Patricia R. Zimmermann, "Hollywood, Home Movies, and Commons Sense: Amateur Film as Aesthetic...

Society for Cinema & Media Studies

Hollywood, Home Movies, and Common Sense: Amateur Film as Aesthetic Dissemination andSocial Control, 1950-1962Author(s): Patricia R. ZimmermannReviewed work(s):Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer, 1988), pp. 23-44Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225151 .

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Hollywood, Home Movies, and Common Sense: Amateur Film as Aesthetic Dissemination and Social Control, 1950-1962 by Patricia R. Zimmermann

She: And just who is it in this family that handles the camera like a garden hose? He: Don't interrupt, please.'

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 home video) crashes through this discursive stability: home 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

Patricia R. Zimmermann is associate professor of cinema and photography at Ithaca College. ? 1988 by the Board of Trustees, University of Illinois

Cinema Journal 27, No. 4, Summer 1988 23



this history. Theoretically, the distinctions between professional and amateur film pivot on the uneven and shifting interrelationship between wage labor and public exhibition and leisure time "production" and privatization. Clearly, the previous fifty years of amateur filmmaking showed that these neat polarities were actually constantly moving boundaries, historically encoded by economic, aesthetic, technical, social, and political formations.3

From 1897 to 1923, amateur film was differentiated from professional film on purely economic and technical grounds to protect the film manufacturing monopolies of Eastman Kodak and Edison. For example, 35mm film, the stock manufactured by Kodak, was considered to be for use by the professional, while the diverse multitude of nonstandard gauges, sprocket designs, and alternative moving picture apparatuses produced by entrepreneurial inventors and hobbyists were lumped together as equipment for the amateur by the engineering and hobby magazines. By 1923, Eastman Kodak and Bell & Howell had established 16mm as the amateur or nonexhibition standard, and both companies had begun marketing cameras to the upper-middle-class consumer by inducing Hollywood directors, camera operators, editors, and stars to offer both testimonials and advice. Amateur film in the 1920s and 1930s emerged in photo magazines as film that naively deviated from classical Hollywood composition and narrative style. Profes- sional film became equated with Hollywood studio narrative, and amateur film was defined by magazines as an aesthetically inferior stylistic category, but one constantly practicing to achieve a homology to Hollywood productions. Amateur film was defined on aesthetic criteria after the technological standards stabilized. The military employed amateur, 16mm technologies in World War II for surveillance, recording the war, and training. While 16mm film stock was unavailable to domestic consumers during the war, after 1945 16mm technology emerged as a semiprofessional medium for the expanding educational and industrial film market.4

This thumbnail sketch of the permutations in the definition of amateur film suggests the insufficiency of theoretical models alone and the problems of a more conventional historiography that would analyze a phenomenon in terms of major changes, landmark events, significant personalities, and a linear chronology. Am- ateur film is not an event, but a conceptual formation created by social practices and discourses, a category embroiled in power relations between a dominant, more pervasive culture and marginal cultural resistances and technological formations. To illuminate how these power relations constituted the definition of amateur film by increasingly framing it as a privatized hobby for families rather than as a means of communication in the public sphere, it is necessary to analyze the discourse on amateur film to decipher these formations. Michel Foucault has defined discourse as a system of statements, written and spoken, that appear as events within a limited field. His historical methodology seeks to describe and reconstitute parameters of a discourse: its conditions of existence, its limits, its correlations with other statements, and its exclusions.5

In the present article, discourse is further concretized as written documents

24 Cinema Journal 27, No. 4, Summer 1988



on amateur film, such as photography and home-movie hobby specialty magazines, and parenting and women's magazines. Corporate records from camera manufacturers, patents, marketing and census studies on amateurism, and en-

gineering journals differ from the photographic and specialty magazines during the 1950s; they elaborate the technical and financial apparatuses of amateur film, but do not explicate its own social articulation. The appearance of aesthetic norms and social directives for amateur film in the more mass-market magazines aimed at middle-class families in the 1950s is significant because it suggests that the definition of amateur film on the discursive level moved toward entrenching this technology within both consumption and the bourgeois nuclear family. The historical conjunction of a rising postwar birth rate, expanding leisure time, the growth of a consumer economy, the development of suburbia, a stratified pricing system for amateur film equipment that expanded its market to attract not only upper-class but middle-class consumers, and popular magazine articles on proper movie technique modified the wider notion of amateur film into a more limited definition identified exclusively with the family - home movies.

By the 1950s, amateur photography and popular magazines firmly situated amateur film as a commodity exclusively for nuclear families. As the do-it-yourself movement flourished, the relationship between amateur and professional film equipment translated into a graduated scale of product lines based on the co- ordination of price, technical gadgetry, and simulation of professional gear.6 As leisure time garnered increased ideological significance with reduced work weeks and more consumer spending for disposable items, the popular discourse on amateur film articulated not only Hollywood narrative style as a natural, almost essentialist, filmmaking version of American common sense but also represented the professionalization of private life as an end in itself - a mirror image of the disciplined, skilled, coordinated world of work, but one enveloped in and ameliorated by the leisure activities of the nuclear family. Promoting the family as a consummate form of recreational activity, the ideology of togetherness situated amateur filmmaking as "home movies" - private films for the beatification and celebration of the home. The discourse and social relations of this period, extending from 1950, when excise taxes on photographic supplies were lifted, to 1962, when European and Japanese films entered the market, constituted and defined home movies as primarily a family activity protected from social, political, or economic effectivity and engagement.7 Although wartime military use had standardized 16mm film into a semiprofessional medium with limited commercial possibilities, the enormous growth of the postwar leisure market provided a powerful marketing incentive and social context that catapulted amateur film technology into the home as another manifestation of the do-it-yourself ideology.

Leisure and the Postwar Economy. America's postwar economy expanded to meet the needs of consumer demands that had been truncated by wartime shortages. During the 1950s, industry increased its production capacity, spurred in large part by automation developed during the war. In this environment of




affluence, advertisers, with the help of sociologists and psychologists, relied more and more on precise analyses and predictions of market needs, desires, and demographics to manipulate demand for consumer products. In addition, credit was extended to the middle and lower classes, stimulating an economy based on spending rather than on thrift and saving. Historian Marty Jezer noted that the economic climate of the 1950s witnessed the increasing concentration and na- tionalization of major industries such as beer, oil, and automobiles; the development of overseas markets; and corporate conglomeration and diversification supported by huge corporate profits from consumer spending.8

With economic and industrial growth and increases in consumer spending, the market for leisure and recreational goods grew at an astonishing rate. Ac- cording to a study reported in a 1954 Fortune article, the $30.6 billion spent on leisure and recreational activities represented 50 percent of the American consumer's expenditures on clothing and shelter and twice the amount spent on new cars and home goods.9 The importance of the exploitation of leisure for commodity production can also be marked by the explosion of sociological research aimed at assessing leisure patterns in order to produce better target marketing.'1

