AMIA Small Gauge and Amateur Film Symposium
To mark the 20th anniversary of the AMIA Small Gauge Symposium (2001) and the centennials for 9.5mm and 16mm film, the Small Gauge and Amateur Film Committee is excited to host a celebratory symposium as part of the 2023 annual AMIA conference. The symposium will take stock of accomplishments within our subfield over the last two decades, spotlight and examine current issues and concerns, and help determine priorities and directions for the near- and long-term future. The symposium will feature a full-day workshop and a combination of screenings, panels, and forums.
Organized by the SGAF co-chairs, Hugo Ljungbäck, Louisa Trott, and Patricia Ledesma Villon.
9:00 AM – 5:00 PM | Separate Registration Required
The Art of Small Gauge Projector Maintenance and Repair
Louisa Trott, University of Tennessee
Dino Everett, USCA HMH Foundation Moving Image Archive
Skip Elsheimer, A/V Geeks
Kristin Lipska, Prelinger Archives
Jennifer Miko, Prelinger Archives
Seth Mitter, Canyon Cinema
The Small Gauge and Amateur Film Committee hosts a full-day pre-conference workshop on small gauge projector maintenance and repair. The workshop will cover an array of 16mm, 8mm, and Super 8 projector models and their repair and maintenance protocol. Attendees will have the chance to work hands-on with the playback machinery and will leave with the knowledge of how to care for the projectors needed to view their archival film. Our thanks to Boston Light & Sound for their generous support in making the workshop possible.
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
Small Gauge/Amateur Film Committee Meeting
2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Roundtable: Small Gauge and Amateur Film at 20
Hugo Ljungbäck, University of Chicago
Louisa Trott, University of Tennessee
Patricia Ledesma Villon, Walker Art Center
2021 marked the 20th anniversary of the Small Gauge Symposium, hosted by the Small Gauge Film Preservation Task Force at the 2001 AMIA conference. That symposium grew out of a focused effort by archivists, preservationists, researchers, and scholars to raise awareness of the cultural, historical, and artistic significance of small gauge and amateur film. It also provided a platform to actively address collection development and preservation issues relating to these formats. Much has happened since those initial meetings 20 years ago, and organizations across the world have emerged to support the study of small gauge and amateur film. As we celebrate two other anniversaries—the centenaries of 9.5mm (1922–2022) and 16mm film (1923–2023)—this seems an opportune moment to take stock of how the subfield of small gauge, amateur, and nontheatrical film has developed and advanced over the past few decades. Participants are invited and encouraged to share their own thoughts, reflections, and recollections of how we got here, and what we’ve achieved along the way.
6:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Let The Emulsion Show: Mix NY LGBT Film Festival
Leopold Krist, Wildlife Conservation Society
In 1987, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman organized the MIX NY Film Festival, in response to experimental film venues in New York City not programming contemporary work made by LBGT filmmakers. Thirty-five years later, which of those personal films are currently accessible for exhibition, and in what format? If the original elements are housed in collections, are they on a path to preservation? Is it appropriate to assume that institutions that refused to program this work when it was created will now prioritize adding it to their current collection?
9:30 AM – 10:30 AM
SGS: Distributor Catalogs, Classroom Study Guides, and the History of 16mm
Gregory Waller, Indiana University
Madeline Webb-Mitchell, Indiana University (IULMIA)
As part of a year-long project at Indiana University marking the centenary of 16mm, the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive has undertaken the digitization and online delivery of two unique collections of ephemeral documents: more than 300 catalogs representing both the broad spectrum of large and small libraries handling 16mm films and also the holdings of commercial non-theatrical distributors, corporations, and companies specializing in particular genres like religious films; and more than 6700 study guides for individual films from companies like Encyclopedia Britannica and Coronet explaining how teachers should most effectively deploy these films in the multimedia, mid-century classroom. This panel will provide an overview of these collections, which provide invaluable (and largely overlooked) information about the marketing, distribution, exhibition, and use of 16mm films when this format greatly expanded and reshaped the parameters and the uses of film in the U.S.
