneous ensemble is more relevant than its spatial features. According to some, Foucault’s concept of dispositif is “characterized by changes in the position of its elements, the multiplying modifications of its functions, and an overall articulated strategic intent, albeit an appropriately flexible one” (Rabinow and Rose 2003). A dispositif thus articulates certain problems and connects them to a set of possible solutions (Raffnsoe et al. 2014, 18) through what Foucault especially in his later work called a “problematization” (1997). If material and spatial arrangements are important elements because they render those possible solutions tangible and visible, the problematization goes far beyond that. Another symptom of media studies’ panopticitis is that Foucault’s History of Sexuality, which elaborates the concept of dispositif in greater detail, is referenced far less often than Discipline and Punish. Although the aspects discussed earlier—spatial arrangements, lines of visibility, distinction between disposing and disposed positions—are important elements of the dispositif of sexuality, History of Sexuality makes it much more explicit that the interplay of the heterogeneous elements does not result from one distinct and stable arrangement, but rather from the ongoing dispersion of a number of mechanisms, concerns, modes of classifications and observations—or the broader problematization. Since the late eighteenth century, sexuality has become an increasingly important topic in schools, hospitals, churches, and families. While becoming object of concerns and regulations, sexuality has rather proliferated than having been narrowly restricted. It is not only sexual practices that are observed, confessed, classified, and thereby intensified and dispersed, but also sexual desires. Moreover, such practices and desires have become part of a system of causal assumptions (e.g., connecting sexual practices with moral or cognitive developments) and therefore of possible (or supposedly necessary) interventions. As a result, people have begun to think of their sexuality (and their hidden and unspoken desires) as inherent to

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their individual being. Sexuality has thereby become a field of intervention that connects the shaping of individual behavior with the regulation of the population as a whole; after all, making people reflect on their sexual behavior has consequences for the health and reproduction of the population. Sexuality, at first sight, seems much less comparable to media than the panopticon and its clear lines of visibility. The analogy’s main advantage, however, is precisely reflected in this feature because it allows for de-­ naturalizing media. Just like Foucault cautioned not to take sexuality as a given, but to analyze where it comes into being and is articulated through forms of knowledge and through different practices, it might be helpful to avoid our own assumptions of what (and where) a medium is and takes place. Media are also dispersed (and thus constituted) through problematizations involving classifications and discourses; medical, psychological, and legal knowledge; and practices claimed to be solutions to behavior that is defined as troubling. To return once more to the example of cinema: it is well possible that neither individual films (and their contents) nor the movie theater’s spatial arrangements make up the dispositif of “cinema,” but rather the way these films and spaces become entangled with strategies to educate the public, to protect children, to research perception, and so on. It is probably due to the connotations of dispositif in film and media studies that present research approaching media in such a way rarely uses this concept, even though critics may refer to Foucault’s later work inspiring the field of governmentality studies.3 Lee Grieveson, for instance, has shown how, at the start of the twentieth century, cinema was an important site for understanding and shaping individual attention and its relevance for group dynamics (2008). Furthermore, the studies of TV by Anna McCarthy and Laurie Ouellette have shown how different program genres, institutional settings, and forms of audience research opened a field in which elites are equipped with the means to dispose the “masses” or “the public” (McCarthy 2010; Ouellette 2002). In the field of new media, several authors have analyzed how games and social media incite behavior that is supposed to articulate one’s own individuality, health, and rationality behind everyday decision making (Sauter 2014; Schrape 2014; Millington 2014, 2016). Eventually, these approaches describe how media become productive because they get addressed simultaneously as a problem and as an instrument (Stauff 2010). Like sexuality, media are thought to contain hidden influences, desires, etc. Yet they also promise to offer the tools to make these influences and desires knowable and manageable—if only the right modifications are applied and if users can be incited to use the medium in a specific way. Due to their technical setup (and their specific spatial and material arrangements), media not only come with the promise of direct, reliable effects, but also with the promise that they can be changed and improved. From such a perspective, the difference between media defined by a more materially rigid setting and media that can be used more flexibly does

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involve not a fundamental difference but rather a difference in strategies. This is why a dispositif is characterized not by the particular stable spatial or temporal arrangement of elements, but rather by the effects that can be achieved (and the effects that are hoped for or were promised) through establishing a specific arrangement of elements and adjusting and modifying these elements according to a historically specific problematization which transforms “the difficulties and obstacles of a practice into a general problem for which one proposes diverse practical solutions” (Foucault 1997, 118). Problematizations thus open up a presumably natural or at least taken-­forgranted set of objects and practices, and ask how best to re-­arrange them to take advantage of their potentials (Castel 1994; Deacon 2000). While we often think of media technologies as mysterious black boxes, they are actually characterized by the veritable explosion of discourses and practices around them, questioning what their impact really is, how to avoid any inherent dangers they might present, and how to awaken their dormant potential. I would argue that this can be taken as a defining feature of media dispositifs: they come into being through problematizations. What is more, media are characterized by connecting two different levels of problematization: (1) they allow us to problematize new things and new forms of behavior because they promise to make new aspects of reality accessible and manageable (cinema, for instance, enabled new means to understand, research, and address mass psychology); (2) the media’s technical development and forms become problematized themselves as something that can and should be improved, changed, or constrained (new media are regularly introduced with the promise of solving the limitations of older media). Practices of people—be they experts or amateurs—operate on the same level (if not with the same resources) as technologies, institutional regulations, and so on. Although amateur cinema and the user-­generated content of current media constellations might be much less coherent and stable constellations than the traditional movie theater, they still get organized around strategies and rationalities which explain their constant reorganization. The problematization thus structures which connections are considered promising, which steps might improve the machinery if it does not deliver the desired results, which entities seem available for being disposed, and who is brought into a position of disposing. More than the concept of assemblage, the dispositif thus underlines that its constellation does result not from the spontaneous accumulation of isolated elements, but from rationalities and problematizations that co-­emerge with the constellation. In this process, pre-­fabricated elements already established as hinges of power and knowledge (like the confession or a particular genre) are adapted and thereby establish connections between different practices and institutions. Flexibility and ephemerality, rather than being signs of the dissolution of the supposedly more dispositif-like structures of older and more solid media

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constellations, precisely indicate the very heterogeneity and transformations that allow a particular constellation to dispose people, things, and practices in unequal and therefore productive ways.

Conclusion This chapter argued that the concept of the dispositif still has a specific theoretical and methodological value that distinguishes it from similar, more recent concepts like ecology, assemblage, or actor-­network. More than these other concepts, the dispositif underlines the question of power, and it does so by asking how these heterogeneous constellations emerge and establish particular forms of knowledge-­power formations which interrelate disposing and being-­disposed positions in structured and unequal ways. While spatial arrangements (and a spatially-­fixed positioning of bodies and visibility) can play an important role here, they are not necessarily the essential feature of dispositifs. Instead, this concept highlights—even more pronouncedly than comparable concepts—the ongoing transformations, structured around specific problematizations of the constellations and their (imagined or realized) interventionist objectives and potentials, which develop around, and in turn foster, the unequal distribution of disposing/being disposed. On the one hand, this allows for an understanding of individual media as dispositifs. Contrary to other assemblages or things, media involve heterogeneous constellations that are explicitly considered as problems for society/culture, while also being simultaneously transformed, reformed, and improved to become instruments to intervene into society/culture. On the other hand, however, the concept of dispositif undermines the assumed unity and identity of individual media. Instead of using the notion of dispositif to determine the features (or affordances) of distinct entities, the concept can perhaps be better used to analyze the problematizations that incite the ongoing transformations of media and the productive interrelations between them. The practices of audiences and users, of amateurs and professionals, are all constitutive elements of a dispositif. The most relevant question, then, is not whether any particular group uses the technology in a surprising, unintended manner or whether they undermine the established disposition of elements, but whether they either propagate an existing problematization adding new answers to established questions by simply rearranging the elements or establish a field of possible answers for completely new questions.

Notes 1 Abe Geil, Toni Pape, and Jan Teurlings read earlier versions of this chapter and gave essential feedback, including relevant references and core arguments. Johan

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Fornäs gave me the opportunity to discuss an earlier version of the paper at Södertörns University, Stockholm. Thanks also to Andreas Fickers, Joseph Wachelder, and Florian Duijsens for their editorial input. 2 For key texts of this debate and critical perspectives on it, see Rosen 1986; De Lauretis and Heath 1980; Winkler 1992. Some of the texts explicitly distinguish between apparatus and dispositif as two different aspects of cinema’s heterogeneous ensemble (e.g., Baudry 1970). In the more general conceptual discussion on dispositif in French and Italian texts, dispositif also is contrasted with the term “apparatus” as used, for instance, in Marxism (Bussolini 2010). 3 Within the space of this article I cannot discuss in detail how Foucault’s later work—and governmentality studies more generally—relate to the concept of dispositif. Although the concept is used less often, its analytical potential is still very much present, e.g., in Foucault’s distinction of technique and technology (2007, 22–5).

5 How to Grasp Historical Media Dispositifs in Practice Andreas Fickers

In search of the past user The search for alternative ways of developing historical claims on past media practices starts from a concern with historical objects of media technology and how they can be used as sources for a sensorially focused history of technology and media. This article looks at the materiality of past media devices, beyond its function as sign and evidence of the past (Fickers 2007), and on the heuristic possibilities offered by an experimental approach to those devices. Although the study of material remains falls under the traditional craft of the historian of technology, especially when reappraising and presenting scientific and technical heritage in a museum context (Gleitsmann et al. 2009), so far technology or media historians have hardly raised the issue of the sensuousness of technical objects beyond strictly aesthetic considerations (Heßler 2012; König 2009; Simondon 1958; Hörisch 2001).1 In recent years, however, the historiography on media and technology has frequently put the question of forms of appropriation and ways of using media technologies at the forefront of research. Instead of concentrating on production and invention narratives, historiography has focused increasingly on the processes of social construction, social appropriation or rejection, and on the symbolic significance of technology and technological artefacts (Edgerton 2008). Similar changes of perceptions in media historiography have resulted in attention for describing and analyzing users of media technology based on the more assertive, action-­oriented concept of “user,” instead of the sociological and media studies categories of “audience” and “consumer” (Ellis 2014; Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003).

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In the argument below, therefore, I will try to gauge the epistemological potential of a hands-­on approach to past media technologies by starting from an interest in sensing the past. I will do so by developing three lines of thought. First, I outline briefly the (thoroughly heterogeneous) conceptual and methodological features of media archaeology. Second, I sketch the heuristic surplus of an experimental expansion of the methodological repertoire of media archaeology, which is excessively geared to discourse analysis. Based on the concept of re-­enactment, I address suggestions and lessons learned triggered by a critical reading of existing experimental approaches to the history of science, archaeology, or musicology. Third, I will explore the epistemological dimension of such an approach compared to the ideas of a “pragmatic use” of the concept of “dispositif” for doing media history as put forward by various scholars (Kessler 2003; Odin 2008; Steinmaurer 1999; Hickethier 1995; Weber 2014; Fickers 2014). These theoretical reflections will be contrasted with a critical assessment of concrete examples of media archaeological experiments, notably the “Staging the Amateur Film Dispositif” lecture performance at the Orphans Film Festival in Amsterdam 20142 and the “Glory and Misery of Dummyhead Stereophonic Recording” radio play co-­produced by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History and the Bavarian Public Broadcasting Service (BR) in 2016.3

Media archaeology as discourse analysis Although media archaeology was intended to focus its analytical interest on the materiality and objects of communication technology, it has managed to deliver on this promise only partially (Winthrop-Young and Van den Oever 2014). To be sure, media archaeology studies by German authors such as Friedrich Kittler (1986 and 2013), Siegfried Zielinski (1985, 1989, and 2002), and Wolfgang Ernst (2002 and 2003) have started from a focus on devices and material objects, but they did so strictly from a discourse analysis perspective. These studies did not so much open up the object in its concrete materiality and tangibility, but they rather center on “texts” (in the semiotic meaning of the term, thus also images and sign systems), which are then interpreted by means of different theoretical concepts—such as Foucault’s concepts of “archaeology” and “genealogy,” Zielinski’s concept of “variantology,” or, as in the case of Erkki Huhtamo’s studies, through Ernst Robert Curitius’s concept of “topos” (Huhtamo and Parikka 2011). Although most of the cited authors also work with a genuine historical discourse approach, the theoretical borrowings and disciplinary traditions in which they operate are extremely heterogeneous. The field of media archaeology is therefore characterized by such a conceptual bandwidth and methodological diversity as to make it problematic to speak of a scientific field, at least in Bourdieu’s sense of the term (Natale 2012). Erkki Huhtamo

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and Jussi Parikka have rightly pointed out that many different ideas have informed specific studies in media archaeology: “Theories of cultural materialism, discourse analysis, notions of non-­linear temporalities, theories of gender, postcolonial studies, visual and media anthropology, and philosophies of neo-­nomadism all belong to the mix” (2011, 2). What the various media archaeology studies have in common is that they are explicitly turned against a teleological media historiography, which, as implicitly alleged, perpetuates assumed narratives of progress rather than critically examining them (Parikka 2012a). Even if this mantra-­like accusation levelled by some protagonists in media archaeology at (media) historians might be of a purely strategic scholarly nature, and in no way reflects the state of current media historiography (Ernst 2013b), the goal of many media archaeology studies, namely to write alternative histories of media and communication technology, is to be welcomed, also from the perspective of technology and media history. In this connection, “alternative” is most often used to describe the historical and contemporary potentiality of media and communication technologies, but not to reconstruct their actual development, dissemination, or appropriation in historical and critical perspective. Therefore, many media archaeology studies are primarily interested in those types of sources, which allow the imagined or configured users to come to the fore, as is the case, for instance, in literary presentations, advertising, and patents (Kümmel-Schnur and Kassung 2012). This media archaeology of the imaginary or even utopian potential, which is ascribed to all new media and communication technologies, has led to numerous historical discourse studies, which have made an important contribution to the cultural history of the media and media technologies (Sconce 2000; Sturken et al. 2004; Flichy 2007; Buschauer 2010; Huthamo 2013).

Re-­enactment: grasping the materiality and sensuousness of historical objects As valuable as these studies are for the historical reconstruction of past expectation horizons, which according to Charles Bazerman’s concept of “heterogeneous symbolic engineering” (1999) or Mikael Hård and Andrew Jamison’s concept of “intellectual appropriation” (1998) are always the result of a complex interplay of imagination, invention, and marketing strategies, they have very little to say about the complex process of the concrete appropriation and use of devices and objects in people’s everyday life. Instead of focusing on the intellectual or mental appropriation, I will concentrate on methods and possibilities for “grasping” media and communication technologies in their concrete materiality and tangibility.

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Grasping or comprehending is to be understood here as a hermeneutical act in the meaning given to it by Ernst Cassirer, which comprises both the intellectual as well as the sensory-­physical appropriation: Grasping or comprehending reality becomes a double act that also involved gripping on it: “comprehending” reality in linguistic—theoretical terms, and “comprehending” it through efficiency; the intellectual and the technical form. 1995, 52 In our view, one possibility of implementing methodologically Cassirer’s hermeneutic concept of “grasping” (within the meaning of a critical and self-­reflective historical scholarship) lies in the transposition of the concept of historical re-­enactment in experimental practice. The idea of making re-­ enactment useful as a heuristic concept for historical scholarship stems from the British philosopher Roger Collingwood. In his pioneering study “The Idea of History,” which appeared in 1946, Collingwood defines the concept of re-­enactment as follows: Historical knowledge is the knowledge of what mind has done in the past, and at the same time it is the re-­doing of this, the perpetuation of past acts in the present. Its object is therefore not a mere object, something outside the mind which knows it; it is an activity of thought, which can be known only in so far as the knowing mind re-­enacts it and knows itself as doing so. To the historian, the activities whose history he is studying are not spectacles to be watched, but experiences to be lived through in his own mind; they are objective, or known to him, only because they are also subjective, or activities of his own. 1946, 218 Although Collingwood emphasizes the significance of subjective experience in the process of historical knowledge generation, his philosophical reflections on the heuristic potential of the concept of re-­enactment ultimately remains a typical ideal nature: historical knowledge is generated as an act of “intellectual understanding” (Dray 1985; Gerber 2012). If Collingwood’s idea is expanded to a concrete, experimental dimension of knowledge generation, however, then the historian who is interested in objects and sensory aspects is afforded the possibility to gain concrete experiences with the physiological and sensory qualities of communication and media technologies, through the media archaeology method. If the sphere of the thought experiment in philosophy of history is relinquished for the benefit of an experimental access, objects and devices of media and communication technology can be grasped in their technical, material, and sensory dimension.

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“Thinkering”: experimenting as style of thinking and education Instead of a deconstructive discourse analysis, experimental media archaeology advocates a playful co-construction of its epistemic object (Rheinberger 2000). According to Michel Serres’ plea for a history of the senses, which traces the wisdom of things beyond the prison of words, experimental media archaeology could turn the historian into an experimenter who becomes sensitive to everything evading pure description (Serres 1985). If experimenting is understood in the sense of Sönke Arens’ differentiation of the exploratory and experimental form of discovering the world as a style of thinking which, instead of relying on a certain theory, is characterized by processes of collecting, tinkering, and translating, experimental media archaeology could make a contribution to historical education, which expands the conventional forms of historical learning to a dimension of sensing the past (Arens 2011).4 As a heuristic method, experimental media archaeology could provide new access to the study of past media practices and appropriation, which would assign the historian or archaeologist the role of an experimenter instead of that of a passive observer. A prerequisite in this respect is the creation of an experimental space where it is possible to experiment either with originals or with replicas in a creative and playful manner. This hands-­ on approach, called “thinkering” by Erkki Huhtamo (2011), must not function as a replacement of conventional media archaeology or media history methods, but should be understood as a methodological supplement, whose greatest heuristic potential lies on the didactic, educational front. As many studies in the field of experimental history of science have shown, the epistemological surplus of an experimental approach to the history of the sciences lies in exposing the complex interaction of objects, practices, ideas, and participants involved on the one hand, and in the experience of failure on the other (Heering et al. 2012; Heering and Witje 2011). Drawing inspiration from experiences in experimental history of science (Breidbach et al. 2010), experimental archaeology (Schiffer and Skibo 1987; Saraydar 2008; Ferguson 2010; Schiffer 2013) and historically-­informed performances in music (Lawson and Stowell 1999; Butt 2002; Bithell and Hill 2014), experimental media archaeology is geared to generating “knowledge that provides a springboard for action,” which underscores the performative dimension of media and communication technologies in practice. This means that the intrinsic performative quality of devices and the interaction between user(s) and objects become perceptible in the experiment, after which they are described and reflected upon. Described by Breidbach et al. (2010, 18) as the cognitive mode of “heuristic touch,” or as “colours of

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grasping” (Rheinberger 2015, 26), this process expounds, in a playful and reflective manner, the relationship between the knowledge that provides springboard for action, theoretical knowledge, and ignorance. By definition it can never be the aim of this experimental approach to reconstruct an authentic historical experience of whatever nature. On the contrary, the aim is to create a situation in which available inventories of knowledge can be unsettled in a creative manner. Only such artificially generated tension between exploratory and experimental knowledge can lead to that experience that Sönke Ahrens refers to as “education” (as opposed to “learning” as a process of appropriating inventories of knowledge available and of facts considered certain.) (Arens 2011, 17–21 and 266–75).

Hands-­on: for a “de-­auratization” of historical media objects In contrast to the precarious excavation objects of archaeology, the sensory experimental systems of historical scholarship, or the rare and valuable musical instruments of historically-­informed performance, experimental media archaeology has the advantage that it has to do, in large measure at least, with mass produced industrial objects which have been handed down accordingly. Throughout the world, there are many private collectors of obsolete media technologies who collectively own hundreds of thousands of Morse and telegraph devices, radio and television sets, photo and film cameras.5 The collections of museums specializing in the history of technology, communications, and the media in general also suffer from an oversupply of objects in this field. Furthermore, in the case of the history of science and experimental archaeology, the production of replicas has proved a tried and tested alternative method for the reproduction and re-­enactment of historical experiments—an idea that is also becoming reality in the case of experimental media archaeology. Whereas classical media archaeology, according to Wanda Strauven, is faced with the “observer’s dilemma: to touch or not to touch,” experimental media archaeology pleads explicitly for a hands-­on approach, which entails Cassirer’s double cognitive concept of “grasping” and “comprehending” (Strauven 2011). Accordingly, it also argues for a “de-­auratization” of the media artefact: instead of holing historical objects up behind showcase glass and touting them as “masterworks” or “originals,” experimental media archaeology could engage in a “dialogue with things,” hopefully through constructive cooperation with curators and private collectors (Hahn 2010). In other words, by using things, we can not only analyze them in terms of their evidentiary and symbolic nature, but we may also perceive and reflect on their performative quality.

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In this respect, experimental media archaeology promises interesting research options for material culture studies and for the history of design (Woodward 2007; Miller 2010; Fallan 2010). Whereas both these disciplines broach the materiality and symbolic nature of material culture from different angles and with different instruments, experimental media archaeology expands the analytical instruments through the concrete interaction with the object and opens up the possibility to study not only the “culture on the back of things,” but to appropriate it in an ethnographic manner (Bloch 1985; König 2003). As such, it aims at a double de-­auratization of the technical object, namely questioning the auratic display of technical objects as “artifacts” in museums and making their collections accessible as “living” objects for experimental research instead of storing them in depots, while making an important contribution toward opening the “black box” and researching the inner life of technical devices and equipment. The use of the rich collections of museums for experimental research into obsolete media technologies would do justice to the educational task of those institutions— with full understanding for the legitimate curatorial interests and tasks of museums and archives, of course (Samida 2010). Museums and archives could thus be turned into laboratories, into concrete venues for the experimental discovering of the world.

From archive to laboratory: reflections on experimenting in home mode So far, the objects themselves have been the primary focus of analysis, not the way they are appropriated and used. If the idea of re-­enactment is taken seriously, not only the technical devices and equipment are important in the media archaeology experiment, but also the place where these are appropriated and used, as well as the social constellation in which this occurs. If laboratories or workshops are seen as spaces of action, where different actors and actants engage in complex interactions, the question arises how this space is to be designed for media archaeology experiments. As the home or the home environment can be considered as the privileged locus for the appropriation and use of communication and media technologies, the arrangement of a domestic environment seems ever so appropriate for conducting media archaeology experiments. As the “central integration power” (Bachelard 1987, 33) and the “museum of the soul” (Praz 1994, 19), the home is the symbolic place for experiencing the whole of life, and as such it often is also the place for the “domestication” of new communication and media technologies (Silverstone and Hirsch 1994). The living room has a special role to play as a material and social ensemble, according to Hans Peter Hahn, as the privileged locus of conspicuous

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consumption (2010, 13). The biographies of objects and their users are intertwined in the living room and are thereby consolidated into a socio-­ technical topography (Woodward 2007, 151–68). According to this hypothesis, this special topography should be taken into consideration in the experimental re-­enactment, in order to be able not only to analyze the “language of things,” but also to try the playful “dialogue with things” (Hahn 2010, 16; Riggins 1994). An initial media archaeology experiment in the domestic appropriation of family films has shown the importance of understanding the experiment as a social, communicative, and collective practice. This experiment was conducted as a “performance” at the International Orphan Film Symposium 2014 in Amsterdam, in the context of a long-­term historical research project on the cultural dynamics of home movies funded by the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO).6 This media archaeology experiment featured three scenes of domestic use of amateur film technology, based on a prepared script, representing the different possible amateur film dispositifs: first, the “8 mm dispositif” (with 8 mm camera, projector, and projection screen), second the “video dispositif ” (with video camera, video recorder, and television set), and third the “mobile telephone dispositif ” (with the mobile telephone as camera, recorder, and playback medium).7 The purpose of this experiment was to attempt to confront the theoretical consideration on experimental media archaeology with practical experiences, or, in other words, to juxtapose explorative speculation with experimental practical knowledge. The major cognitive value of the public staging of the experiment was found perhaps in what Susan Aasman described as the “art of failure” in her review of the performance: One of the biggest lessons was in fact a major failure. In the first scene, at a particular moment, the father failed to wind the reel in the projector. And even worse: when the film was finally in the projector, the lamp broke and we were unable to screen our home movie. Bad luck, but . . . the audience laughed. And even more surprisingly, they accepted this moment as part of the screening practice. They thought it was a moment that was scripted! That moment of laughter made us aware of the importance of people’s relation with technology. And this becomes most clear at those moments when technology fails. Or better put: when people’s interaction with technology becomes a struggle.8 Furthermore, the staging also aimed to leave behind the conventional forms of the transfer of knowledge at academic conferences (lecture) by a theatrical staging of the topic. A “lecture-­performance” was chosen to enable the audience to take part in the research process, as well as to partake in findings through sensory perception. In her study entitled “Der Vortrag als Performance” [lecture as performance], Sibylle Peters argues that the

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FIGURE 5.1  Scene from the performance lecture “The Changing Dispositifs of Home Movies” at the Orphans Film Festival in Amsterdam, 2014.

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lecture-­performance makes it possible “to affirm the performance of on-­ stage research—and in the broader sense the presentation of the artistic research—as a distinguishing feature and thus concurrently to subvert the scientific scheme of research versus presentation” (2011, 187). In other words, the idea of the media archaeology experiment as a medium for the generation of knowledge would be combined with the situation of the performance as the actual transfer of knowledge through the lecture-­ performance format. If the social dimension of historical ways of media appropriation and use are to be investigated in the case of the experiment with the different family film dispositifs described here, role plays provide an opportunity to assign specific roles to actors participating in the experiment and thus have them experience how the production as well as consumption of family films frame “the home” and “the family” in equally large measure. As “formatted spaces of participation” (Müller 2009), spatial as well as socio-­ cultural factors shape the habits and rituals of all participants—those in front and those behind the camera, as well as on the projection screen or monitor. The complex social interactions played out in the background of production and consumption practices nonetheless influence the “result”— in this case the family film—which Martina Roepke has designated as “ensemble play” (2006). Our experiment has clearly shown that the re-­ enactment method can make an essential contribution to becoming aware of this “ensemble play” and thus to reflect thereon as a significant experience. This post-­experimental reflection on the experiences through one’s own body and senses changes with certainty the analytical perspective on traditional types of sources which, as argued at the start of this article, reflect certain types of users and experience each time. The media archaeology experience is not only the producer of a new type of knowledge inventory for the historical reconstruction of past media practices; it also changes the analytical perspective through its phenomenological dimension (Waldenfels 2004; Ihde 1986). Through experimental education, the historian’s attentiveness changes and with it the critical perspective on traditional types of sources as well; the historical interpretation attains a new degree of complexity. A second example might help to illustrate how doing historical experiments, re-­enactments, or performative lectures may be capable of changing our historical imagination and interpretative framework. In the context of the research project “Failure and Success of Dummy Head Stereo: An innovation history of 3D listening,” Stefan Krebs and Andreas Fickers produced a binaural radio play about the history of binaural stereo recording in collaboration with Werner Bleisteiner from Bavarian Broadcasting (BR) in Munich. While the post-­doc research project by Stefan Krebs investigated the history of dummy head stereophonic recording technology and why it failed in the recording and broadcasting business,9 the radio play was the

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FIGURE 5.2  Studio no. 9 at Bavarian Broadcasting in Munich, where the radio play Glory and Misery of Dummy Head Stereo Recording was produced in November 2016.

result of a media archaeological experiment. The basic idea was to tell the story of dummy head recording and at the same time demonstrate binaural technology, its advantages but also disadvantages, to the listener—in short, to make the history of Kunstkopf technology immediately audible for the broader public. The radio play, entitled Glanz und Elend der Kunstkopf-Stereophonie (Glory and Misery of Dummy Head Stereo Recording) and based on the historical findings of the research project, has a rather simple storyline: a radio journalist (stage actor Stephan Wurfbaum) interviews a media archaeologist (media historian Andreas Fickers) about the history of Kunstkopf technology. The challenge was, on the one hand, to tell this story for the broad audience: to explain binaural recording, to embed the story in the historical context, and to provide some reasons for the failure of Kunstkopf stereo—all in only twenty-­one minutes! On the other hand, the radio play was supposed to let listeners experience three-­dimensional audio reproduction and to make some of the major advantages and some of the technical problems intuitively audible—in short, to fully engage the sense of spatial hearing in listening to the radio drama.

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The actual recordings took place in Studio 9 of Bavarian Broadcasting in Munich, a well-­known studio for radio drama productions, and in some places outside the studio.10 The production was supported by two technical and historical advisors: Stephan Peus (former head of research at Neumann in Berlin) and Günther Hess (former sound engineer at BR, who recorded the first binaural radio dramas in Munich in 1973–4); and BR recording engineer Christian Schimmöller (who has a long standing interest in binaural recording). A special guest was the actor Hans Peter Hallwachs who played one of the main characters in the very first binaural radio drama Demolition in 1973, and agreed to speak the “Kunstkopf.” Werner Bleisteiner had the great idea to give the Kunstkopf himself a role in the radio play. His idea was to record the voice of the Kunstkopf in mono, so that listeners could later locate this mono voice inside their head (a phenomenon called in-­headlocalization). In this way, the mono voice would nicely demonstrate the huge difference between the spatial quality of a binaural recording and the in-­ head localization of a mono recording. While the two experiments briefly outlined here were quite different in nature and aim, they both told us a lot about the performative qualities of the past technologies in re-­use and allowed us to grasp the complexity of historical media dispositifs in both sensorial and intellectual way. Both the performance lecture at the Orphans Film Festival and the production of the radio play in collaboration with professional actors and technicians made us aware of the “ensemble play” of the production process and—in a Goffmanian sense—of the role playing involved in the performative reconstruction of past media practices. The fact of speaking to/with a dummy head in a studio environment—which, from a phenomenological point of view is a very different communication situation than speaking into a “normal” microphone—produced a distinct historical experience different from appropriating the past by simply listening to original recordings or studying the literature. The studio (in the case of the radio play) or the stage (in the case of the performance lecture) created appropriate environments for experiences of historical immersion; they facilitated the creation of authentic and immediate multi-­sensory experiences that enabled “the resemblance between the theatrical and the historical” (Gapps 2009, 403).

Conclusion: re-­enactment as authentic memory practice Experimental media archaeology is not about the reconstruction of as authentic a historical experience as possible. Instead it is geared to raising the awareness of participants in the experiment about the functionalities ascribed to the materiality of the object (what can and cannot be done with

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a device), as well as the symbolic nature (design, semantics, interfaces), the explication of implicit inventories of knowledge and ignorance (knowledge that provides a springboard for action), the creative disconcertion of available knowledge (education through failure), the reflective analysis of the performative dimension of technical objects (object as medium), as well as the critical reflection of the situation dynamics in the experimental space (between the object and the experimenter as well as between different actors). Although authenticity is “a currency and competency standard within the reenactor’s history work,” as Stephen Gapps has put it, the reenactor/experimenter are charmed not by the original, but by its authentic simulation (2009, 398). It is the combination of old and new, the playful practice of locating, embodying and recalling that make reenactments or media archaeological experiments an authentic mode of communicative memory practice (Dreschke et al. 2016). As Tilmans, Van Vree, and Winter (2010, 7) put it: “Re-­enactment is both affirmation and renewal. It entails addressing the old, but it also engenders something new, something we have never seen before. Herein lies the excitement of performance, as well as its surprises and its distortions.” Reenactments and experimental approaches open up possibilities that allow history to be unfinished business (Gapps 2009, 207). The heuristic method of re-­enactment can be used to gain new insights into the temporality ascribed to the historical dispositifs of media technologies. The limited shooting time of 8 mm amateur film reels, the short playing time of a shellac record, and the long exposure times of photographic cameras—one will grasp all of this completely differently through the experimental approach to the object than through explorative readings of user’s instructions or how-­to manuals. Re-­enactments, such as in makeshift laboratory spaces in the living room, moreover, enhance the reflexive awareness for the spatial and topographic dimension of past media practices, as regards both the production and the consumption of contents transmitted through media technology. This practical insight in the space-­time conditionality of past objects and equipment provides a better historical and critical understanding of the constructivist nature of communication and media technology contents (photographs, films, audio recordings), which is frequently covered by the visual or acoustic evidence of these representations of realities. The knowledge that provides a springboard for action generated by the experimental approach thus makes an important contribution to historical source criticism and raises awareness among media and technology historians about the significance of the senses in the cognitive process as well as the sensuousness of technical objects (Smith 2007). Compared to the heuristic potential of the concept of dispositifs—be it in the structuralist, socio-­pragmatic, or historical variant (Bührmann and Schneider 2008)—the experimental media archaeology approach as sketched in this chapter emphasizes the importance of doing media history beyond

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the discursive analysis of mediated representations of the past. In interacting with historical objects in a playful and experimental manner, the historian is turned into a self-­reflexive ethnographer, producing “historical” knowledge through intellectual, perceptual, and bodily engagement with historical media dispositifs. This approach is faced with two challenges: a practical challenge and a methodological one. The first is linked to the difficulty of getting your hands on musealized or archived historical objects, which are often surrounded by an aura of being unique/original or by the many challenges involved in the production of replica. The methodological challenge follows from the difficulty of translating implicit knowledge, sensory perceptions, and in-­situ experiences made during the experiments into intelligible information—be it in the form of literary descriptions (e.g., a written notebook or research diary) or in the form of audio/visual documentation (e.g., video or sound recordings). In other words, the challenge consists in making the implicit explicit by means of self-­reflexive second order observations and thereby promoting a critical and problem-­based approach of doing media history in an experimental mode of knowledge generation.

Notes 1 This dimension is not addressed in the classical introductions to the history of technology in the German-­speaking world at least (see Heßler 2012; König 2009). Already in 1958, the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon attempted to sketch a philosophy of the history of technology beyond the duality of form and function. Simondon’s works were scarcely appreciated outside France, however (Simondon 1958). For the history of the media, Jochen Hörisch presented a study motivated by the history of the senses entitled “Der Sinn und die Sinne,” which, albeit inspiring, is often restricted to associative outlines (Hörisch 2001). 2 See: https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/thinkering/amateur-­film-dispositif-­mediaarchaeological-­experiment 3 See: https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/thinkering/listening-­past-two-­ears 4 Learning as an “explorative form of discovering the world” and education as an “experimental form of discovering the world” constitute a complementary relationship of necessity, according to Sönke: “The frequently encountered intellectual separation of the learning of facts and playful experimenting as an activity, which occurs independently from those facts, entails an essential separation of what structurally belongs together, namely: learning as facts considered certain so be able to open up an unforeseen event in an educational process” (Arens 2011, 271). 5 For thousands of collector’s pages on the Internet, see the “Museum of Obsolete Media”: www.obsoletemedia.org 6 For details on the project and its manyfold outcomes, see the scientific blog of the project: https://homemoviesproject.wordpress.com/about/project/

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7 A short film montage of the experiment/“performance” produced by Tim van der Heijden is available at: http://vimeo.com/95314562 8 Details of the project, a documentary film sequence of the experiment, and a critical review by Susan Aasman are available at: http://homemoviesproject. wordpress.com/report-­staging-the-­amateur-dispositif/ 9 For details on the research project, see the scientific blog of Stefan Krebs: https:// binauralrecording.wordpress.com/ 10 The radio play was recorded in November 2016, the final cut was done in January 2017, and it was first broadcasted by the Luxembourg public service radio station Radio 100.7 on June 11, 2017. The radio play is introduced by a short radio feature from 100.7 journalist Kerstin Thalau about the research project. You can still listen to the radio broadcast online here: https:// www.100komma7.lu/program/episode/151018/201706111930-201706112000. Please do not forget to listen with headphones (only)!

PART T WO

Generations

6 Belated Screenings of Home Movies: Biographical Storytelling and Generational Referencing Joseph Wachelder

Some ten years ago, the House of Alijn Museum in Ghent, Belgium, engaged in a project aimed at collecting home movies in its surrounding region. One of the project’s aspects was to invite relatives of deceased makers of family films for an interview, in the context of, what I call a belated, conversational screening. Their children, nephews, and nieces—who sometimes referred to themselves as youngsters in the films recorded—were invited to talk about these films and to help situate them in place and time (Dhaene and Vanderhaegen 2006; Eloy 2007). In so doing, the House of Alijn Museum created precious historical source materials because recordings of conversations during screenings are sparse. Conversation analysis of belated screenings offers a splendid opportunity to study the practicing of history by those who tell the stories (Crane 1997, 1388). During the screenings, a small, selected audience participates in the acts of remembering and forgetting within a collective memory framework, bridging the here and now, through articulating personal memories in response to a documented past. The argument presented here explores such temporal situating and referencing from a multilevel perspective, with a specific interest for narrative constructions that suggest collective historical identities, or, in one word, generations.

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Belated conversational screenings can be viewed as a specific way of reusing home movies. The distinction between use and reuse is, of course, a gradual one. For example, I consider repeated, regular screenings led by the maker—traditionally the presenter—as a form of regular use. The re-­editing of films, sometimes by the maker him/herself, I view as a simple form of reuse. Yet the recycling of home movies by other filmmakers to create collective portraits of a generation or as a form of micro-­history (Cuevas 2014) is already a more radical form of reuse. After the death of the filmmaker or the people depicted in home movies, screenings gradually become belated ones. Family members who were always around are no longer in the audience. The screenings, in an interview setting organized by the House of Alijn Museum, clearly involve a form that is distinct from ordinary use (Nicholson 2009). After all, the screenings, originally held in a domestic context, now took place in the museum, while (most of) those involved in the making of the home movie are no longer alive. The very possibility of having conversations during screenings sets home movies apart from other film dispositifs. In this respect, Margrit Tröhler (2012, 58–9) has made a distinction between the living room, the movie theater, and the museum. The museum gives freedom to the individual to come and go, which is why a filmic experience will rarely start at the opening sequence. The basic characteristics of the cinematic experience are contested, however (Bourdon 2015). Some scholars highlight its individual character, whereas others underscore the collective aspect of going to the movies and jointly watch a selected film (Hanich 2014, 346; Kuhn, Biltereyst, and Meers 2017, 7). There is no disagreement, however, on the observation that quiet listening and focused attention makes the cinematic experience distinct from the living room experience. Home movie screenings in the living room tend to be anything but a silent affair. On the contrary, it is ubiquitous to share opinions on what is (supposedly) seen. Roger Odin (this volume), for instance, underscores the highly ritualized and communicative character of screenings of home movies. So far, however, cultural scholars, film historians, and students of collective memory have paid little attention to the analysis of temporal situating and referencing by individuals during conversational screenings. The disregard of conversational screenings of home movies has different backgrounds. For one thing, such screenings require a serious investment of time. Moreover, participant observation in an intimate, familial setting is anything but straightforward (cf. Olson 2016). On top of that, sources on specific interactions and exchanges during historical screenings are very rare. In terms of the content, scholars in the humanities have engaged in particular in unearthing hidden power relationships. Odin’s chapter in this volume can serve as an illustration. The exchange between family members, says Odin, reflects the power relations in the family, which are part of the home movie dispositif. A screening may trigger the retrieval of memories on

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two levels. It initiates the collective construction of family memories, which might even start to function as prosthetic memories. Yet the individual recollection of memories, he argues, may become subordinate to this collective, consensual procedure, preserving the family as a social structure. Spence and Holland’s Family Snaps (1991) and Marianne Hirsch’s Family Frames (1997) may exemplify cultural scholars’ interest in unearthing power relationships in domestic photographs. So far, few psychologists have displayed an interest in conversation analysis. Although the field is dominated by methodological individualism, reducing collective memories to shared individual memories or so-­called collected memories (Olick 1999, 338), Coman et al. (2009, 126–7) observe some “mavericks” or “renegades” interested in collective remembering (Edwards and Middleton 1988; Middleton and Edwards 1990b; Hirst and Manier 2008). Most of them were inspired by social-­interactionist approaches. Constructivist approaches of autobiographical memories, such as Conway’s, have revitalized such interests (Hirst, Manier and Apetroaia 1997, 165; Brockmeier 2015). Psychologists are primarily interested in personal memory, aspiring to a model explaining its functioning and (lack of) accuracy. Constructivists such as Conway (2005, 594) argue that cognition and thus memory is driven by goals: “memory is motivated.” This makes social context relevant for personal memories. Conway (1996, 67) further suggests that there are no such things as autobiographical memories in the sense of discrete, holistic units in long-­term memory. At the most basic level, autobiographical knowledge ends in episodic, event-­based memories (Conway 2005, 612). Yet event-­specific knowledge (seconds, minutes, or, possibly hours) is accessed via hierarchically higher levels, which are conceptually structured (Conway 2005, 622), aggregating general events (months, weeks, and days) and lifetime periods (years). Lifetime periods can comprise references to “when I was at school, when I was at University, working for company X, when the children were little, when I lived with Y . . . contain[ing] general knowledge about significant others, common locations, actions, activities, plans, and goals characteristic of a period” (Conway 1996, 68; cf. Conway 2005, 608–10). Conway argues that in recollecting autobiographical memories, these three levels—episodic, event-­ based memories; general events; and lifetime periods—are interconnected, in the context of the processing moment. As a result, analyzing conversations, in specific settings, is of interest to both psychologists and cultural scholars, even if both fields may have many different objectives (Conway and PleydellPearce 2000, 261). This chapter examines temporal situating and referencing by selected commentators present at belated conversational screenings of home movies, with an emphasis on their implicit and explicit referencing to “generations,” understood as distinct collectives in time. My argument starts from the assumption that the exchanges during belated conversational screenings

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involve a multilevel dynamic. Like Conway (2005), I depart from the assumption that temporal situating and referencing in belated conversational screenings of home movies zigzags between personal memories, collective memories, and historical facts and interpretations. The first section below will address relevant relationships between memory studies, communication analysis, and psychological approaches to autobiographical memory. Its main aim is to explain the methodology of conversation analysis for the study of temporal situating and referencing in belated communicational screenings. Next, in the section on sources I discuss some peculiarities of the primary materials provided by the House of Alijn Museum. The section on multilevel temporal referencing subsequently details the findings of my analysis. In the conclusion, I argue that at least two different mechanisms can be discerned in belated conversational screenings, which together mediate between personal memories, collective memories, and historical interpretations: linking biographies of an exemplar with biographies of a type and linking natural generations with collective generations. Biographies of artifacts and technologies play a specific role in connecting personal memories with collective memories.