The rise in the amount of time away from work was the result of the combination of the reduction of the work week, which made the three-night, two-day weekend the norm for a majority of Americans; industry's move toward paid vacations as a way to offset worker boredom; industry's increased reliance on automation; and increases in wages and disposable income following the war."l Most of the marketing of leisure goods was targeted at the nuclear family, a pervasive popular ideology that connected intimacy and togetherness with consumerism, as described in a 1953 Business Week essay called "Leisured Masses": "Take a serf who works 12 hours a day, seven days a week. What kind of life is that? He's a mole. All he needs is some burlap to clothe him, some potatoes, a pair of brogans. Now think of a family spending its leisure on the beach or

gardening. The slave hasn't time to consume anything. The family on the beach has time for everything."12

As leisure time expanded, so did the social and cultural pressures that idealized free time, propelled in large part by the ideological and marketing construction of the nuclear family. Popular magazines linked prosperity and leisure to economic productivity. A Business Week piece, for example, marvelled: "Prosperity has done extraordinary things to our leisure habits. And for this we are in turn indebted to increased productivity - the value of a worker's output in a given time - which has made the prosperity and leisure possible."'3 A 1958 study explained the reduction of the work week to forty hours as a consequence of both increased productivity and pressure from labor unions, and it also noted a 60 percent rise in real wages and a 40 percent increase in leisure expenditures.l4

Many popular and scholarly writers during the 1950s attributed the significant shift in interest away from spectator sports to individual recreation to the restoration and resurgence of the importance of the family. According to historian




Richard Polenberg, this ideology of the family was largely based on the huge population shifts away from more public, communal, ethnic urban living patterns toward suburban living, which seemed to increase people's isolation within the home. Bell & Howell's 1954 Annual Report, for example, noted that the rising birth rate and the increase in travel indicated major increases in the family photography market.l5

In 1953, Business Week noted that in the previous year, Americans spent $1.5 billion on spectator sports and $8.4 billion on individual recreation - nearly eight times more money spent for private and individualized, rather than more public and community-oriented, creative leisure activities.'6 Sociologist David Reisman, in his 1957 essay "The Suburban Sadness," described this movement toward private leisure centered on the family in the suburban home as the decentralization of leisure; the home, rather than the neighborhood, was the site of leisure and fun. Reisman attributed the homogeneity of suburban living styles to this removal of contact with differentiated people, but also assessed the increase in leisure activities as an expression of rebellion against the increasing automation and efficiency of workplaces and the lack of meaningful work.17 Thus an ideology emerged that assumed consumption of goods could compensate for lack of control and creativity at work.

Familialism and the Home. The rise of home ownership (largely as the result of easy credit and mortgages - nearly 55 percent of all Americans owned their own homes in 1955, compared to 40 percent in 1946) precipitated what the United States Department of Commerce dubbed the "do-it-yourself" movement, the trend of young suburbanites to spend large amounts of leisure time and money on home improvements.l8 This do-it-yourself market instigated a cultural discourse idealizing the home and nuclear family as the sites of more creative labor. Even a 1954 Fortune article observed that most Americans preferred "active fun" to onlooking.l9

However, the ideology of familialism camouflaged this transcription of the values of the workplace into the private sphere. Familialism can be defined as the transference of the concept of the integrated, patriarchal family as a logical social structure onto other activities. Familialism, then, is a term that describes how other social, cultural, or aesthetic formations become organized along patterns that resemble those of the nuclear family. Through the familialism expressed in the popular discourse on home movies, emotional and family bonds combined with this professionalization of leisure time.

On an economic level, marketing studies of family-oriented, amateur filmmakers indicated that the average amateur filmmaker had a high income and a college education, preferred serious educational television over light entertain- ment, and lived in a major urban/suburban area. In 1948, Movie Makers and Home Movies magazines noted that 1,100,000 families in the United States owned movie cameras. Of these families, 775,000 owned the less expensive 8mm gear, while only 325,000 owned 16mm equipment. Camera manufacturers, aware of




the image of moviemaking equipment as an upper-class luxury item for executive men, tagged lower income groups, rural residents, and women as growth markets in the 1950s.20 By 1959, Americans were spending nearly $300 million a year on photography, compared to $83 million on books, $500 million on musical instruments, and $313 million on theater, opera, and concerts, according to a Bell & Howell internal report on the leisure market.21 Another study done in 1960 showed that photography was the number one hobby in America, with a high proportion of hobbyists living in urban areas.22 An article on Bell & Howell in a 1959 Television Magazine explained the growth of the photography, and in particular the amateur moviemaking market, as a result of earlier and more marriages; the availability of credit to purchase equipment; a tripling of family income, which meant more discretionary dollars; and the simplification of moviemaking gear.3

Photo dealers, in fact, frequently commented in the trade press that only 5 percent of their customers were "dyed in the wool movie and photo buffs."24 A 1952 Bell & Howell survey showed that only 6 percent of American families owned amateur movie equipment, generally because of the high price of equipment and the difficulty in operating it.5 By the mid-1950s, the production of cheaper 8mm cameras had alleviated the price problem, and the proliferation of aesthetic discourse in popular magazines on how to properly shoot film had made moviemaking seem easier.26

Technical control and manipulation, coupled with conformity to the visual logic of the Hollywood narrative system, were inscribed in the photographic and popular press of the period as the norm for amateur productions. "Hollywood" as an aesthetic ideology, rather than battlefield on-the-spot shooting, now infil- trated and domesticated home movies as a form of common sense. However, it is critical here to explain that the definition of Hollywood that emerged in these magazines exposed severely reduced and modified functions. The multiplicity of practices and ideologies that formed the concept of Hollywood - banks, major production studios, feature-length films, specialized craft unions, national advertising, stars, a geographical locale in California, and a narrative style - were transformed into a much more simple and unified ideological entity: aesthetic and storytelling norms based on pleasing, understandable imagemaking. Just as one practiced driving and putting to lower one's score on the golf course, one's leisure-time filmmaking constituted a continual, if illusory, movement toward the acquisition of Hollywood skill and expertise - fragmented components of professionalism. Amateur filmmaking's vestiges of craftspersonship with total control over production transformed during this period into practice sessions that cul- tivated leisure time as an area where one could improve one's articulation of the dominant logic and grammar of Hollywood. Through subject choice, style, continuity, editing, audience reactions, and theories of film aesthetics, amateur movies emerged as one particular site where leisure activity could dissipate cultural diversity and oppositional cultural practice. In effect, this movement




embodied the standardization of the private sphere according to industrial norms of control, skill, and expertise.

