10.54103/2036-461X/19080
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures, ed. by Masha Salazkina and Enrique Fibla-Gutiérrez, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020, pp. 336
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2023-01-24
2022-11-22
2023-01-24
2023-01-24
153-155
Cinéma & Cie
Elena Gipponi
2022
10.54103/2036-461X/19080
153
Università IULM, Milano
2036-461X
39
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155
Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures, ed. by Masha Salazkina and Enrique Fibla-Gutiérrez, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020, pp. 336
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/19080/17547
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                                                                                       Global Perspectives on Amateur Film
                                                                                       Histories and Cultures
                                                                                       ed. by Masha Salazkina and Enrique Fibla-
                                                                                       Gutiérrez
                                                                                       Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020, pp. 336
                                                                                       DOI 10.54103/2036-461X/19080




                                                                                         After having edited, in 2018, the Spring issue of   mere hierarchical overturning ‘from the center
                                                                                       Film History entitled ‘Towards a Global History of    to the margins’, which would run the risk of
                                                                                       Amateur Film Practices and Institutions’, Masha       forcing amateur cinema to be considered as a
                                                                                       Salazakina and Enrique Fibla expand their             mainstream, rather than minor, phenomenon.
                                                                                       research on amateur cinema with this substantial      Following the methodology of media archaeology,
                                                                                       collection of essays, in which the term global        the volume invites us instead to deviate from
                                                                                       returns. The declared objective of the volume is,     a linear historical development, in order to
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License




                                                                                       indeed, the widening of the geographical scope        shed light to the dead ends of film history (for
                                                                                       of the scholarship on amateur cinema beyond           example the utopian and unsuccessful attempt to
                                                                                       the Western world (mainly Europe and the USA,         institutionalize amateur cinema in Vichy France),
                                                                                       such as in the pioneering works of Roger Odin         to the even heretical forms of appropriation
                                                                                       and Patricia Zimmermann) and beyond the               of technology (for example, repurposing the
                                                                                       bourgeois environment, to include non-Western         amateur media infrastructure by activists in
                                                                                       and unconventional practices, from China to           the political environment of Bologna’s social
                                                                                       Venezuela, from Tunisia to the stateless Yiddish      movements in the late 1980s and early 1990s)
                                                                                       community.                                            and, more generally, to the continuities in the
                                                                                         The opening essay — written by Benoît               viewing experience instead of the breaking
                                                                                       Turquety, who has recently devoted pivotal            points (e.g., the same representations of travel
                                                                                       studies to small-gauge cinema — provides a            recur across decades). To this end, it is essential,
                                                                                       solid theoretical foundation by considering           as many of the authors of the essays collected
                                                                                       the amateur as the true subject of film history,      here do, to broaden the range of sources and also
                                                                                       and focusing not so much on single inventors          include oral testimonies, newspapers, booklets,
                                                                                       as on the multifarious ways of using small-           and the underground press.
                                                                                       gauge technologies (and not only: there is also         The plural adopted in the book title — Histories
                                                                                       a way to use standard gauge as amateurs, as           and Cultures — signals the heterogeneity of
                                                                                       demonstrated in the second essay of the volume,       the historical and geopolitical contexts of the
                                                                                       referring to a 35mm film made for an amateur          practices under analysis. Indeed, the volume
                                                                                       competition, that was never shipped).                 focuses mainly on economic, political and
                                                                                         However, this proposal does not result in a         cultural issues in relation to amateur cinema,


