Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place

9. Retracing the Local: Amateur Cine Culture and Oral Histories

197 Oral history and moving images have considerable potential synergy. While amateur films/footage of landscapes and sociocultural practices often account for the majority of regional film collections, accompanying materials such as scrapbooks and interview transcripts can take up more physical space than an archive can reasonably be expected to store in the long term. As a result, the thought processes behind the making of these productions can be difficult to discern for the visiting scholar who does not have the local knowledge required to assess the significance of the films. This problem is compounded by the lack of synchronized sound in many amateur cine productions, meaning that they have now effectively become silent films even if an accompanying soundtrack once existed. In particular, non-fiction films/footage that documented local events, buildings, and spaces are available to view, yet their significance often lies outside the boundaries of the frame. The necessary turn toward local history that results from these problems can be facilitated by interviews with the amateur filmmakers themselves, a research methodology that was developed in the project Mapping the City in Film: A Geohistorical Analysis at the University of Liverpool (2008–2010) and continues in Children and Amateur Media in Scotland at the University of Glasgow (2010–2014).1 The added benefit of these oral histories is that they are stored digitally, which requires less physicalspaceinthearchiveitself.Thereforethischapterwillseektoprovide reflections on adopting the methods of oral history to increase our nine Retracing the Local: Amateur Cine Culture and Oral Histories Ryan Shand 198 · Rya n Sha nd understandingofamateurcinecultureandthepotentialdifficultiesfaced by both archivists and scholars in this activity. To do this I will provide a comparison between two films from the collection of the Merseysidebased collector and filmmaker Angus Tilston, namely Church Street (c. 1975, Jim Gonzales/Liver Cine Group) and A Pool of Life (1976–1978, Angus Tilston/Swan Cine Club). Both films were shot in central Liverpool at around the same time, but this comparison will be used to illustrate epistemological problems as well as to explore possible solutions. After this opening section, attention will turn to examining how the problems previously identified are routinely solved by staff members working in film and television archives using established protocol at the acquisitions stage, but also to exploring how the use of the Internet is changing the ease and scope of the cataloging process itself. Building on the groundwork provided by these film and television archivists, the next section explores why scholars might be drawn to digital mapping platforms such as GIS in order to organize the wealth of empirical data that can now be gathered from various disparate sources. The use of GIS software allows the researcher to organize and analyze this combination of geographical and historical information, incorporating it into layers on digital maps that can be navigated, compared, and used to determine new patterns and data correlations. As Jeffrey Klenotic has suggested: In addition to offering powerful tools for researching and representing cinema history, GIS opens new opportunities for interdisciplinary engagement across cinema studies, ethnography, oral history, architecture, economics, geography, historical geography, historical GIS and other fields and disciplines with potentially mutual interests in the socio-spatial history of cinema and everyday life.2 Therefore, this chapter details how GIS software offers various contextual solutions to many of the problems that have been identified by both archivists and scholars relating to the appreciation and study of amateur non-fiction films. While these technologies do not solve all the potential difficulties encountered by viewers of this material, I argue that in combinationwiththepracticeoforalhistorythesedevelopmentsmakepossible a practical means of bringing previously “local” cultures into the wider publicspace.Indeed,archivists,scholars,andmuseumcuratorshavevariousmutualinterestsinhelpingtofacilitatethecirculationofarchivalfilm R etr acing the Loca l · 199 into display and dialogue with contemporary audiences, those who often have both personal and sociocultural investment in images and sounds from their (and our) localized past. First of all, this chapter will highlight one of the main problems facing researchers of amateur films/footage that are held in public archives. These are issues that archivists face on a daily basis; it is therefore useful to draw attention to these problems for the benefit of future researchers so they can become more aware of the best approaches to archival material. AMATEUR FOOTAGE AS AN INCOMPLETE OBJECT If a film scholar discovers an old feature film, either in an archive or on television, it is usually fairly easy to discern what the filmmaker intended...