David Reisman reasoned that work was less and less diverse and creative for a majority of the population, and that the workplace itself was more organized and fragmented, thereby pressuring leisure to compensate for industrial malaise. He argued that leisure had surrendered its creative, emancipatory potential and its role as an integrator of communities. Leisure became the site where untapped energies and creative activities could be fulfilled. Reisman, however, also argued that this was an essentially futile endeavor because efficiency and boredom had permanently disassembled the delicate equilibrium between work and leisure. He concluded that members of more professional, executive-level, highly educated groups led more active leisure lives than did less highly educated or working- class people.27 Of course, Reisman ignored not only the potential of leisure to disrupt the immobilization of wage labor and to create oppositional cultural practices, but also the class nature of leisure time. While he intimated that industrial norms of behavior had permeated private life, he still mourned the days when leisure time provided the antidote to the rigors of work. He saw this balance as an essentially stabilizing one for capitalism.28 For amateur film production, this new articulation of leisure manifested itself not as community interaction but as a privatized activity cloistered in the middle- and upper-class home, not as creative exploration but as the acquisition of the leisure-time equivalent of the efficiency of time and motion studies and automation in the workplace - the appropriation of homogenized and standardized skills that marked leisure time with the rational, capitalistic values of proficiency, orderliness, and control.

Togetheress, Children, and Travel. However, a pervasive ideology of familialism camouflaged the assimilation of the rationalized values of the workplace into the emotional and social fabric of free time. Through familialism, emotion and family ties intertwined with the professionalization of leisure time. In this context perhaps the most prevalent subject for amateur films was children.29 This drive toward photographing children, while a common motif in the history of amateur filmmaking, gained additional impetus and significance during the 1950s from the social and ideological phenomenon of familialism that characterized suburban growth. With postwar capitalism situating the family as a consumption unit, the ideological role of the family increasingly became the production of children, and with this there developed a supportive ideology that families and children, like hobbies, were ends in themselves. In one sociological study, 81 percent of all respondents named a better environment for their children as the main reason why they moved to the suburbs.30 In a 1956 movie advice column in Parents Magazine, a magazine promoting scientific child rearing, Roy Pinney associated the everyday actions of children with narrative film structure: "You'll find that material for a motion picture abounds in everything a child does from




the time he first opens his eyes until the reluctant lids close ... You have material aplenty for an interesting storytelling sequence."31

Filming children served as a visual elaboration of familialism. This renewed fervor of familialism, an ideology and social practice that emphasized family relations over community or political interactions during the Cold War period, contributed to the privatization of amateur film. Amateur film and home movies emerged as interchangeable terms when familialism blended with this "hobby." As a consequence, "home-movie" practice flourished as a family activity rather than as an individual or collective pursuit and as a documentation of children rather than as a replication of nature as in pictorialism. Zeroing in on and celebrating the family, the stylistic calls for a universal audience comprehension through narrative codes negotiated and ameliorated the extremely isolated, idio- syncratic activities of the nuclear family, thus aggrandizing them through professional techniques. With leisure time escalating, one of the nuclear family's most important forms of recreation was itself. Home movies turned togetherness, family harmony, children, and travel into a performance of familialism.

During the 1950s, popular magazines, marketing studies, and scholars res- urrected the family from the ideological disarray of World War II to signify the quest for fulfillment of internal needs and the satisfaction of desires for meaningful social interactions. The popularized myth of togetherness epitomized the ideology of the family as an emotional lifeboat in an automated and efficient society. Discussed in women's magazines, sociological studies, and the mainstream press, togetherness promoted the bourgeois nuclear family as the only social structure available for the expression of common, shared experiences that could bolster one against alienation, isolation, and the enervation of work. The togetherness myth had several social consequences: with a distinct antifeminist bias, it en- trenched and isolated women within the home, and with its adjunct ideology of consumerism, it attached family security, comfort, and happiness to consumption.32 In this cultural framework, home movies preserved and evoked a residual social formation of the family as an important cultural and social agent through idealizing, indeed, worshiping its secluded interactions. The movie camera and projector served as two more indispensable recreational devices to facilitate and produce family happiness through consumption.3 As one writer observed in a 1954 issue of House and Garden, "Many families now consider a good projector, preferably 16mm sound, a standard part of their recreation equipment, like the charcoal grill, Scrabble set, or ping-pong table."34 Home movies functioned not as technologies for creative labor, but as instruments of socialization to norms through their elaboration of family harmony in the private sphere. This myth of togetherness countered the fluidity between amateurs and professionals that standardized 16mm offered in the abstract.

As Margaret Mead observed in 1957, the home during this period "has now become the reason for existence, which justifies working at all."3 One sociological study conducted in the late 1950s showed that most of the suburban family's recreation was centered in the home.36 This pattern of family activity was par-




alleled in amateur movie practice. A series of articles appearing in 1955 in Woman's Home Companion entitled "How You Can Make the Most of Family Leisure" listed photography, music, and home movies as ideal choices for family recreation because the entire family could participate in them.37 It should be noted that these three activities required not only a certain limited amount of skill - an extension of professionalism, expertise, and upward mobility - but were leisure-time commodities as well. In this sense, if previous periods of amateur film practice operated on pseudo or authentic ambitions of upward mobility and entrance into professional filmmaking, home movies positioned upward mobility exclusively in the private sphere as a professionalization of leisure time. Profes- sional skill acquisition no longer hinged on the illusion of moving one out of the private sphere and into creative wage labor, but instead improved one's enjoyment of leisure in the nuclear family.

The importance of these cultural activities was that the family could engage in them as a unit, rather than as individuals. The atomization of the nuclear family could be averted through group activities. For example, the Richard E. Rylands family, the family chosen by the editors of Woman's Home Companion in 1955 to illustrate the use of home movies, proudly asserted: "Shooting movies isn't a hobby with us - it's even more important. It's our way of remembering... we record our memories in motion and color and store them in film cans for the future."3 Home movies, in this instance, were the family equivalent of bomb shelters for civil defense - a hedge against the insecurities of the future. The role of home movies as the instigators and documenters of family togetherness was further illustrated by an observation in the April 1953 issue of Parents Magazine: "They [home movies] can be an animated, living album of family good times, of all the playing and working together that make up successful family living."39 Home moviemaking, then, coincided with the elevation of the nuclear family as the ideological center of all meaningful activity during the 1950s.

A provocative, yet isolated example of the impact of familialism as a socialization mechanism to discursively redirect the use and to limit the functions of amateur film practice can be seen in a 1952 first-person account in American Magazine by none other than Vance Packard, an advocate of consumption. After his son insisted that all their neighbors owned home-movie cameras, Packard began to investigate amateur filmmaking - not as a way to experiment with technology, but as a way to learn the proper and sanctioned methods of producing films that conformed'to Hollywood conventions of home-movie practice. He claims he was "afraid of bungling," so he contacted the Amateur Cinema League in New York for advice, consulted camera stores, read numerous how-to books, and finally unspooled his film to a former MGM employee for an expert critique.40 By providing a standardized formula for amateur practice, Packard unwittingly demonstrated how clubs, books, camera sellers, and experts set the boundaries for amateur film practice, professionalizing leisure time as a form of consumption and privatization.




