Amateur Movie Making: Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915–1960

“This remarkable collection of essays both documents and brings to life the contributions of amateur filmmakers in the Northeast region.” —Anne Goodyear, Co-Director, Bowdoin College Museum of Art

A compelling regional and historical study that transforms our understanding of film history, Amateur Movie Making demonstrates how amateur films and home movies stand as testaments to the creative lives of ordinary people, enriching our experience of art and the everyday. Here we encounter the lyrical and visually expressive qualities of films produced in New England between 1915 and 1960 and held in the collections of Northeast Historic Film, a moving image repository and study center that was established to collect, preserve, and interpret the audiovisual record of northern New England.

Contributors from diverse backgrounds examine the visual aesthetics of these films while placing them in their social, political, and historical contexts. Each discussion is enhanced by technical notes and the analyses are also juxtaposed with personal reflections by artists who have close connections to particular amateur filmmakers. These reflections reanimate the original private contexts of the home movies before they were recast as objects of study and artifacts of public history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9780253026446

Book preview

Introduction

Martha J. McNamara and Karan Sheldon

IN 1940, AMATEUR Cinema League member Olin Potter Geer brought his camera, loaded with 16mm Kodachrome film, to an Esso gas station in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. There, Geer shot a tightly edited, one-minute movie that, in just six shots, captures the mid-twentieth-century’s absorption with color, sheen and polish, and automobiles—in short, modernity. The film’s establishing shot is a landscape of gas station, commercial signage, a New England clapboard house, attendants at the pumps, and a woman striding across the station lot. Next, a close-up celebrates a 1936 Buick convertible in all its polished glory; two trim and efficient uniformed gas-station workers in frame-filling pride turn toward the camera, and the pump numbers tick over. Gassed up, the car, with no visible driver, leaves the station, passes between two cars, rounds a corner, and drives out of the frame into an enclosing backdrop of trees, an orange Gulf sign on the right. Deeply saturated color and the midday full-sunshine summer light give the film energy, flash, and sparkle. The brilliant blue sky, red-and-yellow awnings on the house with a picket fence, white-painted curb, red-lettered Esso signs, pendant red lights on poles, the red trim on the woman’s saddle shoes, the workers’ blue uniforms, and the navy car all exemplify the richness of Kodachrome, which so superbly retains saturated color, reflections, and fine-grained details. But the movie’s attraction for us goes well beyond its evocative shine. The entire film is impelled by the technology of mobility—the car, the gas pumps, the road—all found in a New England traditional landscape. This is the everyday petroleum-powered life, and it is gorgeous.¹

This short 16mm film is an upbeat celebration of American modernity at midcentury. But to a viewer today, Geer’s Esso film might also evoke melancholy, with the imminence of World War II, vehicles of yesteryear, the consequences of our petrochemical dependence, people now long gone, or the existence and extinction of Kodachrome. Although capturing a brief moment of an ordinary day in rural New England, Geer’s film remains open to many different readings. Not only can it elicit respect for the filmmaker’s skill with color stock and his 16mm camera, but it can also evoke admiration for his ability to suggest a range of emotions, including delight, wonder, familiarity, and wistfulness. Geer’s Esso is not simply a celebration of American modernity; instead, the film is a visual poem, the evocation of a time and place in its most detailed specificity, maximizing the potential of Kodachrome film, the filmmaker’s discerning eye, and the brilliance of New England summer light.

Fig. 0.1 Olin Potter Geer filmed the Esso station in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, in 1940. From 16mm film. Blanche Geer, PhD, Memorial Collection, Northeast Historic Film. [Accession 1005, Reel 30]

Geer’s film puts to rest the commonplace that amateur films or home movies are lacking in aesthetic value—that they are typified by shaky, out-of-focus images depicting family vacations and kids’ birthday parties. Instead, early twentieth-century films made by nonprofessional filmmakers using small motion picture cameras were often complex, artfully constructed, and aesthetically compelling works of art. Training their lenses on the local and the ordinary, vernacular cinematographers in the photochemical era—roughly from the first decades of the twentieth century through the early 1960s—captured a beauty in the everyday and lyrically communicated their experience of place and time. This volume takes these filmmakers and their films seriously. The authors—cultural and art historians, archivists and technology specialists, media-studies scholars, writers, artists, and filmmakers—approach the study of amateur film from a variety of disciplinary perspectives; they are all interested in examining the visual aesthetics of these moving images, as well as placing them in their social, political, and historical contexts. Most importantly, each views these films as creative and compelling testaments to the lives of ordinary people.

