Roger Odin

Various studies of amateur cinema conducted in recent years have sought to fill a sizable gap in the international panorama and at the same time open up various problems and perspectives. In the first place we have to recognize that amateur cinema traverses different communicative spaces and needs to be investigated in relation to them: if the home movie is ultimately a continuation of the photo album – in styles, models of discourse and functions – the ‘amateur’ film draws more properly on the cinema. In the second place we have to question social ambits and parameters hitherto neglected, such as the role of home movies in non-Western spaces and cultures or in relation to determinations of class, religion etc. Further, it is necessary to take stock of the ways the new amateur technologies (from video to digital film to the Web) have profoundly modified the boundaries between amateur and professional or between public and private spaces, raising new issues. In particular, the encroachment of amateur productions on the public space, in both Tv programs (Video Gag) and remontage films or audio-video blogs leads to the necessity of questioning whether and how far these types of products, with their testimonial scope, constitute agents of social ‘deregulation’, a weakening of the civil (and global) institutions as a result of an awakening, sometimes emotional, of questions of identity and definitions of the self.