Employing conversation analysis for cultural memory studies One notable exception to the scholarly disregard of conversational screenings is Martha Langford’s Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (2008). Rather than pursuing a fine-­graded analysis of conversations, Langford develops a theoretical view, building on Walter Ong and claiming that photographic memories are nested in a performative oral tradition. Toward the end of her book, she performs a suspended conversation with Mrs. Chambers, centering on an old family album. Langford underscores that such a suspended conversation is anything but the default mode. “Viewing an album in company must be considered the normal spectatorial experience, so persistent is the framework in scholarly and literary description. This is not because a private album is so greatly accessible, but precisely because it is not” (2008, 5). The belated conversational screenings at the House of Alijn Museum provide a precious source indeed. Memory studies all but have an easy relationship with communication studies (Kansteiner 2002; 2010). Departing from Maurice Halbwachs’s notion of collective memory, Aleida and Jan Assmann distinguished between communicative and cultural memory. They reserve the concept of everyday communicative memory for the realm of cross-­generational exchange— lasting three or four generations, or about eighty years, at most (Assmann

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and Czaplicka 1995, 127). Cultural memory (re)presents notions collectively conveyed over a longer period, without any interference of witnesses or personal testimonies. Following Pierre Nora’s interest in lieux de mémoire, the concept of cultural memory turned out predominantly to be a vehicle for studying the construction of collective identities, stereotypes, and the enforcement of power. Moreover, memory studies pioneers have highlighted the distinctive character of collective memory, compared to psychologists’ interests in personal memories and historians’ study of the past. In the seminal paper entitled “Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory,” Susan A. Crane (1997) argues that the boundary work—my term—by the pioneers who introduced the notion of collective memory should be situated in the then intellectual context. In the discipline of history, reflective, constructivist approaches were still to be developed. In psychology, psycho-­analytical or methodological individualist perspectives were dominant (Coman et al. 2009). In 1997, when Crane’s article was published, historians had expanded their interests into cultural history, the history of mentalities, and teamed up in interdisciplinary fields. Clearly, the discipline had become more reflective as regards to the scholar’s own position. Studying cultural dynamics—my term—implies analyzing the circulation, and its obstacles, of collective memories, for which individuals are key (Crane 1997, 1375). Occasionally, Crane argues, individuals will experience themselves as historical entities. She suggests that to consider each individual’s self-­expression of historical consciousness “as an expression of collective memory, not because it is exactly shared by all of the other members of the collective but because that collective makes its articulation possible, because historical consciousness has itself become an element of collective memory” (1383). Although Crane does not reduce collective memory to shared memories, which even socially oriented psychologists are still inclined to do (cf. Hirst and Manier 2008, 196), she acknowledges the role individuals play in articulating collective memories. The two aspects highlighted by Crane are fundamental to my analysis. Individuals can position themselves as historical actors, referring to a collective memory that is all but unambiguous. She interprets the self-­expression of historical consciousness as a means of practicing history, which she defines as “the active participation in remembering and forgetting within collective memory” (Crane 1997, 1388). In belated conversational screenings, participants address different levels of temporal situating and referencing, from simple dating to historical interpretation. Edwards and Middleton (1988, 9), in their analysis of conversational remembering mediated by pictures, distinguish between deixis, depiction, and elaborated significance. Deixis specifies the particular contexts of time, place, speaker, and listener. In the case of mediating pictures or films, deixis includes the specific time and place of the film’s making and maker(s). Depiction addresses the meaning of the past recorded. Elaborated

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significance refers to how the past recalled mattered to the participants in the conversation. Psychologist Craig R. Barclay (1996, 107–8) distinguishes partly similar functions to analyze autobiographical remembering and storytelling. He distinguishes an orienting, referential, and evaluative function. Orienting boils down to explaining the context—when, where, who. The referential function specifies which events or experiences occur, while the evaluative function informs us about the meaning of the events to the characters. The approaches differ in particular regarding this third level. The evaluative function addresses other issues than elaborated significance. Below I will employ the levels of deixis (situating), depiction (referencing), and elaborated significance/evaluation in their mutual interaction for the analysis of temporal situating and referencing in the House of Alijn Museum’s belated conversational screenings. My argument is devoted in particular to exploring transitions between the abovementioned levels, and thus between personal and collective memories, collective memory and historical knowledge/interpretation, or autobiographical referencing and collective generational positioning (cf. Fivush and Merill 2016). As such, this study is situated in between a social psychologist approach and a cultural studies perspective. Psychologists tend to sort out complicating factors, which is why Brewer (1996) prefers “recollective memory” as a term over “personal memory,” which in his view brings in confusing factors. Cultural scholars start from the reverse angle. Annette Kuhn (2002, 14), for instance, suggests that processes of making meaning and making memories are characterized by a certain fluidity. Memories triggered by a photo do not simply spring from the image, but are generated in a network, “an intertext of discourses that shift between past and present, spectator and image, and between all these and cultural contexts, historical moments.” Over the last decade, the engagement of media scholars with memory studies has stimulated boundary crossings between personal and collective memories. José van Dijck (2004, 262), for instance, building on Kuhn’s concept of memory work, introduced the concept of “personal cultural memory,” which she situates “at the intersection of individual and culture.” Sympathizing with Kuhn and Van Dijck, I am interested in how participants in belated screenings actually employ temporal situating and referencing. As a result, the methodology of conversation analysis (Coman et  al. 2009; Hirst and Manner 1996) is relevant for my study of such screenings. Co-­presence, the presence of others, shapes individual behavior (Campos-Castillo and Hitlin 2013, 168). Both personal and collective memories affect the conversation. Family films engage individuals. Moreover, memories are continuously revised. Autobiographies are constructed and revisionist, dealing with “the relationship between the personal or the individual on the one hand and the social or the historical on the other— or, to put it in another way, between experience and history” (Kuhn 2002, 151).

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Sources During belated screenings in the House of Alijn Museum, relatives from those somehow associated with specific home movies watched these movies and commented upon them, while the interviewer, Sarah Eloy, served as host. Sometimes the film was stopped to create extended discussion time. The number of interviewees present varied between one and three. In accordance with Hirst and Manier (1996), three roles can be distinguished in belated conversational screenings: the main participant (“narrator”) and the interviewer (“mentor”), while the occasional third person monitors, meaning evaluates, whether the narrative or historical reconstruction is correct. The museum organized about eighty-­five belated screenings. A full transcript was available of some ten interviews. These transcripts served as my primary sources, representing, as indicated by Eloy, a non-­biased selection. Although the House of Alijn Museum produced highly informative and extensive summaries of the remaining interviews, it didn’t seem productive to study temporal situating and referencing by individuals on the basis of an objectified, summarizing voice. After all, temporal situating and referencing will often occur casually, between the lines. Only occasionally I studied a WAV file, which sometimes proved challenging due to the Flemish dialect. Methodologically, my collaboration with the museum came with a major benefit. Because another person, Sarah Eloy, was in charge of the belated screenings and interviews, some ten years ago, without having any information about my specific research interests, there is no interference between the researcher and the sources studied. Most of the interviewees were sons, daughters, or nephews of the filmmakers. In HoA 0022 the widowed spouse of the filmmaker served as narrator, while son Henk adopted the monitoring function. This belated screening truly was cross-­generational. Watching and discussing home movies with variously related family members also creates different situations. Some interviewees saw themselves figuring on the screen and could be regarded as secondary witnesses (Wake 2013, 114). Others were more distant in space and/or time, yet they could still feel emotionally connected (115). The transcripts are listed in the bibliography as sources, adopting the House of Alijn Museum registration format. The filmmakers’ dates of birth and death are provided, as well as the interviewees’ date of birth. Sarah Eloy was born in 1983, creating an age or generational gap with most of the interviewees. This may have prompted some interviewees to elucidate different historical contexts displayed on the films. Regularly, Eloy explicitly asked for elucidation of the scenes. In Sennett’s (1998, 20) terminology, the difference in age between the mentor and the interviewees may have helped to de-­center their collective memory (HoA 0004, 4; HoA 0011, 2:03:43; HoA 0036–38, 65).

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Multilevel temporal situating and referencing The House of Alijn Museum organized the belated conversational screenings in the context of collecting and digitizing home movies. The museum itself commissioned the digitizing of the films. The original films, with a digital copy on DVD, were given back to the owners. In the case of HoA 0022 (3; 23), the family had brought in all films, collected on three large reels. In the digitizing process, a number of rather short pieces were “glued” together, mixing up locations and time frames. In the conversation, it turned out almost impossible to sort them out. Due to the technological intervention (digitization), sorting out which images belong together posed already an insurmountable problem before discussion of the where, when, and who— the typical ingredients of deixis. The orienting function, or deixis, plays an important part in belated conversational screenings, as in unique subjects, objects, or circumstances. Of course, individual people will be rather easily recognized, but not always. Interviewees will connect particular automobiles to their owners (HoA 0007, 5), or they will easily recognize boats (HoA 0007, 11; 12) or holiday homes (HoA 0022, 4), especially when their names are designated. But the interviewees started hesitating when they didn’t recognize private property that they assumed to have been familiar to them (HoA 0004 summary, 16). For spatial localization, public buildings, such as churches, may feature prominently, as well as personal memories of a house or place one used to live in, or cafés or restaurants one visited during outings etc. Individual buildings also play an important role in situating places in time. For Belgium, the Brussels’ Atomium, erected for the World Exhibition in 1958, served as a landmark (HoA 0001; HoA 0022, 30). Others recognized particular building activities, such as for Brussels’ Gare du Nord (HoA 0036–38, 50). Some dwellings shown in the movies, however, had been demolished (HoA 0007, 20). A number of public buildings, such as hospitals or banqueting halls, were renovated or removed (HoA 0007, 18), while others ended up in another location (HoA 0022, 6). Market places were identified as being rearranged (HoA 0007, 15; HoA 0011 2:26:21), while proper names of vacation houses, restaurants (HoA 0022, 4; HoA 0022, 21–2), inns (HoA 0011, 31:10), and streets (HoA 0040, 1) were identified as having changed. Moreover, interviewees observed that businesses and brands come and go (HoA 0007, 21; HoA 0011, 2:04:45; HoA 0015, 10), or they were surprised to realize that some persist, such as coach company Smiths in Eeklo (HoA 0011, 2:17:31). Another thing they noted is the disappearance of characteristic trees (HoA 0011, 27:21–28:19). Evidently, recognizable objects, mansions, or circumstances help to situate the where, while knowledge about specific changes over time limit possible time frames: before X, or after Y. Specific titles or names turned out to be very helpful in this respect.

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For determining the when, recurring events, like fairs, processions or annual feasts, posed specific challenges. On the one hand, specifying the period during the year proved easy. Summer holidays or Christmas are seasonal events by definition. But what was the year again? Participants made use of different clues, the age of the main person depicted being a favorite one, an observation that was regularly followed by one on whether the person was still alive or not (HoA 0007, 4; 17; HoA 0011, 21:48; HoA 0036–38, 51). If the main personae were unknown to the viewer, this complicated the orienting in time (HoA 0001 WAV file, 19:45). In those cases, fashion and dress sometimes helped out (HoA 0001 summary, 3). This made it possible immediately to situate a scene in a collective frame, allowing one to apply historical knowledge. The comments in my sample suggest that unique material objects and traditions are not only employed to address changes over time, but also to highlight remarkable continuities with the past. As several interviewees established, traditional shooting clubs were still around (HoA 0036–38, 42–3) or holiday parks were still in use after more than half a century (HoA 0022, 4). Very senior individuals who were still alive received special attention (HoA 0007, 4; HoA 0011, 1:35:03). It struck one interviewee that a sledge had survived as a plaything (HoA 0022, 48), while another commented on a sculptured Buddha that was still cherished by the family (HoA 0022, 21). The special baptism dress passed on from one baby to the next was seen as a deliberate attempt to carry on a tradition (HoA 0004 summary, 7). In another belated conversational screening, the interviewee expressed, slightly astonished, that the benediction of cars was still a practice in Deurle (HoA 0022, 8). The level of depiction, as pertaining to the meaning of the past recorded, involves a potentially more interesting level of temporal situating than deixis. Not all conversations reached the level of depiction, however. Sometimes, it was clear that interviewees forgot crucial elements or could not quite recall particular details (cf. HoA 0011, 27:21–28:19). One belated conversational screening did not go beyond the level of deixis (HoA 0079). As Sarah Eloy noted explicitly in her summary of the screening, the interviewees seemed to lack engagement with the home movies and showed little interest in the interview: “Only rarely did they tell things spontaneously, which made for a sluggish conversation” (HoA 0079 summary, 1). But the opposite occurred as well: some belated conversational screenings revealed huge emotional involvement, understood by Edwards and Middleton (1988) as the level of elaborated significance. Willy Bazyn, the son of an employee who used to film trips of his business, gives a compelling example of the relevance of Event Specific Knowledge (ESK) for reconstructing autobiographical memories. Bazyn was able to date a business outing to Paris quite precisely: he was not allowed to join his parents in Paris because the company involved, the Papeterie de Belgique, was scheduled to visit the Foliés-Bergères, and at

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the time Willy had not reached the age of eighteen (HoA 0005 WAV, 48:30). More common examples pertain to memories of unfashionable clothing (HoA 0005 summary, 6), specific playing experiences (HoA 0011, 35:21; 1:16:01), or the extraordinary harsh winter of 1956, as the interviewee guesses when he entered the army (HoA 0007, 5). Material objects, fashion, and dress turned out to be important clues for participants for situating the home movies screened in their broader timeframe and historical contexts, combining personal memories with assumed collective behavior and/or beliefs. For example, the interviewees linked recurring appearances of cigarettes to the 1950s (HoA 0001). The ubiquitous smoking of cigars (HoA 0022, 27)—“they did not realize its harmful nature back then, I suppose” (HoA 0015, 21)—was also associated with the children’s hobby of collecting cigar bands (HoA 0036–0038, 8). The interviewees considered gadgets such as bracelets, provided for free by the gas station (HoA 0045, 6), as characteristic for a time period, or they remembered that taxi drivers delivered funeral and wedding services as well (HoA 0011, 1:42:00). Images of processions served to express the still ubiquitous presence of Catholicism in public life. Fashion referred to popular commodities, connected to stereotypes regarding age or gender: “the plus fours Philippe was wearing was called a ‘barboteuse’ [romper suit]. Little kids would wear that back then” (HoA 0004, 16). On working days, granddad wore a cap, on Sunday a bowler hat (HoA 0036–38, 9). Grandmother is remembered for always wearing a hat outdoors (HoA 0036–38, 9). Other fashionable clothes might refer to changing habits, for instance, the emergence of bikinis (HoA 0036– 38, 35). Material objects allow for making transitions between personal memories and collective memories, linking the levels of deixis, depiction, and evaluation. As such, material objects, often implicitly, support the creation of collective generational identities. In this respect, Alan Radley (1990, 46) observed only a marginal interest among psychologists who study memory in “the material world.” Specific language or discourse, such as the abovementioned “barboteuse,” turns out to be an important tool to switch from an individual to a collective interpretation. Interviewees recognized the use of particular vocabulary as a collective enterprise that develops over time (HoA 0036–38, 10): Monique Ghyselinck (b. 1938):  That is our charwoman . . . Vincent Ghyselinck (b. 1940):   . . . And that was the charwoman, as we called them then. Monique: The cleaning woman, as we would say now Participants would refer to the vocabulary of elderly people (HoA 0004, 14) or to some word being part of “popular parlance” (HoA 0004, 14; HoA 0011, 27:05–20).

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Sometimes participants started interpreting events historically, referring to events previous to the recording of the film or relying on knowledge about social circumstances at the time (HoA 0040, 3–4). Interviewees regularly referred to former collective beliefs or behavior. The home movies show several recurring events or traditions that have been discontinued, such as flower parades (HoA 0036–38, 37) and decorating front doors on the occasion of a marriage (HoA 0007, 15). When commenting upon a scene where a skirt was torn into pieces, which were then pinned on the clothes of the wedding guests, one interviewee said: “Yes, I believe they did this then” (HoA 0007, 19). Interviewees discussed changed wedding ceremonies in the Roman Catholic church (HoA 0007, 17), while some folk traditions, such as the benediction of cars and fire-­and-brimstone sermons (HoA 0011, 56:21), provoked explicit distance. As regards the habit of burning real candles in Christmas trees, Sarah Eloy (HoA 0005, 15) observed: “Today no one would even think of it,” as one interviewee replied: “Indeed! This is really unimaginable.” Other interviewees pinpointed everyday practices no longer in use, such as fattening a pig for private consumption (HoA 0011, 52:06) and extinct occupations such as boat towing along the canal (HoA 0011, 49:51). Discontinued technologies were also commented upon to underline the distance in time: “There were steam-­powered towboats. Nowadays you do not see them anymore “ (HoA 0007, 10). Technologies and material items, rather than merely serving to underline discontinuities in time, were also used to discuss transitions in a person’s lifetime. This has become particularly relevant in the twentieth century, when the rate of technological innovation began to outpace the rhythm of natural generations (Rosa 2005; Wachelder 2016). Furthermore, because technologies are characterized by development and continuous innovation, switching between biographies of an exemplar (a concrete material object) and of a type (in development) allows one to connect personal memories with collective memories or historical interpretations. Interestingly, when discussing technological affordances, interviewees tend to describe the limitations of former devices as “natural”: “in black-­and-white of course” (HoA 0022, 2) or “There is no sound of course, so we cannot know what [we are singing]” (HoA 0022, 9). No wonder, interviewees used technologies to situate a person’s life in a wider context. Interviewees would invoke a filmmaker’s preference for a specific technology to situate him (rarely her), as an individual in a shifting time frame (cf. Shand this volume). For instance, filmmaker Willy Bazyn was characterized by his preference for the professional 16 mm format compared to an 8 mm camera: “Paillard-Bolex . . . that is a name I won’t forget” (HoA 0005 WAV, 1:30:00). After connecting the camera’s name to the development of a type of technologies, the filmmaker became a member of 16 mm enthusiasts: “its quality is superior” (cf. HoA 0022, 19; 35; cf. HoA 0036– 38, 1; 62). One interviewee remembered filmmaker Gyselinck as an enthusiast

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of 16 mm, even if he used 8 mm for commissioned wedding films. Yet he did not use Super 8: “no Super 8. For he was against Super 8. This is how it goes, isn’t it; he was used to 16 mm and suddenly that image became a fourth” (HoA 0036–0038, 3). The interviewee in HoA 0004 (1) described himself as a user of Super 8, until the format’s demise. Interviewees also commented on filmmakers who changed equipment in the course of their life time: “even with his double 8—he did not yet have his Super 8” (HoA 0008 summary, 2; cf. HoA 0011, 6:50–15:25). Of course, a reluctance to turn to video was also covered. The interviewee in HoA 0040 not only commented on the filmed festivities in Oostakker (a quarter of Ghent), yet also provided a historical exposé on sound technologies. The original sound recordings, on steel wire, had been lost and were replaced by accordion music when copying the 16 mm film on video (HoA 0040, 4–5). The discussants situated themselves also against the backdrop of developing technologies. They apologized, for instance, for not having digitized the inherited films, or they expressed their gratitude for receiving advise about digitizing film materials (HoA 0001). Technologies facilitate making transitions, as regards temporal situating and referencing, between the levels of deixis, depiction, and evaluation. This is not restricted to film or media technologies. I identified switching between the level of the exemplar and that of the type with respect to automobiles (HoA 0004, 14; HoA 0022, 22; 28; HoA 0015, 6; HoA 0036–38, 61; 63), streetcars (HoA 0022, 10), coaches (HoA 0036–38, 50), railways (HoA 0036–38, 17), bottles (HoA 0036–38, 20), and vacuum cleaners (HoA 0036–38, 47). The following dialog involving a cross-­generational exchange in HoA 0022 (28) among relatives of the late filmmaker Léon de Budt (1919) may serve as an illustration of switching between the two levels: Germaine de Corte (b. 1921): And this film is in color already. Henk de Budt (b. 1954): Such an old film and in color! You do not see that very often . . . Germaine: Our old little car! Our old little Ford is even shown here. Henk: That was a T-Ford Sarah Eloy (b. 1983) adds later in the transcript: The production of the T-Ford took place between 1908 and 1927 Sarah: That’s quite an old car indeed! Henk: It was their first car, I was not around then. Germaine: It was a beauty! I still have pictures of it. Sarah: When did you buy it then? Right after the war? Germaine: That will have been the time. But we did buy a second-­hand one from someone

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FIGURE 6.1  Still from House of Alijn 0022, Ghent. Filmmaker Léon de Budt [Buth]. Courtesy House of Alijn, Ghent.

from Lochristi. So it was a used car. Dad had never driven yet and that man asked: “Are you going to be able to do it?” Well, our dad got into the car and off he drove. Unbelievable! He had never driven a car before and off we drove with that car. HoA 0015 (6) provides another example: Aimé Cremers (b. 1948):

Sarah Eloy (b. 1983):

 e were angry at our dad because he had W chosen such an ugly color for that Ford! Such a pale blue! At that time, all cars were still black. I still know that the freeway between Ostend–Brussels had just opened when we bought the Ford Consul. adds later in the transcript: The freeway was opened by the King in 1956.

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FIGURE 6.2  Still from House of Alijn 0015, Ghent. Filmmaker Jacques Cremers. Courtesy House of Alijn, Ghent.

Aimé:

 here is also a film of their trip to Spain: it still T took you three days to get there and three days to return, for all traffic relied on the routes nationales.

When I asked Sarah Eloy whether generation is a keyword used by the museum to describe the films in its collection, she reacted negatively, somewhat surprised. According to her, “generation” does not serve as a keyword in the House of Alijn Museum catalog “because it is obvious that home movies are about generations” (Sarah Eloy, pers. comm. February 13, 2017). If this applies for natural generations, it does so much less for generations as a narrative construct delineating collectives in history (Wachelder 2016). Explicit generational referencing, other than in the natural sense, appears only twice in the sources I studied. In one case (HoA 0004, 4), there is a reference to air flights aimed at fighting whooping cough: “There are many people in my generation who had to do that as well.” HoA (0022) presented a belated conversational screening with the widowed spouse of the filmmaker and their son. The son put forward that in their household French was not a language commonly used: “But the older generation did speak French, certainly in Ghent” (HoA 0022, 1). The

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experience or behavior exemplified in one individual is suggested to be characteristic for a historical collective. In my sample, implicit references to generations occur much more frequently than explicit generational referencing. Given the format of belated conversational screenings, the filmic, materialized memories are swiftly put into a context of kinship relationships. Personal memories can be linked to collective memories by switching between the levels of deixis, depiction, and evaluation. In this respect, material objects and particular technologies play a prominent role. Because of the high pace of innovation in the twentieth century, technological artefacts—by switching between the levels of deixis, depiction and evaluation—allow for linking the biographies of exemplars with the development of types. This makes it possible to situate individuals (proprietors or users) and individual objects in a broader historical time frame. Narrative generational referencing, be it explicit or implicit, points to differences over time, but also creates kinship relationships, opening up possibilities for continuities, transitions, and re-­appropriations, which is often missing in rather static sociological theorizing of generations (Wachelder 2016).

Conclusion: multilevel referencing and generations This conversation analysis of belated conversational screenings of home movies has been in part inspired by the study by Edwards and Middleton (1988) on conversation practices of joint remembering between mothers and young children (ages two to six), mediated by family snapshots. In joint remembering, these authors observe the frequent usage of the deixis-­ depiction-elaborated significance scheme, in that order (10). I observed this as well, yet in conversations among adults elaborated significance appears in conjunction with evaluation. Another qualification can be made. Edwards and Middleton conclude that in joint remembering with children, in “nearly all of the conversational exchanges around them, it was the thing ‘signified’ (the past event recorded) that was the thing of interest, not the ‘signifier’ (the picture)” (9). In my analysis of belated conversational screenings, the media technology employed becomes a major indicator to situate films and their makers, and to characterize the makers’ ambitions, against the backdrop of a broader time frame. Event-­specific knowledge (episodic memories) turns out to be very influential in the accounts. Conway suggests that in the reconstruction of autobiographies three types of autobiographical memories are employed: of lifetime periods, of general events (months, weeks, and days), and event-­ specific knowledge (seconds, minutes, or, possibly hours). For psychologists

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Larsen, Thompson, and Hansen (1996, 135), the power of reconstructive theories, such as Conway’s, “is in large part due to their amorphous nature.” Different fragments of information remembered (temporal clues) are connected with different types of events. In belated conversational screenings, I argue, the amorphous and fragmented nature of autobiographical narratives is further expanded. In belated conversational screenings, autobiographical memories are mixed up with historical knowledge and collective memories (cf. Birth 2006, 194, 196). Here too, I suggest, the amorphous character of its elements facilitates narrative transitions. In their stories about individuals and individual objects, the people who tell these stories often exchange the units of their biographical descriptions—from exemplar to type and vice versa— switching between the levels of deixis, depiction, and evaluation, connecting historical developments, collective memories with personal lives. As such they combine insights that in academia live separate lives in material culture studies and anthropology on the one hand and technology studies on the other (Wachelder 2016; Sally Wyatt, pers. comm., April 12, 2017; cf. Turkle 2007; Kwint 1999). Such dealing with material objects and technologies allows for suggesting collective historical identities, or, in short, generations, without claiming that these generations are fixed or static entities. They merely suggest which historical collectivities might unite them or make them distinct. A similar modesty, I believe, can be found in the approach of collective remembering by Middleton and Edwards (1990a, 11) and Crane’s (1997) analysis of collective memory. Conversation analysis of belated screenings seems to suggest that flexibility as regards to the units of biographical narratives is an important factor in understanding cultural dynamics.

Primary sources (based on House of Alijn Museum documentation) HoA 0001 [F02433 > F02436], October 3, 2007 Summary and WAV file Filmmaker: Marcel Aerts (b. c. 1915) Present: Guido Aerts (b. 1943), nephew HoA 0004 [F0805 > F00], May 1, 2006 Summary and full transcript Filmmaker: Maurice Barbaix (1922–53) Present: Philippe Barbaix (b. 1949), son and his spouse Brigitte van der Aa (no details)

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HoA 0005 [F02439 > F02447], June 12, 2007 Summary and WAV file Filmmaker: Lucien Bazyn (1916–83) Present: Willy Bazyn (b. 1938), son HoA 0007 [F0566 > F 1245], June 8, 2006 Summary and full transcript Filmmaker: Jules Hillaert (?–1975) and Jozef Roegiest (employee) Present: Jacques Bekaert (1941), son-­in-law HoA 0008 [F00020], October 5, 2006 Summary and full transcript Filmmaker: Cor van Leemput (b. c. 1918) Present: Ben Wuyts (b. 1947), nephew HoA 0011, May 23, 2006 Full transcript Filmmaker Medard Bonamie (?–2004) Present: Lieva, Christa, and Marc Bonamie (offspring) HoA 0015 [F01826 > F01839], November 12, 2007 Summary Filmmaker: Jacques Cremers (1919–72) Present: Aimé Cremers (b. 1948), son HoA 0022, August 31, 2006 Full transcript Filmmaker: Léon de Budt [Buth] (b. 1919) Present: Germaine de Corte (b. 1921); Henk de Budt (b. 1954), son HoA 0036/37/38, July 7, 2006 Full transcript Filmmaker: Alfons Gyselinck (1907–70) Present: Vincent Gyselinck (b. 1940), son; Monique Gyselinck (b. 1938) HoA 0040, May 15, 2006 Summary and transcript Filmmaker: Pauwels (no details) Present: John Kellerman (b. 1939), no family of the filmmaker and John’s spouse (not actively participating) HoA 0045, December 3, 2007 Summary Filmmaker: Frans Lox (b. 1935) Present: Karlien Lox (b. 1964), daughter

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HoA 0079, September 27, 2006 Summary and full transcript Filmmaker: Leon Govers (1916–90) Present: Etienne Verhauwert (?) and his spouse Raymonde Govers (b. 1945), daughter

Note The Ghent Museum Huis van Alijn, in the person of Sarah Eloy, deserves my utmost gratitude for sharing the recordings of the interviews and their full transcripts with me. On request, other interested researchers will be given access to the materials.

7 The Social Construction of Generations in a Media Society: The Case of Postwar West Germany Benjamin Möckel

Introduction In the argument presented here, I examine how political generations were created through media discourses and public debates in West Germany between 1945 and the late 1960s. Scholars of modern German history have often referred to the particular importance of generations—or more precisely: of generational discourse—in twentieth-­century German history (Herbert 2003; Roseman 2005). This is particularly true for the post–1945 era. Scholars regularly link historical narratives about the democratization, liberalization, and Westernization of (West-)German society after the Second World War to the collective agency of specific age cohorts. Two groups were given particular attention in this context: the so-­called “45ers”—born in the late 1920s and early 1930s—who have been interpreted as crucial for the reconstruction of democratic institutions and mentalities in the 1950s and 1960s (Moses 2007), and the so-­called “68ers” who have often been seen—and even more often see themselves—as the generation that challenged the restorative culture of the Adenauer Republic and was the first to initiate a political discourse on the German Nazi past (Koenen 2001; Frei 2008; Gilcher-Holtey 2001)—thereby giving rise to what subsequently was coined the “second foundation of the Federal Republic” (Kersting 2010; Siegfried 2015).

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Even though such chains of political generations—45ers, 68ers, 89ers, and so on—offer a convenient way of structuring postwar German history, recent scholarship has challenged the assumption that particular age cohorts can be linked with homogenous political mentalities. Franka Maubach (2013), for example, has questioned the validity of positing clear-­cut differences between these age cohorts, while Anna von der Goltz (2011) and others have highlighted the differences and polarities within specific generations. Other researchers have highlighted the importance of a re-­interpretation of personal experiences for the social construction of generations (Heinlein 2010; Möckel 2014; Behre 2016). These new approaches can be linked to a general trend in recent scholarship, based on the argument that generations should no longer be interpreted as natural entities built on collectively shared personal experiences. Instead, scholarship needs to focus on the creation of generations post festum, once people begin to re-­interpret their personal experiences within collectively shared “frames of reference.” Such reworking of the past can—but does not necessarily need to—result in the creation of generations as collective points of reference. From this angle, generations are no “communities of experience” (“Erfahrungsgemeinschaften”) but “communities of remembrance” (“Erinnerungsgemeinschaften”). Empirically, this has led to a new focus in generational history—one that does not concentrate primarily on collectively shared “formative experiences” anymore, for example during times of war, but on how these experiences were communicated in a generational framework in different public spheres. In this context, the role of media is obviously crucial. Nevertheless, historians in the field of generational history seem to have taken little notice of the theoretical and methodological approaches of media studies. One of the aims of this chapter, therefore, is to consider how generational history can benefit from the theoretical approaches of media studies. I will follow this lead by looking at changes in generational discourses in the Federal Republic of Germany between the late 1940s and the late 1960s. But rather than looking at the different mentalities attributed to certain age cohorts during this period, I will focus on changing media structures that created new possibilities as well as limitations for engaging in generational discourse. As I will argue, it is not only important to examine what is said about certain age cohorts, but also how and through which channels this content was communicated. If such an approach may seem familiar to media historians, in my view it is a productive model for all historians concerned with the history of generations. First, I will outline some central ideas from the historiography of generations that primarily focus on the social construction of generations through public discourses. I concentrate on the issue of how different media influenced these discourses, and why generational history should therefore capitalize on insights from media studies. Next, I develop two case-­studies:

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one dealing with youth discourses in the immediate postwar period and one looking at the discourses of generational conflict in the second half of the 1960s. While these two time frames refer to established notions of generational change during these decades, my analysis does not start from an assumed confrontation between the 45ers and the 68ers as distinct generations. My argument will be confined to so-­called “political generations,” even though the links between media discourses and generational identities are of course important in the realm of family generations as well (Richard and Krüger 1998; Rosenthal 2000).

The social construction of generations and the role of media For a long time, generations have been interpreted as natural entities, constituted by specific years of birth and comparable experiences during childhood and youth. Being born in a particular time and place seemed to put people into similar social and political contexts and made it plausible for them to feel attached to some kind of generational community or identity. In the most extreme cases, the concept of generation has been used to construct a “rhythm of history,” as in the generational approach of William Strauss and Neil Howe to US history, aimed at identifying a complete succession of generations from sixteenth-­century colonial North America up until eighty years into the future (Strauss and Howe 1991). Such approaches are popular because they translate a term traditionally associated with biology, evolutionary theory, and family genealogy into a concept for explaining political, social, and cultural changes over long periods of time. As Sigrid Weigel (2006) has shown, this intersection of biological and cultural topoi is an essential feature of the modern understanding of generations. Social as well as cultural historians have largely dismissed such essentialist interpretations and have joined Weigel in the project of first historicizing the concept of generation before asking for its applicability as an analytical concept. While the time of birth, for example, is a given fact, the interpretations of childhood and adolescence are culturally constructed and highly variable over time, as is the feeling of being part of a generational community. A differentiation between “age cohort” and “generation” has proven valuable in this context: while age cohorts can be defined by years of birth and analyzed through statistical data, generations need to be explained as socially constructed identities. Scholars have regularly referred to Karl Mannheim in order to highlight this differentiation. In his canonical text “The Problem of Generations,” Mannheim (1928) defined three categories of generational connectivity,

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which he called “generation location” (“Generationslagerung”), “generation as an actuality” (“Generationszusammenhang”) and “generation unit” (“Generationseinheit”). While “generation location” refers to the fact of being born in the same time and place, Mannheim emphasized that this is not enough to speak of a “generation as an actuality.” An “additional nexus” was necessary, he claimed, which he defined as “participation in the common destiny of this historical and social unit” (Mannheim 1928, 303). Inside such generations, specific groups may still find different or even completely opposite answers to these challenges, but they are united by the fact of being confronted by identical social and political challenges. These different responses, then, constitute what Mannheim defined as “generation units.” Mannheim’s text is still a key reference for the historiography of generations. Scholars in history and sociology have adopted his distinction between “generations as an actuality” and “generation units” in particular. This concept allows one to identify different or even opposing political groups and movements as part of a shared generational experience, in which these groups gave different answers to a time’s common political challenges. This polarity of generations has proven fruitful for empirical research (Moses 2007; von der Goltz 2011). At the same time, Mannheim’s concept has some crucial analytical biases. When sociologists and historians began to rediscover the text in the 1980s and 1990s, they emphasized that the concept needs to be understood in its historical context of the 1920s, when in Germany “youth” and “young generation” became highly politicized and emotionalized concepts associated with (national) renewal (Koebner, Janz, and Trommler 1985). This partly explains Mannheim’s insistence on the connection between “generation” and “youth” and the predominant importance he ascribed to the political experiences during adolescence. As many scholars have pointed out, this focus on one single biographical stage seems much less persuasive today than in the 1920s (Jureit 2006, 27; Zinnecker 2003, 39–40). Secondly, his approach was clearly socially biased, focusing either on a young middle class striving for political influence or on avant-­garde movements in literature and arts (Jureit 2006, 35). And finally, as Christina Benninghaus and others have pointed out, it was self-­evident for Mannheim (and most of his contemporaries) that political generations were male generations (Benninghaus 2005). While this criticism is valid, new scholarship has shown that the concept of generation can transcend such biases and restrictions. Scholars have, for example, begun to use the concept of generation to interpret experiences of women in the 1960s (Silies 2010), to look for ways of creating generational identities and styles through mass consumerism (Manning 2011), or to identify generations beyond youth, including aged seniors (May 2010). Other critics have formulated a more fundamental challenge of Mannheim’s interpretation of generations as collective agents of political change and his

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emphasis on formative experiences as the central factor to explain generational bonds and feelings of collective identity. Approaches from cultural history and memory studies have instead highlighted the social construction of generations in memory discourses and public debates. For Mark Roseman, generations are therefore “imagined communities” (Roseman 2005), while Bernd Weisbrod has argued that it is more productive to analyze processes of “generationalization” rather than to address generations as such (Weisbrod 2005). Ulrike Jureit has emphasized the importance of distinguishing between “generation” as an analytical category and as a political argument in the public sphere (Jureit 2006), while another group of researchers has interpreted “generation” as a narrative term that can be applied in personal accounts as well as in political discussions (Bohnenkamp, Silies, and Manning 2009). What these interpretations share is the insight that collectively-­shared experiences are not always necessary to explain why a generational discourse can establish itself in the public sphere, nor are they ever sufficient to do so. From this perspective, the predominant importance of media is almost a truism. Surprisingly, however, media studies have played but a slight role in historical and sociological approaches of generations. This might well be partly another legacy of Karl Mannheim: while he wrote in a time of radical media change, he seems to have ignored the influence of media structures on the generational discourses he describes. One way to integrate this perspective is to ask how “generational objects”—i.e., things, persons, or events that attain a special meaning for members of a particular generation—are created through different media. Generational icons of the 1960s like Bob Dylan, Audrey Hepburn, and The Beatles cannot be understood without taking their media coverage and careful media orchestration into account—and the same is true for politicians like John F. Kennedy or Willy Brandt (cf. for example, Münkel 2005). Material objects and consumer commodities, too, became generational objects only through media discourses, such as advertisements or their adoption in popular books and movies. For specific clothes, cars, beverages, or electronic gadgets to become generational objects, there has to be a public discourse on the specific meaning these objects carried for a certain age cohort or social group. And finally, historical events themselves are mainly experienced through media discourses, at least in modern societies. If the Vietnam War or 9/11 were events that stirred a feeling of generational community, it was largely because of the images and other media discourses that represented these events in newspapers, magazines, or on television. This is even more obvious for pop cultural events that have been interpreted as moments of generational community, like Woodstock or the Live Aid festival. As these examples show, even an analytical approach that sticks to the Mannheimian idea of “formative experiences” cannot do without reflecting on the mediatization of these experiences in modern society, referring for example to the importance of iconic images (Knoch 2005), to changes in the

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style and habitus of journalists and journalism (Hodenberg 2006; Klein 2011), or to the ever-­increasing importance of popular (sub)cultures (Seegers 2015). To draw a connection between this aspect of mediatization and generational history, four dimensions are important: (1) media structure, (2) media use, (3) media reception, and (4) media access. (1) Changing media structures, technological innovations, and the introduction of new media alter the way in which generations are created as “imagined communities.” However, new media seldomly replace traditional media altogether and we should therefore be careful to construct “generation gaps” on the basis of such media innovations. (2) It is important that often these media innovations were themselves part of a generational dynamic, being picked up first by a younger generation or even becoming generational objects, such as the transistor radio in the 1960s and the Walkman in the 1980s. (3) Even when certain media are used by all generations, their reception may vary significantly. It is equally important that modern media themselves distinguish between different age cohorts and create particular programs, channels, or platforms for different generations. The definition of specific age-­based target groups in advertisement and consumer research has further intensified this phenomenon. (4) Finally, the question of access is crucial. It is a common phenomenon that the social and medial construction of generations takes place without the active participation of the members of this generation. One central aspect of generational change is to get access to media institutions and to acquire the power to actively influence such generational discourses. This can happen through a younger generation’s gradual progression in the ranks of media institutions, but also through forms of protest and political activism aimed at triggering media coverage and attention.