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                 153
without, however, neglecting technological                      amateur documentary films of the late Soviet
aspects (for example, the transition from                       era on the ethnic Latvians of Siberia, analysed
film to video is also a transition from analog                  in chapter 13, challenges the political institutions
destructive editing processes to a nonlinear and                of the Soviet Union not openly but from within,
nondestructive editing; the weight of the U-Matic               thanks to the minor status of amateur cinema
equipment had an impact on the mobility of                      as compared to professional cinema and also
the amateur filmmaker; the commercialization                    thanks to the peripheral position of this national
of Kodak’s synchronized Super8 cartridge in                     minority. This nuanced and complex relationship
1973 eliminated the need for separate sound                     with the socio-political context is just one among
recording equipment). The case studies under                    the many other occurrences that the volume
consideration can in fact be arranged on an ideal               enlightens.
continuum between two poles. At one end there                      One of the most striking pieces of evidence of
is the peak of normativity: amateur cinema is                   the breadth of the meanings of amateur, which
conceived as ‘an extension of the apparatus of                  runs through the entire collection like a common
state power and regulation’ (p. 97), a practice                 thread, is the lexical choice to define texts
that confirms hegemonic modes of production                     and practices: different words are needed to
and consumption, which are subjected to direct                  illuminate different elements of amateur cinema.
institutional control. This is the case, for example,           For example, while the adjective amateur had
of the small-gauge films made in the corporate                  a certain stigma in the debate on American
culture of Sulzer factory in Switzerland, or of                 experimental cinema of the 1930s, in the 1960s
Israeli commemorative home videos endorsed                      an underground author like Jonas Mekas was
by the state itself. At the polar opposite,                     proud to call himself amateur. Or, preserving
amateur cinema is instead conceived and used                    the space between film and maker (film maker
as a radical alternative to dominant power and                  instead of filmmaker or film-maker) aims to point
hierarchies, as a countercultural and subversive                not to an already codified profession, but to an
agent of self-representation. This is the case,                 artisanal practice in which it is the gesture of
for example, for the activist orientation of one of             construction, of manufacturing, rather than the
Detroit’s amateur film cultures in the 1960s or                 finished product (the making, rather than the
of the Mexican superocheros movement of the                     film) that is to be emphasized. In some cases,
1970s.                                                          the term independent rather than amateur is
   Most of the case studies collected here,                     preferred (chapter 4); when amateur is used as
however, are located not at the extremes but                    a noun, it is also frequently made even more
in the central area of this ideal continuum that                specific, in expressions such as ‘advanced
stretches between norm and subversion, in                       amateur’ or ‘expert amateur’ (or ‘serious
that ‘neither / nor status [...] beyond center-                 leisure’), culminating in significantly long and
and-periphery binaries’ (p. 55), ‘supplementing                 clumsy phrases (‘amateur-though-progressively
already existent amateur film forms and                         professionalizing quality of the […] work’, p. 159).
practices rather than supplanting it’ (p. 73), and,             Similarly, as the last essay demonstrates, the
in so doing, challenging historical and cultural                term vernacular functions in several registers
classifications. An example of an intermediate                  and it suits even substandard cinema very well.
position between the purely oppositional and                       The category of the amateur throughout
the purely cooperative-collaborative, in relation               the book also crosses the three steps of the
to power, can be seen in the essay on Latvia                    traditional theatrical production chain: alongside
(annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, the country               an amateur production mode, there are also
obtained independence in 1991): the corpus of                   an amateur distribution mode and an amateur



154                                                     Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures
exhibition mode, for instance in occupied                  than a cinematographic style, insofar as the term
university classrooms; in neighbourhood-                   indicates a provisional stage in the elaboration
by-neighbourhood tours of screenings as                    of an idea, a visual research project and a social
opportunities for conversation (this happened              investigation that are still in progress.
in Santa Fe); in participatory and performative               What all the essays gathered in the volume
gatherings like the Galician Xornadas do Cine,             share is, ultimately, the recovery of the
where the boundaries between amateur and                   etymological meaning of the term amateur, with
professional were negotiated. According to                 its reference to the Latin root amare, to love (even
                                                           the term ‘enthusiast’ bursts out on many pages):
Vivian Sobchack’s proposal, it is even possible
                                                           as Erik Kessels and Patrice Flichy — the former
to trigger an amateur reception mode, which is
                                                           is a Dutch artist, designer and curator whose
placed not in the film itself, but in the spectator’s
                                                           target are creative professionals; the latter is
viewing experience: when the ‘home movie
                                                           the well-known French sociologist — suggest
attitude’ is adopted, ‘any type of film can be
                                                           in two recent small books,1 it is necessary, in
experienced as a home movie’ (p. 125). The
                                                           spite of the rhetoric of hyper-specialization, to
amateur mode, finally, can also be applied to              interpret the enthusiasm and the lightness of the
the pre-production of a film, as in the case of            amateur not as starting points, but as goals to
the fotodocumentales, inherited from Neorealist            be achieved. One suspects that continuing to call
foto-documentario as an informal teaching tool.            them amateurs is no longer enough.
In this case — paraphrasing the famous phrase on                                             Elena Gipponi
Neorealism — amateur is a moral attitude more                                    [Università IULM, Milano]




   Notes
     1
      Erik Kessels, Complete Amateur. A Pro’s Guide to Become More Amateur (Milan: Corraini, 2022)
   and Patrice Flichy, La sacre de l’amateur. Sociologie des passions ordinaires à l’ère numérique (Paris:
   Éditions du Seuil et La République des Idées, 2010).



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