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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Amateur Media and Participatory Cultures: Film, Video and Digital Media ed. by Susan Aasman and Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes London and New York: Routledge 2019, pp. 164
Text.Serial.Journal
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2019-10-01
2021-09-02
2019-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Chiara Grizzaffi
2019/10/01
Università IULM, Milano
2036-461X
33
en
Amateur Media and Participatory Cultures: Film, Video and Digital Media ed. by Susan Aasman and Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes London and New York: Routledge 2019, pp. 164
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16184/16659
19
Amateur Media and Participatory Cultures: Film, Video and
Digital Media
ed. by Susan Aasman and Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes
London and New York: Routledge 2019, pp. 164




   In the past few decades, amateur cinema studies have overseen a significant,
growing interest and a flourishing of publications devoted to various aspects of
analogue amateur film practices. More recently, several scholarly contributions
have also addressed the digital turn and the contemporary ‘amateurized media
universe’ — as per Patricia Zimmermann’s definition — although the study
of digital amateur media raises some new and delicate issues. The already
conventional and fragile distinction between ‘amateurs’ and ‘professionals’ (and
indeed between amateur and professional devices, or consumption modes, and
so on) have been redefined by the ubiquitousness of user-generated content; to
address their somehow anarchic proliferation, their pervasiveness, the way in
which they seem to elude any attempt to contain, define or classify them requires
the scholar to immerse herself in the contradictions of the present.
   Confronted with the difficult task of dealing with a set of ephemeral practices
that present significant differences, but also unexpected commonalities, Susan
Aasman and Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes — the two authors of the book Amateur
Media and Participatory Cultures: Film, Video and Digital Media — adopt a very
effective strategy. They declare at the outset that their volume does not attempt to
offer a systematic study that aims to investigate amateur production exhaustively,
in all its aspects, but it should rather be considered a ‘work in progress, one
that often combines perplexing theoretical perspectives and several open-ended
analyses’ (p. xii). As such, it proposes heterogeneous paths in which the forms of
the past dialogue seamlessly with those of the present, bringing out some crucial
and urgent aspects that concern our relationship with those amateur media that
are part of our reality, that inform our imagination, that contribute to define our
view of the world.
   The heterogeneity of the analyses and of the approaches offered in this book
is also the result of the different backgrounds and methodologies adopted by
the two authors: Aasman is a media historian, while Motrescu-Mayes is a visual
anthropologist. Rather than being a weakness, though, the methodological
and even stylistic specificities of each of the two authors is undoubtedly one
of the strengths of the book, which offers therefore two unique but effectively
intermingled perspectives.
                                                Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 33, Fall 2019
                              Reviews / Comptes-rendus


    The first and second chapters, written by Aasman, consider amateur practices
as the result of a complex combination of technological, social, economic,
cultural and also political factors. Chapter one offers a diachronic examinations
of amateur media, thus addressing at length their change of status from a marginal
and somehow elitist hobby to a mass diffused practice, from a form of memory-
building fostered by the temporal distance between shooting and projection to an
everyday means of communication marked by immediateness and pervasiveness.
In the second chapter, Aasman focuses specifically on the home movie dispositif,
addressing in particular the shifting boundaries between its private and public
dimension and the consequent complex, contradictory impulses ‘since the
amateur filmmaker/media maker’s identity and political economies have now
entered a highly public and commercialised space’ (p. 7). Chapters 3, 4 and 5,
instead, are written by Motrescu-Mayes as an almost continuous discourse on the
ethical and political aspects of amateur images, especially those that deal with
violence and trauma.
    Motrescu-Mayes’s analysis begins with a discussion on the concept of
ephemerality as both something intrinsic to amateur images — more subject to
be discarded, not preserved because of their low commercial value — but also
something that is presented as a feature of many digital platforms, that therefore
are mistakenly perceived by users as free environments within which they can
perform their own or new identities. The very concept of ephemerality in relation
to amateur media is addressed through an analysis of the practices of recycling,
re-use and resemantization of private images. In chapter 4, Motrescu-Mayes
investigates what happens when the right to narrate and interpret suffering,
trauma and violence passes from (political, economic, cultural) institutions
to individual citizens, those netizens that challenge the dominant ideological
narratives and frameworks, thus ‘acting as memory agent’ (p. 99) and helping to
construct not only a ‘visual memory of trauma’, but also those counter-histories
analysed in chapter 5. In it, she argues how ‘what appears at first to be brief
and possibly inconsequential, ephemeral images (visual constructions) of other
people’s trauma, become in time an ongoing exercise in shaping and challenging
visual identities of the global ‘I’ — an ‘I’ unified by the power of shared anonymity’
(p. 128). The last chapter, by Aasman, addresses a crucial issue, once again related
to memory: the practices of archiving and preservation of digital amateur media.
Aasman acknowledges that ‘the complexities and contradictions that characterize
present-day amateur media cultures are mirrored by, and reproduced in, the
complexities and contradictions of archiving digital memories’ (p. 148). As such,
it is not possible to conceive easy solutions in order to face the fragile, ephemeral
nature of digital media, affected by the paradox of being sharable and easy to
circulate — so as to appear eternal — but instead subject to obsolescence or,
worse, erasure — for example, the removal of contents considered offensive or
that infringe copyright laws implemented by YouTube. However, by listing a
series of individual or collaborative archival practices, Aasman’s analysis suggests


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some possible virtuous strategies, while pleading for both the need to preserve
the memory of our digital present and our right to oblivion.
   The non-systematic nature of the volume does not coincide, therefore, with
the lack of a coherent general perspective. Its cohesion as a whole is guaranteed
by a common purpose shared by the work of Aasman and Motrescu-Mayes:
they both approach amateur media from a fresh, open, multidisciplinary angle,
which combines a wide range of theoretical contributions — not only from
anthropology and history, but also from sociology or psychology, to name just a
few — in order to address the relationship between amateur media and memory,
identity and social structures from a profoundly ethical and political perspective.
This book is indeed a work in progress, in the more positive sense: through the
questions it raises, it is a compelling invitation for the whole scholarly community
to take a closer look at amateur practices with a renewed perspective. Although
ephemeral and often mundane, they can enable, after all, an authentic dialogue
with our past, and they represent the living, beating heart of our present.

                                        [Chiara Grizzaffi, Università Iulm, Milano]




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