Constructing a youth in crisis: “lectures to the young generation” in Postwar West Germany Young people became an object of major concern in the immediate postwar years. While this discourse was a European phenomenon (for the British case, see, for example, Osgerby 1998; Jackson and Bartie 2014), it acquired a special significance in Germany, where it was immediately associated with the Nazi past. In this context, the young generation was interpreted as the segment of the population that had been most radically affected and indoctrinated by the Nazi regime, especially because young people had not

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experienced any political system other than National Socialism (Fisher 2007). While this age cohort was later described as a generation of democratic renewal, in the first postwar years it was primarily perceived in terms of a discourse of crisis. While an argument could indeed be made that the rupture of 1945 was particularly challenging for young people, who had not yet found a secure political and social identity, debates about juvenile delinquency and sexual permissiveness primarily constituted a “moral panic” within the general discourse about a presumed social and political breakdown of the German nation as a whole. Young people figured prominently in these debates because they could be used to symbolize both the breakdown of German society and the hope for national renewal and the interpretation of 1945 as “Zero Hour” (Möckel 2014). One of the most important formats of this discourse pertained to so-­called “lectures to young people,” which in some cases were delivered in front of a young audience and published afterward or published as a speech without ever having been presented before a live audience. Authors like Ernst Friedlaender, Ernst Wiechert, and Paul Schempp spoke to their audience about the current political and social situation, and their hopes and fears concerning the future of German postwar society (Wiechert 1945; Schempp 1946; Friedlaender 1947). More importantly, they used their speeches to construct the image of a homogeneous “young generation” to which they addressed their political agenda. Such lectures were typically delivered by well-­established authors who had been in exile or in opposition to the Nazi regime and who as a consequence could legitimately claim a moral authority to speak to the young generation about a new democratic beginning. They put special emphasis on their experiences before 1933, implying that young people needed special guidance because they had not experienced any political system other than National Socialism. At the same time, they thus sought to convey a set of political goals and experiences from one generation to the next. Gustav Wyneken is a case in point. In 1951, he published a lecture entitled “Youth and State” (Wyneken 1951). While most contemporary interpreters stressed the social, moral, and material breakdown of Germany in 1945 and articulated fears of a “lost generation” growing up in a socially chaotic era, Wyneken tried to establish a more positive interpretation, emphasizing the possibilities for political activism for young people in this situation. He sketched the “young generation” as a modern-­day Robinson Crusoe who should view the political breakdown as an opportunity for a new beginning in which they could play a decisive role. Wyneken’s ideas were fairly detached from the political realities of the postwar years and it is difficult to imagine that young people could relate to them in any significant way. But it is exactly this discrepancy that makes his speech symptomatic for the way the “young generation” was constructed in media discourses during the immediate postwar period.

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FIGURE 7.1  Cover of Paul Schempp’s book Frei und verantwortlich: Ein Ruf an die Jugend und ein Wort auf den Weg (1946). Photo taken by the author.

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The lectures constituted a discourse in which young people could not actively participate. The books were written by members of an older generation— Gustav Wyneken for example was seventy-­six in 1951—that described the characteristics of contemporary youth from their own perspective. To do this, Wyneken and others referred to their own experiences in the youth movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Referring to this tradition, the lectures regularly expressed specific expectations toward the young generation. In particular, they were asked to become active in political and social life, to join parties, unions, or other associations, as well as to form and articulate independent political opinions. At the same time, though, the lectures constituted a discourse in which young people necessarily had to remain passive and silent. Even though some speakers tried to bridge the distance between themselves and their audience, the lectures were structured in the same way as the scientific discourse on the “social problems of youth” that mushroomed at the same time (cf. for example, Gortano 1947; Peters 1947; Moeser 1948). Ironically, however, the most popular criticism leveled at young people was to describe them as a “silent generation,” asking why they did not speak up (Richter 1946). The second genre that was characteristic of generational discourse in the early postwar period was the youth magazine, many of which were founded in 1945 and 1946. Like the abovementioned speeches, these magazines were explicitly addressed at “the” young generation. But unlike the speeches, these magazines tried to integrate members of the young generation into their content. Although most authors and certainly all editors came from an older age cohort, most magazines emphasized that they did not see themselves as a magazine for or about the young generation, but as a forum in which young people themselves could voice their opinion. Translating this concept into an actual magazine was not without problems, though, and in the end, young authors were featured in these magazines sporadically at best. Yet the intention of the editors seemed to reflect a recognition of the importance that young people themselves define their generation, instead of being defined by (older) outsiders. The editors tried to initiate interaction with their young readership, for example by recruiting young authors, by inviting their readers to write articles or comments, by leaving space for letters to the editor, or by initiating debate among readers. Although the magazines were thus much more keyed to opening up opportunities of participation and interaction, they largely continued to be part of the discourse in which the “young generation” served as an object of interpretation for academics, intellectuals, politicians, and pedagogues. Young people themselves, if they managed to let their voice be heard, were often extremely critical about how “their” generation was interpreted and criticized. Taking into account this oft-­stated critique, it is doubtful whether the above-­discussed discourses significantly influenced how young people viewed themselves as a generation.

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In reference to the four dimensions outlined earlier, the aspects of media innovations and their adoption by a young generation were not particularly important. On the contrary, it seems striking that traditional media formats such as speeches, books, brochures, and magazines remained so central. Other media, like cinema and photography, also played an important role, but it was primarily these written media that informed the discourse on the social situation of the young generation. This is underscored by the case of radio. Although radio served as a leading medium and acquired an even more important status in the 1950s and 1960s, radio programs did not formulate an independent generational discourse but mainly repeated the views and interpretations formulated in magazines and books. As analyzed by Christoph Hilgert (2015), programs that aimed at a young audience during the 1940s and 1950s shared many characteristics of the above-­ discussed written discourses. This is true for the content, which often referred to the “moral panic” about the postwar youth, as well as for the structure of these programs, in which young people were primarily perceived as a passive audience, not as active participants. Understandably, then, Hilgert is skeptical about whether these programs really reached the young audience they were addressed to. For this reason, issues of reception and access are quite important for the analysis of this specific generational discourse. Even though the speeches and magazines explicitly addressed the “young generation,” the generational discourse was rather geared at society as a whole. Talking about the precarious situation of contemporary youth was a way of talking about the social and political rupture of 1945. A trans-­generational analysis of the reception of these debates would therefore be extremely interesting. While young people were highly critical toward all attempts to be categorized by an older generation, a discourse that depicted them as the most radical followers of the Nazi regime might well have served implicitly to exonerate older generations (Fisher 2007). And even apart from such political implications, the lectures were presumably much more accessible for an older generation than for the young people to which they were addressed. For example, a reference to the youth movement of the turn-­of-the-­century would be easily understood by a fifty-­year-­old listener but would carry little significance for a twenty-­year-old. The same is true for the style of many of these lectures and articles, which was often criticized as too emphatic and emotional by young people who claimed a much more skeptical and matter-­of-factly attitude and habitus for themselves. As regards the issue of access, members of the young generation would normally not have any direct access to contemporary media and only in rare cases were they able to actively engage in generational discourses and debates. This is why generational discourse mainly consisted in the external attribution of generational characteristics and expectation by an older age cohort. Some youth magazines tried to overcome this dilemma by claiming

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that they did not see themselves as a magazine “for the young generation,” but “by the young generation,” but even in these magazines young people did not figure prominently. In this way, young people’s perspectives remained largely marginal in the postwar period. As a corollary, it is difficult to evaluate whether they interpreted themselves as members of a specific generation. While it seems likely that it was attractive for many young people to interpret their personal war experiences as part of a collectively shared experience, my analysis of personal diaries of the 1940s and 1950s has shown that “generation” was not yet a central aspect of these personal narratives. It was only at a later stage in their life—particularly from the 1980s onward—that this group began to interpret themselves as a generation.

Generational conflict/generational communication on screen: Günter Gaus and Rudi Dutschke, 1967 In December 1967, the German journalist Günter Gaus welcomed Rudi Dutschke in his TV interview series Zu Protokoll. On this show Gaus, who started the program in 1963, regularly interviewed prominent German political leaders like Konrad Adenauer, Franz-Josef Strauß, and Willy Brandt, but also important cultural figures like Arthur Koestler, Hannah Arendt, Golo Mann, and Gustaf Gründgens. Even though Gaus hosted a diverse range of guests, it was a bold decision to interview Dutschke at this particular moment. In June 1967, the visit of Shah Reza Pahlavi in Berlin had provoked massive protests by the student movement, culminating in the shooting of the young student Benno Ohnesorg. In the subsequent months, the left-­wing student movement went through a process of radicalization both in their political positions and in their methods of protest. The general public saw Dutschke as the leader of this student movement, and it would be provocative to many people to see him in such a prominent show on public TV. At the same time, however, interviewing Dutschke automatically guaranteed a large audience for the program precisely because of his controversial image. The choice of such young guests can be interpreted as reflecting a general new trend in media in comparison to the era of the first case study. While in the early postwar years, young people did not find much room to articulate their opinions independently, the 1960s student movement was very aware of the importance of media coverage and was able to generate massive media attention and to use media coverage strategically for their political goals. The Berlin “Kommune 1” is only the most obvious example of this phenomenon (Klimke and Scharloth 2007). But in this case, it was not the interviewee alone who attracted attention. Even more interesting was the combination of Gaus and Dutschke, which

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FIGURE 7.2  Günter Gaus and Rudi Dutschke in conversation before the beginning of the episode of Gaus’s interview series “Zu Protokoll” (1967), SWR/Käte Krome.

added the subtext of an encounter of two distinct generations. Gaus already hinted at this aspect in the short introductory monolog, where he presented Dutschke as the twenty-­seven-year-old leader of a group of radical students aimed at overthrowing German society. These students, Gaus argued, were a very small minority—albeit a “noisy” one. Still it was important to deal with their political positions and to listen to their arguments, even if “the manner of their arguments sometimes makes it impossible to treat them as partners in an earnest dialog.” These words marked another shift from the immediate postwar years, when young people were normally not considered as valuable participants in political discourse. Instead Gaus emphasized the crucial importance of dialog, interaction, and an exchange of ideas. Although this shift can be seen as part of a new “culture of the better argument,” as claimed by Nina Verheyen (2010), it can also be read as a more subtle strategy of discursive exclusion, in which Gaus “infantilized” the young generation by suggesting that—just like with children—society had to listen to young people and let them be heard, yet without taking their arguments too seriously. Throughout the interview, it was clear that both participants hardly shared any political common ground. While Dutschke tried to outline

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the utopian plans and ideas of his movement, Gaus insisted on the impracticability of utopian concepts in modern industrial societies, and time and again came back to the risks of utopias turning into totalitarian concepts and systems of coercion. It was characteristic that Gaus again used a generational semantic to highlight this difference. As he claimed in one of the most often cited statements of the interview: “The difference between your generation . . . and my generation seems to me, that you, the younger ones, lack the knowledge acquired by our experiences in the past decades regarding the exhaustion of ideologies.” Dutschke and his followers were capable of believing in ideologies, Gaus argued, and he explicitly asked Dutschke: “Do you accept this generational difference?” In a nutshell, this statement reflects Gaus’s interpretation of a presumed opposition of two distinct generations, and it is no coincidence that scholars have regularly referred to the interview to distinguish the generation of the “45ers” from that of the “68ers” (Herbert 2003, 112). The statement is particularly characteristic because Gaus thereby did not only describe his view of Dutschke and his followers, but also characterized his own generation (the “45ers”) within the established framework of a “skeptical,” democratic, and post-­ideological generation. This is why Franka Maubach referred to the interview as a key moment, in which one can directly see how generations (as social constructions) come into being (Maubach 2013, 200–1). Her take on the interview is interesting for two reasons: first, she looks closely at how this generational interpretation is represented and staged in the interview—not only through the arguments Gaus and Dutschke exchanged, but also through their different clothes, the camera work, and the gestures and habitus of the two protagonists. Second, she argues that these generational distinctions should not be taken at face value and instead be left open for questions concerning similarities and common features of both age cohorts. While generational discourse commonly emphasizes the phenomenon of a “generation gap,” generational relations, communication, and cooperation are equally important for a historical understanding (Maubach 2013, 203–7). This argument was further conceptualized by Joseph Wachelder, who argued that both media studies and generational studies share a rather one-­sided emphasis on discontinuities. Instead, his own concept of “regeneration” refers to the concept of intermediality to highlight phenomena of long-­term adaption to new circumstances and intergenerational dialog for the social construction of generations (Wachelder 2016). I want to highlight three aspects that are interesting from a media perspective in relation to the generational discourse of the immediate postwar period. First, Günther Gaus himself represented a change of generations within the West German media system. Born in 1929, he was a member of the “young generation” that had been at the center of attention in the postwar years. When he interviewed Ludwig Erhard in his first

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program in 1963, he was only thirty-­four years old. The generational constellation of the interview with Dutschke was therefore rather an exception: normally, Gaus represented a younger generation posing new questions at an older generation of politicians, artists, and intellectuals. As Jörg Requate (2006) has argued, Gaus’s interview series was one of the most prominent examples of a new style of TV journalism produced by a new school of journalists who—like Gaus—came from the so-­called “45ers.” This change of generations was of central importance for the development of journalism in West Germany during the 1960s (Hodenberg 2005, 2006). In this context, generational history can add significant insights to media studies, pointing to the importance of different age cohorts, generations, and networks within media institutions that were crucial for the implementation— or the delay—of structural changes in the content or style of TV or radio stations, newspapers, and so on. Second, technological changes in the media system are important for understanding the differences between the generational discourse in the late 1940s and the late 1960s. While books and magazines dominated generational discourse in the postwar period, the Gaus/Dutschke interview heralded the rise of television as the new defining media for initiating public debates (Fickers 2009b, 393). This had important implications for the staging of generational differences. While in the speeches and articles of the 1940s, generational differences had to be proclaimed over political and cultural issues and different styles of language, the new television audience had significantly more options to search for such contrasts and contradictions— while the participants themselves also had as many new options to emphasize and construct generational styles and differences. In the interview, both Gaus and Dutschke adopted the role that the choreography of the program had intended for them. Gaus spoke slowly and restrained, searching for the right word or correcting himself to come across as cautious and contemplative, while Dutschke spoke louder and more aggressively, bending his body forward and looking directly into the camera. He would not have needed to wear the worn-­out cardigan to show the audience that he liked the role of the young revolutionary assigned to him by the TV station. Third, the two case-­studies also reveal a change in the possibilities of young people to get access to public media. While Gustav Wyneken clearly was a member of an older age cohort who sought to impose his interpretation of the political situation onto members of the young generation, the media structure in the 1960s had fundamentally changed. The interview staged the generational discourse much more as a dialog, whereby Dutschke represented the younger generation’s gaining access to national television. He was not the only one of course, for many more members of the 1960s student movement managed regularly to generate enormous media attention. At the same time, this increased attention was not without pitfalls. In the case of the interview, it went along with a clearly defined role that Dutschke had to

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fulfil in order to use the platform of the TV interview to propagate his political views. While in the 1940s, an older generation had defined the central characteristics of the young generation, now the media logic defined how Dutschke could be represented in the public sphere: namely as a young radical and as a representative of his generation.

Conclusion A closer look at the changes of media structures in modern societies can shed new light on the emergence of generational discourses and the way these discourses change over time. Taking the “45ers” and the “68ers” as the most well-­established generations of postwar Germany as an example, I have shown that paying closer attention to media structures can highlight new features of these two age cohorts that transcend classical dichotomies of skeptical/radical, rational/emotional, or harmonious/belligerent. Instead of taking such characterization at face value, a more careful consideration of media structures can help us to investigate how these classifications were produced, as well as which aspects remained invisible because they did not fit in with the expectations of journalists, media institutions, and audiences. As Günter Gaus argued, Rudi Dutschke represented only a “small minority” of his age cohort. A generational history that takes media structures into account would therefore have to ask why this small minority was depicted as the pre-­eminent young generation during the 1960s. In general, I see three dimensions that are particularly interesting for combining research on media structures with the research on political generations. First, specific media can be analyzed as important arenas in which generations are created in modern societies. This has regularly been acknowledged by historians of generations but still merits closer attention. The reversed perspective has even been less researched: for media historians it would be interesting to ask how media institutions and media structures changed because of new age cohorts coming into these institutions or taking over influential positions. Here, again, research should go beyond merely pointing to the age of certain protagonists. It would be more interesting to ask whether generational arguments played a role in in-­house controversies in which a younger generation for example claimed to better understand certain new media or technical innovations. Finally, the differences in media reception by specific age cohorts remain an interesting field for further research. While this is a well-­established topic of applied economics, social science, and consumer research, historiography has paid little attention to such phenomena as of yet.

8 “Generation Channel 36”: Pirated VHS Tapes and Remembering the Polish People’s Republic in the Age of P2P Networks Mirosław Filiciak

This chapter is devoted to the impact of VHS tapes on memory, and specifically it reflects on how videotapes become memory-­preserving artifacts. I will refer to a project I carried out in partnership with Patryk Wasiak: a survey of Polish users of VHS recorders from the mid–1980s to the mid–1990s. This project relied on archival research and interviews, in which the videotape served as a starting-­point for discussing social practices. We used these videotapes, following Sherry Turkle, as “evocative objects,” as companion to emotional life or as provocation to thought: “The notion of evocative objects brings together these two less familiar ideas, underscoring the inseparability of thought and feeling in our relationship to things. We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with” (Turkle 2007, 5). My aim here will be to examine the technical factors which were conducive to videotapes coming into existence and becoming widespread. I am also interested in looking into the social practices evolving around tapes, as well as how these practices are remembered. By starting from the relationship between the technological and the social—regarded here, in the spirit of Latour (1990), not as oppositions, but rather as mutually influential parts of the same chain or network—I explore the role of videotapes in

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Polish culture as a unique local case. I consider the specificity of the Polish video market of the 1980s and early 1990s by using the concepts of “pirate modernity” and “colonial sublime.” These allow me to reframe Polish normative discourse during that era, whereby I conceive of Poland not so much as a country following in the path of Western countries but rather in that of geographically distant countries such as India and Nigeria, which in terms of technological scarcity were quite similar at the time. I look at Poland as an example of an Eastern European country before and during the fall of the Iron Curtain, a period when the global flow of commodities and media content was still extremely limited. The implication is that the experience at issue is specific in chronological/generational terms, and also in spatial terms. For Polish people who remember the era of the Polish People’s Republic (those who were young when VHS technology first entered the scene in the 1980s), a videotape—a rather simple plastic device by the standards of modern technology—may trigger dear memories and sometimes even strong emotions. Watching an old videotape during our interviews occasionally brought an interviewee to tears. At the same time (and in keeping with Turkle’s argument), the use of a formal technology such as the videocassette recorder contributes to a certain level of abstraction, transferring emotional responses into a theoretical framework. The emotions evoked by the VCR are also related to the role of videocassettes in a wider context, and, as I will argue, this relationship is quite strong. Similarly, it would seem equally contrived to separate the carrier from the content recorded on it: certain types of content would never have come into existence were it not for the carrier (Lobato 2012, 19).

A universal history of video? Any history of video, like that of all media, will have to begin in technical details. Such material approach can hardly be exhausted by stating that a VHS tape is a box measuring 188 x 104 x 25 mm in which a 12.7-mm wide magnetic tape is encased. In fact, the history of the VHS format enables us to bring numerous contexts into play, not in the least the story of media piracy. Crucial to the manufacturing of VHS videocassette recorders is that it involves “one of the technologies appropriated by America from the ruins of Nazi Germany: magnetic tape” (Johns 2009, 432). Before that, sound (as yet imageless) had been recorded on steel wires and tapes that were prone to breaking. The German solution, which ensured that the tapes were easy to operate and edit, represented a breakthrough, and, as such, was regarded by the military as classified information. In 1945, AEG tape recorders and BASF tapes were taken by the American military from Bad Neuheim, a German broadcasting facility near Frankfurt. The Allies had known of the

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existence of these devices before, but it was not until their invasion of Germany that they gained more accurate information about the technology. The analysis of this “trophy” equipment and its structure helped the California-­based company Ampex to develop a technology of audio tape recording. In the 1950s, Ampex introduced a wider range of tape recorders (including the earliest multi-­track devices, which provided an incentive to bring about a revolution in music). This new, wider range of tape recorders included videocassette recorders and was initially targeted at television studios, which in those days relied mostly on live broadcasts. Despite their high price (at the time approximately $45,000, the equivalent of about $300,000 in today’s money), the devices were a success. However, Ampex had failed to patent the technology in Japan. This was due to a local company called Totsuko, which in 1958, its eye on foreign markets, changed its name to Sony. This company had already secured rights to a similar technology, used for audio recording. Still, blocking the patent would not have been possible without the Japanese authorities. Their protective disposition became even more evident when Totusko launched the local production of faithful (and, as one might guess, much more affordable) copies of Ampex videocassette recorders. A focus on technology and patenting issues allows one to develop a narrative of the social impact of technology. This is particularly true if we bear in mind that, as far as VCRs and VHS tapes are concerned, the discord mentioned earlier was but a prelude to an international confrontation, in which cassette recorders were seen as an assault by the Japanese superpower, reasserting itself after the war, on Hollywood, America’s creative heart. A letter from Charlton Heston to the people of America’s key constituencies became the stuff of legend. In the letter, Heston argued that it was vital to save America’s creative industries from an “invasion” by Japanese business. Jack Valenti, head of MPIAA, likewise fell back on racist stereotypes when he said in 1984: “the American movie is the one thing the Japanese with all their skills cannot duplicate or clone” (Johns 2009, 454). It seemed ever more plausible that innovative America would be colonized by Japan, which imitated American inventions. Although this tendency was widely reflected in popular culture, it is also true that the US had a history of piracy incidents of its own. Records of this trade allow scholars to reflect on business models. For one thing, that VHS prevailed over Betamax in the well-­known war of formats was the result of opting for an open standard and relatively low licensing fees, which enabled many companies to start manufacturing the new devices. We could even construct a narrative that would not be too far off from that of today’s uncompromising hackers: after all, the VHS standard is the brainchild of Yuma Siraishi and Shizuo Takano, two engineers who worked for Victor Company of Japan (better known abroad as JVC). Since 1971, they had been collaborating on video technology

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with Sony and Matsushita (at the time, the latter was known outside Japan as Panasonic, which today is the official company name). But these two engineers broke off their partnership with JVC in order to go on developing their own video formats: Betamax and VX. After JVC discontinued the project, Siraishi and Takano still pursued it, leading to the construction of an operational VCR prototype in 1973. Other manufacturers renewed their support for the project later. Victor HR–3300, the first VCR in history, appeared on the Japanese market toward the end of 1976. The familiarity of TV was instrumental for introducing new technologies, such as the VCR and later the computer, into the household. In this respect, the logic of operating a VCR was hardly new. As an American ad put it: “If you’re among the millions who already own an audio cassette recorder, you already know how to operate a VCR” (Hilderbrand 2009, 260). As my analysis suggests, the story of inventors is closely connected to centers of innovation. Such centers were basically found in technological superpowers or countries bidding to replace them, and they invariably involved actors who aspired to trigger global change and who had resources at their disposal lending substance to this sense of agency. But what about the countries, companies, and users outside of the scope of such map? If in developed countries the story of every user of an audio cassette recorder being VCR-savvy could come across as, at most, PR exaggeration, it was blatantly untrue in countries such as Poland. On many levels, the various aspects of the new technologies were incompatible with the TV sets used in Poland (to name but one example). Surprisingly, perhaps, this in fact motivated users in Poland to overcome these obstacles, as this offered them a symbolic way to come closer to the circles in which the technology originated.

Local video studies in semi-­periphery A famous 1984 cartoon by Gary Larson depicts members of an “exotic” tribe—furnished with the standard, overblown attributes of their “primitive” condition, such as leaf skirts and nose ornaments made of bone—who panic after one of them spotted unexpected visitors from the window of his hut. White men equipped with a notebook and a camera get off the boat. “Anthropologists! Anthropologists!” the cautionary caption reads. In response, the members of the tribe hastily stow away their attributes of modern civilization: an electric lamp, a TV set, a telephone, and—last but not least—a videocassette recorder. In some ways the introduction of VHS technology in Poland fits in the mainstream narrative of the history of this technology, while at the same time its social history significantly differed from the accounts found in most

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English-­language publications. Still, Polish scholars seemed increasingly eager to copy such English-­language, Western narratives on this subject. Why is that? The world systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein may be helpful here. When referring to the transnational division of labor, Wallerstein grouped the world’s countries into three categories: core, semi-­peripheral, and peripheral. In this categorization, core countries are assigned the role of highly developed, modern centers taking advantage of the peripheries, providing them with advanced products while extracting raw materials from them (Wallerstein 1974). Wallerstein developed his theory in the 1970s, when the world was still divided by the Iron Curtain, which hampered the pace of globalization processes. This is why this theory is particularly relevant for discussing the period analyzed here. In keeping with the classification outlined by Wallerstein, Poland is assigned a semi-­peripheral role. Being a modernized state, its modernization efforts were successful, but it failed to become fully independent of the center. Semi-­peripheries often act as mediators between the peripheries and the center. This is evidenced by the history of Polish videocassette recorders, which were manufactured by Zakłady Radiowe im. Kasprzaka (Kasprzak Radio Factory, or ZRK) in Warsaw as of the early 1970s. Reel-­to-reel video recorders (the MTV–10 model) were followed by VCRs (MTV–20) and, next, by recorders for VHS format. Local manufacturing (and attempts at co-­operating with other countries in the socialist bloc) always ran up against the same stumbling block: the absence of a suitable technological base, which compelled manufacturers to use imported subassemblies. Poland’s earliest VCRs used structures under license from Philips; later, in the VHS age, the sets assembled in Polish factories were supplied by two Korean companies: Bondtec and Goldstar. However, the end product was invariably more expensive than the original components, which called into question the economic viability of the whole enterprise. This peculiar, semi-­peripheral condition of being suspended “in between”—having hardly any opportunities for creating a technology of one’s own (as the center would), and, at the same time, being in denial about the feasibility of creating such a technology (as in peripheral countries)—has an obvious impact on a country’s cultural standards. Mechanisms of creolization—the local transformation of ideas, content, and products imported from an economic and cultural “core”—have been powerfully at play in countries situated outside the global center. Creolization is the process of creating a slot in which goods and content brought in from abroad are merged with those produced at home. Videocassette recorders were entering into a complex relationship with their users and the media system, some aspects of which they defied, providing an incentive to create their own internal circulation (which became increasingly institutionalized as time went by). At the same time, these new devices forged a relationship with consumerism, being both a consumerist symbol and instrument.

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Videocassette recorders became a material expression of the aspiration of those who longed to be part of the West. It is possible, then, to juxtapose Larson’s cartoon with a caricature-­like image not from the US, but from Poland. Just such an image can be found in Kochaj albo rzuc´ (To Love or to Dump), a 1977 comedy by Sylwester Che˛cin´ski, the third part of a series about two feuding, across-­the-fence families. The Che˛cin´ski trilogy is very popular in Poland to this day, partly perhaps because of the significant role of feuding neighbors in its pre-­war past. In the Polish imagination, even the sheer mentioning of the period before the Second World War is bound to evoke the Eastern Borderlands: Poland’s paradise lost, which became part of the Soviet Union after the war. The protagonists’ families were repatriated west, to lands formerly part of Germany—but, in their new home, they are still neighbors and rivals. One crucial aspect of the plot is the tension between attachment to tradition and the modernization of the countryside, as taking place in the Polish People’s Republic. Kochaj albo rzuc´ begins with the delivery of a letter sent from America by a relative who had been living there for many years. One symbolic scene involves the taking of a family photograph that is to be sent to relatives in America—which, in a sense, is a reversal of Larson’s drawing, or at least it suggests that, from the point of view of the “indigenous people,” it is not at all obvious what actions should be taken when coming into contact with Westerners. Members of one of the families turn up in traditional, shabby peasant dress, meant to remind their American relatives of the family’s eastern roots. The other family takes the opposite approach: their photo shows a brand new tractor, and a (borrowed) car, as well as a cloth-­covered table with a TV set on it. Although this last item raises some eyebrows, the family’s patriarch refutes the comments by saying: “Let him know that ours is color, too.” If the photo would have been staged several years later, a VCR would certainly have been displayed prominently on the table as well. Needless to say, in the context of Polish People’s Republic, there was more to material aspirations than simply emulating the imagined West. In the People’s Republic, with its economy of undersupply, goods took on a different significance than they do today: what mattered was not just to show off that one had money, but also to demonstrate one’s ability to “get a hold of” coveted products. In other words, one had to be resourceful and have access to an extensive social network (“contacts”). To return to our main subject, outlining the economic context of owning a VCR in Poland in the early 1980s: a VCR cost the equivalent of five years of average salary. Although it subsequently became slightly more affordable, it was still exorbitantly expensive, also because dropping prices were largely cancelled out by the falling value of the Polish zloty. Because devices were often acquired outside of official distribution channels, the relevant data are sketchy. Still, it is estimated that, in 1986, five percent of Polish households owned VCRs, a figure that doubled in the following five years. Furthermore,

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the purchase of a videocassette recorder continued to be quite an event, one of a completely different magnitude than buying other audio or video devices. Given the precarious zloty exchange rate, many people used car prices as their point of reference when reminiscing about the cost of a VCR. As Piotr, who had run a video rental outlet since the late 1980s, put it: “The year was 1990, I bought a Sharp VCR. Back then, video recorders cost around $400; I opted for an advanced, four-­head model which was $800— half the price of a ‘maluch’ ” (Fiat 126, the cheapest and most popular car in the People’s Republic, made in Poland). That cars should be mentioned is no accident: in the Polish People’s Republic, the means of acquiring a car were threefold, and I discuss the system here because it offers an insight into the functioning of commercial activity in the country. The first, official and cheapest way of acquiring a car compelled those who did not mind waiting until they were allotted one: usually, the wait took years. The second official way (the one Piotr referred to) entailed payment in dollars: it enabled people to buy a car without taking their turn in the queue, but for a multiple of the usual price: for the state, this was a way of acquiring foreign currency. The third method had to do with the free market, in particular second-­hand cars. This option grew important in the Poland of the late 1950s, following the “thaw” after the death of Stalin, and it involved expensive and much-­desired goods, such as audio-­visual equipment. At the time, a car had stood for a type of good that was easy to sell—but also one that, given appropriate contacts, could earn its owner a handsome sum when bought in the first of the three ways and sold on the free market. Even a several-­year-old car could be sold on the spot for much more than its “catalog price” in zlotys. This is why, in the People’s Republic, issues such as income were relative: a financially lucrative job could well have been low-­paying, but came with access to rationed goods, whose resale could earn the employee more than a full salary. That technology may take on a specific local significance is also illustrated in an article by Jean-Marc Philibert and Christine Jourdan (2004) on the use of VCRs in the Solomon Islands in the 1980s and 1990s. In these Pacific islands, it was difficult to acquire goods regarded as particularly prestigious, such as household appliances, music synthesizers, VCRs, and others. Quite simply, the reality was that these devices were very expensive, very much like in Poland during the 1980s and 1990s. At the same time, people who had the devices did not necessarily use them—if only because they lacked sufficient skills to operate the equipment. What is more, when a device broke down, very often it was not repaired, for ownership and the symbolic capital it entailed were no less significant. In Poland of the 1980s, in an economy that was peripheral in Western terms, the situation was similar. In my argument, however, I will not focus on the VCR as a status-­enhancing tool, but instead consider it as a means of developing a makeshift technology support system in the absence of a professional one.

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Between high technology and pirate modernization German materialist media theory provides an important point of reference for my considerations (Kittler 1990; 2002). Yet this theory is limited in that it only stresses structural issues (Parikka 2012a), which is why it seems productive to supplement it with thinking in terms of new materialisms. As Jussi Parikka has noted in this respect: “technological specificity or physics specificity is perhaps only one possible avenue for such ‘new materialist’ media analyses” (Parikka 2012b, 96). I take this opportunity to argue the importance of local specificity, which is not always accounted for, and if it is, it is expressed at the level of production. But in (semi-)peripheral countries “production” has a different meaning than in countries from the center. In this alternative understanding, new technological solutions become a manifestation of a type of modernization typical of peripheral or semi-­ peripheral countries, which Ravi Sundaram described as “pirate modernization” (Sundaram 2010). Arguably, the VCR was an instrument of such modernization, which refers to processes set in motion with the help of new, relatively cheap technologies “beyond the West,” regarded as the economic and cultural “center.” And yet, pirate modernization, with its dependence on piracy and recycling, appears to conflict with the simplistic formula of peripheries striving to copy the central model and yet continue lagging behind the core countries. This is because, as a rule, peripheries use imported equipment to develop their own, unique uses of technology and their own innovations (which are often cheap, makeshift, and poorly designed). This poses a challenge to scholars, given that these developments can hardly be filed under categories such as subversion and innovation, which are so crucial in cultural studies. What is more, Sundaram’s approach tends to relegate overtly political activity to the margins. Given the tendency to enhance the martyrological facet of the fight against communism in domestic debates on the People’s Republic, video recorders, too, are often presented as instruments used in defiance of the oppressive system. Of course, it would be difficult to ignore this side of the story: at the same time, one would do well to remember that, even in the highest echelons of political oppositions, James Bond films were being watched alongside overtly engagé films as part of anti-­communist screenings. The activity that went on around VCRs was in equal measure significant and commonplace, and usually devoid of any ideological overtones. Let us return to VCRs and cassettes, the operating of which was allegedly no different to operating tapes in an audio tape recorder. But different it was: while an audio tape from anywhere in the world could easily be played in Poland, films were a different story. For one thing, the technology of TV sets posed a huge problem. In one of his blog posts, journalist Wojciech Orlin´ski refers to “generation channel 36”—the then young people who

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helped their parents connect the longed-­for VCR (or the occasional “TV game” or computer) to the TV set (Orlin´ski 2013). An aerial socket was being used to that end in sets that did not have any other connector, and TVs of this type were prevalent in households at the time. After the set was connected and switched on, it had to be tuned to channel 36. Unfortunately, the image that appeared on the screen was usually black-­and-white: this was because the devices used in Polish homes operated on the East European version of the SECAM system (different to its French counterpart)—rather than the PAL system, which was prevalent in Western Europe, where most of the equipment came from. Channel 36 connection in Western countries was quickly substituted by the SCART connector, which in Poland became popular much later, so “36” became the symbol of the generational experience, as much as the symbol of local technological backwardness. The most privileged representatives of “generation 36” were the graduates of technical schools. Youngsters, who in the prevailing imagination used to be associated with the boring industry of producing and repairing old-­fashioned Polish electronics, suddenly represented technological acuity, connecting the West and East with the help of soldering iron. The following story by Janusz Weiss, TV and radio broadcaster and opposition activist in the People’s Republic, is illustrative. One of the less-­ known details of Weiss’s life is that, in the 1980s, he and his wife ran a sort of informal home cinema. The films screened there came for the most part from the NOWA catalog. This underground publishing house inaugurated its presence on the video market in 1985, with Przesłuchanie (Interrogation), a film by Ryszard Bugajski, whose release was blocked by the communist authorities. Weiss and his wife organized screenings at home, but as time went by, they also began to rent out cassettes and equipment. However, their first attempt at acquiring VCRs ended in failure: the devices were sent from France by Mirosław Chojecki, a film producer, who, after martial law was introduced in Poland in December 1981, remained in France as an émigré, where he organized support for the opposition in Poland. “As it turned out, the VCRs he sent us would not take Polish tapes, because France had a different recording system . . . I gave the recorders—used, but premium quality—to Grzegorz Boguta [from the NOWA publishing house]. NOWA used it to rewind tape, because the only part of it that worked in Poland was the engine.” Incidentally, this anecdote touches on another issue: in the local context, problems posed by coding systems (in)compatibility triggered the development of a separate services sector, which offered to mediate between Eastern and Western technology. Retuning could be performed in most audio/video service outlets and was a relatively straightforward operation: a second PAL decoding plate was installed alongside the color decoding module and connected by cables to the circuits of the TV set. Audio/video service outlets were frequently the first step toward wider-­ranging business

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activity, such as importing equipment. This was what happened to the next person who set about providing the Weisses with VCRs: Marek Profus, the owner of a nearby audio/video outlet. Today, Profus is one of the wealthiest people in Poland, and his fortune is in part due to importing VCRs. This is further proof that VCRs can be regarded as a marker of the semi-­peripheral nature of Poland (or, more broadly, Eastern Central Europe). Many members of today’s elites have made their fortunes by introducing VCRs and videocassettes into the local market, often with informal support from the authorities. Perhaps the most spectacular example of this is the former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who in 1988, seizing the opportunities that presented themselves under perestroika, opened a video rental shop in Dniepropetrovsk with her husband. The license to open the “Terminal” video rental shop (which quickly expanded into a whole network of outlets) was allegedly issued by the father-­in-law of the woman who later became known as “Iron Yulia,” a party apparatchik. It was a similar story with other businesses based on promoting new technology. Video games are one example: the founders of Poland’s major development studios, world-­renowned brands such as CD Projekt, Techland, and The Astronauts earned their “first million” on trading in unauthorized copies of Western games (Filiciak 2015). Obviously, distinguishing between the fight against censorship and business motivations is no easy task. As Robert Neuwirth (2011) has observed, such informal systems operating in peripheral countries crucially entail organizing and building a complete ecosystem. Although this system largely involves a spontaneous development, it is also true that effort and considerable ingenuity are required to call it into being. What is more, solutions of this kind serve as a vehicle for globalization—even if goods promoted on the global circuit are distributed solely in the form of pirated fakes. What seems crucial, however, is that these solutions serve as an instrument to fulfill people’s aspirations of living a life in keeping with that of the middle class in the West, as imagined by customers and entrepreneurs alike. For entrepreneurs, being part of this circuit was a ticket to a full-­blown official business. These aspirations (and the fact that they were gradually being achieved) are both evident in the changes that occurred in the tapes circulating in Poland between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s. These changes can be regarded as a manifestation of local modernization. However, in the absence of Edisons, Siraishis, and Takanos, who are unable to establish themselves for want of suitable resources, this modernization took place in unique, semi-­peripheral circumstances. The resources available only enabled individuals to re-­create content, to develop it on the basis of the original, and, at the same time, to strive toward attaining the level of achievement in core countries. The first cassettes exchanged (and, above all, sold) in second-­hand sales in Poland were simply blank tapes that had copies of films recorded on them. The sales venues were mostly weekend fairs organized in major cities:

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FIGURE 8.1  Video cassettes sale and exchange at Gdansk-Przymorze market, c. 1987, © Wojtek Wolan´ski.

initially part of second-­hand car sales, with time they became autonomous, and began to specialize in electronic goods. These venues provided the basis for film and equipment distribution. Rather than on sales alone, the distribution relied on film (and computer game) loans: once you bought a film from a particular seller, you could exchange it for another on preferential terms or exchange a film in the same way elsewhere, for a higher fee. Felt-­ tips were used for describing the tapes; and it was common practice for individual distributors to mark “their” tapes. The majority opted for makeshift solutions, such as “stamping” the stickers on the tape with the felt-­tip cap dipped in ink. With time, sellers who sought to stand out from their competition introduced tapes with stickers featuring a typewritten description: apart from the film’s title, this often included the name of a popular actor who starred in it, or a half-­hearted attempt at genre classification. With the popularity of home computers on the rise in the late 1980s, some tapes came with stickers whose description was printed on a dot-­matrix printer. The practice of meticulously describing tapes with stick-­ on letters provided by the producer was a home-­made equivalent of this. Increasingly, typewritten and home-­printed stickers began to be part of the DIY system, just as they were part of the second-­hand sales. As a rule, home collections featured recordings of music videos from Western TV networks and (perhaps surprisingly from the perspective of the

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present day) porn films. For a long time, porn came to represent material that was accessible by video alone: porn cinemas did not exist in the Polish People’s Republic, nor were porn films broadcast by state television; and the circulation of (mostly East German) erotic films on 8 mm tapes was very limited indeed. It is worth stressing that, as a rule, domestic collections were independent of the logic of circulating tapes exchanged for a fee. Home collections were intended for domestic use and for screenings among friends, which meant that they were usually in a much better condition than the tapes from second-­hand sales, damaged by the constant exchanges. What mattered was not only how degraded the recording was, but also what the carrier itself looked like. We interviewed a man who to this day recollects with regret his incompetence and a sense of disappointment, when it turned out that two blank tapes he gave to the seller as his “buy-­in” share in a lending transaction were exchanged for visibly worn tapes and the boxes holding them were falling apart. It later turned out that the correct way to deal with this was to give the tapes to the other party while keeping the new boxes. Our interlocutor, who at the time was a secondary school student, knew nothing of this. In the late 1980s, those who had made their fortunes on distributing unauthorized copies, gradually began to make their way into official distribution. For a long time, however, the two spheres merged: accounts of copying workshops featuring hundreds of VCRs were a recurrent theme in our interviews. Some of the material acquired in this manner made it into the original boxes of official distributors, some ended up in second-­hand sales venues. Until the 1990s at least, copyright was largely unknown in Poland: the reasons for this were in part economic and in part had to do with the prevalent atmosphere. For instance, it was common practice to include fragments of foreign songs or films in the opening credits of TV shows. Radio broadcasts openly stating their purpose, to enable listeners to record music at home, were another common occurrence (software was distributed by the state radio in a similar manner, if on a smaller scale). The boundary between a legal and an illegal copy was equally blurred from a legal point of view: it wasn’t until 1994, five years after the fall of communism, that a copyright bill was first introduced in Poland, under strong pressure from the West. Even in the mid-1990s, Gazeta Wyborcza, at that point the country’s largest newspaper, founded as the voice of Solidarity movement that toppled communism, made quite desperate attempts to educate its readers by writing about hologram placed on tapes as a symbol of moral virtue. It is true, however, that the situation was complicated. As of 1987, the purchase of a license from the Cinematography Committee was required to open a video rental outlet. This prompted the distributors (and above all ITI, today a giant on the Polish media market) to establish an association called RAPID Asekuracja, whose task was to safeguard their interests. One of our interviewees who owned a video rental outlet at the time recollects

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this legal chaos as follows: “Video tapes were eye-­wateringly expensive, especially in the beginning [of the 1990s] when ITI was the monopolist. Not all customers were understanding: after all, for a long time there was the parallel pirate market, where the carrier made up the largest proportion of a tape’s cost . . . In later years, the market expanded a bit: other distributors came in, and I think some were operating completely outside the law, without paying for distribution rights. So even if you ran a perfectly legal outlet, had your license from the Cinematography Committee (mind you, the license wasn’t all that cheap and had to be picked up in Warsaw), paid your taxes, and had distributor’s tapes on your shelf, rather than copies— you still dreaded an inspection from RAPID,” as our interlocutor told us. One manifestation of the tapes’ precarious legal status was their appearance: in the early 1990s, legal copies were often impossible to tell apart from illegal ones.

