Close Readings: Seeing Amateur Films in Important Ways

On July 27 and 28, 2002, twenty-five people gathered at Northeast Historic Film (NHF) in Bucksport, Maine, to continue and to further develop the intellectual dialogue that began during the 2001 Home Movies and Privacy symposium. While the symposium was a great success, I am somewhat hesitant to review it, as I selfishly wish to keep the annual symposium a secret. Part of its success during the last two years has been its intimate size and the complete lack of blustery careerists who are able to nearly derail any dialogical gathering they attend. Rather than the deathly pedantry that often dominates the large academic conferences that I attend, the conversations at the symposium were intellectually stimulating, playful, open-ended, and congenial.

Other factors also helped to make the symposium a success. It was an interdisciplinary assembly of archival experts and media/cultural studies scholars who were willing and able to cross their disciplinary boundaries to speak both theoretically and practically about amateur films. Each presentation during the two-day symposium was forty-five minutes—which is at least double the amount of time of traditional academic presentations. As a result, presenters had adequate time to show amateur movie clips, to develop their ideas, and to discuss their presentations in some depth with symposium participants. Because the symposium was constructed by depth rather than breadth, participants were better able to work together to create meaningful and appropriate connections as they related to the symposium's theme.

Both the 2001 and 2002 symposiums asked the participants to consider, to discuss, and to theorize how archival amateur films help us make sense of the past and how they help shape our relationship with the present. University of South Florida communication professor Mark Neumann (who was a symposium presenter in 2001) opened the symposium as moderator. Neumann asked participants to consider the following questions as they attended the presentations and the exhibited amateur films: How do we increase the accessibility of amateur film? How do we get beyond the cultural baggage or nostalgia and sentimentality felt for amateur films so that we can find their significance? Neumann urged the presenters to call into question the sense of cultural authority and historic truth that are frequently granted amateur films. He suggested that their "truths" were fictional—particularly the notion that home movies provide us with a lucid behind-the-scenes view of domestic life. Finally, Neumann proposed that participants look at amateur films as a question rather than an answer. "What happens," he asked, "when we treat these films as a mystery?"

The first presenter, Rick Prelinger, president of Prelinger Archives in San Francisco, in his "Amateur Film and New Media," addressed increasing the accessibility of amateur film. Prelinger had an answer that was both philosophic and pragmatic because he has made it his mission to put a great quantity of his archival collection of technical and amateur films on a Web site titled The Internet Archive. The site enables anyone to stream or to download archival films free of charge. He not only led the symposium participants through the site, he also spoke reflectively and philosophically about the competing constructs of archival scarcity and accessibility. Prelinger stated that after seventeen years of making money by charging for moving images, he wanted to help create a noncommercial archive to help foster a new cultural condition whereby the archival model of scarcity was replaced by a model of complete accessibility. He asked participants to imagine what will happen when more and more archival film is completely accessible, and then he predicted that when archives lose control of their materials, artists, scholars, and laypeople will be free to use the material in new ways. In other words, he enthusiastically suggested that greater accessibility leads to the remixing, editing, and recontextualization of archival film. Because preserving and maintaining authenticity is the modus operandi for many film archivists, such a prediction provided...