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
SGS: International Amateur Cinema: Histories, Archives, Metadata
Charles Tepperman, University of Calgary
Dan Streible, New York University
Simona Schneider, University of Udine
Dimitrios Latsis, University of Alabama
Maria Vinogradova, New York University
This panel builds on an ongoing international collaboration between film historians and archivists that sheds new light on amateur, small-gauge filmmaking practices around the globe. In particular, the panel traces points of international commonality and divergence, from common film themes and styles in amateur work, to linguistic differences of terminology, cataloging, and treatment of small gauge film stock. At issue here are the ways that amateur uses of small gauge film formats coalesced around common themes, but also fragmented into locally (geographically, linguistically, politically) different meanings. Through this project, film historians and archives are refining historical accounts and strategies for describing, cataloging and preserving amateur films.
12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
SGS Screening: Home Movies as Microhistories
Patricia Ledesma Villon, Walker Art Center
Débora Butruce, Brazilian Association of Audiovisual Preservation
Daniel Melfi, Toronto Metropolitan University
This screening session brings together two presentations of home movies. Daniel Melfi will present films from the Don Vitalini fonds, preserved at Bologna’s L’Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia. The collection contains 65 8mm films shot by priest Don Cirillo Vitalini between 1959 and 1996, and Melfi examines what the films reveal about the social and cultural importance of home movies as recording and demonstrating developments in Italian society from the postwar period until the late 1980s. Débora Butruce of the Brazilian Association of Audiovisual Preservation (ABPA) will screen a selection of domestic and amateur films from different regions of Brazil recently digitized by Digitalização Viajante. The program presents a broad and rich panorama of records about different historical and cultural contexts in Brazil, and will be a unique opportunity to see these films, which have been historically neglected but must be reconsidered as an important cultural record worthy of preservation, research, and access.
2:00 PM – 3:00 PM
SGS: Preserving and Presenting Small Gauge Formats
Hugo Ljungbäck, University of Chicago
Kirk McDowell, George Eastman Museum
Andrew Watts, University of Calgary
Nicholas Caluda, Jefferson Parish Library
This panel brings together three presentations on small gauge formats and their unique challenges and possibilities for preservation and pedagogy. Based on archival research on a relatively unknown collection of 28mm films at the Library and Archives Canada, Andrew Watts explores the 28mm format through a media-archaeological lens to reflect on what its obsolescence can tell us about the ways film historiography is written today. Kirk McDowell looks at a collection of strange films at the George Eastman Museum, consisting of five-inch wide loops of diacetate film. The Vitalux format was briefly produced in the 1920s before the widespread acceptance of 16mm, and McDowell examines the provenance of the museum’s collection and addresses the challenges these films present for preservation efforts. Nicholas Caluda discusses how public libraries can collaborate with moving image archivists to help educate the public on the importance of small gauge formats and their present uses. Caluda offers models for programming and suggests how public libraries and archives can excite and engage their community members.
3:15 PM – 3:45 PM
SGS: These Are Your Grandpa’s Dirty Movies: The 16mm Pornographic Underground
Dan Erdman, Media Burn
A historical consequence of the introduction of 16mm that has often been overlooked is the wave of pornographic films that followed in its wake, all shot, distributed, and screened illegally and secretly. This talk will demonstrate how the history of pornographic movies—often called “stag films”—has run parallel to the history of 16mm film itself, at first supplementing existing social practices, only to eventually develop into the primary medium for an independent culture of production and exhibition that would take on a life of its own. By demonstrating, through the use of primary sources, the ways in which stag films were sold by their makers and utilized by their audiences, this presentation will contribute to the general store of knowledge about this obscure corner of 16mm film history, and aid in the preservation of this most misunderstood material.