Conclusion Several things reminded Polish people of the winding path they needed to take to access Western films: difficulties with the PAL/SECAM system and with connecting one’s device to the TV set, poor-­quality recordings, as well as other artifacts, such as the logo of a Western broadcaster in the corner of the screen, foreign (predominantly German) voiceover in the background, and foreign subtitles. This made VCR users feel “as if they were in the West,” and yet simultaneously reminding them that they were in Poland. Videocassette recorders brought the Polish closer to the center, while serving as a painful reminder of how far away from the center we still were. This makes VCRs an inherent part of the process that Brian Larkin (2008) referred to as the “colonial sublime”: using technological infrastructure for instilling in its users the firm belief in the superiority of their colonizers. Larkin argues that technology, when used outside the center, is assigned this very role: it becomes an inherent part of a mission to make the peripheries “more civilized,” and part of a spectacle put on to show off the superiority of its creators. Colonial sublimation works two ways: it emphasizes the difference between a colony and the empire, whereby only the latter is capable of creating a thing of such splendor, while also seeking to eliminate the difference by imposing on the peripheries the belief that attempts to emulate the empire are the only way forward. Similar processes involving the colonial sublime took place not just between the center (taken here to mean “the West”) and the global peripheries and semi-­peripheries, but also between a country’s central region and remote small towns, particularly in those instances where differences between the two were very pronounced indeed, as shown by David Morley (2002, 99) in the case of satellite technology in Australia. Morley goes on to observe that

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TV commercials can also make people in the provinces aware of their being far removed from consumption and production centers. The film companies’ blurred watermarks or headings cautioning not to distribute the picture that can be seen on unauthorized film copies circulating on the Internet are today’s faint echo of the same phenomenon. At the turn of the 1980s, the Polish cultural elites, who were initially ecstatic about the opportunities the VCRs had to offer, came to recognize the videotape as a weapon in the new cultural war: a war that placed money at the top of social hierarchy, while diminishing the symbolic power of intellectuals who influenced what was and what was not suitable to watch. A piece by Agnieszka Osiecka—a popular lyricist, poet and author, journalist and director whose significance extended beyond the circles of Poland’s cultural elites—is indicative of the change. Writing in May 1989 in Polityka, an established Polish weekly, Osiecka titled her piece “Wydeo,” emulating the inept pronunciation of the English word “video,” which was common among the less well-­educated. Osiecka presents the fascination held by videotaped films as an indicator of social change, taking as her protagonists men obsessed with watching videotapes of action movies (Rambo is a must) and expensively yet badly dressed women in diamond-­studded blouses and leather skirts: members of Poland’s fledgling middle class, of whom Osiecka is openly disdainful. Today’s press discourse strikes a similarly disdainful note when informal online circulations are discussed—even though research suggests that, to a large group of Polish people, this way of accessing films is preferable to other, commercial channels (Filiciak et al. 2012). But this free access (legal according to Polish law) often comes with a stigma attached to it: it is labeled as a practice characteristic of homo sovieticus, who has no regard for the law. In a way, the practice is also part of the Polish tradition of being in denial about the nation’s own past, and the refusal to reflect on its geopolitical position. The patina brought about by the passage of time, and the nostalgia evident in the practice of organizing video film screenings (for instance, as part of the VHS Hell series) or in the tendency to use the characteristic VHS “blur image” in music videos currently made in Poland— all contribute to the fact that the present discussion is easier to have with reference to VCRs than to the peer-­to-peer network. In other words, the material aspect of the older technologies is full of significance. Once again, the videotape can become a useful artifact, serving as a reminder that the trajectories of interpreting the social practices concerning video content are no less heterogeneous than the local uses of global technological formats.

9 Becoming YouTube’s Grandad: Media, Age, and Generation in a Virtual Community Susan Aasman

When the British citizen Peter Oakley uploaded his very first video on YouTube in August 2006, he named it quite literally “First Try.”1 Viewers who chose to click on this video saw a man seated in front of a webcam explaining that he had become addicted to YouTube and wanted to be part of it. So far nothing exceptional, but what seemed to be different was the fact that he named himself “Geriatric1927,” a direct reference to his year of birth and therefore to his age at the time: 79. His first try was followed by a second one, and from then on Geriatric1927 would post regularly for more than eight years. In total, he posted more than 400 vlogs. On February 12, 2014, he uploaded “In Conclusion,” which he announced to be his last video on YouTube. Not long thereafter, the YouTube community learned that Oakley had died. Somehow his age sparked a great interest among YouTube users who loved his stories, his softly-­spoken voice, and his genuine observations and reflections on life. Over the years he would gain more than 50,000 subscribers, receive millions of views, thousands of comments and emails, as well as dozens of response videos. Viewers would leave him a short note of appreciation, give him advice about the tricks of vlogging, or stimulate him to tell more about his long life. Age really was an issue on this video-­sharing platform that in those days, as we will discuss, was perceived as a community mostly of teenagers. Although some viewers voiced their disapproval of his activities on the internet, most seemed to enjoy his presence as he reminded

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them of their grandad. After some time, Oakley also appeared in other young people’s vlogs, such as in a video called “Closing the Generation Gap, Ft. Geriatric 1927” (June 7, 2007). His popularity also attracted attention from traditional media. Journalists tracked down his real name and interviewed him on television; articles about him appeared in newspapers, even outside the UK. Oakley became a role model for elderly people who would normally avoid computers or things like the web. As Geriatric1927, he actively sought to stimulate his peers to engage with new media technologies. In 2008, he even joined the “geriatric rock group” The Zimmers, consisting of some twenty-­five seniors, performing The Who’s famous song “My Generation.” This cover became a hit on YouTube, and even entered the single charts in the UK. When Oakley died, several R.I.P. videos were produced by YouTubers who mourned his death. As one commenter put it: a legend has gone.

“Talkin’ ’bout My Generation” In this chapter, I will explore this iconic YouTube vlogger by looking at the issue of age and generation. In many reports on media usage, age is a factor in how media use is evaluated: the reports voice concerns on teenagers who use social media too much or on elderly people who would not be using it enough. There seems to be a gap between young people, who almost naturally seem to acquire the necessary skills to use computers, learn to communicate via social media, or to experiment with new computer programs, versus elderly people, who are shy to use web 2.0 technologies and are in danger of social isolation, as they are unable to take advantage of the social benefits of the web (Harley and Fitzpatrick 2009). This contrast is usually phrased in terms of a generation gap. For example, Don Tapscott, in his book Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, has described a so-­called “net generation,” which can be considered the first generation that grew up in a digital world and used “the new technology as natural as breathing” (1998, 40). According to Tapscott, young people are using technology in new ways: “Instead of passively watching television, the ‘Net Geners’ are actively participating in the distribution of entertainment and information” (30). Other digital enthusiasts have followed this same approach of “discovering” new generations in the digital age, such as “Millennials” and “Digital Natives.” This last term was coined by Marc Prensky (2001), to refer to the specific generation whose members seem born with the knowledge of how to deal with digital technologies. This ability stands in sharp contrast with that of “Digital Immigrants,” who lack the same ease when it comes to things digital. Obviously, the approach of both Tapscott and Prensky has essentializing overtones: they view technology as a rather autonomous force, rather than

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as just one factor in a complex process. Their approach also constructs a rather schematic divide between old and new media, while in fact media are evolving all the time. In addition, there are “fundamental continuities and inter-­dependencies between new media and the ‘old’ media” (Buckingham 2013, 9). Another relevant point of criticism here pertains to the emphasis on a particular media technology that might create too stark a contrast between generational differences of use. Such a perspective that favors sharp contrasting positions runs the risk of ignoring intergenerational contact and reciprocal learning opportunities. This is why the case of Geriatric1927 is an interesting one. Oakley started posting vlogs on YouTube at a time when this was seen as a place where mainly young people featured as media producers. In his first video blog for instance, Oakley confesses that he liked this place exactly because of this: “It’s a fascinating place to go, to see all the wonderful videos that you young people have produced” (“First Try,” 2006). Despite the age difference, Oakley felt the urge to join them as he explained in the video: “So I thought I’d have a go at doing one myself” (“First Try,” 2006). According to media scholar Bjorn Sørenssen (2009), Oakley broke the age barrier on the internet. Sørenssen’s main conclusion was that within this “new media situation,” opportunities arise for new kinds of auteurs; even someone of eighty years old, who does have access to and can make use of new tools enables himself to “transfer the experiences and narratives of his generation to a younger one” (149). Over the years, Geriatric1927 would attract more scholarly attention. In this regard, Dave Harley and Geraldine Fitzpatrick’s (2009) Human Computer Interaction (HCI) perspective in their analysis of Oakley’s YouTube media practice is particularly interesting. These scholars focused on the aspect of intergenerational communication and took a close look at his first eight videos and the public comments and video responses it generated. In their view, Geriatric1927 explored the ability of the medium in order to have intergenerational contact and benefit from reciprocal learning. They concluded that his case revealed that web technologies could certainly be “socially engaging and meaningful for older people” (2009, 1). In this chapter, I will revisit this particular case, because we can now explore Geriatric1927’s full oeuvre from the beginning in 2006 until his final video, uploaded in 2014. I focus on how Oakley positioned himself as an elderly person in a virtual community, but also on how his subscribers and incidental viewers responded to his online presence and how this mutual commitment evolved over the years. Harley and Fitzpatrick noticed in 2009 that his age became less of a topic and that, instead, familial intergenerational relationships emerged with some of his viewers, who expressed the wish that he could be their grandfather. Given the eight-­year time frame of his upload activity, we should take into account that Oakley’s role evolved during that period, and that the website developed in certain ways, as well as, along with it, the YouTube community. The argument developed here

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will start from the question of whether a more historical perspective can reveal a different dynamic that is less about a generational gap or about oppositional structures, such as digital natives versus digital immigrants, and more about the formation of something that could be defined as a user generation. Is it productive, in other words, to speak of the formation of a cohort that is not so much defined by age or year of birth but by a shared use of a media technology in a particular period? This historical approach toward understanding the relationship between generation and media also aligns with how historian Joseph Wachelder (2016, 4) makes a case for a diachronic perspective, keeping an eye on the “potential, continuous refashioning of generation.” Wachelder points to the possibility of revising “the allocation to a specific generation in the course of a person’s lifetime” (2) and that such a process-­oriented approach eventually includes “hypermediate regeneration, which implies the continuous, ex-­ post, explicit (re)construction of collective generational identities” (7). Geriatric1927’s case demonstrates how such an allocation could take place, in this case how the social construction of generation works in a way that is not only related to age but to specific social and cultural dynamics as well. In other words, the reception of Geriatric1927 went through a process of “generationalization” (Weisbrod 2005) in which a specific cohort of users of a particular media technology gradually identify themselves as a community which evolved over time while creating a shared memory. Thus, by taking a diachronic dynamic approach I will show how Geriatric1927 developed from “you could have been my grandad” to “YouTube’s Grandad,” which explains just as much about the conceptual complexity of age and generation in everyday life as well as about the changing course of YouTube as a virtual community.

Geriatric1927 as a digital archive To explore systematically the corpus of 434 videos, plus some incidental video responses and thousands of textual comments, I first made a quick scan based on the chronology of uploads of the videos. Geriatric1927 produced some fifty videos per year, working in a series for which he used clear titles: “Telling It All” (a total of seventy-­three videos that ran from 2006 to 2011), “Geriatric Thoughts” (thirteen videos in 2008–9), “Geriatric Cooking” (eight videos, 2008–13), and many other short series like “Looking Back,” “Geriatric Driving,” “Silver Surfers,” and finally a second mini-­series “Telling It All,” which ended with Oakley’s last video post “In Conclusion” (2014). If many of his other videos were not formally part of a series, Oakley addressed topics that he loved to talk about more often, such as new media technologies (iPad, Twitter, Skype, Photoshop), the YouTube community (“YouTube Changes”), his hobby (motorbikes), politics (“Obama”), his

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FIGURE 9.1  Thumbnails of Geriatric1927 video channel (source: YouTube).

view on teenage life (“Teenage Answers”), and various pressing topics (“Response to Hoax,” in which he denies being dead). For my argument in this chapter, I selected fifteen video posts, evenly distributed over the years, on some interesting subjects connected to age, generation, and experiences of the YouTube community. Conducting a close reading of how Oakley presented himself will also contribute to a better understanding of the main context, namely YouTube as a free video-­sharing website, including the many technological changes of the platform since its launch in 2005 that also impacted the YouTube community. In this respect, Geriatric1927, his fans, and many other early users were forced to reposition themselves time and again. Sometimes they would comply, other times they would resist. As noted by media scholar Van Dijck: “YouTube users were anything but complacent dues. They more than once wanted to restore the platforms ‘alternative’ function as a user-­generated content provider” (2013, 111). Especially the early adopters, or the first generation of users, considered themselves to be part of the original community with the authority to speak out and comment on yet another transition. Oakley was seen as one of them, articulating his view on this issue to the community more than once. The comments are interesting sources for understanding how “the community” (if there ever was one) developed and also how age and generation in relation to this specific new media technology were perceived. The comments represent a quite diverse mix of shared purposes, combined with rude reactions revealing ignorance and disrespect, as well as heated disputes about age issues. In general, we should appreciate a collection like this as a rich and seemingly endless digital archive of different voices. But it is not an easy source to work with from a research angle. The Geriatric1927 collection shows that many of the comments were not just posted right after the video’s

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upload, but rather accumulated over a period of approximately eight years. This has resulted in a non-­static, highly dynamic collection. For instance, in its first week, “First Try” attracted some 70,000 views, but after ten years the number of visitors had grown to more than three million. Moreover, at the time of the upload the vlog received almost 3,000 comments, but this number continued to grow until he died, when again another 300 comments were posted. Even today people visit his channel and add their responses.2

Becoming a YouTuber In September 2006, Peter Oakley, still modest and apprehensive about his role, took his first steps on YouTube with his “First Try” vlog. In this rather simple video, he explained that he had grown addicted to YouTube and felt eager to join the community. He chose as his username “Geriatric1927,” referring both to his status as a senior citizen and the year of his birth. It was an explicit attempt to make immediately clear to his viewers that he was an elderly person. Also, in the clip he was rather frank about his age: “And yes as you can see from the picture: I am an old person.” Before Oakley joined YouTube, he had explored other means of expression on the internet, such as chatrooms. He disliked the culture of hiding behind an avatar, however. In an interview for a newspaper, he later claimed that he did not want to pretend being “Dwayne from South London,” so he stopped visiting chatrooms (Digital Trends, May 19, 2011). When he learned about YouTube he saw it as an opportunity to communicate with others, without the possibility to hide or pretend to be someone else. Video, in that sense, is very transparent, even if authenticity is not a given. Around the same time, he started Geriatric1927, a girl with the username “lonelygirl15” quickly gained popularity with her vlogs about her everyday teenage life. She attracted millions of viewers. Not long after, this vlog turned out to be a hoax: the girl, Bree, was revealed to be a nineteen-­year-old actress who co-­ created and co-­produced this series with a professional writer and director. They capitalized on the basic characteristic of YouTube vlogs by showing the everyday life of ordinary people in an autobiographical, first-­person video diary. Many of her fans on YouTube felt betrayed. Although one follower also questioned Geriatric1927’s contribution (Zipster, September 15, 2006), his continuous presence, his softly-­spoken voice, and his calm attitude pleased many viewers as an authentic appearance in what they described as their YouTube community. On the day of his debut, he uploaded a second try in which he elaborated a bit more on his ideas, again asking for comments. It worked. The response to his first short videos was overwhelming. By the end of the week, his vlog was considered to be the best visited on YouTube. When Oakley entered YouTube, the platform had existed for only one year, but by that time, it had evolved into a fast growing and very dynamic

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community that stimulated thousands of people to share their self-­made amateur videos. The success was probably not foreseen by founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, who started YouTube as a free video-­sharing website in May 2005. Initially, it was designed as a video repository that could easily store and distribute self-­made videos and as such it was neither the first nor the only website. As Van Dijck (2013, 111) pointed out, YouTube hardly invented video-­sharing as a sociotechnical practice. But the great advantage of YouTube was that users could not only easily upload and share videos, but also tag them and add comments, as well as embed them, as in a blog. The numbers of people uploading, viewing, and commenting after one year were huge; the website was estimated to have some fifty million users worldwide, being one of the ten most popular online destinations. In October 2006, just one month after Geriatric1927 joined, Google bought YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars. Although many users were worried about Google’s plans, YouTube would continue to grow: in 2008 the platform hosted 85 million videos, many of which involved user-­generated content, even if this is not easy to measure. One of the reasons that Google bought YouTube, rather than investing in its own video server, was that YouTube enjoyed an enthusiastic and loyal crowd of users. According to the Search OnLine Journal (October 9, 2006), the success of YouTube was based on the fact that “YouTube has Community.” And it was exactly this element, being a community, that attracted Geriatric1927. Since Oakley was a longtime widower living in a rural area in the UK, web 2.0 technology enabled him to engage in an online community and gain social intimacy. Basically, he participated in what later came to be labeled a social networking site, using video as a source for establishing online social connections (boyd and Ellison 2007; Harley and Fitzpatrick 2008). According to Michael Strangelove (2010), amateur videos on YouTube stem from a specific practice, as they are a part of a process which encompasses not just the video uploads, but a whole range of responses varying from written comments, video replies, parodies, and likes. This also implies that the meaning and significance of amateur video are not just to be found in the text as such, but rather in the community that responds to it. And this communication has a special characteristic: sharing a video on YouTube meant to start a dialog, albeit a special dialog, one that is basically asynchronous because comments and replies occur long after the original moment of communication, marked by the video’s upload. Videos on YouTube feature a message from one to many but, other than in regular broadcasts, the interaction and responses are crucial elements. Geriatric1927 and many of his fellow users predominantly asked for reactions referring to other videos and in this way, they built their own networks of users. Geriatric1927, who started all his videos with the words “Hello YouTube,” was able to quickly build a network of committed supporters. From his

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earliest attempt, those who watched them (including many young people) wrote enthusiastic comments, in particular about his age: “Old people rock,” “Wow i never thought a 78 year old person could be on YouTube! Nice vid” etc. Of course, there were nasty comments as well: “GASP! Someone over 50 that can operate a computer!” or: “lol old man go to google video and you are boring!!! Boring!!!!!!!!!” or even more nasty: “When is he going to die so we can get rid of his corpse.” But the majority of the remarks were positive and shared by a group that already identified itself as a particular media generation equipped with the tech savviness required to join the community: “Still up to date with technology no matter what the year. In the words of my generation, “Kickass!” (Awesome!) I bow down to you dude,” someone wrote. As part of a more serious intergenerational communication (Harley and Fitzpatrick 2009) people offered tips and tricks that helped Oakley dealing with the technology. Although Oakley mainly used the format of sitting in the living room while talking to a webcam, he did like to play around, adding music (blues or jazz) to his clips and also funny titles. He made jokes, but also used little signs that would be meaningful only for some of his followers. He would for instance hang a T-shirt in the back with a clearly readable “Help the Aged” (“Merry Xmas,” December 11, 2008) Gradually, Geriatric1927 mastered this way of working within a small frame, both through his editing and through his varied staging of his domestic setting. Although his vlogs look quite simple, they are the result of a wide array of small decisions. Oakley would also be open to suggestions from his followers: some young people begged him to tell about his life. Oakley responded to this request with a long-­lasting series he would eventually continue for more than four years and some seventy-­three posts called “Telling It All.” This became quite a popular series; each video attracted thousands of viewers and many left sympathetic comments in which they explicitly made references to his age and to his use of new media technologies. Over the years he would remain a committed “YouTuber,” fervently defending what he felt to be his community. He devoted several videos to the annual anniversaries of the platform, sharing his love for it. In 2010, five years after the start, Oakley made a jubilee video in honor of YouTube’s fifth anniversary (“YouTube’s 5th Anniversary,” May 18, 2010) wishing “that my being here may have encouraged other older people to take part and thereby give a broader scope to the generations to the benefit of all.” He had much confidence in the future of the platform: To be part of this community has been something that has really enriched these latter years of my life and I’m so grateful to all of the other members, video vloggers that have accepted me in the way that they have and all the opportunities that is given me to travel the world and meet lots of people all over the place.

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But every now and then, he could be critical as well; especially when he was afraid his community was in danger of eroding because of a new policy by YouTube. During the last years of his online presence he sometimes felt out of touch with the platform, grumbling about yet a new feature or a new set of rules that disrupted his routines. He often voiced his disappointment and considered to stop vlogging more than once. At such moments, his more loyal subscribers would usually convince him to carry on.

Becoming a YouTube celebrity Almost immediately after his first appearances, Geriatric1927 became a YouTube sensation. As indicated, his video channel reached the number one position in just one week. After just a few days, he attracted 79,000 views and 6,500 subscribers, while he also received over 4,700 e-­mails. This instant success overwhelmed Peter Oakley who responded in a special blog post: “I just need to say thank you . . . this YouTube experience has been one of the major changes and breakthroughs in my life and given me a whole new world to experience” (“Telling It All,” part 1). On internet fora and in newspapers, one could see headlines like “Pensioner a Surprise YouTube Star” (Reuters, August 13, 2006). On August 17, 2006, a few weeks after his start, he expressed his concern about his sudden fame and spoke earnestly with his audience that he feared that his true identity and place of residence might be discovered. He did not want to talk to “the media”: But the only people I want to talk to are you. You people have taken me into your hearts and then encouraged me to continue and warmed my heart with your comments. I do read them all! And I go online every night to see what you have to say, and as long as you continue to tell me that you want me to carry on I will do so. You and all YouTube members are now my friends, and as are my friends I can talk with you in an uninhibited way, I can tell you all my secrets. I have nothing to say to the world in general. “Telling It All,” part 7 This video led to a great number of reactions of people agreeing wholeheartedly: Damn straight, my man! You’re totally New Media and we love you for it. I think you’ve captured exactly what it is about New Media and YouTube that’s unique. We’re all friends here as opposed to Professionals and Consumers. Stay the course and keep on keepin’ it real. We luv’s y’all. You don’t need “The Media.” None of us do. YouTube has superseded “Old Media.” Congratulations on being a pioneer!

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Oakley finally did talk to the press. One of his first public appearances on television was in BBC’s The Money Programme, March 2007. Gradually, he became a celebrity. And he came to like it. After he died, the newspaper repeated a claim Geriatrics1927 once made: “I have had my fifteen minutes of fame and enjoyed every minute of it” (The Independent on Sunday, March 25, 2014). It brought him the attention he needed as a lonely widower, but it also gave him lots of opportunities to travel. Over the years, Geriatric1927 became the icon of the older generation who wanted to discover the internet and teach others how to master the computer. In 2008, he made a series of three videos, entitled “Silver Surfers,” in which he interviewed his peers about their use of the computer. Geriatric1927’s private mission became a more public one when he teamed up with initiatives in the UK and participated in Silver Surfers’ days and other activities. In his view, such activities were necessary because reports at the time showed that seniors did perhaps not so much lack access but missed the skills and courage to participate. In 2007, 16 percent of the pensioners spent time on the internet, in contrast to some 65 percent of those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-­four (The Guardian, August 24, 2007). As Burgess and Green (2009) explain, the so-­called digital divide should not be understood as a lack of access of the older generation but rather as a “participation gap,” in the sense of being committed to join in and become active as users who create online content (70). Being a YouTube celebrity means performing special features. According to Theresa Senft (2013), this new form of fame should be considered as a kind of “micro-­celebrity” by which she indicates a specific technique of self-­presentation of people in an online environment that stimulates users to view themselves as a public persona to be consumed by others. Such a technique requires a specific way of communicating, as a micro-­celebrity blends audiences and communities, two groups that traditionally required different modes of address: “audiences desire someone to speak at them; communities desire someone to speak with them” (350). Geriatric1927 learned all this while communicating with his followers through video responses, give reactions on their comments, emailing back, or by making guest appearances in other YouTubers’ videos and vice versa. He and his followers considered themselves to be “friends,” even though that might be somewhat of an overloaded term, as suggested by Marwick and boyd (2010). At the same time, it is quite possible indeed to refer to this social space as being marked by a kind of “digital intimacy” (Thompson, 2008), which sometimes spilled over into the real world, as some of Oakley’s YouTube friends would also go to his house to meet him in real life. Although Oakley liked his place in the YouTube community, which would uplift him when he was down and encourage him to keep on vlogging, engaging in this kind of online communication was not always easy for

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Oakley. After the novelty of this old man on YouTube had worn off, something Oakley also admits in one of his videos, the number of views went down. He kept on making new series, but it was hard work because he did not always have a topic to share. “Hello YouTube, what shall I talk about today?” he would ask his followers (“Shades of Grey,” September 10, 2013). In one of his later posts, “When is the Time to Leave?” (March 26, 2012), he would wonder if he should leave YouTube: “There is very little place for us older people here,” he would tell his audience, and he continued about his diminishing popularity: If the figures went down to single figures, then I would think I haven’t got many friends to talk to. Maybe at that time I could give my Skype address and we could have our own little private social network I suppose. This quote reveals that Oakley considered YouTube to be primarily about communication and building a social network. This view guided many of his actions and explains his hesitance to become an active participant in the new trend that came to be so dominant after the initial chaotic years of YouTube: how to monetize the platform and how to make the committed user part of this development.

Becoming a Partner According to David Weinberger (2007), YouTube is a meta-­business that does not produce content as such, but that provides services for uploading content. This content is delivered through corporate activities (broadcast media) and community practice (user-­generated content), and this ambiguous situation, as argued by Burgess and Green, sometimes caused “discomfort and uncertainty with the meaning and uses of YouTube” (2009, 5). In their view, this uncertainty follows from the multiple roles of YouTube as being “a high-­volume website, a broadcast platform, a media archive, or a social network” (5). Each of these different roles come with different expectations, because they imply “various forms of cultural, social, and economic values,” which are “collectively produced by users en masse, via their consumption, evaluation, and entrepreneurial activities” (5). These different positions resulted in endless debates, in particular among its early users who saw themselves as the real participants by virtue of having been there from the start. Van Dijck (2013) described how, before Google bought YouTube, volunteers monitored the site and took pride in a kind of community-­based philosophy. After Google acquired the platform, the company promised to keep the community identity intact. So, for instance, YouTube was allowed to keep its own terms of services. Gradually but steadily, however, changes were implemented, and this usually prompted heated discussions.

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One of the hotly debated topics was the introduction of the so-­called Partner Program introduced by Google in December 2007 as a step forward to monetize on YouTube. The program allowed content providers to earn money through banner ads placed in the videos. YouTube would then share its revenues, based on the number of views, with the content providers. Initially, these were mainly professional broadcast companies, but Google developed a policy to enable non-­professional users to make money as well. Initially, Geriatric1927 took a clear position: in his video titled “Money, Money, Money” (February 1, 2007) he opposed YouTube’s new profit-­ sharing scheme. According to Oakley “money and friends are very uncomfortable bedfellows,” and that is why he would say if YouTube offered him the opportunity to become a partner: No thank you very much. I just like to retain my circle of friends that I have made here in this community and that is all the reward that I personally want. . . . Like a grandad, I will sit back as always and watch developments and we will see what happens . . .

FIGURE 9.2  Peter Oakley at the Google office in London, still from “Partners and revenue sharing” (May 8, 2008) (source: YouTube).

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Eventually, Oakley was invited to join the partner program. Google made a real effort to get him on board by inviting him to the head office of YouTube in London. In his vlog posted on May 8, 2008, he reported on this trip. He acknowledges that he had been rather cynical about the revenue sharing project, especially about the fair distribution of money, but now he thought the offer convincing. He decided to join in but wanted to explain his “U-turn” in a vlog: I was down at Google and in the YouTube offices, ah it was fascinating: I can tell you there is a whole buzz of excitement in those offices and they are conscious of everybody who is on YouTube. . . . While I was there they went on again about would I become a partner and so I said yes okay. In the comments, people responded to Geriatric1927’s new position very generously. Despite his U-turn, people still believed in his integrity as they appreciated his honesty.

Becoming YouTube’s Grandad When Peter Oakley died in March 2014 and his subscribers learned of the sad news, many of them responded. They would add comments in the vlogs Oakley had uploaded earlier. Some of them produced a R.I.P. video. The various responses went in different directions: people paid their respects to Oakley, while also a more general process of remembering started in which the memories of the early years stimulated feelings of nostalgia about “Old Skool” YouTube. But how did this shift in the way the age of Geriatric1927 was perceived and valued converge with an awareness of age regarding the medium YouTube itself? It is possible to discern a pattern in the many comments on Oakley’s YouTube videos, provided by users both during his life and after his passing. Initially, users responded to Geriatric1927’s appearance on YouTube enthusiastically but also somewhat surprised. They used terms like “old” and “senior,” but also “grandpa,” “grandfather,” “gran(d)dad.” The terms had specific meaning: users mentioned his age and his position within a natural generation, especially when they wrote how they wished their grandparents would be as active on computers as Geriatric1927. A kind of familial intergenerational relationship developed; some of the users even asked Oakley if they could adopt him as their grandfather. Gradually, the meaning of the word “grandad” shifted: from a grandfather on YouTube, Oakley became more and more the grandfather of this platform, if not, in another version, of the internet as a whole. His age and the way he used his age to give advice to the young and to his peers—sometimes serious and sometimes with a smile, but always in a very benevolent way—showed them

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that YouTube was not for young people only. Amidst all the “trash and shit” present on the internet, and YouTube in particular, the presence of this elderly man thus came to represent an alternative to the medium’s quickly established stereotypical usage or discourse (“When is the Time to Leave,” March 26, 2012), with Oakley adding and embodying another level of respectability and gravity (Fitzpatrick and Hartley 2009). By the time Oakley disappeared from the front page, he increasingly became associated with the early YouTube era: a “legend” or even “hero” of that special period when it still seemed that YouTube was a community-­driven platform, a social space for communication immune to processes of monetization, which would transform it into a much more commercial platform. Interestingly, however, comments about age no longer solely applied to Geriatric1927 as a person but also to YouTube as a medium: it developed a history with Geriatric1927 as its grandfather. In other words, individual media age as well. They evolve over the years together with their users. And they also develop a biography. Here, we can detect a double shift taking place because as it happened, in retrospect, Oakley was acknowledged as one of the founding members of the first generation of users. But by making these comments, these users inserted themselves into this history. Their participation in fact helped to define a particular generation of users who had been busy exploring and exploiting this new platform. Their active identification with this platform automatically contributed to the construction of a particular user generation. Their efforts in the early years came to be remembered as a defining moment for a generation of users. If age was a crucial factor in Oakley’s presence on YouTube, now it had also become a factor for its early users. They, too, had grown older and started reflecting on and rediscovering its past. Or as one of them wrote: “I hadn’t been here for a while, but now I remember.” Although YouTube, as a platform, has been around for more than a decade, it is possible to observe groups of users with a specific sense of belonging, or a “we-­sense” created along the way (quoted in Möckel, chapter 7). After his demise, Peter Oakley became a YouTube legend, a kind of mythical figure in a social construction based on what Wachelder (2016) described as a process of hypermediate regeneration. By embracing a particular memory discourse, it seems, users developed an “ex-­post, explicit (re)construction of a collective generational identity” of this once ideal community (7). In other words, groups of YouTube users developed and acquired a shared collective biography, which in turn informs the history of YouTube as a platform.

Notes 1 Geriatric1927’s YouTube videos are accessible on his channel: Peter Oakley, “The internet granddad,” https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9pKXHIbEZXelvUgy NIStMw

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2 For this chapter, I collected the comments linked to the selected videos using an open source tool that makes it possible to scrape YouTube comments and reproduce them in a cvs document. It allowed me to go back in time, as YouTube does not facilitate a historical search query. By applying a historical discourse analysis of these comments, a focus on particular uses of the words “old,” “age,” “generation,” “grandpa,” “grandad,” and “legend” reveals much about the way other YouTubers positioned him during his presence online before his death, as well after it. See for the YouTube Comment Scraper: http://ytcomments. klostermann.ca/

PART THREE

Amateurs

10 Amateurs: Naïve Artists or Everyday Experts? Patrice Flichy

It is increasingly observed that the web has evolved into a kingdom of amateurs. The mass internet of the early twenty-­first century differs from the dominant media structure developed in the previous century for this very reason: amateurs now play a pivotal role, if they do not run the show. In the past, amateurs used to be involved in quite marginal media such as fanzines, free radio stations, and community TV channels, but today the efforts of amateurs are far from marginal anymore: they are at the heart of the overall communication system. Although amateurs may not have specific competences or qualifications, their voices have become ubiquitous and indispensable. The aim of this chapter is to explore some of the implications of this ongoing revolution. As I will argue, the growing media presence and influence of amateurs is not just a fleeting trend associated with web 2.0, one that is bound to be over soon, after the introduction of web 3.0. The opposite is true. Over the last two centuries we have in fact witnessed a dual process of democratization: political as well as educational. More and more evidence suggests that we are entering a new era—that of a genuine democratization of competences.

Who are amateurs? Let me start out by discussing some general characteristics of amateurs. We commonly understand an amateur to be a person who does something on

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the basis of fairly little know-­how. But the word “amateur” is actually derived from the Latin amare, which means “to like.” In this original meaning, the word is closely connected to a sense of pleasure and choice. Seen in this light, the transformation of the meaning of the word “hobby” is interesting as well. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, “hobby” would refer to “the person, thing or occupation that pleases one most.” Toward the end of the century, however, the word “hobby” was basically used to refer to “voluntarily working alone at home with a few relatively simple tools” (Gelber 1999, 29). Handicrafts and collecting have long been regarded as prototypical hobbies. In French, we use the expression violon d’Ingres as a translation of “hobby.” This is a fine expression indeed, going back to the painter Ingres, who was nearly as good at playing the violin as he was at painting. As this expression suggests, amateurs, like hobbyists, might be almost as proficient or competent at something, even if they do not operate in a professional sphere. To address this issue more fully, it is instructive to consider Howard Becker’s analysis in Art Worlds (1982), where he distinguishes four kinds of artist. The two most common categories are relevant here, which he labels integrated artists and naïve artists. Unlike the former, naïve artists do not have access to artistic training, nor do they have an artistic point of reference. Moreover, they work alone, in the absence of a collaborative network. By contrast, integrated artists belong to the social world of art. Another scholar who did interesting work on the subject of amateurs is Richard Sennett. In The Craftsman, Sennett (2008) argues that each individual has very rich “every-­day expertise,” possessing knowledge and having competences that are clearly distinct from the elites’ expertise. The things he observes to be going on in firms and workplaces appears to be surfacing throughout society. His reflection reminds us that the word “expert” has in fact two meanings: a traditional one (“a person who has become skillful through experience”) and a modern one (“a specialist”). It is the notion of expertise acquired through experience that Sennett is attempting to revive in The Craftsman. In this context, it is perhaps useful to call the specialist a “top-­down expert” and the person who has skills a “bottom-­up expert.” Sennett’s approach echoes the analyses on the “art of doing” by Michel de Certeau. Thirty years ago, de Certeau wrote about the “invention of everyday life” by ordinary individuals who poach knowledge and develop dissident and original practices that could be called bricolages and that may lead to real discoveries. He examined the “disseminated proliferation” of anonymous and “perishable” creations that sustain life and cannot be accumulated (Giard 1990, VII). He wanted to restore the role and significance of “the anonymous crowd of inventive and crafty practitioners.” Accordingly, we observed the appearance of a “ ‘gift’ economy,” “an aesthetics of ‘hits’,” and “an ethics of ‘tenacity’ ” (46). De Certeau’s approach is attentive to

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everyday life, as well as to the connection between the art of doing (art de faire) and the art of living (art de vivre). During the same period, Ivan Illich (1971) insisted on the fact that individuals need to get back in touch with their ability to take care of themselves, rather than relying on “incapacitating professions” that keep human beings away from understanding (themselves). He argued vehemently that individuals have the ability to acquire competences on their own and to share their knowledge. Such learning or knowledge acquisition, in this case, is the fruit of desire, of pleasure. His notion of sharing rested on the idea that the content of learning is less important than the people with whom one can exchange it. Indeed, in Illich’s “society without schools,” transmitting what one has learnt must be recognized as a basic right, just like free speech. With the advent of the mass internet and the participatory web, Illich’s denunciation of the monopoly of schools and medical institutions is taking on a whole new dimension. Finally, any examination of amateurs will have to pay attention to studies on the connection between leisure and work. Some of the scholarly literature on this topic starts from a complete split between work and leisure. In this respect, Steven Gelber (1999) discussed two models: the compensatory model, in which leisure is seen to compensate for the hardness of work, and the “spill-­over leisure” model, “which extends workplace ennui into the workers’ free time.” In contrast, pragmatic sociologists have been inclined to refuse such dualism between work and leisure. For example, John Dewey, in his 1916 study on Democracy and Education, argued that it was absurd to think that workers could be mobilized by increasing the number of leisure hours, claiming such an idea “merely maintains the former dualism of work and leisure,” and that “education most directly intended for leisure should strengthen as much as possible the efficiency of work and the satisfaction derived from it” (Dewey 2005). Unlike work-­oriented training, such education “should foster emotional and intellectual habits that enable one to enjoy leisure to the full.” Dewey reminds us that we must analyze work, leisure, play, and art in their mutual interaction, as activities in which individuals involve themselves deeply and from which they may derive the pleasure of achievement.

Amateurs in the digital era At first glance, proliferating amateur practices on the internet may look like a revolution of expertise. Thanks to IT and the internet, new amateurs have acquired knowledge and know-­how enabling them to rival experts. A new type of individual is emerging, the pro-­am (“professional-­amateur”) (Leadbeater and Miller 2004). Pro-­ams base their amateur activities on those of the professionals; within the context of active, solitary, or collective

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hobbies, they wish to re-­conquer whole sectors of social activity, such as the arts, science, and politics, which have conventionally been dominated by professionals. We are thus entering a knowledge society, suggesting that anyone can access the knowledge and know-­how they wish to put into practice. The most enthusiastic observers celebrate the revenge of the amateurs: amateurs are now defying the experts who tended to misuse their knowledge to protect their social status and, more generally, their power. Today, thanks to the “collective intelligence” provided by the web, a simple amateur can mobilize knowledge that is identical to that of the expert. Individuals with the latest computing equipment can for example connect to the web to form a “smart mob” (Lévy 1997; Rheingold 2002). Not everyone seems to welcome this revolution, which is transforming yesterday’s autodidacts and “ignoramuses” into certified experts. Some fear that mediocre amateurs will replace talented professionals, and therefore they reject the “cult of the amateur” that is supposedly destroying our culture (Keen 2007a). In their logic, various traditional media fall victim to a disaster scenario: peer to peer technology has already begun to kill the record industry, while soon it will cause the demise of cinema as well; blogs have decimated the conventional press; Wikipedia has been replacing a wide range of print-­based encyclopedias; videos posted on sharing websites will soon do away with network TV programming, and so on. This scenario hardly accounts for the various gains of our digital era, however. For one thing, we see fewer “naïve” artists and more bottom-­up experts. Moreover, it is safe to argue that due to the internet we are witnessing a democratization of competences. Just as a political democracy will empower citizens who are largely ignorant about public matters, so this new democratization affords possibilities to acquire basic competences through leisure activities. This phenomenon is very much connected to the level of education and new computing tools. The democratization of competences has two origins: an increase in people’s level of knowledge because they spend more time at school; and the possibilities afforded by the internet to circulate knowledge and to share one’s opinions with a wider audience. The new digital amateurs are geared to pursuing more competences in various fields. Rather than seeking to replace professional experts or even to act as experts, they aim to develop “common expertise” acquired through experience. As such, they occupy a wide range of positions between the ignorant on the one hand and the specialist on the other. Their expertise is acquired little by little, day by day, through practice and experience, modestly or passionately. If one can speak of a process of hybridization between amateurs and professionals, I prefer to speak of a world “in-­between.” Amateurs find themselves halfway between non-­professionals and professionals, between the ignorant and the expert, and between ordinary citizens and administrators and/or politicians. The internet facilitates this in-­between position; it provides amateurs with tools, affordances, and gateways.

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What is the nature of the social economic environment in which amateurs operate? More often than not, their activities are non-­commercial. Moreover, they are rarely on their own. Most of them act within the parameters of a collective, which allows them to obtain opinions, advice, and expertise, as well as to compare evaluations, debate issues, and sometimes find an audience. The internet provides them with a wide array of virtual communities, where they can share in similar experiences or tastes and acquire new or more competences.

