Amateur Cinema (Media) Studies Network News

BAFTTS Amateur Cinema SIG events, 4-5 April 2023, University of Lincoln

4 April 2023, BAFTTS Conference

11.45-13.15. Special Interest Group: Amateur Film ATB0109
CHAIR: Annamaria Motrescu-Mayers
Alyssa Grossman
Transcending Domestic Ethnography: Haptic Remediations of a Family Archive
Zoë Viney Burgess
Towards the next century of amateur film archives: writing ourselves into history
Karianne Fiorini and Gianmarco Torri
A (possible) handbook for the creative re-use of home movies

5 April 2023, BAFTTS Conference

14.15- 15.45 Special Interest Group: Amateur FIlm Screening, MB0312

“Re-framing home movies” screening @ BAFTTS 2023, Introduced by Karianne Fiorini and Gianmarco Torri (Re-framing home movies)

  • Manuale di cinematografia per dilettanti – Vol. I (A Companion for Amateur Cinematographers: Vol. I) / Federico Di Corato (Italy, 2022, 20 minutes)
  • ciudad lineal (Linear City) / Riccardo Bertoia (Italy, 2021, 31 minutes)
  • Gli anni (The years) / Sara Fgaier (Italy/France, 2018, 20 minutes)

Research note

‘L’amateur en cinéma: un autre paradigme. Histoire, esthétique, marges et institutions’ by Benoit Turquety, Chiara Rubessi, Roger Odin, Beatriz Rodovalho, Giuseppina Sapio, and Dominique Bluher, Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinema, 2017.

Invitation to contribute to ‘Documentary and the Amateur Media Swarming’ Seminar, Visible Evidence XXIX, University of Udine, Italy, September 6-9, 2023.

‘Documentary and the Amateur Media Swarming”

Amateur movie makers acted as chroniclers of their time (Motrescu-Mayes and Aasman 2019), going out with their camera and capturing life on the streets and during events. Although increased hybridization characterizes the “home movie” mode and the “amateur/experimental” one, they historically swung from a domestic/observation-based practice to a more complex multi-layered one. Documentary and amateur film practices shared a lineage in the way they maintained a relationship with their environments, in the forms of observing, keeping memory and participating. Nevertheless, media technologies played a decisive role in expanding the realm of the observable, providing new manners of observation, extending the radius of influence. Accordingly, the primacy of observation – of inner or exterior worlds – never outdid creative, militant, and experimental methods, meant as strategies for discovering a “hidden reality” (be intimate/psychological or social) by treating “facts” as technical effects of experimental arrangements or “committed” modes of filmmaking (Gaines 1999). Rather than focusing on the single work’s representations or on the authorial intention of single personalities, this seminar assumes a media ecological perspective, while questioning the impact of spatial interactions and technical entanglements on the amateur film production. It invites us to look at practitioners and their works from afar, addressing the way filmmakers and amateur images flew and circulated among spaces, media infrastructures, and networks, within a multi-dimensional scale, in a long durée perspective.
Scholarship on amateur media history recently stressed global and transnational perspectives (Fibla-Salazkina 2021) as well as critical temporalities (Motrescu-Mayes and Aasman 2019), addressing media practices from analog to digital. This seminar invites to discuss new modes of representing and questioning the amateur “motion intelligence” and identity, stressing media materiality according to a “media theory of swarming”, where situation-dependent interactions on the local level could be transformed by the feedback effects caused by the global changes of the swarm on these local interactions (Vehlken 2019). It will discuss models of interaction between individuals and multiplicity/collectives, material formats of image circulation in relation to local and global media infrastructures, individual or collective movements across multi-scale networks.
Should you be interested to contribute, please send a short proposal (inclusive of a title, a 100-word abstract, and a 150-word bio) to Andrea Mariani andrea.mariani@uniud.it by February 24th, 2023

“Du Pathé-Baby au 9.5 mm, l’invention du Cinéma chez soi”, Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé et à l’INHA, Paris, December 5-6, 2022.

Please see here

‘Révélez vos bobines 9.5 mm’, Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, Paris, 26 Nov. 2022 & 16 Jan. 2023.

Please see here

‘Séance spéciale : Films amateurs en 9,5 mm’, Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, Paris, 25 November 2022.

Please see here

‘9.5mm: and Cinema is Everywhere’, international conference, Berne (& online).  November 17-19, 2022.

Please see here

‘Florilège Pathé-Baby’, Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, Nov. 10 & 24, 2022

Please see here

International Symposium ‘Contemporary reuse of Amateur Films #1’

Please see here & Programme and Abstracts.

Amateur Cinema SIG, BAFTSS Conference, April 20 2022

Amateur Cinema and the histories and politics of collaborative creative practices

Chair: Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes (University of Cambridge)

  • Tom Slootweg (University of Groningen): Challenging amateur modes: Or how to deal with the variety of intent among amateur media practitioners?
  • Giuseppina Sapio (Université Jean Jaurès/LERASS): A middlebrow eye: home movies between ideological subjection and profanation
  • Graeme Spurr (University of the Arts London): Getting Down to the Frillies: Glamour, Permissiveness and Fashion in the UK Amateur Cinema Press, 1970-1980

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