The Chief Purpose of a Home Movie Camera

For the digital poetics book that I’m working on, I’ve been doing a lot of research into earlier do-it-yourself, amateur filmmaking scenes. One of the things that has surprised me are the deep connections between the discourse of DV cinema and much earlier 8mm and 16 mm discourse. I was aware that earlier movements—like Direct Cinema, cinema verite, the New American Cinema of Cassavetes, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, etc.—were very interested in amateurism, but I have been surprised to find that this goes back much earlier. Almost all the features that were touted about mini-DVs back in the 1990s—small, handheld, easy-to-use, etc.—were regularly deployed by camera manufacturers and writers regarding home-movie cameras, back as far as the 1900s and 1910s.

I wanted to write a little bit about more recent amateur movie-making. During the post-war era in the U.S., there was a great interest in home movie making, with scores of amateur film clubs and organizations and numerous magazines, such as Better Movie Making For Amateur Movie Makers. Here is the cover from the January/February 1960 issue:

At the same time that the New American Cinema was thriving—the first issue of Film Culture was published in 1955—so too was a very domestic, home movie culture, one that consciously attempted to emulate Hollywood techniques, not rebel against them. And yet while it’s true that Mekas, Brakhage, Cassavetes, Leacock and others were often defiantly experimental, there are some striking connections between their aesthetics and the aesthetics of the home movie enthusiast crowd. Both groups, for instance, at times championed a more realistic, spontaneous, documentary approach. In an essay from the very first issue of Film Culture, Hans Richter wrote: “With the documentary approach, the film gets back to its fundamentals. Here, it has a solid aesthetic basis: in the free use of nature, including man, as raw material.”

The “raw material” here—people in everyday life—echoes the sentiments of so much in the magazine Better Movie Making, which advocates anything but experimental or avant-garde filmmaking. The assumption of almost every article—and every advertisement—in Better Movie Making—is that the family should be the proper subject of amateur filmmaking. As Bob Knight put it in his essay “Mom—The Moviemaker,” “We agreed last issue—I hope—that the chief purpose of a home movie camera is to make home movies.”

And yet—despite the fact that the experimentalism of the New American Cinema and the nuclear family ideology of the amateur movie making enthusiasts of the 1950s and 60s seem worlds apart—I think they are joined by a desire to achieve a more real or “authentic” representation of everyday life. It’s true that so many amateur home movie articles stress “professional” techniques that merely replicate Hollywood styles, such as discussions about continuity, as in this article, which spends a good deal of time on scene sequencing and continuity:

In the early 1960s, Better Movie Making gives advice that rejects the French New Wave’s jump-cut aesethetics. In his article “Creative Camera Movement,” Carlyle F. Trevelyan writes: “On the other hand, angles should not be changed too abruptly. It might easily happen that radical or severe angle changes could make the same subject look like an entirely different one; the audience would then wonder where they were or how they got ‘way over there.’” (5-6). And earlier, “Unless the continuity is smooth, audiences will wonder what happened between scenes that leap and jump from one thing to another.” (2).

And yet, at the same time, it’s too easy to divide amateur aesthetics in the 1950s-60s into two diametrically opposed camps: the avant garde (Mekas, Brakhage, Deren, etc.) and the middle-class hobbyist (i.e., all the amateur film clubs and publications which promoted well-made, professional-looking movies). The deeper into these two worlds we look, the more it becomes clear that one of the most compelling components for defining, shaping, and delineating the contours of “avant garde” or “experimental” cinema was in fact the discourse that surrounded it. The journal Film Culture actively promoted a regular set of writers who actually created the discursive contours of avant-garde cinema at that time. By and large, the narrative and aesthetic traits that were championed in Film Culture in the 1950s and 60s remain, today, the very ones that film buffs/scholars use to define avant-garde film from that era. If the home movies of Mekas or Brakhage are considered avant-garde—while home movies by any number of amateurs from the same era are not—is this due, at least in some part, to the fact that these films of Mekas and Brakhage were discussed and promoted in the pages of a “serious” journal like Film Culture, while the pages of a magazine like Better Movie Making promoted a different vision?

Robert Ray has written about how most avant gardes, contrary to received wisdom, have actively promoted their work through careful publicity, and about how most of them have one or more “stars” that become closely identified with the movement in the public imagination (i.e, Andy Warhol and Pop Art, Sid Vicious and punk, etc.). What’s so fascinating about the concept of amateurism in film in the 1940s-60s is how with slight tweaking, the amateur, do-it-yourself, improvisorial aesthetics of your average amateur film enthusiast is not that dissimilar from the “avant-garde” cinematic aesthetics promoted in the pages of Film Culture.