Different types of amateurs Apart from amateur artists who express themselves through individual productive activities, another type of amateur inhabits the artistic world: the culture lover, the fan dedicated to the celebration of a professional artist’s work. In this regard, Henry Jenkins (1992) has argued that fans can be highly inventive, and that they occupy a central position between the consumption of culture and its reinvention. Amateurs have developed similar poaching practices in the political field by insisting that they take part in public debates in their own way and on their own terms. They may invest themselves fully in a specific debate or, conversely, jump from one issue to the next. When it comes to controversial issues in which they themselves or their friends and relatives are directly involved, well-­informed amateurs demonstrate their ability to take part in complex debates, or they seek to involve themselves by taking up the space that separates ordinary citizens from professional politicians. These amateurs are different from conventional activists in that their involvement is temporary, marked by limited objectives and focused on concrete protests. They choose to organize into groups of autonomous individuals who engage with isolated causes, rather than devoting themselves in a sustained fashion to major political projects and concerns. They cherish authenticity, being true to themselves, more than loyalty to some grand cause. Finally, amateurs may move beyond their in-­betweenness by acting as genuine substitutes for specialist experts, be it on television or in the domain of science. On television in many Western countries, amateurs are increasingly called upon, at the expense of experts. In debates, producers and presenters increasingly seem to address amateurs rather than specialists. In entertainment programs, professional actors and singers are being replaced by the Mr. Everybody of reality TV. In various online contexts, amateurs eagerly contribute to encyclopedias and analyses of current affairs. Just as original television—used as a tool by the various powers-­that-be— was increasingly replaced by “neo-­television” (Eco 1984), which seeks to capitalize on the authenticity of ordinary testimonies, so the internet has become the instrument of laypersons’ collective brainpower. This is the case

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not only for amateurs of knowledge, but also for the amateur production of knowledge, developed either in opposition to or in cooperation with specialist experts. Within the framework of their hobby, amateurs may challenge major social divides. When they enter a territory that theoretically is not theirs, this involves an encounter between diverse social practices that do not always have the same legitimacy but that nevertheless coexist and mingle. When amateurs become experts through their experience, they also extend the field of social practices beyond that of legitimate practices, moving into the world of art, abstract scientific knowledge, political debate, and so on. To some degree, they counter reason and rational production with bricolage and emotion. The web and the various search engines have profoundly altered the process of accessing knowledge. Books and articles are no longer indexed solely by librarians. Users can create hypertext links between documents on their own. Moreover, big search engines like Google automatically index all the documents accessible on the web, allowing expert and lay users to find the information they are looking for on their own. On most websites, internet users can comment on the texts they read. But there is more. With the sharing of websites and social networks, web 2.0 has made it possible to interlink amateurs’ competences. This expertise acquired through experience, which was previously scattered and confined to a local context, can thus be aggregated and made accessible to all. Do all these possibilities make the internet the “medium of the abolition of mediation” (Loveluck 2008, 165), as some observers put it? Are various media-­related professionals, such as librarians and journalists, becoming superfluous because citizens can themselves produce and circulate information? More generally, “the boundaries of text are dissolving, and with them the author’s authority” (156–7), but does this also change the status of “those who know”? The changes we have been witnessing since the introduction of the internet are in fact more complex and far-­reaching. It is often said that today individuals can do without professional intermediaries, and that their input can be replaced by advice and opinions from new actors, but this process does not simply involve straightforward substitution. Internet users, often qualified as “ordinary” people, are actually amateurs who developed a certain level of expertise, for instance in evaluation and criticism. Furthermore, their advice and opinions are processed by computer systems that aggregate them and make them available. This activity, called “intermediation” or “infomediation,” relies on a socio-­technical system in which internet users represent one factor only. New digital tools have come into play and while intermediaries still have a role of selection, they are assisted by information technologies. Online newspapers, for example, must select and verify the information they receive, and this is still a task of journalists, even though at the same time their professional activities may have changed drastically.

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A similar argument can be made about the role of readers. Readers can access a mass of information on their own today; they may more easily question the authority of authors or experts; and they can coproduce text, as in the case of Wikipedia, or, more modestly, comment on it. Ultimately, amateurs do not so much replace specialist experts as intermediaries. Rather, they occupy the free space between the layperson and the specialist, which is why they are at the heart of the democratization of competences. It is possible to define two key roles for amateurs: to create and to assess/ evaluate/appreciate. The one makes, creates, and invents, like a craftsman; the other knows how to uncover good things and explain them, like a critic or devotee. Of course, these two roles may well be combined in some proportion in a single amateur. If the conventional art world tends to make a sharp distinction between the artist and the critic, in the world of amateurs the two may be intertwined, causing the entanglement of production and discourse, of creation and judgment. Amateurs, first of all, choose their field of practice, define their individual projects freely, and act out of pleasure, depending on their passions and what matters to them. Gradually, they develop an expertise, as the result of the experience from which they derive pleasure. What distinguishes amateurs from professionals is not so much their lesser competences but a different form of engagement in social practices. Their activities do not depend on the constraints of a job or an institution; they start in their own choices and preferences. They are guided by curiosity, emotion, and passion, and their attachment to practices is often shared with others. Below I will explore these concerns in more detail by looking at three domains of digital practices: arts and culture; the public sphere; and the production of knowledge.

Amateurs in arts and culture Most people will associate “amateur practices” first of all with the artistic and cultural domain. In this context, amateurism is conceived as an expression of a modern individualism, one that values self-­expression and produces self-­confidence. The practices and activities of amateurs may also be motivated by other interests, however, such as the quest for symbolic or financial rewards. The investment of amateurs in their activity may vary of course. Some will consider their hobby merely a simple pastime, while others may be passionate about it. In this last respect, Olivier Donnat (2009) discerns two approaches: amateurs see their passionate involvement as some “secret garden,” tended with utmost discretion, largely hidden from relatives and professionals, or amateurs display total commitment to their hobby, it serving even as a cornerstone of their identity. If the former will be able to

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set limits to their activity, the latter are driven by an overpowering need to engage in it. A related aspect is the role of creative work or cultural production by amateurs, notably on the internet (in music, literature, theater, etc.). If some amateurs view their activities as recreational without having any artistic aspiration, others consider them to be essential personal activities that function as a source of strength and provide them with a space of their own—a space they may want to share with others by publicly circulating their production. In addition to amateur artists who express themselves through individual productive activities, there is another type of cultural amateur: the devotee or fan. Such amateurs have selected a topic or cultural genre to which they are fully devoted, and on which they become veritable specialists. As die-­ hard fans, they trace and collect everything about their subject, such as a movie star or pop idol, but they may also aim to appropriate their subject creatively by compiling videos or remixing music tracks. Yet their creative interpretation is secondary to their fandom. Such a creative approach allows fans to build an identity for themselves, and to present it as part of who they are to the outside world. There is another element differentiating fans in terms of how they relate to culture. Amateur artists can adopt two radically different positions. They can opt for a subordinate position vis-à-­vis professional interpreters or popular music groups, to stress their modest ambition in relation to that which they admire (even if they hope to gain some measure of fame through their activity), or they may decide to adopt a marginal position by stressing that they merely produce for their own pleasure or that of their friends and relatives. They seek neither recognition nor compliance with the rules of legitimate production. This mode of artistic production is, in the words of Howard Becker (1982), “naïve art.” Compared to amateur artists, fans do not have more respect for cultural hierarchies. Their fascination with mass cultural productions is rather subversive: they seek to use them for their own purposes or rather to redirect them toward themselves. This paradox, which is at the heart of fans’ activities, means that they are regularly interacting with the producers (Fiske 1992). Their activity, like that of amateur artists, is therefore embedded within an identity-­building process. They seek to distinguish themselves through their attachment to certain cultural productions. They live intensely, on a day-­to-day basis, with the images and productions of their idols, all the while seeking to get closer to them in an almost symbiotic community. Fans can use the work they love in three ways. At a basic level, they can coproduce it by reinterpreting it. They can also build a community of consumers who comment on the work and, more generally, use it as a focus for expressing and exchanging all sorts of ideas and practices, which may even involve dress codes. Finally, they can prolong its cultural production, for example by using it for their own purposes. Thus, they poach from

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available fields of text. These creative consumption activities allow fans to build an identity for themselves, and to present it to the outside world. Because so many amateur artists and fans are presenting their work on the same video-­sharing platforms, such as YouTube and Dailymotion, these provide a crucial framework for access to culture today. They function like a melting pot, a seemingly random juxtaposition of images and sounds. Amateur artists present their most recent performances. Fans can make a series popular by offering an excerpt, increase the fame of a band by posting a concert recording, or decide to put their home-­produced remixes online. In spite of the success of these sites and platforms, they hardly replace conventional television programming. Rather, they serve as a space for presenting a hotchpotch of sounds and images in which the various hobbies and tastes of amateurs feature prominently.

Amateurs and the public sphere If artistic amateur practices have been enriching the world of culture, in similar ways amateur political activity is expanding the realm of citizenship. This activity consists in particular of the production of opinions and participation in the new agorae provided by the blogosphere and social networks. Amateurs of public affairs are citizens who wish to inform themselves independently, to openly express their opinions, and to develop new forms of involvement. They are suspicious of specialist experts and do not always trust elected officials or political representatives. In essence, this is what interactive democracy is about (Rosanvallon 2011). This kind of critical reflection sheds light on the shifting boundary between private points of view and public discussion, as well as on the strong presence of emotions and private experience in discussion on public events. Amateurs’ actions and networks can serve not only as checks and balances in democratic systems, but also as whistleblowers, or to stage virtual demonstrations. The internet is a valuable tool for enhancing citizenship through facilitating public expression by all citizens. This may take the form of writing an article on one’s blog or for an online newspaper, participating in debates on social networks, or, more generally, seeking to convince others or contest their views. Through these various activities, amateurs can write for the pleasure of it, and interact or debate with friends or strangers. But they can also interfere in the political world by challenging a decision, speaking out against a political choice, and offering an alternative. In the field of politics, the internet may be deployed in two ways: it can serve as a tool for expression and public debate, or as a new configuration of action. In turn, this implies two different roles for amateurs: they present themselves as amateurs of politics or they get politically involved as amateurs (or grassroots

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activists). These online activists tend to differ from conventional activists in that their involvement is short-­lived, has limited objectives and focuses on concrete protests. They choose to organize into groups of autonomous individuals who prefer isolated causes to large political projects. Authenticity prevails over loyalty. As a channel for interaction, the web allows grassroots activists to be heard and reduces the distance between leadership and the grassroots level, but this also comes with the risk that the most vocal people online become self-­appointed representatives for some cause, without being elected or assigned to do so. Their legitimacy is exclusively derived from their ability to present themselves effectively in this new sphere. Clearly, the internet has been affecting the nature of social and political relations within democratic systems. In this respect, political scientists have referred to a “structural affinity” between the web and the “anti-­globalization” movement (Cardon and Granjon 2010). This movement, which seems to gain momentum each year when the World Social Forum meets, relies on a transnational network for activists. Information must be circulated, synthesized, and sometimes translated, before being fed to a network without a center. As such this model contrasts with that of political parties, for which the internet is rather a means to re-­centralize their efforts. In the alter-­ globalism neo-­activism of the social forums, there is a political project attuned to the internet model; a fresh attempt at a reticular democracy is evolving, which ties in with civil society’s involvement. As Pierre Rosanvallon points out, one of the major characteristics of the new social movements is their pursuit of an agenda of watching, denouncing, and recording—an agenda aimed at underpinning a “counter-­democracy.” He adds that the web is ideally suited to this type of activity indeed (Rosanvallon 2006, 68 and 75). It is possible, in sum, to identify two modes of network democracy. In the first mode it acts as a force that compels elected representatives to take citizens into account also outside of peak election periods or that encourages journalists to report on less obvious or less visible events. In this sense, network democracy may serve as a counter-­power. In the second mode ordinary citizens, as amateurs connected to IT networks, acquire real power, for instance, by writing blogs that others use as reference or that give rise to unconventional electoral campaigns. Amateur practices may result in the production of information and opinions that matter. As modest as these may seem, these practices have meanwhile developed into a central force in our social and political domain.

Amateurs and the production of knowledge Finally, I briefly consider the role of the amateur as a knowledge producer. The participation of amateurs in knowledge production is hardly a new

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phenomenon. Their contribution was particularly important, for example, in the natural sciences during the nineteenth century, while it also played a prominent role in the various academic societies devoted to the study of local cultures, traditional ways of life, or archaeological sites. Today, the role of amateurs has significantly changed, however. The amateur production of knowledge is no longer the prerogative of restricted groups, having become a mass activity. Above all, the level of education has improved considerably, and many individuals have acquired competences that allow them to carry out studies, write reports, and express well-­founded opinions. Furthermore, IT tools are allowing for this type of intellectual activity to develop on a mass scale. The internet has made it possible for everyone to find ways to advertise or disseminate their views or products. Amateurs of knowledge share their experiences and formalize everyday knowledge, but they also produce knowledge themselves, either by collaborating with scientists or by developing counter-­expertise. They use the internet in two ways: to conduct citizen science (crowd science) and to share knowledge, through popularization. Botanist and naturalist sciences are a good example of this crowd science. In the US, eBird, a project launched by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, was launched to equip North American amateurs in order to facilitate their observational work and to gather the data in a database accessible to everyone. The Tela Botanica, which has managed to mobilize some 10,000 professional and amateur botanists, also revised its entire nomenclature of plants in France. In dozens of other projects, amateurs come together and collaborate with scientific institutions such as the Muséum d’histoire naturelle. For twenty years, members of the Suivi Temporel des Oiseaux Communs have been gathering data on declining and threatened bird populations in specific areas. All these projects corresponded to a contemporary concern: nature conservation. In this context, the internet provided framing devices to unify the collection of data and a network to process them. Compared to professional scientists, amateurs may represent a “lower” level of expertise, also because they often operate in a more local context. Put differently, amateurs produce situated knowledge, whereas scientists are more likely to develop global knowledge, valid in all situations. But if local knowledge cannot be applied universally, it can distinguish itself through precision and descriptive detail. While some authors celebrate these “citizen sciences” (Charvolin, Micoud, and Nyhart 2007) that enable the public at large to participate in developing knowledge, collaboration between amateurs and scientists is often difficult. Amateurs may be courted by scientists insofar as they constitute free and abundant labor scattered across various territories—but they may also be suspected of being incompetent. In response, scientists may seek to control their work by imposing rigorous protocols. Such an attempt at regulation may easily fail, however, for

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amateurs are not always willing to be disciplined, and may decide to quit the project. Apart from problems of coordination, the development of “citizen science” challenges the distinction between scientific work and the amateur’s enthusiasm. In the sociological tradition of Schultz and Garfinkel, it is relevant to consider, as does Florian Charvolin (2009), that there is no essential difference between scientific work and the work of amateurs: they use similar cognitive processes. Interestingly, this view underscores that amateurs are not just servants of science, but contributors in their own right. As regards the process of democratization of competences, which lies at the heart of amateur activity, there is not so much a distinction between scientists on the one hand and information gatherers on the other; rather, they both engage in a co-­construction of scientific knowledge and know-­how. From the angle of interactionist sociology of science, they work on a “boundary object” (Star and Griesemer 1989), suited to amateurs and experts alike. Apart from the issue of crowd science, amateurs may also seek to disseminate existing knowledge. Take the example of Wikipedia, the best known of the knowledge-­sharing websites. First, Wikipedia is not an arena for scientific publications but a site for popularization; it does not produce any new knowledge, but instead publishes existing knowledge. Its popularity is evidenced by the fact that it is one of the ten most visited websites in the world. Wikipedia is an extremely rich encyclopedia. The French-­language version alone contains over 1.8 million articles, ranging from specialized scientific knowledge and disciplines taught to pupils and students, to professional and popular knowledge related to various practices (DIY, gardening, pets, local culture, etc.). Sport, with close to 100,000 articles, is a plebiscite field. In some respects, Wikipedia is a scientific encyclopedia that can be compared to the great encyclopedias such as the Britannica and Universalis,1 and which, like them, is used by the scientific community. On the other hand, Wikipedia can also be likened to a popular encyclopedia that provides practical knowledge. In this world of popularized knowledge, we find knowledge with high and low levels of legitimacy side by side. Each sector defines its own rules of eligibility. In football, only clubs that participate in national competitions can publish an article; in literature, authors must have published at least two books. Crowd science attributes the same value to amateurs as do collaborative online encyclopedias and medical educational websites. After learning to use the tools, the “unqualified” can familiarize themselves with a problem and take a stand on issues that are usually dealt with by specialist experts only. Yet science “in the wild” is not about to replace laboratory science. The aim of scientific and technological democracy is not to replace specialist experts by amateurs. Wikipedia allows amateurs simply to popularize knowledge that they did not develop, and on discussion websites on health, patients do not so much aim to replace doctors but seek to better collaborate with

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them in order to take control of their own health. In all of these areas, the internet allows for a technological democracy that recognizes the amateurs’ investment and the value of expertise acquired through experience.

Conclusion As my argument has established, modern amateurism is symptomatic of three major developments in our society. First, amateurism is closely linked to contemporary individualism. It reflects individuals’ desire to construct their identity, to develop personal skills or talents, and to engage in activities that are pleasurable to them. Their specific amateur activity offers individuals a sense of satisfaction that they may not always find in their work. Their search for identity through some amateur activity stimulates them to express their talents, to demonstrate their uniqueness. Moreover, the elaboration of their digital identity may provide them with recognition and allow them to build relationships. While most amateurs will not be primarily motivated by self-­serving interests, such as financial gains, they will be inspired by the opportunities to derive symbolic gratification from their activity (such as pride or renown). Second, the rise of amateurs is closely bound up with the movement of dissemination and expansion of knowledge and competences. Amateurs tend to put a significant effort into learning and training. The expertise they accumulate is essential to their attachment to specific practices; it is also a crucial part of the construction of their respective identities. The new knowledge they acquire may belong to a variety of domains, such as culture, art, the media, science, technology, and public issues. Importantly, this knowledge often transcends that of conventional educational disciplines of institutions and applies more broadly to popular culture, practical knowledge, technological bricolage, political protest, etc. Finally, amateurs and their activities contribute to a more democratic society. In such a society, individuals are considered to have a certain number of competences that can be connected to others through systems of sharing and cooperation. Another relevant effect of the rise of the amateur is that individuals no longer blindly follow the authority of experts, critics, engineers, scholars, doctors, or politicians. Although, occasionally, amateurs will have developed so much competence that they may well replace expert knowledge, they are mainly motivated to develop their own views and opinions and to be able to defend them. Owing to the internet, amateurs can access a mass of information that was previously unavailable to them, and this information helps them to argue critically and to better evaluate the views of experts. They can now obtain the resources and build the self-­ confidence to stand up to professionals, question them, keep an eye on them, or even challenge them by arguing their own opinions coherently. The

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growing culture of amateur expertise has caused specialist experts to be taken off their pedestal. Amateurs can now deploy their talent or competences as an instrument of power, preventing experts from monopolizing public debates. Amateurs thus contribute to the democratization of particular practices, be they artistic, scientific, or political, while also forcing experts— such as creative producers, elected representatives, doctors, scientists—to pay greater attention to effects and implications of their interventions. At the same time, the rise of the amateur also appears to present new risks and challenges. Although knowledge may be open to all in this more democratic, less elitist world, what about quality standards? Is a part of amateur production not simply mediocre? Amateurs are also responsible for “alternative” truths, for spreading absurd rumors and fake news. Moreover, the internet has made it possible to promote all sorts of marginal and dangerous ideas. Obviously, amateurs are not all geared toward creating exceptional artistic products or innovative scientific findings. In some cases, they may do so (such as free software and some participatory websites) but, overall, amateur practices favor process, pleasure, learning, and self-­ development, rather than some product. Their practices are often part of standard practices, which they adapt, modify, or remix. Amateurs readily resort to copy-­pasting in which a work’s originality is often secondary. They are immersed in an abounding culture that they select and re-­appropriate to better singularize their contribution. They apply strategies such as repetition and variation, typical of popular culture, to the highest degree of perfection. Yet this does not prevent them from borrowing from the tradition of avant-­ garde artists who create independently. In the domain of science, the activity of amateurs is often localized, limited to a specific context, being closer to scientific practice than to theory building. As for the rumors started by amateurs, they can be viewed as the ransom of a more democratic world, where free speech is no longer “confiscated” by experts. Moreover, democracy produces its own guardians—the internet corrects the internet. In the new digital world, debate and argumentation remain the best tools against mediocrity and bad faith. The various online communities have developed regulatory procedures to prevent abuse such as dishonesty and insults. The strength of the control exercised through the internet is in its numbers: the millions of users. Although the rise of amateurs can be profoundly destabilizing for experts, these new social relationships are forcing them to change their position and their tone: no longer able to impose their knowledge through authoritative arguments, they must accept a more balanced relationship in which they need to explain, engage in dialog, be convincing, and take into account the specific observations of the person in front of them. Despite its imperfections, the society of amateurs is one in which a large number of individuals can simultaneously nurture their passions, increase their knowledge, and open up new fields to democracy. For this reason,

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amateurs should not be regarded as intruders or merely as substitutes for experts. They should be seen instead as actors who by cultivating their competences greatly contribute to our society becoming more democratic.

Note 1 In 2005, the journal Nature compared fifty scientific articles in Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Their reliability was found to be identical.

11 Charting Changing Amateur Production Practices: Testimonials of Moviemaking Enthusiasts Ryan Shand

Amateur moviemakers have made a distinct yet largely overlooked contribution to audio-­visual culture. Their production practices have encompassed a variety of methods and brought both documentary and fictional works before a range of audiences. Yet in the popular imagination, amateur moviemaking has become synonymous with just one form of non-­ professional screen production. This misunderstanding has similarly shaped early research activity into the sector. The film historian Charles Tepperman has noted: Amateur movies have received salutary attention from scholars, but this research has generally focused on the domestic characteristics of home movies (with emphasis on their locus of both production and consumption) and neglected other forms and contexts of amateur filmmaking. TEPPERMAN 2015, 6 While these limited perceptions persist, a number of archivists and scholars have begun to challenge the supposedly marginal status of moving image titles produced by amateurs. For example, David E. James has pointed out that during its earliest manifestations “amateur filmmaking was for large

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numbers of people in the United States and across Europe a serious, disciplined, and skilled avocation with a substantial institutional and social infrastructure, directed toward the manufacture of high-­quality works” (141). The popularity of this activity increased over the decades and film scholarship has slowly begun to acknowledge this considerable cinematic legacy. This chapter therefore charts the changing production practices of amateur moviemakers using an innovative research methodology. Between 2008 and 2014, I interviewed a number of amateur moviemakers on many aspects of their leisure pursuit, including reflections on production practices. As Cecilia Mörner (2011) has shown, film scholars who employ oral history interviews as a research methodology often find that their preconceptions begin to change when they open themselves to the testimonials of home moviemakers. My research focused on organized amateur moviemaking, rather than home movies made for the domestic environment. These oral histories were recorded using digital video cameras and focused on amateur moviemakers based in two geographic areas, namely North-West England and Scotland.1 At the beginning of my research, I received training on how to conduct interviews by attending courses run by the Oral History Society.2 A list of questions was developed, focusing on various topics, from the importance of competitions and reflections on particular films to the archival value of their documentaries (Shand 2014a, b). Many issues related to amateur moviemaking were discussed, but three topics emerged as particularly important: the centrality of technology; group collaboration within clubs; and moviemaking outside of club structures. Along these lines, this chapter details the specific responses that interviewees gave to standardized questions on these subjects. While the chapter is divided into three sections, these topics are not completely separate, and there are clearly overlapping concerns that bridge these inter-­connected issues.

Attitudes toward changing technologies The earliest expert studies of the history of amateur cinema tended to focus on changes in technology (Kattelle 1986). For example, Alan Kattelle’s pioneering book-­length account, Home Movies: A History of the American Industry, 1897–1979 (2000), devotes the majority of its content to the evolution of technology aimed at amateur moviemakers. Similarly, Patricia R. Zimmermann (1988) published a journal article that concentrated on shifts between film formats. These were significant studies that defined the debate on amateur cinema for a number of years. However, both studies were largely based on information from industry documents and advertisements, so provide a manufacturer’s perspective on changes in technology. This arguably has the effect of creating a top-­down history of amateur technology, which

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does not account for how these technologies were received by consumers. As Charles Tepperman has suggested, “Investigating the history of amateur cinema requires a consideration of the particular characteristics, effects, and uses of film technology” (2015, 98). This section will therefore explore changing attitudes to amateur moviemaking technologies, including 16 mm, 9.5 mm, video, and digital video. In an attempt to broaden the debate beyond technological issues, subsequent scholarly research has sought to widen this focus by exploring other aspects related to the sector. Yet when asked questions on other topics, interviewees would regularly return to a discussion of technology. For example, the first question asked at the beginning of each interview was: how did you first get involved with amateur filmmaking? Sometimes the amateurs explained that it was after the birth of their first child, so they bought a cine camera to make home movies and gradually became interested in making more elaborate productions. Another common response was that using a home projector to screen films sparked their initial fascination with the technical aspects of cinema. Therefore, gaining confidence in one form of technology encouraged them to branch out into other areas, such as using a camera. This could inspire a lifelong passion, where becoming skilled in film projection at amateur shows might lead to a career as professional projectionist. This was the case with Keith Maxwell, a member of Hoylake Movie Makers, who built a private cinema in his garage. It is significant that the first thing Keith mentions when asked about how he got involved with filmmaking was to talk about his early cameras, rather than his early films: Yes, well that goes back to when I was about ten or eleven and I was on holiday. I was staying in this little boarding house and there was an old family there and they had a cine camera: 9.5. And you know, I was quite taken up with this and when we came back I saved up and bought my own 9.5 camera, a little, well second hand Pathesope H. I used to take a little mini charger to film. I had that, well I had that for about four years and then I started, I met somebody whose father had a 16 mm camera, so we started working on 16 mm then. And then over the years, you know, I bought my own 16 mm camera.3 While Keith began his filmmaking with 9.5 mm, he was quickly drawn to using a 16 mm camera. This might be one of the defining features of a serious amateur. While many home moviemakers buy a camera and tend to retain the same equipment for a number of years, with club filmmakers, one form of technology tends to lead onto another in a much shorter timeframe. For many participants, an interest in technology remains at the forefront of their engagement with moviemaking. During our interview with Angus Tilston, one of the founders of Swan Cine Club, he discussed the enduring affinity some amateurs have for

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9.5 mm cameras.4 Angus continues to participate with groups and festivals all around Europe that celebrate this supposedly obsolete technology. When asked about the attraction of 9.5 mm, he explained: Well it’s the film I started with. It has a fascination for a lot of people because it uses the full width of the film for the picture, compared with say the old standard 8 or Super 8 that only used a portion of the film for the image. So the image is almost the size of 16 mm and so in theory the image should be as good as 16 mm, although in practice sometimes it isn’t, but often it is.5 He went on to point out that there were also strong economic reasons for why 9.5 mm became popular among amateur filmmakers: “16 mm has always been like a professional or semi-­professional gauge, and it’s always been used by, in those days anyway, fairly wealthy, they’d have to be fairly wealthy amateurs to be able to use 16 mm. And 9.5 was almost dirt-­cheap by comparison.” Angus also explained how central this gauge was to the early films produced by the club: “Our very first film was 9.5. Probably about the first three or four films were 9.5. We’ve only ever made one or two 16 mm films, and the rest were standard 8 and later Super 8.” Therefore, during the early days of Swan Cine Club, 16 mm was considered to be a semi-­professional gauge and only one or two films using that format were made. Significantly, subjective perceptions of what a gauge represents can be as important as objective factors like cost and the quality of the projected image. Exploring attitudes expressed by amateur moviemakers to video technologies demonstrates that new formats are not always welcomed. The chief breakthrough of early video formats was the addition of a soundtrack. Film cameras developed for amateurs had significant problems with recording synchronized sound. However, as George Gregory, a member of Swan Movie Makers explained, there were other drawbacks that made filmmakers resistant to embracing this new technology: I can remember a colleague at work saying, “Oh, we’ve got to have video.” I said, “Rubbish. Rubbish. Video is rubbish. Stay with film.” And the reason I said that was then you couldn’t edit it, at that stage, the very early stages. Unless somebody had some other idea. And I would say, “You can’t project it on screen,” which you couldn’t, you know. You could watch it on your TV.6 Therefore, early video formats were not as attractive to filmmakers as might be expected. While club moviemakers were often negative in their opinions about VHS as a format, they were mostly positive about digital video. Many thought that the problems with VHS had been solved by DV. For example,

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FIGURE 11.1  George Gregory, Swan Movie Makers.

Norman Pollock, an amateur moviemaker based in Glasgow, sees digital formats as providing many advantages: It’s lightweight, it’s very fast, it’s terrific. I really do think the high definition, I mean the quality with a little, what £400 camcorder, you could shoot stuff that could go straight on the television, with no problem. So I think it’s great. That’s why I said it would be great to be about 16 or 17 now that that equipment is available and go back you know and start over again. Wonderful stuff, compared with what we had to work on film; beautiful equipment, but heavy and expensive to feed.7 Another member of Swan Movie Makers, Graham Kay described DV as “fantastic”; he felt that during the film era “you were held back by the confines of the medium you were using,” but now it is “an incredibly exciting time for moviemaking.”8 Indeed, many members of Swan now use iMovie to edit their short films and some upload them to YouTube for others to watch. Finally, Ashby Ball, one of the founder members of Southport MovieMakers, wanted to share his thoughts on “very general theoretical

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things.” In particular he observed that an interest in technological matters can influence the type of film that clubs make: The most common thing that happens with, it happened with cine clubs, it happens with video; a lot of men, mainly retired and they’ve got a sort of mechanical interest on these cameras, “Oh yeah, rather natty, I’ve got the video camera here, it’s great, you can do all sorts of things with it. Shall we make a club film, what will we do? Oh, can’t think” . . . They think of ideas which to the outside person seem very weak and feeble. As I say, I’m not making fun, because we do that sometimes, but this tends to be it. These people who are perhaps more mechanically interested than artistically interested.9 Ashby suggests that many serious amateur filmmakers are mechanically minded, rather than artistically inclined. They are often more interested in technological innovation than in being experimental in their filmmaking practice. Ian Rintoul, a moviemaker based in Edinburgh, confirmed this: “The cine clubs have always been obsessed more with the equipment than they are about the actual films.”10 While this may disappoint scholars who regard amateur cinema as having the potential to nurse artistic experimentation, it is perhaps more productive to understand the sector as an expression of cinephilia. In short, reading and talking about technology, building your own private cinema and screening other people’s films, are often just as pleasurable as making your own. Therefore, many club moviemakers tend to approach their practice from the perspective of a technophile. What is more, their enthusiasm for technology often brought them into contact with likeminded individuals in the form of moviemaking clubs.

Collaborative club moviemaking You’re interacting with people. That’s the key to it. It doesn’t matter what sort of a club it is. Clubs are for people interacting with other people. Whatever the interest is. That’s what the media is in the broadest sense, isn’t it? It’s the space between individuals if you like. You convey your thoughts, your ideas, your aspirations, one to another, through the media. Rob Evans, Warrington Cine and Video Society Amateur moviemaking has tended to be a collaborative activity, at least partially due to the technological complexity of producing ambitious productions. Clubs have therefore served as an important focal point for bringing a range of people interested in moviemaking together for shared purposes. There have been relatively few studies of these organizations, but

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some scholars have contributed important case studies that detail the primary activities that clubs undertake. These accounts tend to outline club moviemaking from either a historical perspective (Vinogradova 2011; Norris Nicholson 2012; Dyson 2013) or an ethnographic approach (Stone 2003; Cuzner 2009). The distinct advantage that oral history interviews offer is that they can provide privileged insight into subjective reflections on both past and present activities that can escape official print records, such as club documents or press coverage. Continuing the focus of the previous section, there has long been a close connection between the technological apparatus used in amateur productions and the necessity for collaborative practices within the amateur sector. Angus Tilston explained how they organized film production in the early days of Swan Cine Club: We used to make group films, since again about 1960; it might have been 1959–60 around about that time. We made about four group films a year, so we split the club into four groups. And one year we did eight in a year. So, the club was split into four groups and maybe half a dozen or so in each group. The idea was to go away, think of a script, make a film, and the club would pay for the film stock. In those days of course, many of our members didn’t have a camera either. There were few people who had cameras. So, it was very much a co-­operative. This organizational strategy had the advantage of encouraging creative collaboration and also catering for a need to have access to relatively expensive equipment. In this respect, it echoes the experience of amateur filmmakers in other European countries: people would join clubs to have access to equipment, film stock, and travel funds, but also to participate in competitions and festivals. According to Cichocki (2004), filmmaking clubs allowed cine club members “to indulge in activities otherwise too expensive, if not altogether impossible” (90). Therefore, clubs served as important means of enabling enthusiasts to participate in filmmaking activities that might have otherwise been economically out of reach. Members of moviemaking clubs contribute to productions in various ways, depending on their skills, talent, and availability. Some enjoy specialization in certain roles. However, it tends to be the individual initiating the idea who subsequently becomes the director. As Angus outlined: “The person with the best idea, or that everybody wanted to do, often ended up being the scriptwriter and the director. Because it was his idea you see, and so it was felt he was the best one placed to do it.” The clubs idealistically aim to be inclusive and encouraging of all their members’ talent, but specialization of roles along the lines of the commercial cinema is sometimes necessary. Rob Evans admitted that this division of labor was a common production strategy:

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In a sense we are emulating the professionals, but obviously we couldn’t do what the professionals do. In one way it was a problem because an amateur by definition does it for the love of it, but these were people who were working during the day and they were doing something like this for a couple of hours of an evening, or maybe one day of the weekend. They couldn’t commit so much of their time to this sort of thing. And they were learning as they went along, so it took a long time to produce quite a small production.11 Therefore, while professional strategies are adopted, in practice the amateur nature of the activity becomes more evident as the production progresses. This section will further explore the sometimes counter-­intuitive insights generated by amateurs explaining the processes and methods that inform their own moviemaking practice. One of our standard questions was on collaboration. How are films made today and is that different from how they were made in the past? Frank Baker and Wendy Correlli-Evans explained that the process of making amateur movies was different during the film era: Frank:  You see when you made a club film, if you’re sticking to film, you’re making a club film, you were allowed a certain amount of money for your footage. Wendy:  Which wasn’t bad. Frank:  Right, and any other things that you needed to buy, like to hire some costumes out or something like that, then that came out of club funds. Wendy:  They’ve always done that. Frank:  So, when you were making stuff on film, you had to make it as a club film because you couldn’t afford to do it on your own. To pay for all the film and everything. Wendy:  No. Frank:  And if you had an idea, you’d think “the only way it was going to get made was with the club isn’t it?” So, you would do it as a club film, because you got, all costs were covered if you like.12 From this exchange, it is clear that if you wanted to make films, you had to be a good team player. Amateur filmmakers often operated within a model of collective creative authorship that throws into relief the rationales behind professional film practice. Whereas in the professional industry, labor and creative decision-­making are tightly regulated, while lip-­service is paid to

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“collaboration,” in the amateur sector, decisions were mostly made within a group, yet an attempt is made to suggest a similar type of professional specialization. These tensions were made explicit in an article by Ivan Watson, entitled “I Couldn’t Work with Cine Clubs: Good, fair or hopeless, it’s got to be my film,” published in Amateur Cine World in 1961. As the author argues: The fact is that film-­making is not a democratic pastime, yet in trying to ensure that everyone has a fair share in the proceedings, amateur cine societies tend to lose sight of this. If a film is to be worthwhile, a dictator should be employed for it . . . In practice, of course, this rarely happens. Everybody knows better than the director . . . Half-­a-dozen people have done their best to prove that half-­a-dozen people made it. 111 Here Watson seemed to relish his opportunity to provoke debate among the readers of the magazine in his role as a columnist. Being a significant figure in amateur film culture in the United Kingdom, his name came up a number of times in discussions with moviemakers. For example, Les Holloway noted that Watson’s columns were a point of discussion among members of Swan Movie Makers: “I thought he was very artistic. I think I was influenced by him really. I think, you know Angus, Angus Tilston, he often likes to mention him, but I don’t think the young people in the club now are interested.”13 It is clear that amateurs who read his monthly column absorbed his views on various topics and these ideas have stayed with them over the years. Watson’s article usefully illustrates the tensions inherent in democratic decision-­ making processes. Two broad approaches to organizing group filmmaking emerged: in a top-­down decision-­making process the director and producer make the creative choices and everyone else helps implement them, while in more inclusive models these roles are less clear-­cut. Ashby Ball discussed the problems inherent in the more inclusive approach: With any of this filmmaking, people are called on to have a lot of skills. Like in the professional film industry, you’ve got an enormous lot of people with their own particular technical or artistic skills, then you find with amateurs somebody has to do nearly all of the lot, you know, by themselves. And if you get a few people who are skilled in different ways, you get a problem that they don’t want to kowtow to each other, you know. I mean, if somebody’s like full of artistic ideas in the professional thing, you know he’s directing the film, the others have got to do what he says. But in an amateur film, the person who’s operating the camera can say “Oh, I’m not interested in that, I want to do it my way.” You know what I mean? So, you get problems that way.

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This suggests that the decision-­making process in amateur moviemaking is much more fluid than might be supposed. From conversations that we have had with other amateurs it seems that these roles were not fixed, and club members would often move between tasks depending on their commitment to the film. As the next section demonstrates, such issues around collaboration similarly emerge even when moviemaking is pursued outside of club structures.

