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Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema
Movies on Home Ground Explorations in Amateur Cinema Author:Ian Craven 'Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema' offers a critical response to the still under-explored mode of amateur cinema, as a particular sphere of British film practice. Concentrating upon a roughly fifty-year period (1930-1980), during which such filmmaking grew rapidly as a significant leisure activity in Britain, the volume show... more »s how popular 'cine' assumed distinctive institutional and ideological forms, and some remarkable aesthetic emphases, grounded in consistent technical and critical apparatuses. Although an outline history of such filmmaking is certainly implicit, the priority of 'Movies On Home Ground' is to offer a series of overlapping perspectives on amateur movie-making, with a view to locating such filmmaking as a component of the broader shape of British film culture. Emphasis is thus given to institutional contexts, technical determinants, and the social formations of practising filmmakers, as well as to concerns with the construction of amateur outlooks, understandings of amateur aesthetics, and the remarkable diversity of amateur genericity. The anthology thus supplies a text offering support to courses dealing with the many varieties of nonprofessional participation best understood as truly 'amateur', rather than as 'independent' or 'alternative' filmmaking. By granting the amateur a place within the acknowledged range of significant interventions, the recognised canon of British filmmaking is widened in fascinating new directions.« less