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Amateur Film: Meaning and Practice, 1927–1977
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 44 (2014) 145e162
Simon Sleight, Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870e1914. Farnham, Ashgate, 2013, xviii þ 275 pages£70 hardcover. Amid an upsurge of historical and contemporary interest in the experiences and representations of children, Simon Sleight’s examination of how young people negotiated public space in metropolitan Melbourne in the late colonial period is particularly illuminating. In his detailed case study, Sleight looks to the streets, parklands and wharves of the city as places where children and teenagers played, worked and socialised, and where they created their own distinctive spaces within the wider (and adult) urban environment. Sleight is adroit in positioning his study within the current sociological and geographical literature on young people and the city, but brings to this a focus on the past. As he correctly points out, ‘Youth as a category of historical analysis has not.been adequately ‘spatialized’ (p. 11). Through the examination of a rich range of sources e including diaries and autobiographies, municipal correspondence, newspapers, police records and photographic archives e this book reveals much about the everyday mobility of young people in colonial Australia, and offers a fresh and timely perspective on the historical dimensions of urban spaces. By the late nineteenth century ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ was one of the most rapidly growing cities in the world. Its distinctive sense of ‘newness’ was noted by visitors and self-consciously proclaimed by residents. The social and economic forces of British colonialism were evident in the city’s public institutions, commercial centre, manufacturing hubs and rapidly spreading suburbs. Of course, class defined the realities of the private and public spaces available to young people; the gracious streets lined with the villas of middle-class Melburnians were in sharp contrast to the living conditions in the pinched and semiindustrial neighbourhoods of the inner city. In all locations, young people were particularly abundant. Indeed, taking age as a key factor in society, it is noteworthy that almost half of the white population of Melbourne in the 1870s comprised those 14 years and under. A central theme of Sleight’s analysis concerns the relationship between the city of Melbourne with its ‘growing pains’ and the children and youth who lived in it. At a broader level, ‘Young Australia’ was both a matter of political and cultural discussion in the upsurge of nationalism leading to Federation in 1901, as well as a highly visible demographic reality. There were considerable anxieties expressed in the Australian colonies, and then the nation, about the ways that ‘young’ Australia differed from ‘mother’ England and the older societies of Europe. These ideas were to frame the representations of and official responses to the Australian boy and girl, and to underpin how the role of children was broadly understood in terms of their future prospects for productive citizenship. In a series of thematic chapters that follow a loose chronological thread, Sleight draws on the concept of ‘youthscape’ to chart where young people gathered in outdoor Melbourne. They played in open spaces, walked and travelled by tram to visit friends and ran errands. The freedom of the working-class ‘street urchin’ from appropriate adult supervision was of concern to social reformers, even leading to an unsuccessful bill in the Victorian parliament to impose a curfew on young people in the city after dark. Melbourne’s urban spaces were seen to nurture gangs of unruly working-class youth, who engaged in minor and major criminal or anti-social behaviours. Known as larrikins, these young people e mostly boys but some girls e gathered in ‘pushes’ or gangs, and had their own ways of dressing, walking and talking. Larrikins were to
161
be later redeemed by the forces of nationalism and works of popular literature as a distinctive and well-meaning Australian ‘type’, but in late nineteenth-century Melbourne they exemplified the related ‘problems’ of young people and criminal activities. Moral panic about the real and imagined threat of the larrikins highlighted the tensions so often played out in public space between young people and adult Melbournians. The lives of young people in Melbourne were increasingly controlled through the legal system and social expectations. The introduction of universal education removed children from the streets and put them in the classroom; by the age of 14 years, working class boys and, increasingly, girls, had moved into paid employment. A strong chapter on the experiences of young people as workers is a reminder of their economic contributions to the city. The regulation of street trading for children at the end of the nineteenth century was to correspond with an increasing representation of young people as consumers, too often tempted by the delights of the city to spend, rather than save, their pennies. The adult world in the Australian colonies included the duties of national and empire loyalty, so it is not surprising that children were incorporated into public displays and enactments of allegiance. These included processions in support of causes such as temperance, to celebrations for major events such as including Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee or the realization of Federation. From 1911, compulsory military training for boys aged between 12 and 18 years resulted in enormous street parades of 18,000 boy cadets through central Melbourne. Indeed, the national imperatives of child rescue campaigns were poignantly evident in a publication by the Gordon Institute for Boys in 1916. Above a series of photographs of young boys ‘rescued’ from the harsh life of the streets, the question is posed: ‘Were These Not Worth Saving?’ The answer below reads ‘Some of Our Former BoyseNow at the FronteDoing their Duty to Empire’ (p. 210). Sleight’s ability to delve into the historical experiences of young people has led to a vividly written, well-illustrated and instructive book about childhood in late colonial Melbourne. However, the value of this study is more encompassing than its case study might suggest. Sleight’s approach and findings have important implications for deepening our understandings of the historical, social and spatial relationships between young people and urban space, and how these have evolved over time. Kate Darian-Smith University of Melbourne, Australia http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.02.013
Heather Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film: Meaning and Practice, 1927e1977. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012, xiii þ 279 pages, £70 hardcover. Heather Norris Nicholson’s study of the emergence and practice of amateur film in Britain, a topic on which she has become an expert over two decades, takes a social historical approach to its subject. As a sometime geographer, she seeks to position regional amateur cine practices e especially in the north west e within broader trends of British society and culture. The book pays particular attention to the role of cine clubs and to the hobby press, on which e along with a selection of the films e it also rests substantially for evidence. By these means she sets out ‘to reclaim amateur activity from its once rather marginalised position as clichéd, substandard and of little interest’ (p. 17). The book covers the years 1927 to 1977, a period which spans the flurry of
