Introduction: Toward a Global History of Amateur Film Practices and Institutions

In 2003, Film History published a special issue entitled "Small-Gauge and Amateur Film" (vol. 15, no. 2, edited by Melinda Stone and Dan Streible).¹ It proved to be a watershed moment for amateur-cinema scholarship, signaling its entry into academically legitimate discourses on film history. It was an overdue response to the questions posed by Patricia Zimmerman in a 1988 article in the same journal: What is the significance of analyzing amateur film? What does its history illuminate?² The issue provided multiple answers, exploring the institutionalization of amateur film in the US and UK, its relationship with experimental cinema in North America and Mexico, and the role of archivists in preserving this neglected area of film history. The special issue we present here—fifteen years later and in the same journal—is intended to signal a dialogue with this legacy, as well as engage with more recent work on amateur film, thereby providing further and more varied answers to these questions by drawing from a broader range of geopolitical contexts.

When Patricia Zimmermann's seminal Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (1995) and the later coedited collection, with Karen Ishizuka, Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (2008), established the foundations of scholarly work on amateur cinema as a distinct form of film culture, its primary focus was on the domestic space and the Western nuclear family.³ While this was an important and groundbreaking area of exploration, amateur-cinema scholars have since taken Zimmerman's foundational work into a variety of realms that extend beyond the home.⁴ By doing this, amateur-film scholarship formed part of a larger shift within film history, significantly opening up the field in terms of its objects of study. It is worth briefly examining this broader scholarly context in order to assess the role amateur-film history plays in the reconsideration of the contours of film historiography.

THE USEFUL CINEMA TURN

In recent years, film-studies scholarship has popularized concepts such as useful cinema, nontheatrical, orphan, industrial, or—more simply—noncommercial to analyze the social, political, and cultural relevance of the medium beyond commercial cinema with theatrical exhibition. As Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson mention, this "necessary reorientation of the questions we ask of our film and media history" has opened innumerable avenues for research,⁵ introducing into academic discourse experiences and materials previously overlooked. Scholars have begun to reconstruct the powerful effects that these various cinematic practices had on the way modern life was experienced and imagined in the first decades of the twentieth century and beyond. These studies include, for instance, the documentation and analysis of the efforts by colonial authorities to discipline the colonized,⁶ the circulation of radical political imaginaries through informal networks of exhibition,⁷ the intersection of different educational initiatives and cinema,⁸ the use of film in the industrial environment,⁹ and the crossover between amateur and professional practices since the first decades of film history.¹⁰

How can we describe these experiences, and how do they engage with the narrative of film history as we know it? As Thomas Elsaesser aptly concludes, when examining this corpus of nonfiction films, it is "advisable to suspend all pre-existing categorizations."¹¹ In other words, previous scholarly approaches don't work well when applied to this particular history of moving images since they were based on entirely different historical paradigms. Elsaesser himself, in reference to industrial films, specifically suggests asking three questions when approaching such materials: who commissioned the films, what occasion were they made for, and to what use were they put?¹² His approach considers the broader social, cultural, and institutional factors behind the production and circulation of such audiovisual works.

The importance of adopting this expanded understanding of the medium cannot be understated. It helps us see how the assumption that film was largely either a monetary business in search of impressionable audiences or else an aesthetic pursuit for the artistic elites has in effect obscured the rich history of cinema's other functions. Institutions beyond...