There has been surprisingly little attention paid to American home movies and amateur films in the scholarship on vernacular visual expressions. And yet interest in snapshot and everyday photography has recently surged. The discovery, exhibition, and publication of the work of street photographer Vivian Maier is an example of curatorial and scholarly focus on vernacular photography that began with the work of Barbara Norfleet in the late 1970s.²

The literature of home movies and amateur film has begun to build, however, constructed on a foundation laid by Patricia R. Zimmermann in Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film. Subsequently, Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in History and Memories, edited by Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann, brought an international scholarly perspective to home movies made across the globe, from Mexico to New Zealand. More recently, Janna Jones, in The Past Is a Moving Picture: Preserving the Twentieth Century on Film, has drawn attention to challenges inherent in the film-archiving project, while Charles Tepperman’s Amateur Cinema: The Rise of North American Moviemaking, 1923–1960 illuminates the breadth and reach of amateur cinema in the United States and Canada. In the British Isles, long home to comprehensive audiovisual archives, scholars have also begun to turn their attention to amateur film. Recent work includes Ryan Shand and Ian Craven, eds., Small-Gauge Storytelling: Discovering the Amateur Fiction Film; Ian Craven, ed., Movies on Home Ground, Explorations in Amateur Cinema; Heather Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film: Meaning and Practice, 1927–1977; and Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young, Barry Monahan, eds., Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web. Paralleling these print publications, moving image archivists and curators have been engaged in programming work to promote recognition of amateur film’s importance to visual culture. For instance, the nonprofit Center for Home Movies and its international Home Movie Day, the Orphan Film Symposium (1999–present), and Northeast Historic Film’s annual symposium held in Bucksport, Maine, since 2000 have all advanced scholarship and awareness of the issues surrounding nontheatrical film.

This body of scholarship and increasing public engagement, however, has not resolved the difficulties of choosing a single definitional term that will do justice to the complex array of moving images under discussion in this volume. The big-tent phrases moving images and time-based media are too broad to convey the singularity and intimacy of these films. Other choices—vernacular film, amateur film, personal film, and home movies—have all been used to describe various forms of nontheatrical, nonprofessional filmmaking. Although vernacular film has resonance for a book structured around the significance of place and the strength of local attachment, it is not yet a generally accepted term for moving images. Similarly, personal film implies a single-author, single-viewer experience and does not adequately capture the collaborative production processes of many of these images, nor the collective viewing context in which they were screened. Home movies or amateur film seem to provide the best descriptors for the films under study here, but what is the difference between a home movie and an amateur film? The answer we propose is that all home moves are amateur film, but not all amateur films are home movies. Home movies are essentially domestic moving images meant to be screened for a small audience of friends and family, whereas amateur film connotes nonprofessional productions often intended for a wider audience.³

A working method of sorting home movies from amateur films was presented at a 2010 Center for Home Movies meeting at the Library of Congress. Albert Steg clarified the primary differences, with the following working definitions:

Home Movies are home made motion pictures created by individuals primarily for an intended audience of family members and friends within the immediate circle of the home.

The following factors make it likely that a Home Movie designation is appropriate: (1) The subject matter includes family members, family events, and family activities. (2) The films were manipulated, edited, screened, and stored in a home setting. (3) The film materials are original reversal projection materials. (4) The film stock is a popular consumer gauge (9.5mm, 16mm, 8mm, Super8).

Amateur Film would take in non-professional film production that aims for a wider audience in settings such as film-making classes, film festivals, or local broadcast, or by means of mechanical reproduction in the form of multiple prints or copies made available to a public outside of the film maker’s immediate circle of friends and family.

The following factors make it likely that an Amateur Film designation is appropriate: (1) The film is a composite work making use of multiple elements in the final print. (2) Multiple copies were struck in order to reach a wider public. (3) The film was screened at film festivals or public events. (4) The film was created in the context of a filmmaking course or made use of film editing equipment outside of the home.⁴

The essays in this volume—looking at both home movies and amateur film—focus on a specific time and place. The time is the photochemical era; the place is New England, that part of North America arrayed against the Atlantic Ocean and Canada. Alexander Forbes, a 28mm film enthusiast, shot the earliest film in these essays in 1915 on an island off the coast of Massachusetts; and Charles Norman Shay of Indian Island, Maine, filmed the most recent reels on 8mm Kodachrome in 1962. These and the other films explored in this volume are historically informative as well as aesthetically engaging, revealing the quotidian and remarkable aspects of life from distinct points of view. All are original works, edited by their makers in camera or at the editing table, possessing integrity of vision and sensibility. Not only do they document place, time, individuals, and experience, these works are imaginative, creative, and beautiful.