3:45 PM – 4:15 PM
SGS: Decoding Colonial Ideology in Sponsored Travel Films: Holiday Native Land
Brian Virostek, Library and Archives Canada
Nicolas Renaud, Concordia University
A presentation of excerpts and a description of the creative process behind Holiday Native Land, a montage experiment that remixes sponsored films from the 1920s to the 70s that advertised the Canadian wilderness as a holiday destination. These films’ commercial objectives and spectacular views lie on the surface of an ideology of modernity and power. They reflect a collective need for power over the land and the First Peoples connected to it. Through the recombination of images, music, and narration in a diptych composition, Holiday Native Land explores the colonial unconscious lurking in these enchanting Canadian landscapes, making connections between different eras, locations, and voices. This film is an example of collaboration between the artist in the archive and the artist-scholar as well as a dialog between Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives. Holiday Native Land highlights a collaborative and innovative method of preserving, researching, and interrogating 16mm sponsored films.
4:30 PM – 5:30 PM
SGS: Tomorrow’s Promises: Researching and Restoring the Films of Edward Owens
Kyle Westphal, Chicago Film Society
Carolyn Faber, John M. Flaxman Library at the School of the Art Institute
Emily Martin, Video Data Bank
Edward Owens (1949–2010) had a brief but sterling career in underground cinema in the late 1960s. Mentored as a teenager by Gregory Markopoulos at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Owens demonstrated a unique creative vision and a technical dexterity with superimposition that belied his youth. Despite international festival recognition and the support of tastemakers such as Jonas Mekas and Parker Tyler, Owens did not sustain a career. He made four films on 16mm by the age of 20, and then faded from the scene without a trace. A queer, Black teenage prodigy whose style mixed obtuse experimentalism with the awestruck love of a home movie maven, Owens was long absent from histories of the American avant-garde. A consortium of institutions came together to research and restore Owens’s 16mm output. The multi-year project will be detailed by curators, programmers, and preservationists who contributed to restoring Owen’s legacy.
9:45 AM – 10:45 AM
SGS: A Modern Microcinema: Hand-Manipulated Films and the Living Legacy of 16mm Film
Justin Clifford Rhody, No Name Cinema
Abigail Smith, No Name Cinema
This presentation contextualizes No Name Cinema (NNC) within the history of microcinemas and small-gauge alternative film exhibition in the United States. It also provides an overview of the continued usage of 16mm film in contemporary artistic practices through a deep dive into the thriving activities of NNC—a microcinema, gallery and community gathering space that specializes in small gauge film exhibition in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This presentation will also include a screening of The Interior Frontier (a recent short by the artists shot on Super-8 and 16mm), as well as an expanded cinema performance involving analyst and regular 16mm projectors, dual 35mm slide projectors (with found slides previously soaked in rat urine, currently covered in mold), and live improvised sound created in collaboration with Gretchen Korsmo. This screening addresses the historical artistic uses of 16mm for the creation of experimental film as a living tradition by presenting contemporary films by artists working in the medium today. These works explore the essential physicality of film, utilizing the economy and accessibility of the 16mm format which can be projected in non-commercial settings like the microcinema.
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
SGS Roundtable: Small Gauge and Amateur Film in 20
Hugo Ljungbäck, University of Chicago
Louisa Trott, University of Tennessee
Patricia Ledesma Villon, Walker Art Center
The “digital turn” in commercial film production and projection has prompted a new generation of filmmakers to rediscover and revitalize small gauge film practices, while digitization has provided new platforms for nontheatrical film collections through online streaming sites like YouTube and the Internet Archive. Digital technologies have also made it possible for thousands of hours of amateur media to be created, posted, streamed, and circulated through apps like Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat every day, intensifying concerns about saving amateur media in a digital culture where today’s trends will be forgotten tomorrow, as the “digital dark age” looms ever closer. The goal of this open forum is to bring together archivists, technicians, artists, scholars, researchers, and students—“veterans” and “newcomers” alike—to spotlight and examine current issues and concerns for our field, and to help determine our priorities and directions for the near- and long-term future.