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Reviewed by:
  • Amateur Movie Making: Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915–1960 ed. by Martha J. McNamara and Karan Sheldon, and: Main Street Movies: The History of Local Film in the United States by Martin L. Johnson
  • Liz Czach (bio)
Amateur Movie Making: Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915–1960 edited by Martha J. McNamara and Karan Sheldon. Indiana University Press. 2017. $85.00 hardcover. $35.00 paper; also available in e-book. 290 pages.
Main Street Movies: The History of Local Film in the United States by Martin L. Johnson. Indiana University Press. 2018. $90.00 hardcover. $36.00 paper; also available in e-book. 294 pages.

On Main Street in Bucksport, Maine, sits the 1916 Alamo Theatre, home of Northeast Historic Film (NHF), an archive founded in 1984 with the aim of preserving New England's moving image heritage. In its over thirty-year history, its success has been an inspiration to other regional archives. NHF collections are featured in two recent publications from Indiana University Press. Martha J. McNamara and Karan Sheldon's edited collection Amateur Movie Making draws exclusively on the archive's holdings, and Martin Johnson's far-reaching study of local film culture Main Street Movies makes use of NHF's "movie queen" films—films that used a template scenario in which a successful Hollywood actress returns to her hometown for a visit. Each volume makes a significant contribution to the exploration and analysis of filmmaking far beyond the reaches of the production centers of Hollywood and New York.

At first blush, Amateur Movie Making's subtitle, Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915–1960, might suggest a narrowly defined field [End Page 179] of inquiry with limited appeal to a broader audience. But readers would be remiss to dismiss such a delightful and expansive volume that resonates far beyond the realm of amateur film. One of Amateur Movie Making's greatest strengths is its addition of materials that animate the films in surprising ways. Included, for example, are three "Reflections" in which the films of prominent figures are discussed by someone close to their work. Feature-film director Whit Stillman reminisces about the films of his grandfather, Ernest Stillman, as a site of family filmmaking heritage that anticipates his own work, and Martha White reflects on the home movies of her grandfather, American novelist and essayist E. B. White, which offer a rare glimpse into the personal life of a deeply private man. Perhaps most moving is Jennifer Neptune's account of her conversations with Penobscot tribal elder Charles Norman Shay. His films of life as a Native American man from Indian Island, Maine, offer rare glimpses into Indigenous life that are not from the perspective of a white settler anthropologist. Shay's films feature images of life on the reservation as well as his many travels abroad and around the country as a serviceman.

Archivist Dino Everett provides technical notes that accompany each chapter and offer clear and concise descriptions of the film stocks, cameras, and other technology used in the production of the films; they represent another intriguing way the volume illuminates the films it considers. (Everett also contributes a general overview of amateur and home-movie technologies.) Unlike the recent volume Exposing the Film Apparatus: The Film Archive as Research Laboratory, which uses film technology as a starting point for understanding the interplay of technology and visual aesthetics, the technical information here is driven by specific films.1 Seemingly insignificant technical details, such as the popularity of the diagonal cement splice, encouraged because of its presumed superiority in passing through a projector, take on more meaning when we are informed about the labor and meticulousness involved in this form of editing. Readers understand how the affordances and limitations of the equipment affected the individual film's aesthetics. Perhaps it is unsurprising that a book devoted to films held in an archive should be so attentive to the materiality of the works, but this careful consideration of the intricacies of their production adds another layer of understanding to their interpretation and appreciation.

Amateur Movie Making is divided into four parts that roughly organize...

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