This volume also recognizes, however, that when home movies leave the domestic realm and enter a repository—library, museum, moving image archive—to be exposed to the scrutiny of scholarship, something is lost. The intimacy of the films, their connections to these people, their special places and cherished events, and particularly the context of projection and viewing, cannot easily be reconstituted in the archive. To counter that loss, the scholarly essays here are juxtaposed with a series of personal reflections on films written by individuals with close connections to the filmmakers. Shorter in length and more informal in prose style, these essays help reanimate the private contexts of individual home movies before they were recast as objects of study and artifacts of public history housed in an archive. Viewing moving images from the perspectives of both creative expression and personal association, these reflections serve as a bridge between the scholarly development of aesthetic theories about personal film and the intimate experience of personal films in art and life.

In addition to reanimating the personal experience of amateur film, this volume also invites thoughtful consideration of photochemical works just as the enabling technology has come to an end. There are few other art forms for which the artists’ materials are no longer available. For moving images, while some photochemical substitutes remain, it is impossible to shoot 28mm film, or 8mm Kodachrome, or create works on many of the reversal stocks that 8mm and 16mm filmmakers used. Throughout the volume, then, an understanding of amateur filmmaking’s material culture—reversal film, color stocks, changeable lenses, the question of equipment portability—helps to contextualize the films and the technologies that made them possible. The development of amateur film gauges (28mm film in 1912; 16mm in 1923; 8mm in 1932) and personal-sized cameras and projectors between 1915 and 1960, shaped the attitudes, perspectives, and abilities of amateur film creators. Kodachrome, for instance, the carrier for O. P. Geer’s work and that of Charles Norman Shay, was a color reversal film stock made available to home movie makers in 1935 and last manufactured in 2010. It was not the first home color product, but it was highly valued for its intensity and has a remarkably stable chemistry enabling it to retain its brilliant colors. In addition to color, other parameters of filmmaking—reel length, titling, editing equipment, and trick film techniques particular to photochemical technology—enhanced the form’s effectiveness as an expressive medium.

A fundamental point is that the cellulose acetate that we call film, despite its susceptibility to damage, is an irreplaceable, paradoxically robust, fixed, and tangible medium that can be remarkably long lived, particularly when compared to digital media, which require perpetual migrations. Film is for the most part stable in cold storage, and may retain its qualities for decades, or even centuries. Justin Wolff’s essay on Alexander Forbes provides an introduction to 28mm, the home film stock that preceded the better-known amateur film gauge of 16mm, and reminds us that home movies were shot and screened over one hundred years ago. Forbes’s films are bookended in this volume by those of Charles Norman Shay in the 1960s, just before the advent of home video, because, as Karen Gracy notes, there are many differences between shooting film and contemporary digital production—notably that film cannot be erased intentionally or accidentally, as can analog and digital video. This span of years, from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1960s, is the photochemical era of filmmaking, and because it is now past, we must pay attention to the physical objects that it produced and not merely settle for their digital surrogates.⁵

In order to view photochemical works, digital copies are typically made from the original translucent ribbons. These scans, even at high resolution, are only rough representations of highly complex objects and are often played back with compromises to size of display and aspect ratio, frame rate, light source, and other qualities inhering in the photochemical object and its display. Digital surrogates are also usually limited to the image itself and therefore neglect the information found on the film outside the image frame, such as date and camera codes, perforation patterns, and optical soundtracks. In order to reveal examples of that information, the image scans in this volume are printed edge to edge. In addition, each essay is accompanied by technical notes written by University of Southern California film archivist Dino Everett, which provide a thorough understanding of the materiality of amateur film production by using data that appear outside the image, such as number and type of physical splices, and film stock identification.

While time and technology are important lenses through which to view these films, a tight focus on place allows consideration of these films as regional expressions. New England’s mythologized past has provided rich fodder for writers, poets, painters, sculptors, and photographers since the middle of the nineteenth century. Recently, the role of these cultural expressions in the re-creation of New England and its past has been the subject of some path-breaking scholarship in cultural history and regional identity.⁶ This volume allows the same scholarly perspective on regionalism to be brought to home movies and amateur film that has been accorded the writings of Sarah Orne Jewett or Carolyn Chute, and the paintings of Fitz Henry Lane or Marsden Hartley.