After his "professionalization," Packard then filmed a family feast and his children working in the garden and playing, all in narrative style that idolized naturalism and surveillance. "It is important that the people acting in your movie be so deeply absorbed with what they are doing that they seem to be taken unawares," he proclaimed. "They break the spell if they yell, wave or stick out their tongues."4' In this amateur context, naturalism shed its aesthetic as the purveyor of perfect, harmonious beauty and acquired a new role as the most accurate form of observation of family happiness and interaction. This institu- tionalization of the family as a natural construct preserved the ideology of the patriarch in total control of his family (if not his work life) since, typically, the father was the primary filmmaker.

Children, as the consummate goal in life and in recreation, were crucial components of family togetherness and amateur film. One sociologist observed that parenting was viewed as fun, with parents "promised that having children will keep them together, keep them young, and give them fun and happiness."42 As this fetishizing of children became ideologically pervasive, amateur movies became increasingly associated with the preservation of the image of children and by extension, with the cultural production of the myth of parenting as an easy, leisure-time hobby. Home movies were not designed for children, but for parents, as a means by which they could prolong the prototypical nuclear family. Roy Pinney offered a solution to aging and the dissolution of family life in a 1955 article in Parents Magazine: " 'If only they wouldn't grow up so fast,' that's a common complaint.... But you can make a permanent record of their child- hood - an investment of time that will pay dividends in pleasure for decades to come."4 For one family, as chronicled in a 1951 Parents Magazine piece entitled "Catch and Keep Your Happiest Moments," mailing home movies of their children to friends and relatives served as their method of letter writing, thus elevating the cult of children to a form of social interaction and communication.44

Several Bell & Howell marketing studies confirmed that photographing children was the most compelling reason families purchased amateur film equipment. Typical purchasers had one or two children, and the average amateur most frequently shot pictures of children.45 Indeed, amateur cinematography reinforced the patriarchal character of nuclear families, with the father taking twice as many movies as the mother, according to Bell & Howell marketing data.46 If women were necessary to mitigate the intrusion of amateur technology into the home in the 1920s, amateur photography and cinematography expressed patriarchal domination of family life and leisure time in the 1950s, with women as adjuncts to expand the market.

Travel was yet another correlative to familialism and to the marginalization of home movies as leisure. Travel allowed the family to be together for longer periods of time than was possible during the work year, and hence marked the total integration of family play as togetherness. In relation to travel, home movies were prized not for their pictorial attributes, as in the 1920s, nor for their images




of unusual sites, as in the 1930s,47 but for their portrayal of the family as it reacted to different experiences, as illustrated in the following quotation from a 1956 Parents Magazine article entitled "Better Vacation Movies":

For most parents, vacation time is a family affair, so why not make a film that will serve as a nostalgic moment of a happy holiday. Whether you spend your vacation at the beach or in the mountains, it isn't the beauty of the place that makes the picture good - it's your family's response to it.48

Travel home movies articulated the penultimate expression of family togetherness; the nuclear family as a leisure activity on the road away from social, political, or economic pressures and free to consume with abandon.

During the postwar years, the travel industry expanded, a consequence of the shorter work week, paid vacations, the availability of easy credit to purchase cars (at least for the white middle class), and the development of the superhighway system that effectively obliterated mass transit. In 1956, the auto and highway lobby induced Congress to pass a law authorizing the construction of the 41,000- mile interstate highway system, and this, along with the availability of cheap gas, further promoted long car trips and the production of large cars.49 These factors contributed to an increased emphasis on amateur travel films to document a family's affluence. According to sociologist Dean MacCannell, modern society is bent on constantly expanding and accumulating experiences, and tourism manifests this overconsumption of diverse knowledge.50 As an expression of how a cultural contradiction was balanced in the 1950s, the homogenization of everyday life through the rigid socialization and standardization of suburbia was offset by the differentiation of experience and scenery offered by car travel in the United States. A columnist writing in American Photography in 1951 explained how to create the best travel movies: "Naturally, one of the delights of any trip is the unexpected. These shots will have to be included, but they will be more easily edited into a smooth film if they fit into a general framework planned ahead of time."51

Other writers in amateur photography magazines, who feared the chaos of the open road would annihilate continuity and comprehension in home movies, emphasized the importance of preproduction research, planning, and plotting by mothers, who were thought to have more spare time and narrative sensitivity than busy fathers.52 The ideological importance of continuity for travel films was exemplified in a shooting script idea offered in How to Make Good Movies. In the section on vacation films, this book asserted that the narrative fulcrum of travel films depended on a build up of worklife, anticipation of the vacation through fantasy, and the visual payoff of interesting scenery and unexpected family interactions on the trip.5 Thus travel movies functioned as transitions between routinized work and homogenized experience and differentiated, ex- citing, unexpected environments. Narrative and planning prevented travel films from extending beyond leisure as a meaningful antidote to worker boredom.




While family, children, and travel were recurring themes in the social articulation of amateur filmmaking, it was not until the 1950s that they were coordinated and then mapped into the ideology of togetherness. Now, amateur film was not only lodged within the nuclear family as a support for the rigors of the public sphere and work, but was drafted into the nuclear family as an activity in and of itself that glorified the operations of the private sphere. To- getherness thus moved amateur film practice from a site of illusory hopes of upward mobility, freedom, invention, and success in the public sphere and from its discursive position as an oppositional practice to a force that organized the family's social relations in the private sphere. If the social relations of amateur film practice had previously promoted the private sphere as a place where one could practice skills and techniques that would aid one's movement out of it, togetherness and its adjunct of familialism encouraged amateur film practice to be totally directed inward to the private sphere and to the family as an end in itself, as a pure commodity to be consumed, within the aesthetic structures and limits of Hollywood narrative styles of composition, special effects, and continuity.

Natural Conmposition and Narrative Continuity. Compositional technique was also a site of ideological struggle in home-movie discourse: on one side, a con- trolled, static camera emulating the most mundane studio film; on the other, a mobile, intimate, and tripod-free style that exalted in lightweight amateur gear. This contradiction eventually dispersed into camera stability as the realm of amateurs, and the moving camera as the reserve of professionals in cinema verite films. For example, amateur cinematography advice columns maintained an insistence on tripods, no panning, details, and close-ups. In addition, home movies were again aligned with a photographic naturalism that displayed an uninter- rupted surveillance and objectification of subjects. Magazines used the term natural to mean that subjects did not acknowledge or act for the camera, suggesting that the "most natural" home movie was one that totally effaced the camera and any manipulation that a spectator could detect. This ideology of naturalism and uninhibited action as a more accurate record of family activities and emotion was elevated to a set of strategies designed to manipulate spontaneity, as shown in the following list of directives published in a 1960 Better Homes and Gardens article:

(1) Shine the lights in the direction of the subject for several seconds before actually beginning to shoot the scene.

(2) Don't encourage your subjects to look at the camera. They will look much more natural if they simply continue to do what they were doing before you started to shoot.

