Ongoing and past projects relating to the use, research and promotion of amateur cinema and home movies.
Ongoing Projects
‘Private Pasts and Future Publics‘ by Daniel Mauro (University of Texas at Austin, US)
Mauro is exploring research questions such as whether home movies are ‘truly “representative” of the everyday on a larger scale?’ and ’Do curators/filmmakers/scholars/etc. have the goal of making these films representative, or, is it the context of their selection that necessarily positions them on a representative scale?’.
‘Ephemeral Films: National Socialism in Austria‘ (2011-2013). Among the goals of the project are the preservation, scientific exploration and analysis of a unique collection of “ephemeral” films on National Socialism in Austria. The group includes more than fifty films, largely unknown and in need of restoration, which relate to the rise of the NSDAP since 1932, Austria’s “annexation” in 1938, the war period from 1941-42 as well as Jewish everyday life before the expulsion and the Holocaust. These documents – mostly amateur films, but also “Kulturfilme” and other types of sponsored films – derive from the collections of the Austrian Film Museum and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. The two institutions have, in 2011, begun to intensify their collaboration in this field. During the course of the project, the preserved films will be contextualized and made accessible to a broader public in order to complement and correct a discourse which has been dominated to an extreme degree by the imagery of propaganda film.
Unitat d’Investigació del Cinema, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain (since c. 2002)A research group led by Prof. José Carlos Suarez Fernandez that has specialised in the identification, recovery and research of non-professional (amateur and domestic) film. The group has already recovered over 3,000 amateur films and is disseminating its research in published works and by making short documentaries and television programs. The group supports the recently launched Cinemateca Antoni Martra Badia,
Changing platforms of ritualized memory practices: the cultural dynamics of home movies’, Netherlands (2011-2015)
Team: Dr. Andreas Fickers (Maastricht University), Dr. Jo Wachelder (Maastricht University), Dr. Susan Aasman (Groningen University). Funded by NWO (the Free Competition in the Humanities),project focuses on the changing practices of home movie making and deals more specific with the question of how changing technologies of memory production (film, video or digital camera) have shaped new practices and rituals of memory staging (screening in domestic or public venues) and thereby initiated processes of (re)negotiating user generations and (group) identities.
‘Children and Amateur Media in Scotland’, UK (2010 – 2014). Team: team – Prof. Karen Lury (Principal Investigator) and Dr. Ryan Shand (Research Assistant).
A major aspect of the project is to locate amateur video makers active between 1980-2000 and preserve and store some of the videos made during this period. The academic research team, based at the University of Glasgow, will investigate this video material to gain a unique insight into the lives of Scottish children in the twentieth century.
Film Fairfilm Project, USA (ongoing)
A collaboration of Northeast Historic Film, the Queens Museum of Art, and the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film.
For bulletins on the progress of this ongoing project, visit NHF’s Hidden Collections blog, The Big Reveal.
Stichting Amateurfilm Foundation (since 2004), Netherlands.
The Foundation consists of a small team of five board members who organise and support various activities concerning amateur film in all its varied forms. The Foundation wants to stimulate the collection, preservation and re(use) of amateur film material, to support the research of amateur film, both through funding and through the team’s own research, and aims to arouse public interest in both historical and modern day forms of amateur film production.
Past Projects
Ernemann project-description.(2002-2009).
The project was dedicated to the 17,5mm-film format which was patented by the Heinrich-Ernemann A.G. in Dresden in 1902 and brought on the market in 1903. The project was conducted by Martina Roepke (University of Utrecht) and Henk Verheul (Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision, Hilversum) with the support of the Association Europeènne Inédits.