The regional emphasis of this volume is possible because the films under scrutiny are drawn from the collections of Northeast Historic Film, a moving image archive and study center established to collect, preserve, and interpret the moving images of northern New England. Since 1986, NHF has acquired nontheatrical moving images, building a collection perhaps unparalleled in its regional depth and its strength in home movies and amateur film. Through its study center, annual scholarly symposium, the William S. O’Farrell Fellowship, and publications, NHF is known for providing resources to advance the study of twentieth-century personal filmmaking. In 2013 the archive was awarded the highest honor of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, the Silver Light Award, for leadership in the field.

Focusing this volume on Northeast Historic Film’s holdings gives the authors the benefits of curated moving image collections, but also presents the challenge of working with an archive that has been constructed—as they all are—within the inescapable constraints of time and money. Although NHF has been lauded for its commitment to home movies and amateur film, the organization’s collecting aspirations and the scope of its holdings are not always perfectly aligned. Film collecting and preservation can take place day-to-day only within the parameters of both cultural expectations and the resources available to hold the archival sand pile together. For example, the predominant film creators (by number) in this volume are white, male, and extravagantly privileged. It would be a mistake to conclude that the smaller number of filmmakers who are women or people of color or working class, indicates that Northeast Historic Film, or the essay authors in this volume, prefer (or seek out) films only from an elite white male demographic. To be clear, Northeast Historic Film has a very large corpus of moving images, but the formation of those holdings is avowedly accidental and ongoing. Northeast Historic Film has developed ties with individual and family donors and their communities—but these relationships have not emerged from an established school or market, or from a pipeline of donor-institutional agreements. Today we still do not know what else lies out there for discovery. This field is being built as we go along, and that requires intellectual agility, optimism, and a far greater financial commitment.⁷

The next generation of archivists and scholars will be able to remake the landscape of archived amateur film only if resources are brought to bear on collection and preservation. The 8mm films of Anna B. Harris (1876–1979) are a case in point. Harris, believed to be an African American woman from Conowingo, Maryland, died in Manchester, Vermont, where she had lived for forty years, filming mostly Kodachrome between 1949 and 1958. Her thirty-seven surviving reels, which arrived in Kodak-yellow film boxes that telegraph a delightful personality through brief notations such as Fishing in high heels, are now safeguarded at Northeast Historic Film. They depict a rural New England world populated by people of color in a resort town during the mid-twentieth century. Harris and her community are not part of the archival and interpretive record of Manchester, Vermont. Moreover, the films came via eBay, rather than from her family, making their historical and creative context difficult to reconstruct. Research has begun on the work of this filmmaker by networking with church and family friends, jump-started in part by the African American Home Movie Archive, initiated as a student project in New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program.⁸ Anna Harris’s New England is one that can be recovered through attention to amateur film and home movies that lie undiscovered in an unknown number of attics, basements, closets, and storage units, or uncataloged and unopened on library or museum shelves. There are vastly more films out there than we know.

Fig. 0.2 Anna Harris wrote Clytie, Holiday House, Self, Snow on the 8mm film box, 1950. Scenes of Anna (on the right) shot with her camera were likely taken by people who appear with her by the Holiday House in Manchester, Vermont. From 8mm film. Anna B. Harris Collection, Northeast Historic Film. [Accession 2420, Reel 15]

By focusing on one region (New England), archive (Northeast Historic Film), and form (amateur film and home movies), the essays in this volume map common themes within several dozen films. In order to bring some coherence to the volume for the reader who moves seriatim from introduction to index, we have grouped the essays into sections that provide a sense of orderly movement across and through the varied terrain of New England’s amateur film. And while all of the essays are mindful of the technology used to create amateur film, archivist Dino Everett’s technical notes—identifying camera, film stock, and editing practices for the films—give depth and intricacy to the authors’ interpretations.

