The Amateurs
AFTER a perfectly beastly morning with Frankenstein (or rather his son) in Leicester Square, it was a relief to cross the river to the plain living and high-thinking amateurs being shown at the National Film Theatre, where we spent a pleasant couple of hours seeing seven of the winners of the magazine Amateur Cine World's competition for the ten best films of 1956, a representative enough selection of the sort of thing being done by amateurs at present in this country and the Commonwealth. There was variety enough : an excellent straightforward documentary on road safety, a less successful but more ambitious and imaginative documentary about an Australian eagle, a stylised tragedy set in old Japan, filmed in one room and using British actors, a light comedy about a driving test, a schoolboy comedy made by schoolboys, a strange, not always successful but always personal and often beautiful film by a country doctor about his efforts to paint driftwood, shells and other objects, and a couple of cartoons of such an extraordinarilY high standard that it is not Sur- prising we (the amateurs of this country, that is) enjoy an international reputation as cartoonists and for that take prizes at international festivals rather oftener than for straight film making. They had, of 'course, all the amateur faults to what seemed an exaggerated degree, since we know the medium so well and are used to such a high technical standard. Film making, like film acting —the merest movement of hand or head—is something that needs to be learnt; and the equip- ment to learn it is far too expensive to allow anyone but a millionaire much practical messing about. This is what gives the amateur film maker, far more than, say, the amateur photographer• or magician or winner of competitions in the weekly reviews, his air of naivete, his enormous technical disadvantage; there hovers still about his head that indefinable air of the black cloth and the little bird.
A crop of (angry and otherwise) young men —and one woman—interviewed in the current issue of Sight and Sound were asked if they would be interested in working for the cinema. Miss Iris Murdoch's answer—the best—has some bearing on the amateurs' efforts. 'As things are,' she writes, 'the cinema is a vast expertise in itself and one might as well want to conduct the London Philharmonic. I think, leaving myself out, that in a happier state of affairs the tech- niques of cinema and wireless would be in much closer contact with ordinary people and ordinary artists. Schoolchildren ought to be making films and experimenting with, sound and visual effects. These techniques ought to be our familiar play- things. As it is, they belong (the cinema at least) in an immensely remote and expensive dream- land.'
The amateurs try to answer this on the cheap; 'there are about 50,000 of them in this country, and their films, if not commercially saleable, are becoming surprisingly good. Of the 400 or so yearly entrants to Amateur Cine World's com- petition (the main one : others are run by the Scottish Film Council and the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers), only about'a quar- ter come from clubs, the rest from individuals or groups, generally of two or three people only. The films are clearly made for their makers' satis- faction, no one else's; at best they swap them with other clubs (there are 200 in this country, so they may end up with quite a sizeable audience) and pray for the remote chance of having them shown on television or to film societies. The British Film Institute keeps a few, a very few, amateur films and sponsors two or three non- commercial, though not strictly amateur, films a year. On the Continent there is a hazier division between the amateur and the professional film maker. Spain, France and Italy are the three most energetic amateur-film makers, and in Italy amateur films appear regularly on television (but then in Italy a semi-amateur tradition—too red a herring for me to chase now—produced some of the best of the postwar commercial cinema). In Britain amateur films can never (I imagine) hope to break into the strictly commercial market; but television could, if it liked, open up a big free- lance market for them'. No one thinks it odd for articles by non-journalists to appear in the press; and a privately made film is something like a free-lance occasional article—something that ex- ploits a particular piece of knowledge or experi- ence or point of view or even style. Film societies, too—the watchers, as opposed to tine clubs, the makers, of films—could take a bigger interest (at present they take very little) in amateur efforts; and perhaps find their technical limitations a salutary object of study. Meantime the amateur carries on his rather mole-like and subterranean existence; faintly ludicrous to the outsider, like every enthusiast with a hobby. Yet who are we to smile, when so many of us who may even make a living out of the cinema could no more make a film—good, bad or indifferent; 8, 9.5, 16 or 35 millimetre—than we could fly? ISABEL QU IGLV
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