Journal of Film Preservation N° 56 - FIAF

tradition of Blood of a Poet and Fall of the House of Usher. In toto, these
amateur films could be programmed as part of an alternative avant-garde
film history, which would include all those films not canonized by the
official film histories. That an avant-garde film history is still very much a
matter of huge gaps and fissures in our knowledge is demonstrated by
the fact that nearly fifty filmmakers made such films in the United States
before Maya Deren, yet all of them have heretofore been excluded from
the canon. On the other hand, we need to realize that most “classical”
avant-garde films from Man Ray to Maya Deren were in fact amateur
films, made by artists who were not full-time
filmmakers. Not until after World War II were
avant-garde filmmakers professionalized, thanks
to museums, universities, and government and
foundation grants.
As a number of speakers noted, archivists must
also realize that amateur cinema documents a
social phenomena of immense, international proportions,
and therefore represents a history of the
medium itself. Amateur film clubs existed world
wide and developed global systems of distribution
and exhibition. Thus, since the 1920s literally
hundreds of thousands of amateurs have
taken the means of production of mass communication into their own
hands, in order to produce something akin to a democratic art form. This
point was made most directly by Prof. Patricia Zimmermann from Ithaca
College. Her very dense lecture summed up many important issues,
including: 1) Transnational, multimedia corporations now control the
production and distribution of images world-wide, delimiting the expression
of public and local cultural formations, in the interest of creating
passive consumers. 2) The study of amateur film and amateur film cultures
allows for the construction of a more diversified, even conflictladen
view of history which refuses to harmonize ideological
contradictions. 3) Amateur films document the history of marginalized
peoples and cultures, but maybe more importantly, their fantasy lives, i.e.
they are documents of social relations at the fringes. 4) As a result of its
very independence from both the technology and economy of mass
media, amateur film still allows for a freedom of expression that can open
-up suppressed and politically undesirable discourses, or as Zimmermann
put it, « create an imaginary geography beyond the global flows of
transnationalism.» Therein lies the promise and pleasure of amateur film
Clearly, much work needs to be done. Amateur film now encompasses
amateur video, an area the major archives have not even dared to touch,
given video’s preservation problems. Secondly, criteria for collecting and
evaluating amateur film need to be formulated, if the archives are to
begin systematic preservation. Finally, as this conference proves yet again,
film archivists need to communicate more with film historians, not only
(grudgingly) providing services (as in the past), but entering into a true
dialogue.
53 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998
Peter Kubelka during his
presentation in Cartagena