Beginning with Locating Contexts: Archive, Material, History, Place, the first essays establish the various contexts in which to view amateur film. Karan Sheldon’s overview of the thirty years of Northeast Historic Film’s activities grounds the essays in the materiality and practice of collecting, and introduces themes that will reappear throughout the volume: region, socioeconomic class, aesthetic beauty, historical context and value, and technology. Dino Everett’s The Technologies of Home Movies and Amateur Film synthesizes complex historical data on amateur filmmaking into a narrative of technological innovations and dead ends; international competition and industrial intrigue; and the industry’s goal of putting sophisticated, easy-to-operate, affordable filmmaking and projecting equipment into the hands of ordinary people.

Fig. 0.3 Reel 1 notations, Fishing in high heels, and Picnic at Arlington [Vermont], along with names of those filmed, are written on one of thirty-seven 8mm film boxes sent between Kodak and Anna B. Harris of Manchester, Vermont. Anna B. Harris Collection, Northeast Historic Film.

Libby Bischof’s essay pulls back from a focus on the archive and its material objects to provide the historical context for a region undergoing vast change as modernity, with its technological, socioeconomic, and cultural revolutions, transformed the everyday life and aspirations of New England’s inhabitants. Establishing the aesthetic context for viewing amateur film is Justin Wolff’s essay on the 28mm films of Alexander Forbes, a physician, engineer, geographer, and artist. Wolff reads the films with Forbes’s scientific orientation in mind, but perhaps more importantly, points us to the choices made by the filmmaker to achieve aesthetically compelling results.

Context—archival, material, historic, and aesthetic—therefore roots these analyses of amateur film and leads to the volume’s second section, Creative Choices: Recovering Value in Amateur Film, which demonstrates the extraordinary variety of moving images under discussion and the range of values associated with them. Filmmaker Whit Stillman, writing about his grandfather’s home movies, perceptively draws our attention to the difficulties faced by filmmakers (of any generation) in determining what to capture from the confusion of the world. He writes, The key decision—the choice of subject—sounds simple but, extrapolating from the many cases of talented people who have made poor ones, is not. Examining the filmmaker’s choice of what to film is the closest contextual read we can give these objects and possibly the most satisfying.

Next, Karen Gracy interrogates the position of home movies vis-à-vis the motion picture industry and argues that, just as home movies have been stereotyped as to their subject matter and technological sophistication, the perception of their value as cultural artifacts has also been straitjacketed. She encourages scholars to read against the grain to reveal the multiplicity of values inherent in home movies in order to broaden the films’ reach and impact. Charles Tepperman’s essay on Hiram Percy Maxim and the Amateur Cinema League affirms Gracy’s call for revaluing by drawing our attention to the variety of films made by skilled amateurs: chronicles, practical films, short fiction, experimental, trick films, and poetic form, and the sophistication with which many amateurs (like Maxim) approached their work. Rounding out this selection of essays on the multiplicity of amateur film is Martha McNamara’s close study of the comedies produced by landscape architect Sidney Shurcliff and his friends during the early years of the Great Depression. McNamara explores, in particular, the attention Shurcliff lavishes on the marsh landscape of Boston’s North Shore, interpreting his lyrical depictions as a stabilizing force in what are otherwise zany, high-energy, somewhat out-of-control Keystone Kops–like comedies.

The volume’s third section, Everyday Lives: Home and Work in Amateur Film, turns toward the quotidian: amateur film’s emphasis on daily life. It begins with Jennifer Neptune’s evocative exploration of the life and work of Charles Norman Shay—Penobscot tribal elder, veteran, emigrant, homecomer, cultural memorializer, husband, and father—and his images of Penobscot life in the early twentieth century. Next, Cyrus Pinkham’s films provide an opportunity to interrogate everyday family life of the late 1930s through the lens of a young gay filmmaker. Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed note that Pinkham deploys Hollywood-style aesthetics in his depiction of family members transformed into actors by his scripting, filming, and editing. Filmmaking provided Pinkham a mode of self-expression that is at once nostalgic and glamorous, that could delicately balance the competing claims of home and movie. Finally, Brian Jacobson explores the everyday of the workplace through films made by Charles B. Hinds and Henry Sturgis Dennison. Jacobson reveals that the Boss’s Film is often as much about the application of scientific management principles as it is about what happens on the factory floor. While nominally placing workers at the center of their films, these bosses were also clearly making a case for a work world dominated by efficient business practices overseen by individuals who positioned themselves as capable, enlightened, modern, and benevolent factory owners.