(3) Grown-ups will be much less self-conscious if they are engaged in some activity with a child while you are shooting.54

This period also began to emphasize special effects for the amateur as a means to enliven one's spontaneous footage and to intrigue one's audience through




the mystification of Hollywood-like special effects. While special effects apparatuses created additional markets for filmmaking accessories, they also promoted an idea of trading up to technology that included mechanisms for rewind, split frames, frosts, and soft-focus gels. This trend toward special effects as commodity acquisition and icons of professionalism no doubt stimulated demand for the Swiss-made Bolex camera, which included many options that could accommodate these effects.55 Both natural and spontaneous filming created through a static camera and special effects demonstrated the emphasis on control and manipulation of the subject and the film that simulated a distorted form of professionalism and an imitation of rationalized technical control.

Narrative continuity was increasingly positioned as logic and as common sense - the only way one could imagine a movie, despite the fact that most home movies were inchoate documentaries. Note how our characters in How to Make Good Movies responded to the chapter on continuity:

She: This is the chapter I've been waiting for. He: Right! I've a feeling that this continuity idea is going to be good for our souls.5

Hollywood style, then, infused amateur film practice by naturalizing its own codes and controlling the documentary flexibility and spontaneity inherent in lightweight equipment. As the male character above suggests, even one's intuitions and anticipation of filmmaking depended on the commonsensical assumptions of internal harmony and continuity. Order was again maintained as the goal for amateurs in a 1953 Photography advice article:

In our dreams, things have an unreal quality because they don't happen in logical order; events are jumbled and meaningless. A movie attempts to create the illusion of reality. In real life the things we see during the course of a day bear a definite relationship to one another.... If we were to describe the day's events to someone, the recital would be a narrative of what we saw and heard and recorded with our senses.57

The rules of conventional Hollywood narrative, through which shots were related to one another in a sequential and thematic order, were also proffered as the keys to complete audience enjoyment. For home-movie writers, the purpose of narrative and continuity was to absolutely efface the maker of the film, so that one would not have to interrupt the flow of the show to explain out-of-focus shots, or to embellish images with stories. The result of narrative style for amateur filmmakers was to colonize even the viewing experience, making the private exhibitions of these movies themselves copy the rules of conventional filmgoing. Any narration or interaction from the filmmaker was considered a transgression of the privacy of the audience, who, amateur film discourse "common sense" assumed, could best enjoy films if they followed the logic of conventional continuity. With such emphasis on technique to erase the producer, stylistic conventions equaled the importance of family content, since these formal narrative rules were considered universal truths that all audiences could understand. Carlyle




Trevelan summed this up in a 1952 American Photography piece unassumingly titled "Let's Make Movies": "How it is filmed is even more important than what is filmed."58 In addition, the value of home-movie film was assessed on this criterion of audience understandability without interaction with or interference from the filmmakers. In a 1955 Parents Magazine article, Roy Pinney observed: "In our lexicon a mediocre movie is one that only your family can enjoy. A good movie can entertain an audience that doesn't know the actors."59 This logic of continuity moved from an aspect of a Hollywood technique to an expression of the natural as narrative grammar during the 1950s. According to a 1953 piece in Photography, this naturalism guaranteed audience understanding: "The motion picture is a medium of expression which when properly executed, abides by a technique as marvelous and purposeful and pure as the grammar of our language. Each scene is the equivalent of one or more sentences. Each short sequence of scenes is the equivalent of a paragraph.... Actually, motion picture technique, in spite of its high sounding name and Hollywood parentage, is little more than the application of good common sense. [Emphasis added.] Anyone can apply it, once he is aware of its importance to the enjoyment of his films by others."6 Thus the position of the audience and its comprehension of home movies served as an adjunct and support for the ideology of narrative organization as an extension of common sense, of an everyday and innate logic about how to use media without offending spectators.

With narrative and continuity the major organizing principles of amateur movies, editing served as the tool by which home producers could repair their haphazard and confusing shooting according to established Hollywood narrative norms. Editing allowed one to eliminate poorly executed scenes and to restore continuity before exhibition. In addition, editing could be an activity performed indoors during inclement weather, and thus, from a marketing viewpoint, the insistence on editing was a strategy aimed at framing home moviemaking as less of a seasonal activity and as more of a bench-type hobby. While editing appeared to rejuvenate home movies by providing coherence on the surface, the underlying goal of editing was, according to American Photography, to produce "a logical, smooth, understandable flow of the actions and situations."61 To this end, articles elaborated on shooting methods such as tilting or shooting a person flipping through a book of snapshots - all of which could be completed indoors and out of narrative sequence.62

Perhaps the most unusual articulation of this cult of editing was the enterprise of Ralph Eno, as profiled in a 1956 American Mercury article. President of the Metropolitan Motion Picture Club, Eno ran a home-movie editing service. For a fee, Eno would "transform the jumble of unconnected frames into a coherent and interesting story of a family's life" and would even provide pretrip continuity consultations.6

When inexpensive sound recording became available on the amateur market in the mid-1950s, some columnists saw recording as yet a further extension of narrative continuity, since a family could do a narration over the images and




further integrate and control the action.6 While describing home movies in

person to an audience was considered the mark of an inferior amateur film, a mechanically reproduced voice was seen as yet another tool to deliver a more

logical and professional film.

Resistance: Cinema Verite and Experimental Film. However, there is at least fragmentary evidence to show that this ideology of the family and of its "home" movies did not totally eclipse the emancipatory possibilities of amateur equipment. By the mid-1950s, television news camerapersons used Filmo 70DL's to shoot stories. Since this technology was available to both amateurs and professionals, the opportunity for amateurs to become quasiprofessionals by gaining access to television, although not typical, was at least a possibility, since both used and had access to 16mm film. Popular Photography in 1955 encouraged amateurs who wanted to sell news footage to cultivate local television stations and follow community stories: "What they [the stations] need are stories which their own cameramen haven't covered.... This is where you come in. Your best chance of shooting saleable stories comes when you shoot what you know best -

your own community, when things are happening, in the early stages before they reach their climax."6 Would-be news cinematographers, like amateurs, were instructed to avoid panning, since that would elicit an instant rejection from news directors, who would deem the footage unusable.6

Although it is nearly impossible to assess precisely the success rate with which amateurs sold news footage to television stations, we can infer from the availability of common technological formats and the presence of articles in photography magazines concerned with strategies for selling footage, that isolated instances of such sales did occur, evoking the fluidity between amateurs and professionals that the standardization of 16mm film promoted during World War II.

In another development of the late 1950s and early 1960s, independent documentary producers began to shoot with hand-held moving cameras, against the "common sense" of using the stability of tripods to create static shots. The flexibility of lightweight amateur equipment adapted easily to this style. In this aesthetic, real life was revealed through a combination of subject movement and camera movement. Because this style directly challenged almost thirty years of amateur filmmaking aesthetics, it raised controversy in amateur photography journals. The point of the moving camera was to become as intimate with and close to the subject as possible in order to position the audience as an active participant rather than as a passive spectator. Rather than striving for the in- hibition of subject alone, the camera, according to a 1954 Photography article, grew into a spontaneous participant in events, and, therefore, gradually shed its obtrusive, technological nature through humanization:

Hand-hold your movie camera so that you can move around quickly. Move in for close-ups, out for wide shots.