Makeshift moviemaking units For the lone worker is the salt of the movement: he makes pure cinema. Unhampered by share-­holders and box-­office, he can try new visual presentations for fun. As snapshot grows into sequence and sequence into spool he savours the joy of uninhabited invention which the professional, and his imitator the club worker, are losing day by day. ALDER 1949, 734 The term “lone worker” has now largely fallen out of use, but it was once commonly used within amateur cine culture to describe filmmakers who choose not to become members of cine clubs. The apparent tension between lone workers and cine club members over many issues can be traced in amateur film magazine columns (Donlan 1977; Hodge 1978). Essentially, both camps would assert the superiority of their particular production method, while the sector’s guardians would attempt to present both as complementary to furthering the broader goals of the amateur film movement. Drawing on interviews with a number of contemporary lone workers— award-­winning filmmakers such as Frank Baker and Ian Rintoul—this section will outline the lone worker film as a well-­established specialist production strategy. It will chart the rising popularity of this method among contemporary amateur moviemakers, before offering a much- ­needed historical perspective on these seemingly individualistic creative practices. There have been a number of scholarly accounts of lone workers, but there is a recurring tendency to overlook their amateur status in favor of promoting them as examples of idiosyncratic artistic film traditions. For example, as David E. James (2005) points out, Maya Deren was a highly regarded amateur whose “first audience was not a museum elite but a popular amateur one” (148). Yet over the years her filmmaking has been de-­contextualized, and today she is more commonly regarded as an avant-­ garde filmmaker. This revisionism has the effect of obscuring the importance of amateur networks to lone worker moviemakers. Consequentially, film

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scholars overlook other individuals, who crafted less overtly artistic films, but were still connected to amateur festivals and organizations. An important trend that emerged from our discussions was that moviemaking, even by members of clubs, has become a much more individualistic activity. When discussing the early days of his filmmaking, George Gregory reminisced, “We used to run four groups, film groups, and it was twice a year for a short period and with a film group you’re actually making a film. So, you can produce four good story films per year, and they were the good times I suppose.” His observation that they were the “good times” is significant. Fellow club member Angus confirmed that, “It’s completely different today than it was then. Now more people are making their own films. In those days they made perhaps one holiday film a year, something like that. But the rest of them tended to be small group productions.” The shift in emphasis away from group collaboration and toward lone worker moviemaking has parallels with the social tendencies noted by Robert D. Putnam. In his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Putnam charts the decline of many civic, leisure, and political activities in the United States over the last thirty years. He argues that the “social capital” of many Americans (i.e., how often they meet up face-­to-face with other people in their local community) has been reduced. One example he offers is bowling, which is the “most popular competitive sport in America” (Putnam 2000, 111). Yet despite the quantity of participants, paradoxically the organized variants of this leisure activity are falling: Given population growth, more Americans are bowling than ever before, but league bowling has plummeted in the last ten to fifteen years . . . league bowling, by requiring regular participation with a diverse set of acquaintances, did represent a form of sustained social capital that is not matched by an occasional pickup game. 112–13 In a similar way, moviemaking is perhaps easier and more affordable than it ever has been; yet many people who pick up a camera would not consider joining a club in order to share their leisure time with a group of likeminded enthusiasts. Pauline Harrison, of Preston Movie Makers, admits that the recruitment of new members has become challenging, “Unfortunately at the moment our membership is very low and we can’t get people interested in it. I don’t know why because there are so many camcorders out there and you learn so much by joining a club. It just seems unbelievable, we’d like a lot of young members.”14 However, this issue is not restricted to a particular club, as Rob Evans reports, “All clubs seem to report the same sort of thing. It’s not just the amateur cine clubs. I think people are less inclined to get together as clubs,

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FIGURE 11.2  Pauline Harrison, Preston Movie Makers.

they’re less social.” Even within the clubs themselves, most members have their own camera, so the necessity to form small groups to make films is no longer there. This tendency is highlighted in Daniel Cuzner’s (2009, 197) study of a contemporary amateur moviemaking club, “currently films are largely produced by individuals, rather than in club projects, or by more recognised small groups within the club. This decrease in organised, collaborative club activity is considered highly problematic.” Heather Norris Nicholson (2012, 13) has similarly noted that: It seems ironic that the very time when cine equipment reached its lowest price relative to other consumer goods, and when membership levels in many cine societies were at their peak, video technologies began to undermine amateur practice. Collaborative moviemaking within clubs has waned at least partially as a result of digital video camera technology. George Gregory confirmed this noticeable shift, “Everybody’s doing their own thing. I really blame, if you can blame it, video came in. Because a film camera is great, you can make a film with a group . . . now video, they’ve all got their own little cameras, they can do their own little thing.” This has even had an impact on the sorts

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of movies that are being made. It seems to be the case that fewer fiction films are being made in contemporary moviemaking clubs. The ability to get a group of people to volunteer a day or two of their weekends to make a dramatic film has become increasingly difficult now that the other members of the club may be shooting their own films. This more individualistic mode of production might initially seem like an ideal opportunity for the personal approach to filmmaking endorsed by Ivan Watson, but in fact, it often creates a situation where individual moviemakers focus on making relatively small-­scale documentaries about local events, landscape, and scenes of nature. While club productions are often seen as the preserve of the most dedicated of participants, award-­winning amateurs such as Ian Rintoul did not find club structures to be conducive to furthering his moviemaking goals. He related an early experience with cine club competitions: In my cine club days at the Edinburgh Cine Society, when I had a big Ten Best win, you know with The Hour of the Eagle, I mean there was more, I think more envy than praise from the club. I mean there was a person in the club, Frank Walker, who was a journalist, he was great that this film had won, bringing reflected glory on the club, but I was politely asked not to put the film in for the annual competition as it would obviously win, so I thought, you know, what am I doing here? Because I was making my own films anyway. As this comment suggests, some advanced amateurs considered cine clubs as being too embedded within casual leisure cultures to produce high quality work. Indeed, it is significant that even in the 1970s, the Edinburgh Cine Society had a completely different approach to nurturing filmmakers from that of Swan.15 John Welford, former member of Edinburgh Cine Society, explained: They had the Basic Group, our Tuesday night meeting, they had the main meeting on a Friday, the Basic Group on a Tuesday night, where you had a series of, kind of, presentations on how to make films; edit, do all those kind of things. And at the end of it you would have put together a film between you all, a little film, guided by the person who’s leading the group. And I think from there, you then went to your own place and made the films that you wanted to make, I think that was the notion of the cine society. And you met on a Friday night, to show the films you’d made. That was kind of the thing. I think the idea of making group films wasn’t, we weren’t a group filmmaking society, which one could be. And there will have been group filmmaking societies. But we weren’t a group filmmaking, we were a social club for people who were making films, is the best way of describing it, I think.16

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As John suggests, some clubs were more oriented toward encouraging individual film practice rather than group work. Similarly, Norman Pollock noted that this was also the case at Carmyle Cine Club: The people tended to be individual members and make their individual films, and everyone more of less had a camera and a sound projector, by this time, their screen, and so on. So everyone was well equipped, actually with all the basics to make a film. So, it wasn’t really a resource center, it was more of an individualistic filmmaking club. Like the members of Edinburgh Cine Society, during the mid-1970s to early 1980s, these club members were prepared to purchase filmmaking technologies for their own use. As a consequence, some caution is needed in relation to claims about the recent emergence of lone workers. It should also be acknowledged that lone workers often recruited club members for their own makeshift productions. Ian Rintoul concedes that such productions draw on a diverse range of talents: “I’m a lone worker. But I don’t think it is possible for films like these to be made satisfactorily by one person unaided” (Beal 1980, 177). During my interview, Ian built on this point by pointing out that “If you look at the cast list for The Loss Ness Monster, there’s loads and loads of people in it.”17 As he concludes: “Thus I suppose I can be said to work with a small film unit” (ibid.). This seems apt, but what has become evident is that in the digital era, these units have become even smaller. This section has painted a more holistic picture of amateur moviemaking than has been acknowledged in scholarly research until now. While the focus of most academic studies tends to be on lone workers rather than cine clubs (usually home moviemakers), it is also the case that scholars studying cine clubs can overlook the complementary importance of lone worker moviemaking. Indeed, George H. Sewell (1941, 137), one of the founders of the organized amateur film movement in the UK, wrote that “both club and single worker have their functions, that neither is necessarily better than the other, and that both can further the art of the cinema.” Prominent voices within the sector often make a conscious effort to include both club filmmakers and lone workers in their activities, as they are seen as aiding each other in furthering the goals of the sector. For example, Norris Nicholson (2012, 75) draws attention to this initiative by the journalists behind Amateur Cine World: In an attempt to reach filmmakers who were not part of existing club networks, ACW set up cine circles in 1951. This “invitation to lone workers” using different film gauges also sought to offer support and strengthen individual practice where clubs did not exist or meet particular needs. The organized amateur moviemaking sector has regularly adapted to changing circumstances in order to aid inclusion and further their primary

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goal of raising the standards of production. David Buckingham (2009, 231) has concluded that “there is a considerable amount of continuity in amateur video-­making practices that belies the rhetoric of revolutionary change.” Indeed, Angus Tilston acknowledged that lone workers have long co-­existed alongside group moviemakers, “There was always a number of people who liked to do their own thing. Even today, probably even more so today actually. We have more lone workers today than before, but there were always a number of people who liked to do their own thing [pause] . . . but not a lot. You know, maybe three or four.” Therefore, this orientation toward smaller-­scale productions is not a recent development, as there was even a column in Amateur Cine World during the 1950s called “A Lone-Worker’s Diary” which catered for this production preference. Crucially, while in those days it was a minority, perhaps even elite practice, this mode of production has increasingly become the norm.

Conclusion In this contribution, I explored issues related to technology, group collaboration, and makeshift production units in the amateur moviemaking sector, and reflected on how these aspects have changed. Amateurs have a primarily practical orientation toward moviemaking practice. Unlike film school students, amateurs tend to lack interest in commercial and artistic approaches to moviemaking, with notable exceptions. For many, an enthusiasm for technology drew them toward more advanced practice. Charles Tepperman has similarly highlighted the way that “Amateurs used the cinema as a tool for a pragmatic reimagining of their relationships to art, technology, and mass culture” (24). This practical orientation toward the pursuit of advanced moviemaking has meant that the “social world” of clubs and informal networks of likeminded enthusiasts significantly shape the resulting works. Amateurs—club members as well as lone workers—often express communal sentiments and are quick to point out that moviemaking is an inherently collaborative activity. However, some clubs have historically been more focused on group activities than others. For example, Swan Movie Makers were organized around group films, but has now realigned for the benefit of lone workers. By contrast, Edinburgh Cine and Video Society was encouraging of group work for its novices but expected its experienced members to graduate into lone workers. These two examples suggest that further research is required on the range of functions that amateur moviemaking clubs have provided for their members. Likewise, the significant contribution of lone workers to the sector has not yet been fully appreciated. They adopted flexible production strategies, a makeshift model that has increased in popularity. More attention on their work, both

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documentary and fiction, would shed light on the relatively mainstream content produced by enthusiasts who would be resistant to being termed either “avant-­garde” or “independent” moviemakers. Charting the changing relationship between clubs and lone workers, at specific historical points of technological transition, is a promising avenue of future research.

Postscript Material for this chapter was gathered over the course of two research projects. While I was based at the University of Liverpool, seventeen amateur moviemakers from local moviemaking clubs were interviewed, specifically members of Hoylake, Preston, Southport, Swan, and Warrington. Later, at the University of Glasgow, eleven interviews were conducted, including former members of Edinburgh Cine and Video Society and selected individuals associated with organized amateur moviemaking. On this occasion I have mainly drawn from oral history interviews with members of Swan Movie Makers and the Edinburgh Cine and Video Society. As clubs that were founded decades ago and continue to operate today, they are invaluable repositories of information on amateur moviemaking, both past and present. The North West Film Archive, in Manchester, England, holds the University of Liverpool interviews. The University of Glasgow interviews are stored at the National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive, located in Glasgow, Scotland.

Primary sources Alder, R. H. 1949. “Personal Column: A New Series for the Lone Worker,” Amateur Cine World, March: 733–4. Donlan, Peter. 1977. “Club Forum: Come and Join Us!” Film Making, August: 67–8. Hodge, Jimmy. 1978. “One to One: What DO clubs offer the loner?” Film Making, January: 37. Sewell, George H. 1941. “Letters to the Editor: In Defence of the Clubs,” Amateur Cine World, October: 137. Watson, Ivan. 1961. “I Couldn’t Work with Cine Clubs: Good, fair or hopeless, it’s got to be my film,” Amateur Cine World, July 20: 111–13.

Notes 1 These projects were Mapping the City in Film: A Geohistorical Analysis (University of Liverpool, UK, 2008–10) and Children and Amateur Media in Scotland (University of Glasgow, UK, 2010–14). Dr Les Roberts was my co-­interviewer on conversations conducted between 2008–10.

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2 The Oral History Society website can be accessed here: http://www.ohs.org.uk/ 3 Interview conducted in Moreton, Wirral, on May 21, 2009. 4 Swan Cine Club has been renamed Swan Movie Makers. Their website can be accessed here: http://swanmoviemakers.weebly.com/ 5 Interview conducted in Bebington, Wirral, on November 25, 2009. 6 Interview conducted in West Kirby, Wirral, on August 19, 2009. 7 Interview conducted in Baillieston, Glasgow, on December 10, 2013. 8 Interview conducted in Heswall, Wirral, January 27, 2010. 9 Interview conducted in Southport, on January 21, 2009. 10 Interview conducted in Edinburgh, on November 29, 2013. 11 Interview conducted in Runcorn, September 25, 2009. 12 Interview conducted in Hoylake, Wirral, on March 18, 2009. 13 Interview conducted in Noctorum, Wirral, on April 30, 2009. 14 Interview conducted in Preston, on November 4, 2009. 15 The Edinburgh Cine Society has been renamed the Edinburgh Cinema and Video Society. Their website can be accessed here: http://www.ecvs.co.uk/ 16 Interview conducted in Edinburgh, on November 29, 2013. 17 The Loch Ness Monster Movie (Ian Rintoul, 1984, 18 mins) is available to view from the National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive, Glasgow, Scotland: http://movingimage.nls.uk/

12 Home Mode, Community Mode, Counter Mode: Three Functional Modalities for Coming to Terms with Amateur Media Practices Tom Slootweg

Introduction With the proliferation of digital media and the purported rise of a Do-ItYourself (DIY) media culture, notions related to the “amateur,” “amateurism,” and “amateur media technologies” have again become relevant to media scholars over the last two decades. Henry Jenkins (2003), for instance, claimed that the convergence of old and new media also led to the emergence of a “double logic,” which shaped a media environment characterized by “both a top-­down corporate-­driven process and a bottom-­up consumer-­driven process” (18). Moreover, he argued, the new media technologies used in this environment—by media institutions, as well as by “grassroots” communities and individuals—have spawned a distinctly new and more democratic “participatory culture” (3–4). Over the last decade and a half, numerous publications have tried to ascertain the status of amateur media practices, asking questions such as: what kind of new amateur media practices have emerged? How do they differ from past or present professional media practices? Do contemporary amateurs have more agency in the new digital

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media ecology? The search for a clear concept of the “amateur,” or differently put, the effort to come to terms with an often highly nebulous cluster of notions, concepts, propositions—but also with a utopian celebration or dystopian disapproval of the amateur—has been a priority on many research agendas, as well as a concern in popular discourse (cf. Keen 2007b; Burgess and Green 2009; Flichy 2010; Burgess 2012; Foege 2013). For many decades, however, and also before the onset of the digital age, the proper understanding of media “amateurs” or “amateurism” has been contested. This chapter will return to the academic debates on historical amateur film and video-­making as evolving media practices since the latter part of the twentieth century. I will argue that, initially, a highly pervasive, deterministic, and normative ideological perspective on media amateurism came to dominate these debates. This particular perspective often stemmed from a Foucauldian and progressive media theoretical tradition of critical analysis, which strongly favored a political and media participatory understanding of amateurism. The democratic, emancipatory potential of media technologies was assessed in terms of “bottom-­up” tools to challenge “top-­down” hegemonic power relations in capitalist society and media. Scholarship departing from this premise often downplayed, or neglected to take into consideration fully, the sociocultural and historical importance of other iterations of amateur film and video. Different scholarly analyses challenged the ideological perspective and many of them made compelling arguments to see value in other forms and functions of film and video amateurism—not in the least, perhaps, to redeem those amateur practices and artifacts that failed to fit comfortably in the ideological mold of critical analysis. My argument in this chapter seeks to strike a balance between the various issues raised in these often contentious debates on the kind of film and video amateurism that deserves more attention, or that is equally “relevant” or “worthwhile.” To do so, I claim that it is more fruitful to depart from a premise in which film and video amateurism are understood as a cluster of several separate, coexistent, yet sometimes slightly overlapping amateur modes of practice and functioning.1 This perspective draws inspiration from the work of media theorist James Moran (2002), who rightfully emphasized that various “functional modalities of amateur practice” need to be distinguished in order to come to terms with multifaceted notions of the amateur and their specific engagement with media technologies (69). When it comes to understanding and defining different kinds of amateurs, or various conceptions of amateurism, it proves fruitful to work within a framework that acknowledges and analyzes “different sets of intentions” (70), thus understanding them on the basis of their own merits and idiosyncrasies. In other words, instead of privileging or ignoring one form and functioning in favor of another, I propose a perspective on media amateurism that will provide the means to bring more descriptive and

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analytical clarity to the different intentions among historical film and video amateurs. In the sections below, I will build on previous research on amateur film and video by discussing three amateur modes, namely home mode, community mode, and counter mode, including their interrelationships. The concept of “home mode” was originally coined by media anthropologist Richard Chalfen (1987) to delineate the use and function of film, photo, and video in and around the home as a particular form of mediated communication for a relatively small social circle of family and friends. Second, film historian Ryan Shand (2007) proposed the term “community mode” (53) to understand the serious, highly organized amateur filmmakers, who were members of the numerous cine-­clubs found in many countries throughout the twentieth century. Finally, I discuss the concept of “counter mode.” Although this mode is not coined as such in previous scholarship, the counter mode is closely aligned to the “preferred” understanding of amateurism as conceived within what I identified as the ideological perspective. Discussion of this third mode allows me to address those amateurs who have deployed media technologies to adopt a “radical” or “resistive” stance regarding the prevailing or institutionalized media and socio-­political landscape to which they respond. Before exploring these three modes in more detail, I will first discuss the seminal work that has been done from what I view as the ideological perspective. The main representative of this perspective is media historian and theorist Patricia Zimmermann (1995), who pioneered the study of amateur film as a topic deserving serious scholarly attention. Her work is well-­known for its theoretical preference for a more “radical” understanding of film amateurism, which from my perspective in this chapter would be seen as useful to understand the counter mode. At the same time, in her detailed analysis of the history of amateur film Zimmermann also pays attention to some of the discursive traits of the home and community modes, even though she does not label these modes as such.

From the ideological perspective to three amateur modes The history of amateur film, according to Zimmermann (1995), is characterized by several more or less consecutive phases in which different discursive conceptions of amateurism emerged. These conceptions were intricately intertwined with the technological development of amateur film: a trajectory that started out at its emergence as a novelty at the end of the nineteenth century, moving toward its gradual standardization into several commodified consumer media technologies based on 16 mm around the

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1930s, and 8 mm film gauge formats in the 1950s and 1960s. As claimed by Zimmermann, the early history of film marked out a period in which notions of amateurism were mostly shaped by popular discourses foregrounding its radical artistic and political potential. However, as further technological innovations resulted in its gradual standardization into semi-­professional and amateur formats, two additional conceptions of amateurism became more prolific. The first discursive conception of film amateurism construed it in terms of serious leisure and hobbyism. As a hobby and leisure pursuit, Zimmermann argued, the film amateur was encouraged to “ape” the technical skill and aesthetic related to professional filmmaking, in particular those characteristic of Hollywood (65). The other conception of amateurism gained prominence with the commodification of 8 mm film, for example with the arrival of Super 8 film cassettes and cameras. At this point, amateurism was discursively framed more and more, in advertisements and other popular discourses, from the perspective of what Zimmermann considered to be the “passive” domestic consumption of the film camera, centering on the making of home movies of family life in the private sphere (142). As suggested by the specific terminology used, Zimmerman criticized these last two discursive understandings of amateurism. Whereas the early discourses on film amateurism explored and encouraged an emancipatory, media-­democratic, and autonomous artistic appropriation, she evaluated the other two notions of amateurism as irrevocably falling short to live up to the potential of amateur film. They represented the moments in which the value of “amateurism” was absorbed into either the dominant capitalist ideology of “professionalism” (61) or the “bourgeois” ideal of celebrating the nuclear family’s “togetherness” (113). For this reason, Zimmerman, partly inspired by the work of progressive media theorist Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1970), concluded that these two modes of amateur film (as serious leisure and as home movie-­making) were to be listed in the “domination and consumption” category, while the early socio-­political and artistic exploration of film amateurism reflected its true potential for “resistance and hope” in relation to the very ideologies of capitalist society that encroached upon all aspects of everyday life (Zimmerman 1995, ix). This particular critical framework, including its sometimes evaluative tone, was further developed in scholarship on consumer electronic video. For example, in the same year that Zimmermann’s book was published, media scholar Laurie Ouellette (1995) reflected on the potential video embodied for amateurs in the guise of the then fairly new camcorder, which she saw as the electronic successor of the once commercially successful Super 8 film camera. Interestingly, she seemed to be less dismissive than Zimmermann when it came to home video-­making, because Ouellette argued that using the camcorder to record family and domestic life “should not be devalued as an authentic cultural practice” (34). Still, Ouellette put forward a rather elaborate

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analysis in which the camcorder, as an easy to use and widely available electronic consumer media technology, should be valued predominantly in terms of its unprecedented means for amateurs “to reimagine television as a participatory, democratic form of communication” (42). In contrast, James Moran (2002) was highly critical of the recurring tendency to theorize amateur media technologies, whether it be film or video, as possible tools for democratization and to instigate a media revolution from below. Like Zimmermann’s appraisal of early film, Moran detected that the discourses surrounding the possible amateur appropriation of early electronic video in the 1960s and 1970s were characterized by a pervasive “rhetoric of liberation” (7). In these highly emancipatory discourses, video was more often than not seen as a new media technology for amateurs that had the potential to challenge the electronic media landscape in which commercial and institutionalized broadcast television reigned supreme. At the same time, Moran was suspicious of such utopian expectations of the significance of video for the amateur. He concluded that the large majority of video amateurs did not necessarily embrace video as an oppositional alternative media practice, set against media institutions. In other words, Moran pointedly reminded us that many of these media theories, including the work of Zimmermann and Ouellette, were misguided because the ideologically-­charged hopes and desires were neither confirmed nor grounded in much empirical evidence of some democratic film or video revolution. Instead of condemning one form and function of media amateurism of being somehow less “democratic” or “valuable” than another, Moran proposed to take serious media amateurs according to their variety of intentions and how these materialized in specific practices. In his view, the highly determinist ideological perspective, or the “dominant ideology thesis” (50), had to be replaced by a framework that does not “denigrate” (54), but instead takes into account the complexity and variety of intent among film and video amateurs. Moran proposed to understand amateurism in terms of a complex form of media “creation through the mutual acts of production and consumption” (57). To understand the characteristics of these “mutual acts,” it is important to analyze them according to the particular “functional modalities,” or modes, in which several forms and functions of amateurism emerged. In other words, to fully appreciate amateur film and video practices, it is necessary to ascertain which specific “cultural functions” (69) came to motivate and shape them. To redeem those amateurs who from the ideological angle were believed to fall short, Moran elaborated on one functional modality only: the home mode. He convincingly defined the amateur home mode as an “active, authentic mode of media production for representing everyday life” (59). His explanation of its “functional taxonomy,” however, is so elaborate and inclusive that also more or less artistically and politically inspired

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amateur film and video practices would fit his understanding of the home mode, if at least these amateur media practices explored and negotiated very broadly defined categories such as “family,” “community,” “identity,” “self,” and “place” (59–61). If not, they would be subsumed under the “avant-­ garde” or “documentary mode,” or approached as hybrid practices of “pseudoprofessionals” (65). Strikingly, Moran chose to ignore altogether the existence of the highly organized and serious film and video amateurs in the “community mode.” In other words, his notion of the home mode, rather paradoxically, foregrounded only one dominant conception of amateurism as well, albeit an inclusive and intellectually refined one. To move beyond such one-­sided focus and to honor the diversity in practices and functions among historical film and video amateurs, I propose two additional modes, aside from the home mode, labeled community mode and counter mode. But first I will discuss the home mode in more detail.

The home mode The home mode is well-­established in media scholarship. Although Zimmermann and Ouellette did not necessarily see much “radical” or “resistive” potential in this amateur mode of practice and function, for Moran and other media scholars the home mode is the quintessential form of film and video amateurism. Originally coined by Richard Chalfen (1987), the home mode implied a particular form of technologically mediated social communication. By terming the social actors involved with film, video, and photography in home mode communication as “Polaroid People” who are part of “Kodak culture” (10), Chalfen maintained that they did not necessarily aim to capture a fictional filmic representation, but rather created “symbolic worlds” of highly valued moments of everyday life. These valued events and activities of everyday life were mediated as unpolished “snapshot representations” (93) of pivotal moments in the “modern human life-­cycle” (74), such as married life and parenthood, the birth and growth of the children toward early adulthood, and so on. Moreover, these representations of various life experiences were made with and for a small social group of family and friends, predominately to fulfil a “memory function” (140).2 Since Chalfen introduced the home mode, various media scholars have developed the “memory function” of this domestic and often family-­oriented amateur practice. More extensively than Chalfen, media historian Susan Aasman (2004) elaborated on the importance of the ritualistic aspects of the home mode that catered to an “archival desire” to create “visual family memories” (51). Film theorist Roger Odin (2014b), in contrast, sought to refine Chalfen’s communicational understanding of the home mode as

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a memory practice, arguing that the home mode enables a complex and reciprocal “communicative space of the family” (16). This space shaped both the family dynamics during production as well as the dynamic that emerged during the film’s eventual reception by the family as a visual memory artifact. Moran (2002) similarly expanded on Chalfen’s notion of the home mode, linking it to video. Unlike Aasman and Odin, Moran put no special emphasis on the home mode’s “memory function,” but instead developed a highly advanced “functional taxonomy of the home mode,” which provides a theoretical basis for its most valuable everyday cultural functions. As well as emphasizing the home mode as an “authentic, active form of media production” (59), it also enables a “liminal space” in which its practitioners can negotiate their “public, communal, and private, personal identities” (60). The home mode not only left room for a complex identity negotiation; it also provided the means to articulate through media use and consumption a “material articulation of generational continuity over time” (60). Moran also expanded the notion of “home” within the home mode beyond a strict understanding of the “domestic,” arguing that in this mode one can “construct an image of home as a cognitive and affective foundation situating our place in the world” (61). Despite the merits of Moran’s taxonomy, his inclusive perspective on the home mode may go at the expense of the level of detail and precision when it comes to analyzing home video artifacts and practices. Put differently, the model essentially allows for the inclusion of all kinds of amateur film and video dealing very broadly with what Moran called “the families we choose” (39). While he rightly criticized the lack of solid empirical evidence in Zimmermann and Ouellette’s analyses, he did not test his model on actual home mode videos. In a case study of a Dutch expatriate family using video in the second half of the 1980s, I found that the historical appropriation of a VHS camcorder within the home mode was driven by a desire to use video as a technology of memory and belonging (Slootweg 2018). The home mode was thoroughly integrated in the everyday “homemaking” and “memory practices” of family life on the move. The family explicitly used video to capture their lived experience and making their home abroad, in order subsequently to communicate via television these mediations to family and friends left behind in the Netherlands. Drawing from insights by Odin (2014b) and film historian Liz Czach (2012), the video home mode’s communicative capabilities implied an intimate and presentational form of “home mode performativity” (cf. Czach 2012, 164; Schneider 2004; Roepke 2006). This performative dynamic allowed for a complex and layered audiovisual, rather than a strictly visual, interplay of performing or acting out the family as whole and individually, both in front and behind the video camera.

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The community mode The community mode is characterized by a different amateur mode of practice and functioning. As such, it also embodies an alternative set of intentions compared to those amateurs who engage with film and video technologies in the home mode. The first scholar to point at this alternative mode was film historian Ryan Shand (2008; 2007). Explicitly condemning Zimmermann’s condescending tone with regard to her conception of serious film amateurism in terms of “aping” professional standards of film-­making, Shand introduced the “community mode” (2008, 53) to understand serious amateurism in a cine-­club context (cf. Stebbins 1992). As such this mode allows film scholars thoroughly to assess the merits and idiosyncrasies of “cine-­club culture” in which “highly organized artistic regimes” played an important and valuable role (Shand 2008, 54). A further theoretical discussion on the aesthetic and stylistic regimes of serious amateurism is provided in Shand’s 2007 dissertation, in which he argued for a more thorough exploration and analysis of the notions of authorship and genre to get a better grip on how these artistic regimes operate within the community mode. At the time, film scholars had linked up these notions with professional and artistic practice, but not with serious amateurism. This oversight, as Shand pointed out, created a blind spot with regard to “generic practice” and the “aspirational models” within the community mode directed toward internalizing proper professional discourses on the pre-­production, production, and post-­production of film (16). A similar argument for serious attention for this mode of film amateurism was made by film historian Charles Tepperman (2015). Although he acknowledged in a footnote the theoretical existence of the community mode, he did not explore it any further. Instead, he defined serious amateurs as those “who participated in a film culture outside of the commercial mainstream and developed ‘advanced’ skills in film production” and who therefore should be seen as “independent media experimenters and producers” (9). The American filmmaker and scholar Melinda Stone (2003) has provided more elaborate insight into a broader understanding of the “culture” of the community mode. She analyzed cine-­club culture as a creative “structured community” shaped by six “ingredients” (223): (1) the monthly club meeting; (2) the club magazine; (3) business meetings concerning the internal operation of the club; (4) filmmaking contests; (5) the production of collaborative club movies; and (6) the organization of regular outings and banquets. Stone came to the conclusion that this club culture consisted of an amalgamation of components that provided a particular shape to the social, communicative, and creative identity of the club and its members. The club provided both a formal and informal setting in which a particular hierarchy, continuity, cohesion, knowledge dissemination, and also sociality could be

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built around a shared interest in the media technologies associated with serious amateur filmmaking. Media sociologist Daniel Cuzner (2009) explored club culture in terms of a “community of practice” (196; cf. Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998). He theorized the setting of the club as a participatory learning environment in which its individual members embodied various degrees of craftsmanship, knowledge, and commitment. Rather than having homogeneous clubs, Cuzner identified “six types of club members” (2009, 203): (1) the beginner; (2) the lone operator; (3) the club mover; (4) the celebrity; (5) the professional; and (6) the social member. Given this typology, there was also a “significant diversity in the motivations, interests and expertise that members bring to the club setting” (206). Despite these various individual motivations, according to Cuzner, club life was quite institutionalized through “the club committee and the roles of the various ‘officers’ (president, secretary, and so on),” which inevitably gave rise to “hierarchies and power relations” (206). These institutional and formal aspects of the community mode were confined not only to local organizations, but also extended to national and even international organizations and networks of amateur filmmaking, as also pointed out by film historian Heather Norris Nicholson (2012). In the case of the Netherlands, as I argue elsewhere, the arrival of electronic video spurred a fierce debate among community mode amateurs between the 1970s and the early 1990s (Slootweg 2018). Various prominent figures within Dutch organized amateur filmmaking were convinced that the advent of video technologies would pose a threat to the practice and function of community mode amateurism. This dismissive attitude toward video partly followed from the “spirit of community” favored within serious organized amateur filmmaking. Analysis of the dynamics of a Dutch club in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s as a community of practice revealed the highly valued nature of such spirit, with its “auratic” and “mythological” understanding of amateur film, while it was carefully constructed when new members entered the club. As a rite of passage, the beginner had to prove his commitment to amateur filmmaking and willingness to adopt the reigning “spirit of community.” During the period of one year, the novice embarked on an apprenticeship with a senior club member, so as to be trained and supervised in the various technical aspects of filmmaking. The successful appropriation of these skills by the novice was eventually evaluated by a committee on the basis of a written exam and a short admission film. After a positive evaluation the novice would then become a full member of the club. Monthly workshops and lectures foregrounded the craftsmanship of various filmmaking practices, but also communicated a particular view on the history of amateur filmmaking and of film in general as a creative and artistic cultural form. These lectures fostered the myth of film amateurism as an edifying hobby, as a serious and freely-­adopted pursuit that preferably drew from, but was not

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dependent on, professional or avant-­garde practices of filmmaking (cf. Van der Heijden and Aasman 2014). As technologies and cultural forms, video and television were considered to be incompatible with this ubiquitous understanding of the practice and function of the community mode, and these other media were accepted, albeit hesitantly, not until the 1990s, after both the film club and small-­gauge film were on the decline.

The counter mode Accounting for the intellectual genesis of “counter mode” film and video amateurism is a far less straightforward task, because it has not been strictly coined as such in scholarship. This is why it is fruitful first to discuss several major examples that inspired the conception of film and video amateurism as an oppositional practice. Two prominent artists who inspired the theoretical formation of this particular “oppositional” understanding of amateur filmmaking were Maya Deren and Jonas Mekas. They celebrated amateur filmmaking on the basis of different views on amateurism, however. Mekas, on the one hand, embraced the aesthetic and practice of home mode film and photography as examples of authentic media practices for exploring intimacy, belonging, and memory in everyday life. He sought to incorporate and experiment with the unpolished aesthetic of the home mode in his own artistic expression to challenge the norms and values embodied by modern abstract art in the postwar art world in the United States. As media scholar Jeffrey Ruoff (1991) argued, Mekas’s artistic motivations to adopt the home mode stemmed from a desire to use film “to participate symbolically in the avant-­ garde film community, to become a member, to share the struggles, to pay homage to the pioneers of film art” (15). Besides aiming to introduce small-­ gauge film technologies as new tools to explore a more personal artistic practice, Mekas also used them to mediate the journey he and others undertook in their daily lives to form an intimate, small artistic film community within the New York avant-­garde. Furthermore, by embracing an aesthetic connected to memory and belonging, as well as the intimate and the personal, Mekas resisted the dominant “aesthetic of abstraction and formal experimentation” in the New York avant-­garde of the 1950s and 1960s (19).3 Maya Deren (1965), on the other hand, has argued for a different approach of film amateurism. Although, as she claimed, the term “amateur” has an “apologetic ring” to it in everyday parlance, it should be valued and embraced according to its Latin etymology: as meaning “lover” (45). By not being tied to filmmaking as a commercial profession, but as a freely chosen creative and artistic pursuit, the full potential of amateur filmmaking implied a “physical” and “artistic” liberation (45). Deren argued that amateurs, as

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“lovers” of highly portable small-­gauge film technologies, could develop an economically disinterested attitude in which they would enjoy a high degree of artistic and creative freedom driven by an individual passion to seek poetic beauty in everyday life through the lens of a film camera. Thus, the resistive stance to be taken by amateurs related explicitly to commercial professional film practice, rather than the art world itself, as was the case with Mekas. Regardless of these differences, both of these artistic explorations of amateur filmmaking have come to obscure the conceptual understanding of the amateur, by wrongly confusing amateurism with avant-­garde artistic practices, functions, and intentions. Arguably, Patricia Zimmermann (1995) has been instrumental in perpetuating this confusion, as she regarded the various avant-­garde appropriations of and experimentations with small-­ gauge film as superior examples of small-­gauge film’s potential for amateurs. In this respect, it is important to point out that her analysis of amateur film seems indebted to the work of more politically minded media critics such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger and, his intellectual predecessor, Walter Benjamin. In the 1930s, Benjamin (2007 [1968]) prophesized that the arrival of the then relatively new reproductive technologies of photography and film could be put to use as emancipatory tools for the masses to challenge the repressive capitalist society in which they lived. He furthermore maintained that film and photography could play an important role in democratizing “practice-­politics” (226), which would allow for a bottom-­up resistance to the institutional use of then existing media technologies, and by extension, to the ideology of capitalism in which their institutional use was embedded. A similar discursive pattern and intellectual appraisal can be found in criticism in relation to the arrival of video technologies in the 1960s and 1970s. Discourses on its potential appropriation by amateurs were also characterized by a strong conviction that video allowed for new possibilities to instigate a revolution from below to challenge the status quo in capitalist society, politics, and media. Elsewhere, I argued that those who belonged to the video avant-­garde of Canada and the United States endowed consumer video technologies with the possibility for amateurs to be aesthetically as well as socio-­politically radical (Slootweg, 2016). As evidenced by their writings in the journal Radical Software, the video avant-­garde’s discursive imagination of amateur use of portable video much resembled Maya Deren’s notions of the amateur filmmaker (185–6). If Moran would disapprove of these utopian discourses, some video amateurs did aim to appropriate video politically as a resistive tool to counter television, or to counter the electronic media landscape at the time. Regardless of the fact that an oppositional appropriation was often spearheaded by a relatively marginal group of avant-­garde artists, as described by video art historian Chris Meigh-Andrews elsewhere in this volume, some amateurs

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deployed it to be socio-­politically resistive and as an alternative to institutionalized media. Video was sometimes appropriated in “oppositional” amateur practices, despite the often misguided utopian impulses underpinning them. As media historian Deidre Boyle (1997) has showed, the arrival of video technologies gave rise to the emergence of video collectives that sought to explore the artistic and democratic use of video technologies in the United States. In contrast, media sociologist Jo Henderson (2009) analyzed experimentations on British public television in which video was explored as a democratic medium used by “ordinary people” in the “Video Nations” project (157). Tom Slootweg and Susan Aasman (2015) have similarly pointed at experimentations on Dutch public television in the late 1970s and early 1980s in which media democratization via portable video and small-­gauge film was explored and given a platform. The counter mode is complementary to the community and the home mode in terms of its practice and functioning. By coining this mode, it will be possible to acknowledge that certain amateur engagements with media technologies, regardless of their marginal and, perhaps, ideologically misguided nature, were shaped in terms of an oppositional practice, similar to Benjamin’s amateur “practice-­politics.” This alternative mode foregrounds a particular function not necessarily found in the other modes, one embodying a strong conviction that consumer media technologies may enhance media participation by explicitly challenging the institutionalized media landscape existing at a particular moment in time (cf. Slootweg 2017). In the counter mode, the exploration and experimentation of consumer media technologies’ democratizing potential from below took precedence over memory, belonging, or an edifying form of creative craftsmanship. In a case study of a Dutch video collective, I found that video technologies were explicitly attributed with a countercultural agency and used in various projects and experiments to explore video’s democratic and emancipatory potential for the individual and local community (Slootweg 2018; cf. Slootweg 2017). Regardless of whether the collective— and the “ordinary” people it collaborated with—was successful or not, it operated within a different mode. To account for this alternative dynamic, the counter mode can serve as an additional analytic and descriptive tool that allows media historians, sociologists, and ethnographers to address the practice and functioning of those social formations in which media technologies were appropriated in an oppositional practice in order to take control over the media environment from “below.”

Conclusion In this chapter, I presented an argument aimed at acknowledging the importance of functional modalities, rather than an ideological or normative

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perspective, when trying to understand amateur engagements with film and video technologies. It is helpful to grasp such past or present engagements in the context of the three modes identified. This approach elucidates in particular the different “sets of intentions” underpinning amateurs’ investment in media technologies and the manner in which their “participation” takes shape. Notions regarding the relationship between amateurs and consumer film and video technologies have often produced confusion, which resulted from a pervasive tendency within scholarly, artistic, and popular discourses to understand film and video amateurism normatively. By investigating three modes of media amateurism as such, taking them seriously according to their own merits and idiosyncrasies, evaluations and theorizations that pit them against each other—in terms of one form of amateurism being significantly more “real,” “proper,” or “false” than the other—become superfluous. This should be welcomed because such attributions are unfruitful, I believe, and they obscure the various “sets of intentions” and cultural functions implied in various forms of media amateurism. The following step should be to ascertain whether these functional modalities of historical film and video amateurism still bear relevance for contemporary scholarship into media amateurism in the digital age. In addition, a more comprehensive and long-­term historical investigation into the practice and functioning of amateur modes might reveal several complex moments of transition in which social, technological, cultural, and other dimensions play a significant role. To some degree, this seems apparent in the transition from film to video and its implications for media amateurism in the latter part of the twentieth century. Although only touched upon in passing in this contribution, there are strong indications that the understanding and dynamics of a mode’s practice and functioning can be subject to moderate or sometimes more radical changes. The latter was certainly the case for the community mode in which for many decades the “spirit of community” effectively tried to negate the creative or craftsman-­ like potential of media technologies other than small-­gauge film. More important, however, are the kind of questions to be asked when delving into the digital age. Are there any new iterations of the serious amateur’s “spirit of community” and “community of practice” to be found on contemporary and past digital media platforms? Moreover, when moving away from the community mode, the emergence of a networked digital media environment since the 1990s has rekindled desires for “radical” and “oppositional” amateur media practices from “below.” Can concrete materializations of these desires into digital amateur media practices also be understood and analyzed in terms of the counter mode? And what about the digital home mode? Some of these questions were tackled over the past decades or are being investigated today. It is nevertheless important to keep in mind that discerning between several functional modalities will contribute

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to acknowledging the diversity of intent among the various amateurs who operate within the historical or contemporary media environment in which they are embedded.

Notes 1 The notion of “mode” bears some resemblance with theorist Bill Nichols’ (1991) documentary “modes of representation” (32) of reality. However, in this chapter the notion of “mode” will be used to isolate and identify the different manners in which amateurs appropriated media technologies for a particular purpose and within a particular practice: modes of practice and functioning. 2 In the tradition of Chalfen’s media sociological and ethnographical investigation, a more contemporary re-­evaluation of the home mode in the digital age can be found in the work of Buckingham, Pini, and Willet (2007); Pini (2009); Buckingham, Willett, and Pini (2011). 3 Another notable filmmaker to emerge out of the New York avant-­garde, Stan Brakhage, in fact explored small-­gauge film technologies (mostly 16 mm) as a medium for abstraction and formal experimentation. For several scholarly reflections on Brakhage as an experimental and abstract artist and filmmaker, see the edited volume by David James (2006).

13 “Something More”: An Analysis of Visual Gestalting in Amateur Films Danièle Wecker

Introduction What constitutes amateur filmmaking? Amateur films visualize, I argue, the bringing-­into-being of expressive signification through and by the mediation of technology. Filmmaking is thus never merely a consumerist hobby. It can be taken as an existential process of bringing personal experience to expression and this process is revealed anew every single time we open these filmic worlds. This is the particular beauty of an approach that considers amateur films as a becoming rather than a being. Within the course of my research for my doctoral thesis, I have watched more than sixty collections of amateur films made between 1929 and 1983, with a combined approximate running time of around sixty hours. All collections, which consist of analog films mostly shot on 8 mm and Super 8 equipment, are from the Centre National de l’Audiovisuel (CNA) in Luxembourg. I came to one simple, if crucial, observation: the various themes chosen by amateurs for their filmmaking project are shot in specific filmic modes. I decided to focus not exclusively on film content but to analyze the collections in relation to the filmic language that frames them. When going through each of these sixty film collections from one shot to the next, I systematically made notes on camera position, angle, zooms, pans, length, location, content, and so on. This made for a sort of staccato viewing that led to a multitude of exhaustive information

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that crystallized into various identifiable patterns, if by no means homogenous ones.

Mode The filmic universe of amateur films follows a different logic to that of the professional cinematic productions. Within the corpus I analyzed, none of the productions is conclusively post-­edited. This seemingly self-­evident notion nevertheless reveals an all-­significant feature of their meaning-­ generating process: if amateur films do not construct cohesive and homogenous narratives consisting of beginning, middle, and end, it follows that what they actually constitute is the process of narration coming-­intobeing. Motivation, focus, filmic language, and visual content can thus be dissected as different layers of a filmic mode. A mode is here taken as an umbrella term to analyze motif (what is filmed) and language (how it is filmed) within the amateur universe. I have identified three main modes within my corpus. While they are not homogenous, they do remain unchanged throughout the decades covered by this corpus. The predominant filmic engagement consists of a focusing on family life and all related activities and festivities. The second mode pertains to a filmic impulse to document and archive a lifeworld. The third mode of filmic engagement comprises what I will identify as attractional display. These three modes are structured by cultural codes. Each of these codes, as we will see, provides a structure for certain offers of subject forms an individual can take up. These subject forms provide identity formations in which an individual can momentarily inscribe him/herself. There is, however, for lack of a better expression, “something more” to these films. Every researcher I have spoken to in the last few years shares this vague and shadowy feeling of an interpretative surplus that never quite binds to whatever hypothesis we impose upon them. These films can seem stubborn and obtuse. They refuse our imposing gaze upon them. “The essence of technology,” writes Heidegger, “is nothing technological” (Heidegger quoted in Sobchack 2004, 84). I came to realize that the essence of the amateur film relates to the same equation. The “something more” is nothing less than existential.