The last section of essays, Families: Private and Public, explores the ways in which personal filmmaking addresses the complex meanings of family and privacy. Images of family are, of course, a mainstay of home movies, but writer Martha White beautifully reveals that for her grandfather, writer and essayist E. B. White, filmmaking was a means of catching time and threading together the experiences of generations past, present, and future. White reflects on the ways that her grandfather’s films capture the inheritances—physical, intellectual, artistic—looping through her family from grandfather to great-grandchildren and drawing a web of relationships whose timelessness is made visible by film. Shifting to the question of privacy, archivist Melissa Dollman asks whether we have a right to control images of our loved ones or ourselves when they move from private hands to public settings. She examines the concept of privacy as it relates to amateur film, asking about the ethics of collecting, preserving, and presenting images of people who may or may not have granted their consent. Are home movies by nature private, or do they leave privacy behind when they move from home to archive?

In the final essay, Mark Neumann and Janna Jones explore how amateur filmmakers Elizabeth Woodman Wright and Archie Stewart narrativized their lives through amateur cinema. While the world Wright commits to film is one of rural domesticity for her family at their summer retreat from urban life in western Maine, Stewart’s is a narrative of masculine adventure. In both cases, the camera afforded Wright and Stewart the opportunity to construct alternate identities, away from home, but within the protected confines of camera, film, and projector.

Amateur Movie Making deploys different modes of writing—the scholarly essay, the personal reflection, and the technical exegesis—to explore and celebrate an extraordinarily diverse range of moving images, from films of the factory floor, to madcap comedies, to family narratives. By fixing on a particular place at a particular time, the essays in this volume are able to investigate thoroughly and precisely the elements that constitute amateur filmmaking practice. Together, these authors and these essays illuminate the engaging, sometimes frustratingly complex, and often beautiful world of amateur film in early twentieth-century New England.

Technical Notes: Olin Potter Geer, Esso Station, Boothbay Harbor, Maine (1940) and Anna Harris, Clytie, Holiday House, Self, Snow (1950)

Esso Station, Boothbay Harbor, Maine, 1940. Olin Potter Geer.

Blanche Geer, PhD, Memorial Collection, Accession 1005, Reel 30.

Gauge: 16mm. Stock: Kodak Safety Film (Kodachrome).

Length: 18 ft. Splices: zero within gas station scene.

Overall reel length: 20 ft.

Date code: 1939 (Kodachrome).

Camera code: Bell & Howell Filmo 141.

Clytie, Holiday House, Self, Snow, 1950. Anna Harris.

Anna B. Harris Collection, Accession 2420, Reel 15.

Gauge: 8mm. Stock: Kodak Safety Film (B&W reversal).

Length: 50 ft. Splices: one, the standard splice at 25 ft.

Overall reel length: 50 ft.

Date code: 1949.

Camera code: Keystone Eight Model B-8 f-3.5.

Martha J. McNamara is Director of the New England Arts and Architecture Program in the Department of Art at Wellesley College, where she specializes in vernacular architecture, landscape history, and material culture studies of New England. McNamara is author of From Tavern to Courthouse: Architecture and Ritual in American Law, 1658–1860 and editor with Georgia Barnhill of New Views of New England: Studies in Material and Visual Culture, 1680–1830.

Karan Sheldon is Cofounder of northern New England’s moving image archive, Northeast Historic Film, recipient of the Silver Light Award from the Association of Moving Image Archivists. She has curated screenings including You Work, We’ll Watch and Exceptional Amateur Films and given annual lectures in Regional and Nontraditional Moving Image Archiving for the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, Rochester, New York.

Notes

1. Midcentury landscapes of mobility also fascinated American painter Edward Hopper, who featured gas stations in his paintings Gas, 1940 (Museum of Modern Art, New York), Portrait of Orleans, 1950 (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), and Four Lane Road, 1956 (private collection).

2. John Maloof, ed., Vivian Maier: Street Photographer (Brooklyn: Power House Books, 2011); Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows (Chicago: CityFiles, 2012); Barbara P. Norfleet, The Champion Pig: Great Moments in Everyday Life (Boston: D. R. Godine, 1979). Other recent studies of vernacular still photography include Sarah Greenough and Diane Waggoner, et al., The Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2007); Catherine Zuromskis, Snapshot Photography: The Lives of Images (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).

3. For further discussion of these terms see Patricia R. Zimmermann, The Home Movie Movement: Excavations, Artifacts, Minings, in Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, eds. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 1–28.

