The “Family Film” as Amateur Production Genre: Frank Marshall’s Comic Narratives

Frank Marshall (1896–1979) was one of the most well-known figures in postwar Scottish amateur film culture. He was involved in developing the remarkable infrastructure that amateur cinema enjoyed in Scotland as the first chairman of the Scottish Association of Amateur Cinematographers (SAAC) when it was formed in 1949 and as a member of the board of the Scottish Film Council until 1972. Tom Clark, former secretary of the SAAC, compared Marshall’s central role within amateur filmmaking in Scotland to the influence that John Grierson exerted on the professional industry.¹ Furthermore, Frank Marshall was one of the most active participants in postwar Scottish amateur film culture, responsible for making approximately seventy-seven short films. One recurring preoccupation within this vast body of work was what then was known to its practitioners as family films, a category featuring family members, close friends, and/or pets, which tend to be shot either at the filmmaker’s home, in his or her garden, or on vacation. Family films can be either fiction or nonfiction. Marshall’s family films, in particular, expand moments captured in private cine recordings into planned linear comic narratives. These films provide an opportunity to examine the intersection between the domestic focus of the family as subject and the aesthetic expectations for the genre that prevailed at amateur cine contests. I will show that the family film was championed as a hybrid form that could be celebrated as the emblematic genre of amateur cinema.

Examples of family films, in particular, those of Marshall, were recurrently employed by the movement’s champions and critics to illustrate the distinctive nature of the sector to wider audiences. Marshall’s reputation in turn encouraged other amateur filmmakers to attempt their own variations on the genre as it became a formalized category in amateur film competitions, both in Scotland and internationally.

This case study demonstrates that some aspects of methodologies that have been developed to analyze commercially released feature films may also be applied to the creative works of nonprofessional filmmakers. Marshall’s amateur films raise questions of authorship, genre, and pragmatic analysis—approaches that have been well rehearsed in studies of feature films.

Dana Polan reminds us that studies of authorship require critical engagement with archival resources to provide historical context:

A related aspect of auteurism today has to do not simply with the reincarnation of older auteurist methods but their refinement or even transformation. . . . New advances in historiography (for example, the potentials that gritty archival work offers) have led, in contrast, to a greater concreteness and detail in the examination of just what the work of the director involves.²

Frank Marshall, accordingly, may be studied as an example of an amateur auteur—that is, as a director who exhibits stylistic continuity but is also significant because he or she influenced a particular genre of film.³ In both the amateur film press and in later archival cataloging, a film “in the Frank Marshall style” is shorthand indicating peculiar personal idiosyncrasies and certain generic qualities that other filmmakers sought to replicate and refine.⁴

Figure 1.

Frame enlargement from ARP: A Reminder for Peacetime (Frank Marshall, 1940). The Marshall family from left to right: Muriel, Chrissie, Nairn, and Frank. From the collection of the Scottish Screen Archive at National Library of Scotland copyright NLS.

Marshall’s films are often centered on his immediate family: his wife, Chrissie, daughter Muriel, son Nairn, and, later, his grandchildren.⁵ Most of his films are variations on a few familiar themes that give them a distinct authorial signature. The comic narratives that incorporate these domestic preserves are slight tales spun around small incidents that disrupt the tranquility of home life in Whitecraigs (a suburb on the south side of Glasgow) before equilibrium is happily restored. The mode of production specific to amateur cinema meant that “cinedads,” as George Wain called them, could integrate family members into their films as a pragmatic way to recruit and retain actors.⁶ Children are readily available and often can be...