Hollywood, Home Movies, and Common Sense: Amateur Film as Aesthetic Dissemination and Social Control, 1950-1962

Abstract

Appearing as a photograph caption in a 1950 Eastman Kodak manual entitled How to Make Good Movies, the exchange above between a husband and wife maneuvers through multiple discourses of the 1950s like a Rototiller in a suburban garden. These discourses include a notion that moviemaking was a family activity, an idea that filmmaking goals involved attainment of correct and sanctioned aesthetic norms, and an ideology that the rewards of leisure demanded both control and skill over the family and creativity. These fragmented discourses in movie how-to manuals, photography and parenting magazines, and advertising articulated a highly codified social and aesthetic position for hobbyists to occupy, one that posed as seamless, monolithic, and immovable in the photographic enthusiasm of the popular press. However, we should remember that actual home-movie practice during the 1950s (and even now, with video) crashes through this discursive stability: movies ignored aesthetic prerogatives when documenting a child's birthday in favor of recording an event, many avant-garde filmmakers used amateur 16mm film equipment for visual experimentation, and marginal social groups created their own visual cultures with inexpensive equipment.2 While this article concentrates on the more mainstream articulations of amateur film discourse, accessible media technology poses a dialectical formation: on the one hand, the unlimited possibilities of resistance to dominant cultural practices and the enfranchising of groups with a public media voice; on the other hand, the movement of the market and consumer ideology to inscribe it as a commodity. The surface simplicity and nostalgic quaintness of directions that admonished home-movie enthusiasts against shooting movie film as they would randomly water their lawns applies a glossy, even veneer to the more complex social and aesthetic construction of amateur film in the 1950s in the United States. Although home-movie technology and marketing expanded dramatically during this period, the history of amateur film equipment and filmmaking reaches as far back as the origins of cinema in 1897. Indeed, the definition of amateur film, and the social construction of the term home movies, changes and transforms during

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