4. The Center for Home Movies 2010 Digitization and Access Summit Final Report, (January 2011), accessed May 26, 2015, http://www.centerforhomemovies.org/Home_Movie_Summit_Final_Report.pdf. See also Center for Home Movies, Home Movie Terminology, and associated web pages, accessed August 11, 2015, http://www.centerforhomemovies.org/homemovie-terminology/, and Martha Yee, Moving Image Materials: Genre Terms (Washington, DC: Cataloging Distribution Service, Library of Congress, 1988).

5. Jean-Louis Bigourdan, et al., eds., Film Forever: the Home Film Preservation Guide, chapter 2, Film Specifics: Stocks and Soundtracks, accessed May 26, 2015, http://www.filmforever.org/chap2.html; Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009).

6. Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1995); William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein, eds., Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Julia B. Rosenbaum, Visions of Belonging: New England Art and the Making of American Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

7. Film scholar Patricia R. Zimmermann draws attention to this issue in her essay Cinéma amateur et démocratie, Communications, no. 68 (1999): 281–92.

8. Home Movie Registry, African American Home Movie Archive, produced by Jasmyn Castro while a student in New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation MA program, 2014, accessed August 18, 2015, http://aahma.org/registry/. Manchester Historical Society’s Shawn Harrington located Anna B. Harris’s obituary in the Manchester Journal, May 3, 1979, personal e-mail, May 18, 2015.

PART I

LOCATING CONTEXTS: ARCHIVE, MATERIAL, HISTORY, PLACE

1  A Place for Moving Images: Thirty Years of Northeast Historic Film

Karan Sheldon

Although they use as their material the vocabularies of established languages (those of television, newspapers, the supermarket or city planning), although they remain within the framework of prescribed syntaxes (the temporal modes of schedules, paradigmatic organizations of places, etc.), these traverses remain heterogeneous to the systems they infiltrate and in which they sketch out the guileful ruses of different interests and desires. They circulate, come and go, overflow and drift over an imposed terrain, like the snowy waves of the sea slipping in among the rocks and defiles of an established order.

—Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

HOW ARE WE to understand twentieth-century films made by regular people in light of their qualities of experimentation, the continuities and shifts in individual and family-based entertainments, and the intermingling of personal expression and popular culture? The collaborative creativity among women, men, and children in personal films has been largely unrecognized, imperiling the survival of home movies and amateur film in museums, libraries, archives, and other repositories.

This essay calls attention to challenges faced by the custodians of amateur films and home movies, recognizes scholars who have spoken on behalf of personal films, and comments on issues in institutions promoting humanities and arts endeavors that have stood in the way of fuller recognition of these creative works.

Personal films contain images of lives and landscapes, of gestures, colors, and interactions that survive only on these original reels of celluloid. Michel de Certeau’s phrase identifying consumers as poets of their own acts might describe the creators of home movies and amateur films as they moved in their worlds and framed particular visions. Becoming acquainted with these films as intentional works, despite their largely hidden flow in private spaces, slipping in among the rocks and defiles of an established order, may change our understanding of visual media. My argument derives from the experience of a moving image archive that has concentrated on collecting and sharing home movies and amateur film. Northeast Historic Film has a regional collecting mandate, northern New England, that has functioned as a filter, organizing criterion, and intellectual ground. The film examples are rooted in twentieth-century New England, inviting comparison among works made in this place within the span of five decades. Each personal film is both as common as the everyday and is also the sole instance, reflecting private lives, creative notions, engagement with photochemical and mechanical technologies and the culture of its moment.

The Journal of Film and Video in 1986 published a special issue on home movies and amateur filmmaking. Fred Camper’s Some Notes on the Home Movie captured two concepts that seem no less important today to those concerned with personal film. Camper’s points are that home movies have been little understood, and archives for their care are necessary: It would be presumptuous to offer anything but the most preliminary of taxonomies of the home movie. What is needed is first of all an archival source, in which all type and manner of home movies are collected and preserved. Then scholars could go about the work of screening, studying, [and] evaluating. My primary goal here is to assert that such a work should be done, especially now, when families are increasingly transferring their home movies to video. There is always the danger that this aspect of our cinematic heritage may be lost. The same year as the special issue of the Journal of Film and Video, 1986, Northeast Historic Film was founded with a mission to preserve and make moving images of northern New England accessible.¹

Camper identifies the motivating anxiety of loss when facing audiovisual technology’s shift from photochemistry to video; he states that the transition to videotape should provoke public and scholarly interest in finding and discussing home movies. While in the