Dear all,
The first BAFTSS Amateur Cinema Special Interest Group conference panel will take place on 21 April (14.30) at the BAFTSS conference in Bristol (http://baftss.org/conference-2017/). It will address the theme of ‘Amateur cinema and its multiple film sub-genres’ and include the following papers (see also http://amateurcinemastudies.org/editors-choice/):
Panel overview:There is an urgency to circumscribe, re-define and develop a critical language able to cope with the rapid shift between what was conventionally categorised as private and personal – i.e. home movies watched and distributed as ‘home entertainment’ – and what has become in the digital space a public, global privacy where the image-maker adopts the amateur’s creatively liberating status. The three speakers will place their core research agenda at the confluence of such clashing and yet co- dependent moving-image production and distribution practices and will consider possible new directions in inter-disciplinary scholarship. Each speaker will explore methodical, extensive approaches addressing developments in amateur cinema practice and studies while relying on the intrinsic interdisciplinary approach dictated by specific questions of technology, social and political dynamics, economic structures, changing aesthetic cannons, and contemporary cultural patterns. They will consider new insights regarding the ways in which visual and memory experiences are currently shaped, stored and re-distributed across new amateur cinema/media technologies and visual channels, and will discuss several examples of visual methodologies relevant to collective memory and representation studies within the global framework of amateur/user- generated film and media.
Paper 1 “My first Videotape: from amateur film to amateur media” (Susan Aasman, University of Groningen)
This paper will trace the ways in which anthropologists, sociologists, cultural historians, and film and media theorists have explored amateur cinema and media as a rich source of new means of cultural production. From the invention of the film camera at the end of the nineteenth-century until the late 1960s, amateur film making on 16mm, 9.5mm, and 8mm film was a hobby practiced predominantly by white middle-class men. As such, it became part of the twentieth-century everyday life as a new cultural practice that primarily used the camera as a technology of memory-building an archive of idealised representations of family life. So far, not much attention has been paid to the era of amateur video, which is a serious lack as from the 1980s onwards amateur media production became more diverse. This paper will especially address these more recent changes of the concept of ‘amateur’. New media technologies brought new representational possibilities that were explored by different groups of users attracted to new kind of amateur media usages. More recently, the emergence of the Web 2.0 challenged amateurship in an entirely new way, moving beyond small social circles of reception. YouTube’s initial call to ‘broadcast yourself’ individualized the possibility to express oneself to a potentially world-wide audience. In addition, a niche demographic, such as children and teenagers has quickly embraced this new visual literacy – a group who had never could produce, edit and broadcast its amateur cinema/media productions.
Paper 2 “Amateur cinema: from ethics to semantics” (Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes, University of Cambridge)
This paper will consider an in-depth analysis of how cultural and social networks of amateur cinema/media redefine key concepts of surveillance and media ethics. Examples selected from different amateur media genres, i.e. home movies, web-dramas, vlogs, snapchats, are central to the argument around issues of authenticity and of global, national and gender identities. This perspective becomes particularly relevant when considering amateur cinema/media as an ever-changing vernacular text within the global visual literacy and its efficacy in modelling new perspectives on media ethics and semantics. The current visual culture and its by-product literacy are constantly shared and shaped by a synchronous global network of producers-cum-audience. While studies of the rapid shifts in popular visual and digital culture have already been published and scholarship addressing home movies and/or amateur film culture is gaining momentum, the study of amateur cinema / media as a text able to challenge conventional critical methodologies is still an uncharted territory for most media scholars. The paper will advance the thesis that the study of amateur cinema/media prompts the renegotiation of established (cine/media) semiotic studies that locate film/visual culture within the logic of structural linguistics and, most importantly, within the fluid parameters of media ethics that define today’s new visual literacy. Several examples of amateur cinema/media will be discussed from this perspective with the aim to identify the ways in which visual identities, memories and histories have been negotiated within private networks (i.e. family, social clubs) of distribution and/or continue to be interpreted across online, free-access global media networks.
Paper 3 “Film Cans or Coffins? Reframing “Amateur” Archives in the YouTube Era” (Caroline Frick, University of Texas at Austin)
In his oft-cited work on the develop of professionalism in the United States, scholar Burton Bledstein illustrates the shift from amateur to professional through the experience of nineteenth century coffin-makers. From woodworker to “mortician,” and coffin to “casket,” Bledstein argues that these practitioners strived to distance themselves from their craftsman origins to gain closer links to the loftier position of medical “physician.” The contemporary evolution of YouTube personality into broadcasting star mirrors such shifts and harkens to the advent of the Hollywood celebrity system, grooming the unknown into well-trained studio player. The intersections between industry, amateur, technology, and the historical media canon offer compelling evidence for a closer look at the nuances of “amateur” film and video. With a case study of amateur “horror” genre content from the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, this paper will address the challenges of generic classification presented by repurposed “amateur” archival content online. The 1966 feature film, Manos: The Hands of Fate, created by a fertilizer salesman from El Paso to win a bet, offers a unique example of the ongoing life cycle of archival media: From nearly orphaned amateur relic, to cable celebrity status, to online viral click-bait, amateur horror refuses to be relegated to the coffin-like nature of an obsolete film can.
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