Phenomenology This article takes a phenomenological approach as style, that is, as mode of engagement. Phenomenological analysis functions according to an analytical reversal in that it arrives at insights or knowledge of subjective experience not by analyzing the subject itself, but by looking at its constitution in the relational

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engagement between subject and world, here relationality as situated in perception. World and subject come-­into-being co-­constitutively and meaning emerges in the relation that binds the two. This is the phenomenological correlation as ontology. As such, “[i]t is from the reflection, the bouncing off from the object-­correlate, that the eye is to be seen, and it is from experience of the world that the I is to be understood” (Rosensohn 1975, 280). Such an engagement “seeks to identify the underlying structures of the phenomenon at hand by studying its intimate entailment with the intentional act of perception to which the phenomenon is present” (Barker 2009, 11). Perception is here taken as the complete sensorium, including sensual engagements through touch, smell, hearing, seeing, tasting, and the proprioceptive sense of navigating space. Phenomenology treats object and subject as inseparable in experience. Rather than focus on either one, it focuses on how a phenomenon is given in experience. In experiential phenomenology, experience equals perception. As such, it analyzes how subjectivity is constituted in a given (i.e., social and historicized) lifeworld. Certain oscillations underlie how perception is structured. I thus take these oscillations into account to examine how they offer insight into how an individual takes up an experiential stance in the lifeworld. Amateur films are incredibly favorable to such an analysis, as their mostly non-­edited nature allows for an examination of experiential stances, i.e., how meaning is made in experience/perception. Perception and expression exist in a reversible structure. Filmmaking presents a project in which perception is taken up as expression (filmmaking) and reverted back into perception (film). We can thus analyze an amateur film in the light of how perception is brought to expression, and we can examine how perception is structured by fluctuation in terms of different foci, guided by the shifting of an attentive focus of the perceiver and influenced by exterior impetuses. Appearances are thus taken as inherent parts of analysis. They are formed as “gestalts,” i.e., as perception shaped by attentive focus. Amateur films as narration thus not only show us appearances; they show us how perceptual gestalts are formed. I will treat these films as a becoming rather than a being, and thus in terms of how we can think of them as visualizing signifying oscillations within perception. This will allow us, in short, to gain insight into the signifying processes that underlie meaning-­making in the world. Within this framework, a gestalt is the perceptual figure as it is constituted momentarily in the (here) visual field. Furthermore, perceptual oscillations prove how perception represents a combined micro-­perceptual experience and a macro-­social engagement that oscillates in the attentive “gestalting” within the image. Don Ihde has explained this perspective/approach as follows: What is usually taken as sensory perception (what is immediate focused bodily in actual seeing, hearing, etc.), I shall call microperception. But

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there is also that what might be called cultural, or hermeneutic, perception, which I shall call macroperception. Both belong equally to the lifeworld. And both dimensions of perception are closely linked and intertwined. 2002, 29

The family film The predominant filmic mode in amateur films in terms of filmic style and content is, of course, the family film. Chaotic, unorganized, and often failing in comprehensive filmic succession, the family film is frequently decried as the epitome of unprofessionalism. While it is certainly true that the family filmmaker is less interested in filmic coherence, this has more to do with its function of stressing participation and authenticity. In this context, the belief in the indexical authenticity of the filmic medium also has the effect of “naturalizing cultural practices and of disguising their stereotyped and coded characteristics” (Hirsch 1997, 7). Stylistically, the family record lives by the close-­up and zoom, devices mostly pointed at children, who are, after all, the main focus and purpose of family filmmaking. Naturally, it would make more sense to point the analog camera at the children in a steady and static medium shot, instead of zooming in on the child, and—more often than not—losing the latter as they move too fast. This, however, is never the point of the family film. Here, clarity is consigned to familial involvement. The family film serves as a transposal of family into familial. It is inherently underscored by an ideology of familialism (Zimmermann 1995, 132), namely the promotion of family life with an exclusive emphasis on the private as sole meaningful social space and the transferal of children as currency of social value. It also pertains to notions of consumption, display, and exhibition of these familial values as valorization through exteriorization. Familialism relates to how the filmmaker narrates the family into visuality to serve as meaningful space of self-­emplacement and stability for its individual members. The transposal of family into familial is thus structured by cultural codifications. For the family film to function as an instrument of self-­emplacement, it is imperative for its imagery to become clichéd. This is why the family mode never changes over the course of several decades, because these films show how the family is told as unrelated to when they were produced. Generally, children are happy, the weather is sunny, family life is harmonious. The family film has a need for imagery that reproduces an event not so much as it was, but that instead restructures the present as a past that will be worth inscribing into in the future. This transposal is thus structured by a self-­ reflexive relation of future looking back. Naturally, this includes several

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notions of taboo. The event is not only represented as it was, but as deemed appropriate. The imagery is composed as if faced by a self-­imposed societal judgment. Children are clean, not dirty; bodily fluids are taboo; elderly relatives are never filmed when ill; bathtubs are fine—toilets are not. Concomitantly, the family film is mostly about showing. One has not only had a past; one constructs a past that is ready for self-­inscription. The familial thus serves as a cultural form of self-­inscription that constructs the micro-­unit of the family as sole space of meaningful social interaction. What is constructed here is a familial visual archive, the structuring principle of which is linearity and circularity. Not only do yearly events occur successively in the film collection and thus give the stability of chronological reoccurrence; the family unit is also often presented as self-­perpetuating in circularity. Parents become grandparents, children become parents themselves etc. The family unit is thus presented as seemingly unaffected by notions of finitude and death as the familial circle presents exactly that—an eternal circle. The family’s main purpose is thus the re-­creation and re-­consumption of itself in the visual (Zimmermann 1995, 132–3). Furthermore, the familial is reconditioned according to a capitalist structuring. Children come to function as emotional currency that are paid into the memory banks of the visual archive. The family could consume its own representation of togetherness anew. Familialism thus stands at once as a cultural codification that underlies representation and as a cultural offer for self-­inscription. Still, the abovementioned shadowy feeling of “something more” remains. While the cultural codifications certainly underlie all production in the domestic space, what is often relegated to a mere “affective charge” lingers in familial productions, namely the emotive base of expressive signification. Naturally, one must tread carefully with regard to affective imposition upon the imagery, but the focus on film language warrants a visual base from which to proceed with an alternative access to private expression. Here, the gestalting, the perceptual oscillation that structures all filmmaking and viewing, comes into play. Filmic devices such as zoom and close-­up come to stand for a micro-­perceptual engagement and can be read accordingly. The love and care that underlie the family film are palpable within the imagery and, while non-­conclusive, should never be ignored. One thing needs clarification: what is analyzed is e-­motion as trajectory observable in filmic language—never emotion as fleeting sense that results from the performative context of the viewing and filming situation. As argued by Jennifer Barker, “emotions operate in this space of intersubjectivity and reversibility, described by Merleau-Ponty as the basic structure of perception” (2009, 155). Emotions represent an irreducible intentional relation; they are not constituted by the practice but are brought to expression within it. The camera comes to record motion as e-­motion. Emotion is co-­constituted

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between world and subject, subject and subject, and subject and object. It rises within mediation. E-motion, here, comes to signify the visual remnant of this move in mediation through the trajectory of the camera. For example, devices such as close-­up and zoom come to constitute an e-­motive move “towards.” The technological trajectory thus visualizes a micro-­perceptual expressive signification, potentially illustrating an emotional engagement, which, while lost in the present, leaves its trace in filmic language. Filmmaking conveys an expressive stance in the lifeworld. Sara Ahmed, via philosopher Glen Mazis, has described the way that “life is lived as specific inflections of a general ‘towardness,’ hate [or disapproval] as an ‘againstness,’ fear as an ‘aboutness,’ disgust as recoil away from something or other” (Ahmed 2004, 4). E-motive expression (as movement “towards” or “against” as expressed by the camera) thus functions as evocation rather than conclusive and visual empirical proof. Still, e-­motive expression can account for that shadowy feeling of interpretative excess. For example, the filming of a new-­born often exceeds the length deemed normal for an amateur filmic sequence. If an amateur films an object for a short time, it can be argued that it was simply “there.” If the camera lingers however, e-­motional intention rises to the fore. Duration thickens the expression of the filmmaking project. Filmmakers perpetually film their babies in cribs. The duration of these shots often exceeds the “normal” duration of an amateur sequence and is frequently combined with a zoom in on the child. The e-­motive movement “towards” expresses, and thus renders comprehensible, the emotive stance of the filmmaker through the motion of the zoom. These primordial engagements can be read as remnants in the image and can be understood without an extensive meta-­context. The zoom technologically embodies the motion in the intentionality of e-­motion as “towards.” In the intentional life-­ project that is filmmaking, an irreducible intentional relation between subjective desire and technology renders this e-­motion visible. E-motive trajectories can also be revealed as stance of “againstness” as is shown in another example within my corpus. The scene presents an outing with grandparents. The family is moving towards the camera. The approximately four-­year-old girl lifts her skirt playfully. Her mother emulates the movement and slowly lifts her own skirt while smiling into the camera. The camera pans in on the mother. Suddenly, the camera (and presumably the filmmaker) catches a glimpse of the disapproving gaze on the face of the grandfather and, after a slight hesitancy, filmmaking stops. The visual trajectory changes in inflection. This macro-­perceptual, socio-­ hermeneutically inflected sense is still embedded within the micro-­perceptual experience itself, abruptly; however, it rises to the fore and takes precedence. This precedence influences the filmmaking project and brings it to a halt. An oscillating movement between macro- and micro-­perception thus characterizes the visual gestalting of the filmmaking project.

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What this shows us is that amateur films as visualizations of an irreducible intentional relation also illustrate the “revealing roles which both art objects and equipment or technological objects contain when they are seen as focal elements against a context or field that is ‘lighted up’ as ‘world’ ” (Ihde 2010, 76) and how filmmaking becomes an expressive means of lighting up a world that is as much constituted by a socio-­culturally positioned gaze as it is a micro-­perceptual engagement.

Films of a documenting and archiving drive The self-­inscription in the familial is, however, not always the sole meaningful space of self-­interpretation. The second mode in amateur film is highly varied in terms of content, but presents a certain commonality with regard to style and impulse. Style can give important insights into motivation. What stands out in these images is their clear willingness to be universally understandable and insert as much visual information as possible into the frame. Here, people create a private rendition by venturing into the public space. This mode then proves an equalization of the privately produced film with the family film erroneous. Filmmakers adopting this mode (these might be the same ones adopting a family mode when filming their children) favor the long and medium shot over the close up and often use establishing shots to set the scenes. They prefer aslant angles when dealing with longer objects or edifices (buildings, roller coasters, staircases). They frequently create context by including signs, text panels in museums, and historical landmarks or cityscapes. While the family film presents an inward-­look, the documenting mode reflects an outward-­gaze. These filmmakers display a willingness to serve as record-­keepers of local memories. The documenting style and archiving impulse that underlie this mode can give important insights into different subject forms that exist as cultural offers (Reckwitz 2016, 73).1 These offers represent abstract forms that allow an individual to partially and momentarily inscribe in. One predominant motif that is filmed lies in the focus on parades, processions, and public displays, including crowds of strangers. Here, filmmakers clearly display a willingness to record local memories they deem important for future conservation and thus audiences. A pendulum movement underlies narration: filmmakers inscribe themselves within the communal space and integrate the latter within their private visual archive. They narrate the self in sociality and the social in the self. Thus, the subject form offered is an inscription of the private self in sociality. Like an ethnographic impulse, this mode illustrates a self-­reflexive willingness to emplot the self in a temporal and experiential spread that extends beyond the private. These images thus indicate a direct blurring of the public-private divide and render the latter legible as not in sync with lived experience. In

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fact, these films come to visualize a process of autobiographical memory practice that is embedded in the cultural offer provided by a social we-­group (Straub quoted in IPSE 2011, 18). However, the collective identity as cultural offer (subject form) is but an abstraction; it cannot be lived conclusively. It is here materialized, engaged, and narrated within the personal history of the individual. The immateriality of collective identity is materialized in the private practice of filmmaking. The second motif narrated within this mode lies within the capturing of cultural memory artifacts that function as official imaging of a historical narrative. They are here presented as text panels in museums, street signs, war memorials, and the inclusion of self-­made titles recounting historical details of the filmed site. The main purpose of cultural memory artifacts pertains to conceptual offers for the construction of self-­interpretation in larger collectivities that are construed through the belief in a shared past. These micro-­histories of personal narration demonstrate a differentiated multi-­ layered view on how individuals take position towards an institutionalized cultural offer. These filmic foci represent a communicative actualization, as filmmaking functions as a materialization of an immaterial inscription in historical strata. Again, they function according to a pendulum movement: for one, filmmakers reclaim cultural memory artifacts and institutionalized narratives in their own private films, while the taking up of these cultural artifacts also serves to legitimize and valorize personal experience. Underlying this materialization and self-­inscription of institutional narratives lies a willingness to narrate the historicized present and past beyond the individual space. A third motif pertains to the capturing of the city through a detailed inclusion of signs, landmarks, and statues. Contextualization within the image is favored. Filmmakers transpose the city as emplacement. While the capturing of cultural memory artifacts makes for a cohesive strategy of emplotment, the construction of a filmic city creates a filmic, if not actual, space of emplacement. The filmic city is construed selectively. Back alleys, dirty bins, ugly tower blocks, etc. are consciously eclipsed in the amateur film. Filmmakers construct a version of the city that allows for a self-­ emplacement in the historical and the communal. Here the city itself is engaged as a physical manifestation of an affectively charged heritage. Filmmakers take the opportunity to actualize the immateriality of their relation to the past. The city as selective views transpose it as emplacement that frames the self-­narration. The cultural offers of subject forms are thus never taken up homogeneously, indeed, they can never be lived conclusively due to their abstract nature. Still, the cityscape, the institutional narratives, and the communality of the public space provide essential means for self-­emplotment and self-­ emplacement. This is the documenting logic of this second mode in which identity formation plays a predominant role.

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At the same time, there is a deepening of meaning to these films if we look at what lies at the base of this archival desire. This motivation extends beyond the private space. It involves a notion of selflessness, because it intends a potentially unknown spectator. Within phenomenological thinking, access to the world is provided by the means of intentionality. The trajectory this intentionality takes in the documenting and archiving mode is revealed as ontologically social. A filmmaking project as micro-­experiential expression includes sociality not as macro-­social imposition but reveals it as an ontological part of being-­in-the-­ world. Sociality and historical consciousness are here taken as intersubjective, forming a crucial part of everyday experience. What these filmmakers illustrate is how history is lived in the everyday. Historical consciousness is related to two primordial aspects: to the experience of temporality and to sociality as deeply intersubjective. These elements configure the primordial status of “being-­in-history” as experiential stance. This has to do with how subjects live temporality and spatiality. While the filmmaking activity here clearly adheres to inscriptions in subject forms in the “now,” it also comes to show, moreover, how temporality and spatiality can be lived as selfless de-­ centering. How can we deduce this merely from filmic language? The inclusion of text panels in museums, street signs, landmarks, the adoption of a universally understandable language, and, first and foremost, the inclusion of self-­made titles such as the labeling of the film by name, the introduction of a last frame titled “Fin,” or the inclusion of historical details within the title—all hint at a filmic trajectory that is intentionally directed beyond the private space at a potentially unknown spectator. The intention to render imagery understandable without the filmmaker present plays a crucial role and can be witnessed within imaging language. The logical conclusion to this filmic mode is thus the deduction that filmmakers intend an audience beyond their own lifespan even. As Vivian Sobchack has noted with regards to a historical consciousness in the everyday: “[P]eople seem to carry themselves with a certain reflexive phenomenological comportment toward their ‘immediate’ immersion in the present, self-­consciously grasping their own objective posture with an eye to its imminent future possibilities for representation” (1996, 4). Past, present, and future are here not depicted as clear-­cut chronological categories but are reflected as temporal spreads that are synthesized in these visualizations in the “now.” Filmmakers intersperse their own present with a future inclination, they take in a communally experienced past (especially wartime memorials) and thus visualize how historical consciousness is lived as self-­ reflexive. The emphasis on communal spatiality offers a further indication of a deeply intersubjective space. The emphasis on crowds, on a phenomenological level, illustrates a motivation to give as much space as possible to the Other.

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The Other, i.e. not myself, constitutes alterity within communality, yet not as an alienating presence, but as constituent of their own lived experience. Intentionality here is always communal in the personal actualization of a we-­experience. Filmmakers display the deep correlation between subject-­ and-world. They furthermore prove how this relationality always includes the alterity that is the Other, however, not as uncanny presence of a “not-­ myself,” but as a joyful inclusion that proves the lifeworld as ontologically social. This is history as lived. As David Carr notes: “We experience history not just in the social world but also in our engagement with it” (2014, 1). We are a far cry from amateurs using the camera “unwittingly,” if we take into consideration the historical situatedness that always forms an essential backdrop to experience and that is brought to expression here. If intentionality, in a phenomenological understanding, also represents the very means of access to a world that is lighted up, this mode illustrates how this access is always already social in its very foundation. The visual gestalting of film production is modulated socially, communally, and historically, and thus in these images the figure-­ground gestalting that rises to the fore in this mode proves the micro-­existential expression of a private lifeworld to be ontologically social.

Mode of an attractional display Within the corpus analyzed, the third mode can only be found when filmmakers decide to shoot at the fairground. While most of them engage the familial or documenting mode while visiting the fairground, certain perceptual fluctuations are inserted within the imagery. These vacillations will be analyzed in terms of an industrialized alternation of perception that not only governed the attention of the modern subject, but also introduced the concomitant element of distraction as irreducible concordance within modern perception. At the same time, some of the visuals taken at the fairground stand out by their abstract and non-­contextualized nature. Filmmakers at the fair produce images that not only focus on technologized light in motion; they deliberately further a seemingly estranging effect in moving the camera by hand until the images come to present a kaleidoscopic abstraction of lighted motion against a black background. What stands out with regard to these abstractions is their complete disengagement from a productive outlet and thus their isolation, yet insertion, within the amateur film collections. They can neither be put to service in the coherent construction of an inscription in the familial, nor do they display a willingness to take up different offers of subject forms in the communal and social. I would like to take up two reoccurring views that can help illustrate how amateurs engage the fairground filmically. The filmic universe of the fairground visualizes the very restructuration of perception as a distinctly

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modernist effect. While the amateur film corpus analyzed here reaches well into a post-­industrial age, the attractional impetuses that underlie it can be identified as effects of a perceptual reformation that went before it. Without going into too much detail, industrialization saw a relegation of visuality (internality) to visibility (externality). Its technological innovations all present one communal effect: they introduced a shift from an internally lived sensorium to an exterior imposition. Time, space, and the sensorium were no longer lived autonomously as internal properties in accordance with lived experience but come to constitute exterior impositions. The affective charge that accompanied industrialization was expressed as alienation, insecurity, and a general perceived absence at the heart of perception. Once we locate the practice of making images “within a history of sense perception in modernity, in particular the spiral of shock, stimuli protection, and ever greater sensations (‘reality!’)” (McQuire 1998, 363), we can historicize the motivations underlying amateur films and filmmaking in more specific terms. The immateriality of this perceptual shift can be read conclusively by how attention (here translated by the camera) is managed at the fairground, namely how attraction guides attention. Because amateurs rarely go through a rigid post-­production process, they include the major counterpart to attention, namely distraction. Distraction here stands as a sign of how attention is managed by the external impetus of attraction at the fairground. If people engage the fairground in a familial mode, distraction is rendered visible in an almost comic filmic dance from an intended focus on children to the camera gaze being drawn by a ride in the background, gears and levers in motion, or lighted displays. After a few seconds, the camera will refocus and shift back to the intended emphasis. The amateur film corpus is interspersed with numerous examples of how attention shifts and is drawn by external impetuses at the fairground. These examples come to show how perceptual attention is drawn by external impetuses that manage the sensorium of the subject. Concomitantly, attraction at the fairground is inherently technologized. At the fairground, the affective sense of alienation and estrangement that was a direct byproduct of a technologization of lived experience could be experienced as thrill and attraction. Furthermore, the thrill and attraction of the fairground are organized by a consumerist ideology in that they are repackaged as commodified leisure-­ time activity. The activity of filmmaking underscores this consumerist logic as images were created and re-­consumed at home. The thrill ride especially shows a commodification and thus cathartic repackaging of an industrial experience in which physicality is no longer bound to the body but comes to constitute an imposition of machine over man. To function as attraction, the experience is amplified. This becomes legible when filmmakers shoot from thrill rides. Especially at night, the speed of the thrill ride visualizes light as lines.

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What can be seen here is kinesthetic motion imposed on the body-­withcamera that becomes visualized as light on film. The main attraction of the thrill ride lies in the following: technological motion can be subjectively experienced. Technologized experience comes to be relieved and relived as cathartic. Also, what the experience of being seated on a thrill ride as an immobile body presupposes, is a transposal of motion from body to world. In fact, the very experience at the fair assumes a cinematic dispositif. This dispositif becomes most apparent with regard to a further frequent, and somewhat more extreme, display of attractional views. Here filmmakers deliberately create views that are not perceivable by organic perception. Filmmakers consciously convert lights as motion. They do not contextualize or embed the imagery in establishing shots. The zoom proves popular in combination with these displays of lights in motion. Filmmakers use the camera as deliberate means of creation and introduce a further layer of motion into the image. The fascination that lights at the fairground provoke is clearly related to their electric nature. Lights here come to function as a visualization of the immateriality of electricity itself. The enhancement of electrified displays is furthered to the point of it becoming a pure presence in the image. Light is not only no longer attached to the objects it illuminates; it becomes an objective entity in itself and can be consumed as image. As such, it is relegated from a necessary means of visuality to an externalized notion of visibility. It fulfils the very conditions of reification as it is rendered into a commodity. As Guy Debord shows in Society of Spectacle (1983), the image functions as ultimate form of commodity reification. Electric display at the fairground thus externalizes light from its status of a condition for visuality and transforms it into an object of visibility. The effect of electrified attractions coincides with cinematic vision as exteriorized perception. Not only is the scene (here: lights) transposed as image, again, the gravitational center of subjective embodiment being relegated in favor of non-­participatory perception. Also, the transposal of light as image to film image functions according to a commodified logic. There is a deeper experiential stance that the creation of these views reveals. This stance is intimately accorded with the inherent reversibility that underlies perception as structuring condition. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh as the common materiality of world and subject is illuminating. Flesh “connotes the structure of reversibility whereby all things are at the same time active and passive, visual subjects and visible objects, the outside of the inside, the inside of the outside” (Del Rio quoted in Sobchack 2004, 286–7). While this appears quite abstract, the concept of reversibility in the flesh becomes quite apparent when analyzed in the light of filmic behavior at the fairground. As Elena del Rio notes: “both body and world are . . . intertwined—their general existence figuring and differentiating itself into particular forms and

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modes of material being” (quoted in Sobchack 2004, 287). The fascination of electrified spectacle at the fairground introduces alterity in material being that is not so much threatening as triggering a desire to express the distinctive reversibility that lies within the flesh. Put differently: while lights in movement at the fair are generally differentiated in their particular form as non-­organic, their presence in the flesh provokes a desire to mimetically engage that experience and express it through filmmaking. It is the very movement by hand (or rather its effect in the image) that reveals the reversibility that characterizes a world-­subject experience in the flesh. As such, it visually expresses a relation that becomes specific in these images, namely the notion of bodily posture that mimics. Devotion to the materiality of the world (flesh) is not only reversible—it is mimetic. A.D. presents such a mimetic engagement.2 She emulates technological movement with the camera in hand. For example, filming a ride called Calypso, a platform that is moving in a circular fashion and on which teacup wagons are attached that move in a reverse circular motion, she not only rapidly zooms in and out until the frame is filled with blurred lights; she next proceeds to quickly tilt the camera from left to right and upside down, resulting in a slewing motion until the camera, at times, is almost horizontally inverted.

FIGURE 13.1  Collection Alice Dalvecchio (source: Centre National de l’Audiovisuel).

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She expresses the motion of being sensually drawn-­in and reflexively pushed back out by the attraction at the fairground. She furthermore adopts a mimetic posture in that she expresses technological perception with the camera. She mimics the reversibility that underlies her perceptual engagement with the attraction. She furthermore adds onto and expresses this relationality. She does not wish to dominate the attractional view through a masterful gaze, but corporeally engages with the attraction through bodily gestures. She willingly furthers the attractional view by zooming in consciously. She visually expresses “our subjective body image [that] is always also materialized objectively in a potentially mimetic ‘postural schema’ responsive to the world we inhabit” (Sobchack 2004, 290–1). These filmmakers corporeally engage with the attraction through bodily gestures and the camera as tool of sensual expansion. While such a potentially mimetic postural schema is part of every engagement in the world, here the potentiality becomes an actuality that is expressed by and with the camera. This is the reversibility of the sensual outreach and reflexivity in the body as materialized on film. The creative expression here visualizes the reversibility and reflexivity of the engagement in the flesh. We can thus reasonably say that the chiasmatic devotion to the world presents an alluring attraction in itself. The spectacular attraction of the fairground and the lighted movement that pervades it draw us in a manner that pulls affective subjectivity away from an ego-­central position. As Elaine Scarry (2001, 113) notes, in the encounter with the extraordinary, we relinquish our position as center of the world, even if we never stood there. In the encounter with an attractional display a similar e-­motion characterizes the world-­subject relation. The e-­ motion as attractional draw or pull is here expressed as the zooming-­in and panning motion that is created with the camera. This draw is reversible; it is effected with the zoom in the camera and also exerted from the draw of the visible impetus. Hence, the reversible draw renders the reversibility of the flesh legible. What these images visualize is how the “demarcation between the world’s ‘inhabitants is always provisional, never quite finished and always open to new possibilities of encroachment’ ” (Barry quoted in Sobchack 2004, 293).

Conclusion I have come to view these films as somatic landscapes that come-­into-being in every viewing. Naturally, researchers bring to the viewing their own socio-­cultural inflections, a trace I have taken up in my doctoral thesis, but that exceeds the scope of this article. The amateur film, these materialized self-­expressions from the past, can thus serve as trigger. They give rise to an understanding of how subjects make meaning in the world, rather than

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presenting concrete, unchanging realities. These films can be taken as indications of how people react to, engage with, and filmically transform larger historical and socio-­cultural impacts within their personal self-­ narrations. Concomitantly, these films are always also micro-­perceptual engagements in that their main impact lies in how experience is brought to expression. These visual snippets from the past can thus foremost give indications about how people express and narrate their lifeworld and their selves. Furthermore, the concept of gestalting helps us see the differently inflected visual trajectories that come to the fore in amateur images and thus provide us with a non-­restrictive tool for analysis. Rather than look for a fixed meaning in meta-­context, a phenomenological approach can help us understand how meaning is generated in correlational subject-­world engagement. Even without meta-­information, they are never completely senseless, if we recognize the amateur film as visualizations of a process of expressive signification effectuated in the past and leading to an enriched understanding of film as self-­narration. We need to remind ourselves of the fortune of having a visualization of the very processes that underlie meaning-­ making that becomes anew in each viewing.

Notes 1 Subjectform as cultural offers is here loosely based on the conception of Andreas Reckwitz (2016, 72): “A central part of sociological and historic subject analysis is thus to begin not with subjects, but by reconstructing social practices and complexes of practices, therefore pursuing a ‘doing subject.’ This postulates corresponding subjectforms for them, addresses them and spawns them—at least in the ideal situation of a complete fit and seamless reproduction.” 2 Archives: Centre National de l’Audiovisuel, Collection Alice Dalvecchio (IA_AMA_001051), Super 8, color, mute, 1975

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Susan Aasman is media historian and Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. Her field of expertise is in media history, in particular the history of documentary and amateur media, and in digital humanities and digital archives. Her current research involves projects that address the possibilities of using digital tools for doing media historical research. Currently, she is director of the Centre for Digital Humanities at the University of Groningen and in charge of the Master in Digital Humanities. Aasman is chief-­editor of TMG— Journal for Media History. Andreas Fickers is Professor for Contemporary and Digital History at the University of Luxembourg. His fields of specialization are European history of technology, transnational media history, and digital historiography. He is currently directing the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) and coordinator of the Doctoral Training Unit (DTU) on Digital History and Hermeneutics. He is co-­founder of the European Television History Network (ETHN), the Network of Experimental Media Archaeology (NEMA) and a member of the Management Committee of the “Tensions of Europe” Network. Mirosław Filiciak is the Director of the Institute of Cultural Studies at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw (Poland), and the editor of the Polish cultural studies Open Access quarterly ultura popularna (Popular Culture). He is interested in the theory of media studies, archaeology of media, and the relations between media technologies and cultural practices. He led many research projects, including “The Circulations of Culture” (2012) and “Youth and Media” (2013). Currently, he is the leader of an interdisciplinary team working on the issue of popular culture and its theoretical ramifications in Poland before Second World War. He also works on a project devoted to the strategies of collecting, restoring and simulating old technical media, using the case of pinball community. Patrice Flichy is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Paris Est University, France, Editor in Chief of Réseaux. His most recent books are: The Internet Imaginaire (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007); Le sacre de l’amateur, Sociologie des passions ordinaires à l’ère numérique (Paris: Le Seuil, 2010); Les nouvelles frontières du travail à l’ère numérique (Paris: Le Seuil, 2017). Tim van der Heijden is a post-­doctoral researcher at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) at the University of Luxembourg. He holds a PhD in Media History from Maastricht University, a research-­master’s degree (MPhil

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equivalent) in Media Studies from the University of Amsterdam, and a BA in Cultural Studies from Erasmus University Rotterdam. His dissertation, entitled Hybrid Histories: Technologies of Memory and the Cultural Dynamics of Home Movies, 1895–2005, was written in the context of the NWO-funded research project “Changing Platforms of Ritualized Memory Practices: The Cultural Dynamics of Home Movies.” Chris Meigh-Andrews is a pioneering video artist, writer, and curator who has been making and exhibiting screen-­based video and sculptural moving image installations since the mid 1970s. He has held a number of artist’s residencies in the UK and abroad; curatorial projects include Yes, Snow Show (British Film Institute, 2009) and Analogue: Artists’ Video from the UK, Canada and Poland: 1968–88 (Tate Britain and Tate Modern, London). Meigh-Andrews has written extensively on the history and context of artists’ video. His book, A History of Video Art: the Development of Form and Function (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006 and Tokyo: Sangensha, 2013), provides an overview of the development of artists’ video since its inception. The second expanded edition of the book was published by Bloomsbury in December 2013. He is Professor Emeritus in Electronic and Digital Art at the University of Central Lancashire, UK and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Moving Image Research in the Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries and Education at the University of the West of England (UWE). Benjamin Möckel is a post-­doctoral researcher at the University of Cologne, Germany. His Habilitation Project is about “Konsum, Moral und Globalität in der Bundesrepublik und Großbritannien, ca. 1960–1990.” Previously he worked as a post-­doc at the University of Jena. His PhD dissertation, entitled “Erfahrungsbruch und Generationsbehauptung”: Die Kriegsjugendgeneration in den beiden deutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaften, was published in 2014. Möckel worked as research fellow at the DFG-Graduate School for Generational History (University of Göttingen), and as visiting research fellow at University College London. Roger Odin is Emeritus Professor and was the Head of the Institute of Film and Audiovisual Research at the University of Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle, France from 1983 until 2004. Founder of the semio-­pragmatics approach, he is the author of Cinéma et production de sens (Paris: A. Colin, 1990), De la fiction (Brussels: De Boeck, 2000) and Les espaces de communication. Introduction à la sémio-­ pragmatique (Grenoble: PUG, 2011). He is a specialist of documentaries (L’âge d’or du cinéma documentaire: Europe années 50, 2 volumes, L’Harmattan, 1997), home movies and amateur productions (Le film de famille, Paris: Méridiens-Klincksieck, 1995; Le cinéma en amateur, Communications n° 68, 1999). He has recently edited Il cinema nell’epoca del videofonino (n° 568, Bianco e Nero, 2011) and co-­edited (with L. Allard and L. Creton), Téléphone mobile et création (Paris: A. Colin, 2013). Ryan Shand is an Editorial Assistant in the Curatorial Unit at the British Film Institute. He has contributed chapters to the anthologies Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections (London: Palgrave, 2010), and Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place

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(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014); his articles have appeared in The Moving Image, Leisure Studies, and the International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen. Ryan Shand is also the co-­editor of Small-Gauge Storytelling: Discovering the Amateur Fiction Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Tom Slootweg works as a post-­doctoral researcher in the Media Studies Department at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. His dissertation, entitled Resistance, Disruption and Belonging: Electronic Video in Three Amateur Modes was written in the context of the NWO-funded research project “Changing Platforms of Ritualized Memory Practices: The Cultural Dynamics of Home Movies. Slootweg (co-)authored articles in VIEW: European Journal of Television History and TMG— Journal for Media History and contributed to the book Exposing the Film Apparatus (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016). As a researcher he is currently involved in a CLARIAH research project in which the possibilities of digital tools for doing media historical research are explored. Markus Stauff received his PhD from the Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany, with a thesis on Digital Television and Governmentality. Since 2008 he has taught Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). His main research interests are television and digital media, governmentality, visual culture of media sports. Recent publications: Transparency (= special issue of Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 1/2014, edited with J. Teurlings). “Taming distraction: The second-­ screen assemblage, television and the classroom,” Media and Communication 4.3 (2016). Joseph Wachelder is an historian and Associate Professor in the History Department, Maastricht University, Netherlands. His research focuses on interactions between science and culture, with special attention for the mediators and media between intergenerational exchanges. His publications are devoted to issues spanning the period from the late eighteenth century till today, including higher education, Science Shops, the popularization of science, spectacular phenomena, color and sense experience in art and science, educational toys and games. Wachelder was a board member and vice president of Gewina, the Dutch Society for the History of Medicine, Mathematics, Science and Technology. He served as a member of the scientific board of the European Society for the History of Science (ESHS), and chaired the scientific advisory body of the Limburgs Museum (Venlo). As an executive board member of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, he served as associate dean of education (2012–15). Danièle Wecker has recently obtained her PhD from the University of Luxembourg and the University Paris Diderot, France. Her thesis What Do You Mean You Lost the Past? Agency, Expression, and Spectacle in Amateur Filmmaking, focuses on amateur filmmaking and the role of the researcher in the viewing process. Her main interests lie in home movies, phenomenology, and feminism.

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INDEX

16 mm 10, 35, 37, 39, 44, 50, 65, 113, 114, 187, 188, 205, 216 8 mm 35, 37, 39, 50, 92, 97, 113, 114, 148, 206, 217 9.5 mm 35, 37, 39, 50, 187, 188 A Song of Air 28 Abe, Shuya 59 active 22, 107, 126, 129, 130, 160, 161, 163, 164, 171, 207, 209, 228 activist 55, 145 Adenauer, Konrad 121, 131 adolescence 123, 124 advertisement 126 AEG tape recorders 138 aesthetic 37, 51, 52, 62, 64, 67, 75, 85, 206, 210, 212 affinity 178, 187 affordance 2, 8, 9, 10, 14, 46, 82, 113, 172 Africa 21 againstness 222 age 2, 6, 11, 21, 27, 39, 40, 41, 109, 111, 112, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 133, 134, 135, 141, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 158, 163, 164, 165, 204, 215, 216, 227 age cohorts 11, 121, 122, 123, 126, 133, 134, 135 agency 68, 70, 71, 73, 77, 121, 140, 203, 214 Akerman, Chantal 5 Aleppo 4 alienation 227 Allies 138 alterity 226, 229 alternative 8, 11, 36, 40, 41, 46, 51, 53, 57, 68, 73, 78, 85, 87, 90, 144,

155, 164, 177, 182, 207, 210, 214, 221 amateur 1, 2, 11, 12, 13, 15, 22, 23, 35, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 57, 58, 69, 75, 81, 92, 97, 98, 99, 157, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 200, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 217, 218, 219, 220, 222, 223, 224, 226, 227, 230, 231, 233, 234, 235, 238, 244, 245 Amateur Cine World 193, 198, 199, 200, 237, 260 amateur moviemaking 185, 186, 187, 194, 196, 198, 199, 200 amateur video 13, 157, 199 amateurism 13, 14, 67, 175, 181, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 211, 212, 213, 215 American 34, 54, 56, 62, 138, 139, 140, 142, 179, 186, 195, 210, 241, 248, 249, 253, 254, 258, 259 Ampex 43, 139 Amsterdam 32, 50, 86, 92, 93, 234, 235, 237, 239, 242, 243, 248, 251, 252, 253, 254, 257, 258, 260 antagonistic 57, 58 anthropology 87, 118, 253 anti-globalization 178 antithesis 53, 57, 65 apparatus 10, 36, 38, 41, 44, 48, 62, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 83, 191 apprenticeship 211 appropriation 70, 85, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94, 117, 206, 207, 209, 211, 213

262

INDEX

archival desire 208, 225 archive 4, 7, 31, 52, 91, 154, 155, 161, 218, 221, 223 archiving 8, 21, 29, 30, 31, 33, 223, 225 archivist 30 Arendt, Hannah 131, 238 Armenian 4 Arnatt, Keith 54, 253 art 2, 7, 21, 28, 32, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 92, 170, 171, 174, 175, 176, 181, 198, 199, 212, 213, 223, 235, 239, 249 art house 21 art of failure 92 artefacts 85, 117 artist 4, 5, 13, 53, 54, 55, 57, 61, 62, 63, 64, 69, 170, 173, 175, 216, 234 artistic 28, 54, 55, 64, 94, 170, 173, 175, 176, 177, 182, 190, 193, 194, 195, 199, 206, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215 assemblage 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 78, 81, 82, 235 asynchronous 157 attention 7, 11, 13, 24, 34, 40, 58, 68, 70, 73, 75, 80, 85, 104, 111, 121, 126, 131, 133, 134, 135, 152, 153, 160, 171, 182, 185, 198, 199, 204, 205, 210, 226, 227, 235 attitude 11, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 130, 156, 187, 188, 211, 213 attraction 188, 227, 228, 230 attractional display 218, 226, 230 audience 1, 20, 34, 40, 52, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 65, 74, 76, 80, 82, 85, 92, 95, 103, 104, 127, 129, 130, 131, 134, 135, 159, 160, 161, 172, 173, 185, 194, 223, 225, 239 audio cassette recorder 140 audio-visual culture 185 audiovisual media 47 aura 31, 98 authentic 90, 96, 97, 156, 206, 207, 209, 212 authenticity 97, 156, 173, 220, 244 authority 70, 127, 155, 174, 175, 181

authorship 192, 210 autobiographical memory 12, 106, 224 autobiographical narratives 118 autobiographies 108, 117 avant-garde 13, 58, 65, 124, 200, 212, 213, 216 baby 32 Bad Neuheim 138 Baillieston 201 Baker, Franz 192, 194 Baker, Richard 58, 64 Ball, Ashby 193 BASF tapes 138 Baudry, Jean-Louis 20, 37 Bavarian Public Broadcasting Service 86 BBC 54, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 64, 160 Beatles 59, 60, 125 Bebington 201 becoming 13, 23, 31, 32, 79, 90, 94, 126, 137, 174, 183, 187, 217, 219, 228 being-in-the-world 225 Beirut 4 belonging 12, 14, 24, 27, 31, 164, 209, 212, 214 Benjamin, Walter 213 Bennett, Merilee 28 Bentham, Jeremy 76 Bentham’s panopticon 74 Bergson 52 Bergsonian 52 Berlin 54, 96, 131, 241, 243, 246, 248, 254, 255, 260 Betamax 39, 42, 43, 46, 139, 140 biography 92, 106, 113, 117 birth 21, 48, 53, 109, 123, 151, 154, 156, 187, 208 birthday 39 Blade Runner 24, 249 Bleisteiner, Werner 94, 96 blockbuster 21 blog 98, 99, 144, 153, 157, 159, 177 bodily gestures 230 Bogopolsky, Jacques 32 Boguta, Grzegorz 145 Bol camera 32

INDEX

Bond, James 144 Bondtec 141 book 9, 11, 12, 15, 23, 31, 51, 76, 106, 128, 152, 186, 195, 206, 234, 235 Boston 59, 62, 241 bottom-up 73, 170, 172, 203, 204, 213 boundary object 180 bourgeois 206 Bown, Gabrielle 64 Brandt, Willy 125, 131, 252 Braun Paximat Cine 8 44 brightness 59 British 54, 55, 57, 60, 88, 126, 151, 214, 234, 246, 250 broadcast medium 51, 54, 62 broadcast television 46, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 207 broadcast TV 13, 52, 54, 56, 58, 59, 62, 64 broadcaster 56, 57, 60, 145, 149 Brussels 110, 115, 234 Bugajski, Ryszard 145 business models 139 cable 62 Cage, John 54 camcorder 26, 27, 29, 42, 46, 189, 206, 207, 209 camera 5, 9, 20, 21, 22, 26, 27, 29, 32, 35, 37, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 48, 56, 57, 74, 92, 94, 113, 133, 134, 140, 187, 190, 191, 193, 195, 196, 198, 206, 209, 213, 217, 220, 221, 222, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230 Campus, Peter 62, 63 Canada 213, 234 Canon Canovision 44 capitalist 204, 206, 213, 221 car 111, 113, 114, 115, 125, 142, 143, 147 Carels, Edwin 2, 3, 6, 7, 15 Carmyle Cine Club 198 cassettes 27, 28, 31, 33, 144, 145, 146, 147, 206 catalogue 253 catastrophe 4 categorization 31, 141 celebrity 159, 160, 211

