Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Since the early decades of the 20th century, amateur filmmakers—those early adopters of 16mm and, later, 8mm cameras—have largely been dismissed for making films that recorded birthdays, vacations and other aspects of everyday life. Contrary to such views, amateur films are significant resources that document both the constraints and possibilities for understanding organic representations of social and cultural life, and the history of moving images. They also can reveal an amateur filmmaker’s flashes of imagination, creativity and a surplus of meanings that contain evidence of the mysterious relationships between camera and performance. This paper takes amateur films seriously. It focuses on practices for critically reading amateur films in a manner that probes for the potential plurality of latent meanings that dwell in the frames of home movies, and in those who watch and study them. Film scholar Robert Ray notes that movies are often experienced as “intermittent intensities…that break free from the sometimes indifferent narratives that contain them.” Home movies are instances where such “intensities” appear in loosely structured narratives and reveal symbolic excesses that are ripe for interpretation. Specifically, through brief excerpts of amateur films, I will examine how events and spontaneous performances captured by home movie cameras suggest clues and knowledge not only about the ambiguity of images, but also about the ineffable qualities of the lives that are “called forth” as they are recorded by the camera, revealing traces of people and their actions as performances that are representations of real and unreal life.