Both operated outside the realm of Hollywood. Both worked in genres that were largely absent from the big screen. Both experimented with the camera and openly embraced a logic of mistakes and trial-and-error. If today we associate the cinematic avant garde from that period with a handful of names, then this must be due, in part, to the movement's self-canonization, which was made possible largely through writing. Just as Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, Richard Meltzer, Lisa Robinson and others legitimated the 1970s punk scene by translating its dark refusals into art by writing about its irony, so too the writers in Film Culture and other journals helped create a space for the cinematic avant garde that the films of Brakhage, Mekas, and others filled. Which is to say: today's avant-garde filmmakers await writers who can only hope to match their vision with a fierce and confident prose that makes people want to believe that what they are seeing is, in fact, art.

Appendix: Amateur Editing Devices from the 1920s and 1950s.
Here are four images of home movie editing related technologies from two old magazines that I have. In the many magazines/journals from this period that I own, there are literally hundreds of such ads for the home consumer, amateur movie enthusiast.

These first two images are from the magazine Amateur Movie Makers, May 1928, published monthly by the Amateur Cinema League:

And here are two ads from the magazine Better Movie Making for Amateur Movie Makers, 1962:

Comments

[dvd]

This is only marginally related to your post, but you should really check out last week's episode of 'This American Life,' which I coincidentally just finished listening to about an hour ago. It's theme is (the psychology of) home movies - it's still up on their homepage, http://www.thisamericanlife.com/

[Nick]

Thanks for sending this link along--a great story. I'm amazed at how much interest and bidding there is for strangers's old home movies--especially from the 1940s and 50s--on Ebay. I think some of this must have to do with the sheer documentary aspect of the films. But there is also something about the very craft of the films themselves: the framings, the camera movments, the edits, that speaks to something beyond the content of the films. Were the choices about camera placement and framing, for instance, the result of trial and error? Or were they deliberate technique? Were they conscious efforts to replicate Hollywood-style techniques? It's interesting that these home movies--the most private of archives--are finding a more public venue now.

There was an article here in our local Ann Arbor newspaper about a local video store, Liberty Street Video, that has a section "Local Films." Anybody can submit a DVD to be included in this section. Their most popular rental is a home movie somebody found at a garage sale for one dollar. It's about ten minutes long, and seems to be set at a cabin in Northern Michigan in the 1950s. It's just some family members wrestling in the mud. It's one of the most popular rentals from Liberty Street...

[Anne Walk]

a bit off topic but i've been thinking about home movie making and how it is changing as technology changes. home movies today can be made using the same technologies as production houses, utilizing special effects and transitions, sophisticated text and sound, etc. there are even online tutorials for green screening. we can even expand our audience past friends and family through online distribution via vlogs.

how does this relate to the desire for authenticity?

[Nick]

A really interesting point, Anne. Do you think the special features aspects of home movie-making in some ways changes what we normally think of as the amateur quality of home movies? While I think this desire to make "good-looking" home movies has always been there (old ads for home movie equipment from the 1920s-50s include much talk about "professionial" results, etc.) your point that today technologies make it possible for the amateur to nearly compete with the look and feel of some indie or even low-budget Hollywood fare is well taken. Maybe this is one of the appeals of the "mistakist" cinema of directors like Harmony Korine, Lars von Trier and other Dogma 95 folks (some of their 1990s films) and others--they use new technologies not in the service of a more pristine, hyper-real image, but rather to create something almost deliberately flawed...

[Tim]

nick,

those home movie enthusiasts were using super 8 cartridges that forced the "filmmaker" to edit "in camera". the avant-gardists had the luxury of almost endless footage. they had no restraints. yet isn't the function of the artist to make choices, striking choices?

[Nick]

Hi Tim,

Thanks for your comments. Actually, the pages of amateur/home movie magazines from the 1920s-50s are chock full of advertisements for editing related devices for home use for 8mm and 16mm film. These ads also show up in many newspapers from this time period. Also, there are lots of articles in these mags giving tips, instructions, etc. for how to edit film, basic editing principles, etc.

I have added some of these images to the end of my post "The Chief Purpose of a Home Movie Camera."

I'm not sure that all the avant-gardists had the luxury of easy access to editing equipment or the luxury of endless footage. In the Summer 1966 issue of my copy of Film Culture, for instance, Tony Conrad talks about the travails of editing his experimental film The Flicker--trying to find a place and equipment to do it, etc. How difficult this was, etc.

Did the avant-gardists have no restraints? Certainly compared to Hollywood filmmakers they faced restraints in terms of budgets, equipment, time, etc. In many of the issues of Film Culture, they speak with pride at developing creative ways to meet and often overcome these restraints.

[rfid4dna]

In addition to avante garde and hobbyist aesthetics of today's home movie-making, I would add a class called 'surveillance'. It is epitomized by choppy, low-rez video shot by cheap ccd cameras like those on cell phones and digicams. Unlike the hobbyist with a $500 minidv camera, surveillance filmmakers are not concerned with image quality as long as the subject of the shot is discernible somehow. There is no editing, and a typical roll (or in this case flash card) has no context if clips are played end to end because they are all typically shot at different times and locations.