Don't direct attention to yourself by asking a subject to do something. If you missed an interesting bit, relax and catch it the next time it comes up. Remember you are out to catch real life movement, nor direct a fictional movie.67

By 1962, this argument for the moving camera gained additional credibility through the distribution of independently produced cinema verite films on television. Advocates of the moving camera style told amateurs to use their bodies like crab dollies and to always shoot with a wide-angle lens. Described by Ed

Corley in a 1962 Popular Photography article, "Liberate Your Camera," the

apparatus developed into a body appendage: "I think of the camera as my 'eye.' Once it starts rolling, the camera is part of me.... I see with it."6 The fluidity of the moving camera broke down Hollywood narrative conventions, point of view, and spectator passivity, according to the ever enthusiastic Corley: "In the second school [cinema verite film], the camera is an active participant. It may occasionally play a part, taking the viewpoint of first one, then another character. It may be a curious visitor, probing, moving in to look more closely at a tiny detail, stepping back to examine the overall picture.... 'Why move?' If you want to look at the world through a rectangular window, the passive camera is fine. But if you want to escort your audience through that window, your camera must join in the life outside its encasements."69 Continuity here was constructed

through the unification of the camera and the event, in the spontaneity of the camera's interfacing with the subject. This style required that the filmmaker

analyze the narrative of the event and then duplicate a sense of it through liberated camera work. Experimental filmmaker Maya Deren wrote an article

stressing this style for the First Popular Photography Movie Making Annual in which she asserted that the most important part of filmmaking equipment was a "mobile body," and an "imaginative mind," rather than a static camera on a

tripod, a mind ordered on the rules of continuity, or technical gadgetry.70 Although it is not within the scope of this study to mine the relationships

between the avant-garde filmmaking in the 1950s and cheap, lightweight 16mm film equipment usage in the development of oppositional film cultures, it is nonetheless important to note how amateur photography magazines responded to this usage and exposed the contradiction of amateurism. A 1962 obituary for

Maya Deren published in Popular Photography articulated the emergent potential of amateur film to oppose and even challenge the dominance of professional filmmaking standards and professional exhibition. One of the most critical points of amateurism here was the individuality of the filmmaker, which was revealed in both a personal vision and a total control of the filmmaking process. In effect, amateur filmmaking, particularly within the avant-garde aesthetic, postured individual control of all phases of the filmmaking process as resisting the mass

production and dehumanizing techniques and organization of Hollywood film-

making. Her obituary situated Deren's "amateurism" and individual expression as goals for the amateur producer, a very different aesthetic direction from that of home movies, which conversely portrayed familialism with quasi-professional techniques:




She was the epitome of what an amateur should be.... Her films were made not with the resources of a professional studio but with simple equipment and at a cost comparable to many amateur productions. They were not made by a highly trained staff of technical experts but by Maya herself as a writer, director, cameraman, and editor. This was their strength, for they were very personal expressions of an artist who had very definite ideas to express.71

In this respect, amateurism could be reinvigorated as resistance to commercial film. It countered big-budget productions with low-cost films, expertise with

imagination, professional equipment with simple cameras, and the division of labor with the total integration of the individual in the filmmaking process.

Conclusion. The aesthetic controls exerted over amateur film production in the 1950s exhibited a trend to concentrate amateur film usage on the leisure activities of the nuclear family, thus inscribing the ideology of familialism on amateur

practice as an inconsequential hobby within the private sphere and simultaneously positioning it as a chronicler of the home. These discourses fused to situate amateur film as "home movies" - movies exclusively ordained for private use. In addition, Hollywood style was even more naturalized as a commonsensical, sequential organization of film through its emphasis on continuity, audience

intelligibility, and editing. In this way, the aesthetics of the control and manipulation of spontaneity stamped amateur film practice with the systematic regimen of professionalism, turning amateur filmmaking into a skill to be perfected in the private sphere for enjoyment rather than for participation.

There is also some evidence to suggest that this discursive homogenization and privatization of amateur filmmaking was not a completely even hegemonic process. Two emergent, yet not totally successful, formations developed that cut into this immobilization of amateur film practice within the private sphere. First, due to television news crews' use of 16mm equipment, some amateurs could sell stories, but again, this required adaptation to professional aesthetic standards and the ownership of top-of-the-line amateur gear. In addition, news shooting re- mained a practice within the parameters of a dominant institution. Second, moving hand-held camera work began to be encouraged as a more intimate and

participatory shooting style that was easy to accomplish with lightweight amateur

equipment. Yet by this period, the liberation from the tripod, while a break in the dominant amateur conventions, was also as much a result of the influence of cinema verite films on television.

In conclusion, the terrain of amateur film in the 1950s is uneven and rocky. While marketing studies and amateur journals evidence conformity, television, the avant-garde, and other usages of this inexpensive technology suggest hope and emancipation.

Notes This research was funded in part by a National Endowment for the Humanities Travel to Collections Grant and an Ithaca College Summer Research Grant. I would particularly like to thank Becky Simmons at Eastman House for her generous help with research.




1. How to Make Good Movies (Rochester: Eastman Kodak, circa 1950), 28. 2. For examples of how amateur films during this period totally abandoned narrative

continuity for shaky, wide-angle shots with subjects looking directly at the lens, see the George Johnson Collection of Home Movies, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin, and the Ithaca Home Movie Reel 1951-1957, Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York. For a discussion of the relationship between amateur and avant- garde film, see Patricia R. Zimmermann, "The Amateur, the Avant-Garde, and Ideo- logies of Art," Journal of Film and Video 38 (Summer/Fall 1986): 63-85. For an excellent analysis of the use of 16mm and 8mm amateur equipment for the production and distribution of gay male erotica (physique films) between World War II and Stonewall as a form of oppositional culture, see Thomas Waugh, "Hard to Imagine: Gay Erotic Cinema in the Postwar Era," paper presented at the Society for Cinema Studies Conference, Montreal, Canada, 1987. Waugh's study provides an intriguing textual analysis of physique films that circulated in mail order networks.

3. For a more in-depth study of the history of amateur film, see Patricia R. Zimmermann, Reel Families: A Social History of the Discourse on Amateur Film 1897-1923 (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1984).

4. Ibid. 5. For a description of how a discursive analysis is defined and distinguished against a

more traditional historiography that traces internal cohesions, interprets documents, and establishes continuity, see Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1976), esp. 21-63. For a concise account of how Foucault's methodology analyzes the formation of categories rather than explicates hidden meaning and notions of progress, see "Nietzsche, Genealogy, and History," in his Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1977).