263

ceremonies 23, 113 channel 34, 54, 59, 75, 144, 145, 155, 156, 159, 164, 178 Channel 13, 137, 145 Chaplin, Charlie 60 Che˛cin´ski, Sylwester 142 Chen, Steve 157 Chicago School 70, 259 child 10, 11, 23, 26, 27, 28, 29, 34, 39, 80, 103, 105, 112, 117, 132, 187, 220, 221, 222, 223, 227 childhood 123 “chosen” family 29 Cichocki, S. 191, 241 cine club 188, 190, 191, 194, 195, 197, 198, 201 cinema of attraction 75, 248 circle 162, 205, 221 circularity 221 circulation 10, 107, 141, 148, 150, 241, 243 citizen 60, 151, 156, 172, 173, 174, 177, 178, 179, 180 city 3, 224 cityscape 223, 224 classification 14, 30, 77, 141, 147 clichéd 220 close-up 58, 220, 221, 222 club 13, 39, 46, 111, 180, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 205 210, 211, 212, 247 co-constitutively 219 code 11, 34, 176, 218 codification 220, 221 cognition 105 cohorts 10, 122, 135 collaborative 170, 180, 190, 191, 196, 199, 210 collage 53, 60 collecting 89, 103, 110, 112, 170, 233 collection 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 34, 90, 91, 116, 147, 155, 156, 179, 217, 221, 226 collective creative authorship 192 collective identity 125, 224 collective memory 27, 103, 104, 106, 107, 109, 118, 237, 241, 246, 248, 253

264

INDEX

collective remembering 105, 118 collectivities 118, 224 colonial sublime 138, 149 color 3, 39, 44, 58, 59, 114, 115, 142, 145, 231, 235 Combray 19 commentator 57, 62, 105 commercial mainstream 210 commitment 153, 175, 194, 211 commodification 206, 227 commodities 112, 125, 138 commodity reification 228 communal 199, 209, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227 communal spatiality 225 communality 224, 226 communication 1, 8, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 28, 31, 32, 34, 38, 40, 54, 59, 64, 69, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 96, 97, 106, 131, 133, 153, 157, 158, 160, 161, 164, 169, 205, 207, 208, 234, 242, 260 communication space 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 32, 34 communicative 92, 97, 104, 106, 209, 210, 224 communism 144, 148 communities of experience 13, 122 communities of remembrance 13, 122 community 4, 24, 31, 55, 123, 125, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164, 169, 176, 180, 195, 205, 208, 210, 211, 212, 214, 215, 233 community mode 203 community of practice 211, 215 competence 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183 complexity 40, 49, 68, 70, 94, 96, 154, 190, 207 configuration 7, 8, 38, 67, 177 conflict 24, 26, 27, 70, 123, 131, 144 constant 14, 38, 49, 68, 81, 148 constraints 21, 22, 23, 26, 33, 60, 175 construction 11, 23, 24, 28, 85, 89, 105, 107, 122, 123, 125, 126, 133, 140, 154, 164, 180, 181, 224, 226

consumer 35, 41, 42, 43, 51, 62, 64, 76, 85, 125, 126, 135, 196, 203, 205, 206, 207, 213, 214, 215 consumerism 124, 141 consumerist hobby 217 consumption 38, 92, 94, 97, 113, 150, 161, 173, 177, 185, 206, 207, 209, 220, 221 contextualization 7, 224 continuity 27, 32, 36, 49, 111, 117, 153, 199, 209, 210 contract time 52 control 26, 27, 28, 56, 57, 59, 64, 76, 179, 181, 182, 214 controversial 131, 173 conventional 53, 59, 62, 65, 89, 92, 172, 173, 175, 177, 178, 181 convergence 53, 203 conversation analysis 13, 103, 105, 106, 108, 118 cooperation 15, 90, 133, 174, 181 co-operative 191 coproduce 175, 176 copyright 148 Correlli-Evans, Wendy 192 counter mode 13, 205, 208, 212, 214, 215 countercultural 214 counter-democracy 178 counter-expertise 179 counter-power 178 countryside 142 craftsmanship 211, 214 creative 46, 47, 78, 89, 90, 97, 139, 176, 177, 182, 191, 192, 193, 194, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 230 creolization 141 cross-generational 106, 109, 114 crowd science 179, 180 crowds 223, 225 cultural analysis 7 cultural domain 175 cultural dynamics 2, 92, 107, 118, 154 death 5, 26, 104, 109, 143, 152, 165, 221 de-auratization 90, 91 de-centering 225

INDEX

decentralisation 55, 56 De Certeau, Michel 170, 245 democratic 121, 127, 133, 177, 178, 181, 182, 183, 193, 203, 204, 206, 207, 214 democratization 39, 121, 169, 172, 175, 180, 182, 207, 214 democratization of competences 169 democratize 65 democratizing 213, 214 Deren, Maya 194, 212, 213 Derrida, Jacques 4 desecrated 28, 31 details 98, 99, 106, 111, 118, 119, 138, 145, 186, 224, 225 diachronic 9, 36, 37, 40, 41, 48, 49, 154 diachronic analyses 9 diachronic perspective 36, 154 dialog 90, 92, 114, 132, 133, 134, 157, 182 diaspora 4 Dibbets, Jan 54 dichotomy 68, 77 digital era 13, 171, 172, 198 digital media 1, 20, 21, 29, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 47, 49, 203, 215, 235 digital media platforms 1, 215 digital natives 11 digital video 50, 186, 187, 188, 196 digital video cameras 186 disciplined 180, 186 discontinuity 36, 40, 49 discourse 24, 28, 48, 49, 72, 86, 87, 89, 112, 121, 122, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 138, 150, 164, 165, 175, 204 discursive 45, 47, 58, 72, 98, 132, 205, 206, 213 disengagement 226 dispositif 2, 3, 10, 13, 15, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 29, 33, 37, 38, 47, 48, 49, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 92, 98, 99, 104, 228, 248 disruptive 60 dissemination 14, 36, 47, 49, 52, 57, 87, 181, 210 distinct medium 59

265

distraction 226, 227, 235 DIY system 147 document 5, 10, 31, 165, 218 Do-It-Yourself 203 domestic domain 36 domestic medium 42 domestic screening medium 41, 43 domestic setting 53, 72, 158 domestication 1, 91 domination 206 Donebauer, Peter 60, 61 dress 111, 112, 142, 176 duration 27, 33, 54, 222 Dutch 7, 15, 43, 54, 209, 211, 214, 235, 257 Dutschke, Rudi 131, 132, 135 DV 188, 189 DVCAM 5 Dylan, Bob 125 dynamic 10, 12, 14, 36, 37, 38, 49, 64, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 78, 80, 97, 106, 126, 154, 156, 209, 211, 214, 215 dystopian 204 early adopters 155 Eastern Central Europe 146 Eastern European 138 East-German 7 ecology 42, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 78, 82, 204 ecosystem 146 Edinburgh 58, 190, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 235, 241, 242, 256 Edinburgh Cine and Video Society 197, 198, 199, 200, 201 Edison, Thomas 238 education 89, 90, 94, 97, 98, 171, 172, 179, 235 educational 89, 91, 98, 169, 180, 181, 235 Egoyan, Atom 26 elderly 13, 112, 152, 153, 156, 164, 221 electric display 228 electromagnetic 41, 46 elite 1, 10, 35, 80, 146, 150, 170, 194, 199 Eloy, Sarah 109, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 120

266

INDEX

emancipatory 70, 204, 206, 207, 213, 214 emotions 138, 177, 221 emplacement 220, 224 empowerment 57 engage 3, 90, 91, 95, 108, 130, 152, 157, 173, 176, 180, 181, 182, 210, 226, 227, 229, 230, 231 engagement 5, 7, 98, 108, 111, 175, 187, 204, 218, 219, 221, 222, 223, 226, 229, 230, 231, 242 engineering 52, 87 engineers 57, 65, 139, 140, 181 England 186, 200, 234, 246 English 7, 10, 50, 141, 150 enthusiasm 15, 56, 180, 190, 199 entrepreneurs 146 environmental 67 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 206, 213 ephemeral 64, 67 ephemerality 61, 81 era 6, 30, 55, 121, 127, 131, 138, 164, 169, 189, 192 estrangement 227 Eumig R2000 Projector 44 euphoric memory 22 Europe 51, 53, 145, 186, 188, 233, 234, 240, 243, 258, 259 European 58, 126, 145, 191, 233, 235, 239, 246, 257, 259 Evans, Rob 191, 195 event 4, 12, 23, 27, 30, 53, 54, 98, 105, 108, 111, 113, 117, 118, 125, 177, 178, 197, 208, 220, 221 everyday 28, 53, 75, 80, 87, 106, 113, 154, 156, 170, 171, 179, 206, 207, 208, 209, 212, 213, 225 evocative objects 137 exchange 8, 30, 60, 64, 104, 106, 114, 118, 132, 143, 147, 171, 192 exhibition 3, 53, 220 existential 217, 218, 226 expectation 87, 129, 130, 135, 161, 207 expensive 141, 142, 143, 149, 189, 191 experience 1, 14, 15, 24, 28, 30, 38, 49, 55, 58, 59, 61, 62, 69, 74, 75, 88, 89, 90, 94, 95, 96, 104, 106,

107, 108, 117, 124, 131, 138, 145, 159, 170, 172, 174, 175, 177, 181, 191, 197, 209, 217, 218, 219, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 231, 235 experimental 15, 55, 56, 58, 59, 65, 73, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 97, 98, 190, 216 experimental video programs 56 experimenting 53, 89, 91, 98 expert 170, 172, 174, 181, 186 exploratory 89, 90 expression 8, 33, 59, 64, 107, 142, 156, 170, 175, 177, 190, 212, 217, 218, 219, 221, 222, 225, 226, 230, 231 expressive signification 217, 221, 222, 231 external impetuses 227 fair 163, 193, 200, 226, 228, 229, 260 fairground 226, 227, 228, 229, 230 familial 104, 153, 163, 220, 221, 223, 226, 227 family 1, 3, 4, 5, 10, 13, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 46, 47, 49, 92, 94, 103, 104, 105, 106, 109, 110, 111, 117, 119, 123, 142, 187, 205, 206, 208, 209, 218, 220, 221, 222, 223, 237, 243 family mode 220, 223 family viewing 26 fan 155, 156, 173, 176, 177 fandom 155, 156, 176 fashion 111, 112, 173, 229 father 4, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 34, 59, 92, 146, 187 fee 147, 148 festivities 7, 114, 218 fetishism 34 film 1, 3, 5, 7, 10, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 58, 64, 67, 68, 74, 75, 80, 90, 92, 94, 97, 98, 99, 104, 107, 109, 111, 113, 114, 116, 145, 147, 150, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190,

INDEX

191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 230, 231, 234, 237, 252, 259, 260 filmic modes 217 filmmakers 6, 7, 40, 42, 46, 104, 109, 114, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 194, 197, 198, 205, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 230 finitude 221 Fiore 69, 251 first steps 39, 156 Flanagan, Barry 54 flexibility 56, 61, 78, 118 fluid movement of matter 52 Fluxus Group 53 forgetting 103, 107 format 22, 33, 57, 62, 65, 94, 109, 113, 114, 117, 138, 141, 158, 188 formative 14, 52, 53, 122, 125 Foucauldian 204 Foucault, Michel 72, 76, 244 Foucault’s panopticon 68 France 60, 98, 145, 179, 233, 234, 235, 244 French 7, 10, 34, 37, 38, 62, 71, 75, 83, 98, 116, 145, 170, 180 Friedlaender, Ernst 127 friends 1, 29, 30, 148, 159, 160, 161, 162, 173, 176, 177, 205, 208, 209 Fuji Single 8 Camera 44 functional modalities 204, 207, 214, 215 gadgets 6, 22, 112, 125 Galerie Albert Baronian 5 Galerie Parnass 53 Garabedian, Mekhitar 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 15 Garfinkel 180 gauge 39, 43, 44, 50, 56, 57, 86, 188, 206, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216 Gaus, Günter 131, 132, 135, 254 gender 22, 62, 72, 75, 87, 112 generation 4, 6, 11, 13, 14, 15, 27, 28, 58, 64, 88, 94, 98, 104, 116, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130,

267

131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 144, 145, 152, 153, 154, 155, 158, 160, 163, 164, 165, 244 generation gap 133, 152 generational shifting 39 generationalization 125, 154 genre 51, 52, 53, 81, 129, 147, 176, 210 Gentbrugge 5, 15 Geriatric1927 13, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164, 245, 257 German 7, 53, 54, 86, 98, 121, 122, 127, 131, 132, 133, 138, 144, 148, 149, 237, 252 Germany 53, 54, 60, 121, 122, 124, 126, 127, 134, 135, 138, 139, 142, 234, 235, 243, 259 gestalting 219, 221, 222, 226, 231 gestalts 219 Giolo, Eva 2 Glasgow 189, 200, 201, 253, 256 global 7, 56, 60, 71, 138, 140, 141, 146, 149, 150, 179 globalization 141, 146 Goldstar 141 Google 157, 161, 162, 163, 174 grandad 13, 112, 151, 152, 153, 162, 163, 164, 165 grandmother 4, 5 grassroots activists 178 Gregory, George 188, 189, 195, 196 Gründgens, Gustaf 131 Hall, David 58, 64 Hall, Sue 55 Hallwachs, Hans Peter 96 Handicrafts 170 hands-on 15, 86, 90 harmonious 135, 220 Harrison, Pauline 195, 196 Hartney, Mick 57 hauntology 4 HD video 5 heavy 189 Hepburn, Audrey 125 hermeneutic 88, 220 Hess, Günter 96

268

INDEX

Heswall 201 heterogeneity 67, 68, 71, 82 heterogeneous 14, 36, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 82, 83, 86, 87, 150 heuristic 10, 21, 37, 38, 40, 41, 47, 48, 85, 86, 88, 89, 97 Hi8 5 hierarchical 24, 65, 70 hierarchy 22, 150, 210 historical 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 21, 32, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 47, 49, 73, 76, 78, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 117, 118, 121, 124, 125, 133, 154, 165, 191, 194, 200, 204, 205, 208, 209, 215, 216, 223, 224, 225, 226, 231, 233, 235, 244 historical consciousness 107, 225 historical events 125 historicized 219, 224 history 9, 11, 23, 29, 36, 38, 40, 49, 53, 75, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 103, 104, 107, 108, 116, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 134, 135, 138, 139, 140, 141, 164, 186, 187, 191, 200, 205, 206, 211, 224, 225, 226, 227, 233, 234, 239, 244, 249 Hitler, Adolph 60 hobby 35, 112, 154, 170, 174, 175, 206, 211 hobbyist 35, 58, 170 holiday 23, 39, 75, 111 Hollywood 139, 206 home mode 13, 91, 205, 207, 208, 209, 210, 212, 214, 215, 216 home movie 1, 6, 7, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 47, 49, 92, 104, 206 home video 26, 29, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 206, 209 Homeless Movies 2, 5, 6 Hopkins, John 55, 245 House of Alijn Museum 2, 3, 4, 15, 103, 104, 106, 108, 109, 110, 116, 118

Hoylake 187, 200, 201 Hoylake Movie Makers 187 Huhtamo, Erkki 86, 89, 243, 247, 258 Hurley, Chad 157 hybrid 14, 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 208, 250 hybridity 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 47, 48, 49 hybridization 36, 37, 41, 42, 45, 48, 172 Icelandic 62 iconic 58, 125, 152 icons 60, 125 identity 11, 49, 52, 71, 75, 82, 123, 127, 159, 161, 164, 175, 176, 177, 181, 208, 209, 210, 218, 224 ideological 24, 27, 32, 75, 77, 133, 144, 204, 205, 207, 214 ideology 68, 74, 76, 206, 207, 213, 220, 227 illusion 68, 74, 75, 76 image 23, 33, 35, 36, 39, 40, 43, 44, 51, 52, 53, 57, 59, 60, 61, 64, 65, 74, 108, 114, 127, 131, 142, 145, 150, 185, 188, 209, 219, 222, 224, 228, 229, 230, 234, 245 imagination 45, 87, 94, 142, 145, 185, 213 imagined communities 125, 126 immediacy 36, 44, 45, 56 immediate 1, 4, 11, 30, 96, 123, 126, 127, 132, 133, 219, 225 immersion 96, 225 iMovie 189 inclusive 38, 191, 193, 207, 208, 209 indexical 220 India 21, 138 individual 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 24, 29, 53, 55, 67, 74, 75, 76, 80, 82, 104, 105, 107, 108, 110, 112, 113, 117, 118, 147, 164, 170, 171, 173, 175, 176, 191, 197, 198, 211, 213, 214, 218, 219, 220, 223, 224 individual memory 8 individualism 105, 175, 181 individualistic 194, 195, 197, 198 individualizing 29 industry 45, 56, 57, 64, 70, 145, 172, 186, 192, 193

INDEX

inflection 222, 230 innovation 14, 94, 113, 117, 126, 130, 135, 140, 144, 190, 206, 227 innovative 38, 48, 52, 53, 54, 64, 139, 182, 186 institution 22, 23, 32, 64, 72, 175 institutional 1, 22, 26, 57, 80, 81, 186, 211, 213, 224 institutionalization 1, 13 intentionality 222, 225, 226 interactionist sociology 180 interactive democracy 177 intercontinental 60 intergenerational 133, 153, 158, 163, 235 intermedia 48 intermedial 13, 41, 42, 48 intermediality 37, 42, 48, 133 international 10, 139, 211 intersubjective space 225 inter-textual 60 interzone 6 intimacy 157, 160, 212 intimately 9, 10, 19, 228 invention 35, 37, 64, 69, 85, 87, 170, 194 inventor 32 Iron Curtain 138, 141 isolation 39, 48, 152, 226 Italy 60 Jahrling, Rolf 53 Japan 139, 140 Japanese 44, 59, 139, 140 Jenkins, Henry 173, 203, 258 JVC 42, 43, 139, 140 kaleidoscopic abstraction 226 Kamrau, Katrin 7 Karaguezian, Laurice 5 Kay, Graham 189 Kennedy, John F. 125 keyword 116 kinematography 39 kinesthetic 228 kitchen 5 knowledge producer 178 Kodak 22, 35, 44, 208, 245

269

Kodak culture 208 Kodak Supermatic 44 Kodak’s Super 8 cassette-film 44 Koestler, Arthur 131 Korean 53, 141 Krebs, Stefan 94, 99 Krikorian, Tamara 62 Land Art 54 landmark 110 landscape 8, 43, 45, 53, 72, 78, 79, 197, 205, 207, 213, 214 lay users 174 learning 14, 89, 90, 98, 153, 171, 180, 181, 182, 192, 211 learning environment 211 legal 10, 12, 80, 148, 149, 150 legitimacy 174, 178, 180 leisure 15, 171, 172, 186, 195, 197, 206, 227 Lennon, John 55 Les Holloway 193 liberalization 121 license 141, 146, 148, 149 lifeworld 218, 219, 220, 222, 226, 231 light 8, 21, 22, 44, 48, 56, 76, 77, 135, 170, 177, 200, 219, 226, 227, 228 lightweight 44, 52, 189 linearity 221 Liverpool 200 living room 3, 5, 23, 32, 39, 43, 91, 92, 97, 104, 158 local 6, 7, 12, 13, 31, 32, 138, 139, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 150, 174, 179, 180, 195, 197, 200, 211, 214, 223 local modernization 146 localized 182 lone worker 194, 195, 198 Long, Richard 54 lost generation 127 low-gauge video 57 Lucie-Smith, Edward 57 Luxembourg 86, 99, 217, 233, 235, 247, 260 machine memory 52 MacLaren, Norman 21

270

INDEX

McLuhan, Marshall 69 magazine 43, 44, 46, 54, 60, 125, 129, 130, 131, 134, 193, 194, 210, 258 makeshift 97, 143, 144, 147, 198, 199 male 75, 124 Manchester 200, 247, 252 manipulate 52 Mann, Golo 131 Mannheim, Karl 123, 125 marginalized position 52 marketing 54, 87 mass 4, 19, 36, 57, 64, 81, 90, 124, 169, 171, 175, 176, 179, 181, 199 material 2, 4, 10, 37, 38, 41, 46, 47, 52, 55, 57, 62, 67, 68, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 85, 86, 88, 91, 111, 112, 113, 117, 118, 127, 138, 142, 148, 150, 209, 229 material culture 91, 118 materialities 68 Matsushita 140 Maxwell, Keith 187 meaning 7, 9, 19, 38, 48, 56, 86, 88, 107, 108, 109, 111, 125, 144, 157, 161, 163, 170, 212, 218, 219, 225, 231 media 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 24, 30, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 60, 61, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 108, 114, 117, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 138, 141, 144, 148, 152, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159, 161, 164, 169, 172, 174, 181, 190, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 233, 235, 246, 248, 250, 253, 257 media archeology 90 media revolution 207 media studies 7, 10, 14, 40, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80, 85, 122, 125, 133, 134, 233 mediated memory practices 1, 2, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15

mediatization 8, 125, 126 medium 6, 26, 38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 58, 61, 62, 64, 65, 68, 69, 74, 75, 77, 80, 92, 94, 97, 130, 153, 163, 164, 174, 189, 214, 216, 220, 223 Mekas, Jonas 212, 255 member 13, 23, 24, 29, 34, 113, 133, 134, 187, 188, 189, 195, 197, 211, 212, 233, 235 memory 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 96, 97, 105, 106, 107, 108, 112, 125, 137, 154, 164, 208, 209, 212, 214, 221, 224, 259 memory practice 2, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 46, 47, 49, 51, 96, 97, 209, 224 memory studies 7, 8, 106, 107, 108, 125 mentalities 107, 121, 122 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 221, 228 metamemory 24 methodology 106, 108, 186 Metz 21, 251 micro-celebrity 160 middle-class family 35 mimetic 229, 230 mobile phone 29, 31, 33 modernization 141, 142, 144, 146 Mona Lisa 60 mono 96 mono voice 96 Moorman, Charlotte 59 moral panic 127, 130 mother 5, 24, 27, 74, 222 motivation 33, 223, 225 movement 27, 32, 52, 57, 58, 64, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 148, 178, 181, 194, 198, 222, 223, 224, 229, 230 moviemaker 189, 190 multi-layered view 224 multilevel 103, 106, 117 multilevel perspective 103 Munich 94, 95, 96 museum 4, 34, 98, 103, 109, 120, 235, 238, 242, 250, 257

INDEX

music videos 147, 150 myth 24, 211 narration 11, 218, 219, 223, 224, 231 narrative 11, 24, 33, 37, 38, 75, 103, 109, 116, 118, 125, 139, 140, 224 narratives 8, 36, 40, 85, 87, 118, 121, 131, 141, 153, 218, 224, 243 national 8, 12, 34, 60, 124, 127, 134, 180, 211, 231, 244 National Socialism 127 native capital 31 nature 10, 33, 58, 59, 64, 72, 87, 88, 90, 91, 96, 97, 112, 118, 146, 173, 178, 179, 192, 197, 211, 214, 219, 224, 226, 228 navigating 27, 219 Nazi 121, 126, 127, 130, 138, 252 nephews 103, 109 Netherlands 92, 209, 211 network democracy 178 networks 12, 57, 68, 134, 147, 157, 174, 177, 178, 194, 198, 199, 211 new materialisms 144 new media 8, 13, 36, 40, 68, 70, 80, 81, 87, 126, 135, 152, 153, 203, 207 new social movements 178 New York 60, 212, 216, 234, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260 newspaper 148, 156, 160, 177 nieces 103 Nigeria 138, 249 night 159, 197, 227 non-convergent 68 non-edited 219 non-professional 59, 162 Nordmende Spectra-Vision 44 norm 40, 45, 49, 199 normative 11, 138, 204, 214 North West Film Archive 200 nostalgia 150, 163 novice 211 Oakley, Peter 151, 156, 159, 162, 163, 164 old media 48

271

Ohnesorg, Benno 131 ontology 219 operator 20, 22, 26, 27, 211 oppositional 51, 52, 53, 64, 154, 207, 212, 213, 214, 215 optical 51 organization 6, 71, 78, 210 organized amateur 186, 198, 200, 205, 211 oscillation 221 Osiecka, Agnieszka 150 Other 225, 226 P2P 12, 137 Pahlavi, Reza 131 Paik, Nam June 53, 57, 58, 59, 60 painting 55, 62, 170 PAL system 145 PAL/SECAM 149 parades 113, 223 parents 4, 26, 27, 111, 145, 221 Parikka, Jussi 87, 144, 243, 247, 258 Paris 21, 53, 60, 111, 233, 234, 235, 237, 238, 239, 240, 244, 245, 251, 252, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 260 participation gap 160 participation TV 59 participatory 171, 182, 203, 204, 207, 211, 228 participatory culture 240, 249 passion 175, 187, 213 patent 139 Pathé 32, 35 pause 27, 199 peer-to-peer 1, 150 perception 10, 37, 38, 39, 49, 52, 67, 69, 74, 80, 92, 219, 220, 221, 222, 226, 227, 228, 230 performance art 62 performativity 209 peripheral 141, 143, 144, 146 personal cultural memory 259 personal experience 24 personal memory 108 Peus, Stephan 96 phenomenological 15, 94, 96, 218, 219, 225, 226, 231

272

INDEX

phenomenology 219, 235 Philips 42, 43, 50, 141 photo 2, 3, 20, 22, 29, 30, 33, 90, 108, 142, 205, 251 photo booth 2, 3 photograph 32, 142 photography 7, 21, 23, 32, 33, 34, 40, 44, 76, 130, 208, 212, 213 Picasso, Pablo 60 picture 23, 24, 26, 29, 30, 32, 33, 57, 59, 62, 107,, 114, 117, 150, 156, 188, 198 piracy 138, 139, 144 pirate 13, 138, 144, 149 pirate modernity 13, 138 pirate modernization 144 pirated 12, 146 platform 36, 39, 67, 70, 72, 126, 135, 151, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 163, 164, 177, 214, 229 Plato’s cave 68, 75, 77 play 6, 22, 23, 24, 27, 59, 82, 86, 91, 94, 95, 96, 99, 106, 107, 110, 117, 127, 138, 141, 158, 169, 171, 174, 213, 215, 221 playback 55, 56, 92 playful 15, 22, 89, 90, 92, 97, 98 playing experiences 112 plot 7, 142 Poland 12, 65, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 233, 234, 249 Polaroid 33, 44, 50, 208 Polaroid People 208 Polavision 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50 Polavision cassette 44 Polish 64, 65, 137, 138, 141, 142, 143, 145, 148, 149, 150, 233, 243, 249 Polish People’s Republic 137, 138, 142, 148, 243 political 4, 11, 40, 51, 52, 55, 58, 62, 64, 70, 77, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 144, 169, 172, 173, 174, 177, 178, 181, 182, 195, 204, 205, 206 political generations 121, 122, 123, 124, 135 politicians 125, 129, 134, 172, 173, 181

politics 56, 72, 154, 172, 177, 213, 214 Pollock, Norman 189, 198 popular 14, 39, 44, 112, 123, 125, 126, 129, 139, 142, 143, 145, 147, 150, 157, 158, 176, 177, 180, 181, 182, 185, 188, 194, 195, 204, 206, 215, 228, 233 popularity 10, 33, 147, 152, 156, 161, 180, 186, 194, 199 popularization 35, 41, 42, 179, 180, 235 porn 148 portable 42, 50, 52, 53, 56, 60, 213, 214, 237 portable equipment 52 portapak 55, 57 post-edited 218 Postman, Neil 69, 70, 71, 254 post-production 57, 210, 227 power 10, 23, 27, 52, 55, 56, 68, 70, 72, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 91, 104, 105, 107, 118, 126, 150, 172, 178, 182, 204, 211 power of television 52 practices 1, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 28, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 89, 94, 96, 97, 113, 117, 137, 150, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 185, 186, 191, 194, 199, 203, 204, 207, 208, 209, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 220, 231, 233 pragmatic 2, 10, 15, 37, 38, 49, 86, 97, 171, 199 Prensky, Marc 152 present 4, 5, 8, 9, 23, 27, 32, 33, 48, 52, 53, 62, 68, 69, 80, 81, 83, 88, 105, 108, 109, 148, 150, 164, 176, 177, 178, 182, 191, 194, 200, 203, 215, 219, 220, 222, 224, 225, 226, 227, 259 preserved 31, 52 Preston 195, 196, 200, 201 private 19, 28, 34, 36, 39, 90, 106, 110, 113, 160, 161, 177, 187, 190, 206, 209, 220, 221, 223, 224, 225, 226, 240

INDEX

private cinema 187, 190 private mode 19, 34 private space 225 pro-am 171 problematization 68, 79, 81, 82 problems 43, 79, 82, 95, 129, 145, 180, 188, 193 process 11, 14, 23, 24, 27, 30, 36, 49, 53, 54, 55, 60, 81, 87, 88, 90, 92, 96, 97, 98, 110, 131, 141, 149, 153, 154, 157, 163, 164, 169, 172, 174, 176, 179, 180, 182, 192, 193, 194, 203, 217, 218, 224, 227, 231, 235 processions 111, 112, 223 producer 12, 56, 65, 94, 145, 147, 153, 173, 176, 182, 193, 210 production dispositif 21 produser 12 professional 6, 11, 13, 22, 33, 46, 56, 57, 61, 62, 64, 96, 113, 143, 156, 162, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 179, 180, 185, 187, 188, 192, 193, 194, 203, 206, 210, 211, 212, 213, 218 professional gauge 188 professional practices 11 professionalism 67, 206 professionalized 51 Profus, Marek 146 projection 39, 44, 92, 94, 187 projector 20, 23, 28, 31, 32, 35, 44, 74, 92, 187, 198 propaganda 54 prosthetic memories 24, 105 prosumer 12 protest 126, 131, 173, 178, 181 Proust, Marcel 19 pseudoprofessionals 208 psychoanalytical 28 psychological 12, 27, 28, 80, 106 public 28, 30, 32, 36, 39, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 76, 80, 92, 95, 99, 110, 112, 121, 122, 125, 131, 134, 135, 153, 160, 172, 173, 175, 177, 179, 181, 182, 209, 214, 223, 224, 252 public displays 223 public museum 76

273

public space 28, 30, 53, 223, 224 public sphere 125, 135, 175, 177 Putnam, Robert D. 195 radical 14, 29, 49, 53, 55, 56, 60, 71, 104, 125, 130, 132, 135, 205, 206, 208, 213, 215 radical alternative 53 Radical Software 213 radio broadcasts 148 ranking 31 RAPID Asekuracja 148 re-appropriate 182 recollection 24, 105 recorder 22, 35, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 48, 50, 92, 138, 140, 143, 144 recording 1, 23, 26, 36, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 54, 60, 62, 94, 95, 96, 113, 139, 145, 148, 177, 178, 188 recording technology 42, 43, 46, 94 reel 3, 44, 92, 141 re-enactment 86, 88, 90, 91, 92, 96, 97, 244 reflexive phenomenological comportment 225 remediate 8 remembering 12, 30, 103, 107, 108, 117, 163 remembrance 14, 20 remix 182 repertoires 1, 237 representation 23, 58, 208, 216, 221, 225 resistive 205, 208, 213, 214 reversibility 221, 228, 229, 230 reversible 219, 229, 230 revolutionary change 199 rewind 27, 145 Rigole, Jasper 2 Rintoul, Ian 190, 194, 197, 198, 201, 238 Robakowski, Jozef 64, 65 Runcorn 201 Rustamova, Meggy 2 sarma 5 SCART 145

274

INDEX

Schempp, Paul 127, 128 Schimmöller, Christian 96 Schoolman, Carlotta Fay 62 Schultz 180 Schum, Gerry 54, 55, 260 science 7, 75, 86, 89, 90, 135, 172, 173, 179, 180, 181, 182, 235 science and technology studies 7 Scotland 186, 200, 201 Scott, Ridley 24 Scottish 58, 235 scrapbooking 33 screen 3, 7, 14, 20, 23, 27, 28, 29, 32, 39, 40, 44, 53, 54, 64, 72, 74, 92, 94, 109, 131, 145, 149, 185, 187, 188, 198, 234, 235, 260 screening 3, 11, 20, 21, 23, 24, 27, 32, 35, 36, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 92, 103, 104, 109, 111, 116, 190 sculpture 55, 62 SECAM system 145, 149 Second World War 12, 121, 142, 233, 243 second-hand sales 146, 147, 148 selection 30, 71, 109, 174 selective 22, 27, 224 self-reflexive 98, 223 seniors 124, 152, 160 senses 56, 89, 94, 97, 98, 256 sensibilities 58 sensory 88, 90, 92, 96, 98, 219 sensual 219, 230 sensuousness 85, 87, 97 serious 46, 104, 158, 163, 186, 187, 190, 205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 211, 215 serious amateurism 210 Serra, Richard 62 Serres, Michel 89 Sewell, George H. 198 shared 8, 10, 24, 29, 30, 53, 56, 60, 69, 105, 107, 122, 124, 125, 130, 131, 132, 154, 155, 158, 164, 175, 190, 211, 224 shared interest 8, 211 sharing 1, 10, 15, 24, 29, 35, 39, 120, 151, 155, 157, 158, 162, 163, 171, 172, 174, 177, 180, 181

Sharp VCR 143 shock 227 shot 5, 23, 28, 58, 65, 217, 220, 223 showing 25, 26, 28, 156, 221 signal 51, 61, 62 silent generation 129 single worker 198 Siraishi, Yuma 139, 140 situated knowledge 179 Sjölander, Ture 60 skill 32, 206 skilled 186, 187, 193 SLR 5 small-gauge 44, 213 smart device 30 smartphone 38, 72 smell 20, 219 social capital 195 social infrastructure 186 social networking site 157 sociality 210, 223, 225 solutions 79, 80, 81, 144, 146, 147 Sony 42, 43, 50, 55, 139, 140 Sony UK 55 sound 3, 20, 26, 36, 39, 46, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 75, 96, 98, 113, 114, 138, 188, 198 soundtrack 59, 188 South Korea 60 Southport 189, 200, 201 Southport MovieMakers 189 spatial 27, 38, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 94, 95, 96, 97, 110, 138 spatial hearing 95 spatiality 225 specialist 29, 53, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 180, 182, 194, 234 spectator 27, 55, 74, 75, 108, 225 speech 26, 127, 171, 182 speed 43, 56, 227 Spilliaert, Lisa 2 spirit of community 211, 215 sports stadium 76 stage 41, 42, 74, 94, 95, 96, 124, 131, 177, 188 staging 39, 92, 99, 134, 158 standardized 68, 186 statues 224

INDEX

Steina 62, 245 stereo 94, 95 stereotypes 62, 107, 112, 139 stickers 147 still photos 33 Strangelove, Michael 157 strategic 72, 73, 79, 87 strategies 51, 54, 71, 76, 80, 81, 87, 182, 192, 199, 233 Straub 224 Strauß, Franz-Josef 131 street signs 224, 225 STS 7, 9 studio 53, 58, 59, 60, 62, 96 style 1, 33, 56, 57, 89, 126, 130, 134, 218, 220, 223 subjectivities 69, 73 succession 4, 6, 14, 37, 123, 220 Sundaram, Ravi 144 Super 8 6, 22, 35, 37, 39, 44, 50, 114, 188, 206, 217 surveillance 68, 76, 77, 78 Swan 187, 188, 189, 191, 193, 197, 199, 200, 201 Sweden 60, 257 Switzerland 60 synthesizer 60, 61, 143 taboo 221 Takano, Shizuo 139 tangibility 86, 87 tape 20, 26, 27, 31, 41, 45, 46, 48, 57, 58, 59, 62, 138, 139, 144, 145, 147, 149 Tapscott, Don 152 taste 19, 20 team player 192 technical training 52 technicians 57, 96 technological determinism 8 technological principles 51 technologized light in motion 226 technology 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 20, 28, 29, 32, 33, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 46, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 67, 74, 75, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 92, 95, 97, 98, 113, 117, 118, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145,

275

146, 149, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 172, 181, 186, 187, 188, 190, 196, 199, 207, 209, 217, 218, 222, 233 technophile 190 technostalgia 254, 259 teenagers 151, 152 television 21, 24, 26, 28, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 72, 75, 76, 78, 90, 92, 125, 134, 139, 148, 152, 160, 173, 177, 189, 207, 209, 212, 213, 214, 235 Television Gallery 54 temporal spreads 225 temporality 97, 225 temporary delay 52 Tepperman, Charles 185, 187, 199, 210 testimonial 26, 34, 186 text 2, 3, 10, 38, 53, 62, 83, 86, 123, 124, 157, 174, 175, 177, 223, 224, 225 text panels 223, 224, 225 theater 20, 21, 23, 32, 74, 75, 78, 80, 81, 104, 176 thesaurus 7 thinkering 89, 247 thrill 227, 228 Tilston, Angus 187, 191, 193, 199 time-shifting 250 top-down 170, 186, 193, 203, 204 Totsuko 139 tradition 4, 62, 86, 111, 113, 194, 260 traditional dish 5 training 64, 170, 171, 181, 186 transcultural 7 transformation 14, 36, 37, 40, 42, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 76, 78, 79, 82, 141, 170 transgenerational 31, 130 transistor radio 126 transition 12, 13, 21, 29, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 155, 200, 215 transitory 48, 72 translation 7, 10, 71, 72, 170

276

INDEX

transmission 8, 56, 57, 60, 61 transnational 8, 13, 141, 178, 233 trauma 4, 28 traumatic 4, 24, 28 Tung, Mao Tse 56 TV 28, 32, 33, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 64, 65, 75, 80, 131, 134, 135, 140, 142, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 169, 172, 173, 188, 242, 253, 260 TV commercials 59, 150 TV de-Collage 53 UK 54, 56, 58, 152, 157, 160, 198, 200, 234, 237, 239 unauthorized copies 146, 148 underground 58, 145 unequal 68, 76, 77, 82 uneven 70, 76, 77, 78 United States 53, 56, 58, 186, 195, 212, 213, 214 USA 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 245 user 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41, 45, 46, 49, 67, 81, 85, 89, 97, 114, 140, 154, 155, 157, 161, 164 user generation 164 user groups 2, 6, 11, 46 user-generated content 155, 157, 161 utopian 65, 87, 133, 204, 207, 213, 214 utopian revolution 65 Valenti, Jack 139 VHS 12, 39, 42, 43, 46, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 150, 188, 209 video 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 22, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 33, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 92, 98, 114, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 163, 177, 187, 188, 190, 196, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 234, 249, 255 video artist 55, 57, 59, 60, 62, 64, 234

video formats 140, 188 video rental shop 146 Video Synthesizer 59 Video2000 42, 43, 46 videocassette 35, 43, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143 video-sharing 157 videotape 43, 60, 137, 138, 150 Vietnam War 125 viewing 3, 21, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 38, 52, 75, 157, 217, 221, 230, 231, 235 virtual community 154 visual experiences 57 vlog 156, 163 voice 26, 29, 53, 58, 59, 96, 109, 129, 148, 151, 152, 156 voiceover 149 Vostell, Wolf 53 VTRs 43 VX 140 Walkman 126 Wallerstein, Immanuel 141 war memorials 224 Warrington 190, 200 Warsaw 141, 149, 233, 241 wartime memorials 225 Wasiak, Patryk 137 Watson, Ivan 193, 197 wealthy amateurs 188 weather 69, 220 webcam 151, 158 Weck, Lars 60 Weiss, Janusz 145 West 121, 126, 133, 134, 142, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 186, 200, 201, 234, 256, 259 West Kirby 201 Western 75, 138, 141, 143, 145, 146, 147, 149, 173 Wikström, Bror 60 Wiechert, Ernst 127 winter 112 Wonder Woman 62 work 7, 20, 21, 24, 28, 29, 37, 48, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 69, 70, 73, 75, 79, 80, 83,

INDEX

86, 97, 107, 108, 133, 155, 161, 170, 171, 173, 176, 177, 179, 180, 181, 182, 188, 189, 197, 198, 199, 204, 205, 206, 207, 213, 216 Wuppertal 53 Wurfbaum, Stephan 95 Wyneken, Gustav 127, 129, 134 young 11, 117, 124, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 138, 144, 152, 153, 158, 163, 164, 193, 195

277

youngsters 145 youth 123, 124, 126, 129, 130 YouTube 2, 13, 39, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 177, 189, 240, 245, 248, 257, 258 Zakłady Radiowe im. Kasprzaka 141 zoom 220, 221, 222, 228, 230 zooming in 12, 220, 230