6. By the late 1940s, 8mm cameras were manufactured by ten different manufacturers. Bolex and Filmos were considered top-of-the-line 16mm cameras, and even these brands ranged in price from $55 to $282, according to an article called "Equipment Survey," Movie Makers, Dec. 1947, 516. All the top five camera manufacturers during the 1950s- Revere, Bell & Howell, Eastman Kodak, Keystone, and Universal- marketed both 8mm and 16mm cameras with varying degrees of technical gadgetry, special lenses, and special features such as slow motion and stop framing. A graduated price system expanded the market to the middle class, especially families. See "Equip- ment Survey," Movie Makers, Feb. 1948, 64-68; Revere Camera ad, Photography, Aug. 1953, 97; Bell & Howell Camera ad, Photography, July 1953, 94; Kodak Camera ad, American Photography, May 1951, 302; and Arthur D. Little 1956 audit of Bell & Howell Corporation, Bell & Howell Corporate Archive, 66.

7. For discussions of the impact of the 25 percent excise taxes on the amateur photographic industry in the postwar period, see James Young, "News of the Industry," Movie Makers," May 1947, 203; "Opinion Round-Up for 1949," Photographic Trade News, Jan. 1949, 38; and "The Cold Facts on Excise Damage," Photographic Trade News, Mar. 1950, 64. For ongoing discussions of how imported cameras edged out American camera manufacturers, see The Wolfman Reports (Modern Photography) for the years 1957 to 1963.

8. Marty Jezer, The Dark Ages: Life in the United States 1945-1960 (Boston: South End Press, 1982), 118-53.

9. Dero A. Saunders and Sanford S. Parket, "30 Billion for Fun," in Fortune, June 1954, 115-19.

10. See, for example, Alfred C. Clarke, "Leisure and Occupational Prestige," in Larrabee and Meyersohn, eds., Mass Leisure, 205-14.

11. "Leisured Masses," Business Week, 12 Sept. 1953, 142-43.




12. Ibid., 145. 13. Ibid. 14. Joseph S. Zeisel, "The Workweek in American Industry," in Larrabee and Meyersohn,

eds., Mass Leisure, 149. 15. See Richard Polenberg, "The Suburban Nation," chap. 4, in his One Nation Divisible

(Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1980) 127-63; 1954 Bell & Howell Annual Report, Bell & Howell Corporate Archive, 3; and Bell & Howell press release, 27 Jan. 1955, Bell & Howell Corporate Archive, 1-2.

16. "Leisured Masses," 143. 17. David Reisman, "The Suburban Sadness," in The Suburban Community, ed. William

M. Dobriner (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1958), 375-408. 18. United States Department of Commerce, "The Do-It-Yourself Market," in Larrabee

and Meyersohn, eds., Mass Leisure, 274-81. 19. Saunders and Parket, "30 Billion for Fun," 115-19. 20. "25 Years of Amateur Movies," Movie Makers, July 1948, 284; "Cine Round-Up,"

Home Movies, July 1948, 366; "News of the Industry," Movie Makers, Apr. 1947, 158; "Small Town Deficiency," Photographic Trade News, Nov. 1952, 37; "How to Sell to Women," Photographic Trade News, Apr. 1949, 78-79; "Mothers Day," Pho- tographic Trade News, Apr. 1949, 34-35, 95; "Reeves Sells with Movies Made in Bed," Photographic Trade News, July 1951, 72. The latter three articles noted that the tobacco and beer industries witnessed major jumps in sales when they expanded ads targeted to women; in the late 1940s many camera manufacturers began placing ads in magazines such as Woman's Home Companion to attract this market and to change the image of amateur camera use from that of a technical hobby for men to that of a family activity.

21. "Suggested Materials for Leisure Time Discussion," ts, Nov. 1961, Bell & Howell Corporate Archive, 1-4. See also 1959 Bell & Howell Annual Report, Bell & Howell Corporate Archive, 9; Charles Percy statement, ts, n.d., Bell & Howell Corporate Archive.

22. "Report on Size of Photographic Market," ts, Oct. 1960, Bell & Howell Corporate Archive, 1-3.

23. Frank P. Model, "Percy of Bell & Howell, Public Service for Profit," Television Magazine, Dec. 1959, 84. For further evidence of how credit and installment payments on camera equipment stimulated sales in the family market, see Bob Berner, "How Do We Win the Mass Movie Market," Photographic Trade News, Apr. 1952, 40-41, 72; and "No Interest Installments plus Customers Face Value," Photographic Trade News, Feb. 1949, 42-43.

24. Russell A. Bird, "Let's Stop Being Snobs about Photography," Photographic Trade News, Jan. 1950, 30-31; "Camera Habits of the Nation," Photographic Trade News, Dec. 1951, 42.

25. 1952 Bell & Howell Annual Report, 4-5. 26. The result of these two strategies - less expensive equipment and more how-to

information - was staggeringly successful, with Eastman Kodak and Bell & Howell, the two largest camera manufacturers, experiencing peacetime peaks in sales. See James Young, "News of the Industry," 203. The Bell & Howell case is a good example of this growth in sales. According to a 1956 Arthur D. Little audit of Bell & Howell, the company's net profits more than tripled from 1947 to 1956, and its sales accounted for 36 percent of all sales made by the entire photographic industry (33). The major portion of this recovery occurred after 1950. From 1946 to 1949, Bell & Howell's net sales fell from a wartime high of $21,930,971 in 1945 to $13,238,116 in 1949. In 1948 and 1949, due in part to the 25 percent excise tax on all photographic equipment, sales for the entire photographic industry in the United States dropped




40 percent. After this tax was reduced to 10 percent in 1949, sales began to escalate, according to the 1949 Annual Report (10, 33, 67). From 1949 to 1952, net sales more than doubled from $13,238,116 in 1949 to $28,665,915 in 1952, as shown in the 1952 Annual Report (18-19). During this period, the company initiated more aggressive marketing through market research surveys to determine what kind of equipment families were interested in.

27. David Reisman, "Leisure and Work in Post Industrial Society," in Larrabee and Meyersohn, eds., Mass Leisure, 368-79.

28. The notion of leisure activities invigorating one from the enervation of capitalism has been noted by several historians and theorists as a common ideological maneuver of the twentieth century. See, for example, T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Anti-Modernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981); Jurgen Habermas, Towards a Rational Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970); Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez, Art and Society: Essays in Marxist Aesthetics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973); Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, The Family and Personal Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); and Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982).

29. Nearly every issue of Parents Magazine, Home Movies, Movie Makers, House and Garden, and Woman's Home Companion contained articles on how to photograph and film children.

30. Wendell Bell, "Social Choice, Life Styles, and Suburban Residence," in Dobriner, ed., The Suburban Community, 234.

31. Roy Pinney, "Tell a Story with Your Movie Camera," Parents Magazine, Sept. 1956, 139.

32. Jezer, The Dark Ages, 223-25. 33. See, for example, "How You Can Make the Most of Family Leisure," Woman's Home

Companion, Oct. 1955, 110-19. For other articles on the family as the subject for amateur films, also see David McLane, "Stories in Close-Up: Film Record of Family Activities," Photography, Dec. 1953, 163; David W. DeArmand, "How to Shoot Home Movies," Parents Magazine, Apr. 1953, 110; and Roy Pinney, "Make a Motion Picture Record of Your Baby," Parents Magazine, Oct. 1955, 146.

34. Ben L. Williams, "Home Movies for a Winter Evening," House and Garden, Dec. 1954, 162. Further examples of the promotion of amateur filmmaking as a family endeavor include a number of articles by Carol Starr in House Beautiful: "You Can Make Your Own Movies," Apr. 1954, 113-15; "You Can Make Your Own Movies," May 1954, 240-43; "You Can Make Your Own Movies: Word Portrait of J. E. Davies," June 1954, 170-72; and "Your Child's Own Moviemaking," Sept. 1954, 22.

35. Margaret Mead, "The Pattern of Leisure in Contemporary Culture," in Larrabee and Meyersohn, eds., Mass Leisure, 14.

36. Ernest Mower, "The Family in Suburbia," in Dobriner, ed., The Suburban Com- munity, 157.

37. See, for example, "How You Can Make the Most of Family Leisure," Woman's Home Companion, Oct. 1955, 110-19.

38. Virginia C. Rylands, "We Make Movies for Remembering," Woman's Home Com- panion, Oct. 1955, 112.

39. DeArmand, "How to Shoot Home Movies," 110. 40. Vance Packard, "We're in the Movies Now," American Magazine, Oct. 1952, 38-39,

111. 41. Ibid., 111. 42. See Martha Wolfenstein, "The Emergence of the Fun Morality," in Larrabee and

Meyersohn, eds., Mass Leisure, 91.




43. Pinney, "Make a Motion Picture Record of Your Baby," 146. For further examples of the emphasis on filming children, see Rylands, "We Make Movies for Remem- bering," 112; and DeArmand, "How to Shoot Home Movies," 110.

44. Meryl E. Nelson, "Catch and Keep Your Happiest Moments," Parents Magazine, Aug. 1951, p. 42.

45. Bell & Howell Internal Memo, "Information for Television Magazine," 22 Oct. 1954, Bell & Howell Company Archive, 1; and "Investors Forum: WGN-TV Suggested Material for Leisure Time Discussion," ts, November 1961, Bell & Howell Company Archive, 2.

46. "Investors Forum," 1-12. See also 1956, 1957, 1958 Bell & Howell Annual Reports. 47. For an analysis of the influence of pictorialism on amateur film in the 1920s and

1930s, see Zimmermann, Reel Families, chap. 4. 48. Roy Pinney, "Better Vacation Movies," Parents Magazine, June 1956, 26. 49. See Jezer, The Dark Ages, 138-46, for a cogent analysis of the growth in transportation

during the 1950s. For an analysis of how the development of the United States highway system and the greater availability of cars increased travel during the postwar period, see John A. Jakle, The Tourist: Travel in Twentieth Century North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 185-98.

50. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 34. 51. Francis X. Nolan, "You Need a Plan for Your Movies," American Photography, Aug.

1951, 500. 52. A good example of the fetish for the preproduction planning of travel films is Esther

Cooke, "Travel Checklist: Make a Travelog," Popular Photography, July 1962, 110. From 1946 to 1960, every single issue of Movie Makers had articles on how an amateur should shoot in a variety of foreign and domestic vacation spots.

53. How to Make Good Movies, 51. 54. "Shooting Script for Christmas Time Home Movies," Better Homes and Gardens,

Dec. 1960, 26. 55. Arvil Ahlers, "Special Effects," Popular Photography, Sept. 1962, 88-89. The Bolex

and the Cine Kodak were 16mm cameras equipped with a multitude of special- effects functions and were the highest-priced amateur cameras, both targeted to the more advanced amateurs who had "outgrown" their simpler equipment and desired more control. See "Equipment Survey," Movie Makers, Feb. 1948, 64-65; "The Secret of Bolex Superiority," Home Movies, July 1948, 362; and "Bill Daniels Uses the Bolex H-16," Movie Makers, Jan. 1950, 2.

56. How to Make Good Movies, 61. 57. James C. Dobyns, "Three C's for Movie Makers," Photography, Aug. 1953, 96. 58. Carlyle F Trevelan, "Let's Make Movies," American Photography, Oct. 1952, 42. 59. Roy Pinney, "Better Home Movies," Parents Magazine, May 1955, 126. For additional

examples of this emphasis on audience comprehension, see also Payton M. Stallings, "How to Make Your Movies More Interesting," American Photography, June 1951, 359-61; and Bob Clouse, "Jerry Lewis, Movie Maker: Hints to Fellow Amateurs," Photography, Dec. 1953, 87, 164.

60. Roy Creveling, "How to Sustain Movie Interest," Photography, Sept. 1953, 94, 115. 61. Carlyle F. Trevelyan, "Put in a Good Word: Editing and Tilting," American Pho-

tography, Jan. 1952, 51. 62. For example, see Robert B. Rotherton and Arthur Goldman, "Edit Your Movies for

Applause," American Photography, Feb. 1952, 42-77. 63. Harry Kursh and Harold Mehling, "Your Life on Film: Ralph Eno, Amateur Editor,"

American Mercury, Nov. 1956, 69. 64. Robert Newman, "When Your Film Needs Words," Popular Photography, Sept.

1959, 82-88.




65. Chester Burger, "Cover Your Town for TV," Popular Photography, Oct. 1955, 68- 69. Other articles describing appropriate subject matter for amateurs who wanted to sell to television include "8 or 16," Movie Makers, Mar. 1948, 102-3; Jerry Fairbanks, "Films for Television," Movie Makers, May 1949, 186; and Lawrence Craig, "Movie Adventure Sells Film to TV," Home Movies, Sept. 1959, 301-11.

66. See Frederick Foster, "Television Film News," Home Movies, Apr. 1946, 191, 232- 33; John Battison, "Can the Amateur Tie into Television?" Movie Makers, May 1951, 152; "Want to Sell TV? Here's How," Home Movies, Aug. 1959, 258; and John Gilligan, "Television Documentaries Use Amateur Footage," Popular Photography, Jan. 1958, 120.

67. Hugh Bell, "Ringlight Your Next Party Film," Photography, Nov. 1954, 105. 68. Ed Corley, "Liberate Your Camera," Popular Photography, Apr. 1962, 100. 69. Ibid. 70. Charles Reynolds, "Maya Deren," Popular Photography, Feb. 1962, 83. See also

Maya Deren, "Creative Cutting," Movie Makers, May 1947, 190-91, 204-6; and Maya Deren, "Creative Cutting," Movie Makers, June 1947, 242, 260.

71. Reynolds, "Maya Deren."




Patricia R. Zimmermann, "Hollywood, Home Movies, and Commons Sense: Amateur Film as Aesthetic...

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