162
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 44 (2014) 145e162
amateur club formation in the late twenties and the 1970s when a variety of technological and social changes dramatically altered the amateur scene. After an introduction that gives a tour of the book’s territory in miniature as a way of advocating the significance of its topic, it divides its material into substantial chapters on the clubs, the magazines, then on how the films represent family life, local events, working life, and travel, and ‘socially engaged’ filmmaking, before a final chapter reflects on potential future directions for studying amateur films as the potential of digital streaming is realised, and in the context of the amateur cineastes of the YouTube generation. The book’s strength is in its core seven chapters, in which Nicholson uses an impressionistic layering of empirical description drawn from publications and oral history interviews to convey the spirit of amateur filmmaking. For example, in the clubs chapter, she draws on the history of several such organisations, including those at Bury and Warrington. We see how, in the early decades, amateur cinematography drew on conventions and practices of amateur photography. She shows the importance of competition-running and prize-giving within this particular amateur culture. This chapter, and the succeeding one on the amateur press, are chronological surveys, usefully illustrating at a distance how the broader social and economic history of the last century affected, and found expression in, amateur films. It is in the five chapters on different subjects that we gain a sense of what the films actually looked like, as here she gives some valuable descriptions of selected individual examples such as Lucy Fairbank’s Views and Personalities (1935), which featured the citizens of her home town, Wellhouse, or Pilkington’s Colliery Boys go on Holiday, seemingly made for a particular mining company to show their organised response to 1938 legislation on paid holidays. The division of material between these chapters would seem to be Nicholson’s own; she perceives a tendency for amateurs to start with family subjects and then to branch out into local views, with some enthusiasts then opting to specialise in particular subjects, such as, for example, Sam Hanna’s sixty years of recording rural trades. For this reader, the bookending scene-setting and concluding chapters are a little disappointing. For what is at heart a plea for the significance and interest of a particular genre of material, the text does tend to veer off into generalities precisely where the reader might wish for the closer engagement with the broader literature that might help the book develop beyond its empirical core. Here, the endnoting also becomes rather evasive, with gestural references to whole texts, without page numbers. Occasional references
throughout the book to authors including Michel de Certeau and John Berger are suggestive only, where a more intensive discussion might have helped make an even stronger case for the interest of the material. One area of potential future development might be to undertake a more sustained discussion of what amateur status entailed and meant in filmmaking; an investigation of how the protagonists thought about their status, what it meant socially, and how existing literature on the amateur mode relates to her subject. Instead, Nicholson has chosen to diffuse such discussion throughout the volume. So, for example, we learn in passing of links to other amateur activities, including amateur dramatic societies, and of film competitions run in association with other hobby activities, including one by Autocar magazine. There is also sporadic mention of individuals e including Kevin Brownlow and Peter Watkins e who ‘went professional’, and discussion of relations with television, where occasional screenings of amateur films and ‘how to’ series were gleefully received by the amateur press. But such scattered discussion of such a core aspect of her subject feels like a missed opportunity, especially for those readers who might come to the book out of interest in the first term of her book’s title more than the second; that is, those who are interested in what amateur cine activity tells us about the role and status of amateurs within culture, more than simply what amateur filmmakers did. We might wonder, for example, what amateur filmmakers had in common with those amateur thespians, for example or, to take another example, amateur astronomers, or birdwatchers, and how they differed from them. In other words, what was specific about film in all of this? Equally, what did it mean when amateurs treated the same subjects or genres that paid filmmakers also assayed? How, for example, does the Bury Cine Society’s Our Town compare with Paul Rotha’s A City Speaks or John Taylor’s The Londoners? Such a comparison would reveal what, in a particular case, is specific about the amateur view. In sum though, in this book, by showing the range of amateur films, Nicholson most effectively makes the case for their potential in many kinds of historical and geographical research, not just as records of people and customs, but specifically as cultural artefacts inflected by lay sensibilities. We owe her a vote of thanks for opening-up the territory with this charming volume. Tim Boon The Science Museum, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.02.004
Simon Sleight, Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870e1914. Farnham, Ashgate, 2013, xviii þ 275 pages£70 hardcover. Amid an upsurge of historical and contemporary interest in the experiences and representations of children, Simon Sleight’s examination of how young people negotiated public space in metropolitan Melbourne in the late colonial period is particularly illuminating. In his detailed case study, Sleight looks to the streets, parklands and wharves of the city as places where children and teenagers played, worked and socialised, and where they created their own distinctive spaces within the wider (and adult) urban environment. Sleight is adroit in positioning his study within the current sociological and geographical literature on young people and the city, but brings to this a focus on the past. As he correctly points out, ‘Youth as a category of historical analysis has not.been adequately ‘spatialized’ (p. 11). Through the examination of a rich range of sources e including diaries and autobiographies, municipal correspondence, newspapers, police records and photographic archives e this book reveals much about the everyday mobility of young people in colonial Australia, and offers a fresh and timely perspective on the historical dimensions of urban spaces. By the late nineteenth century ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ was one of the most rapidly growing cities in the world. Its distinctive sense of ‘newness’ was noted by visitors and self-consciously proclaimed by residents. The social and economic forces of British colonialism were evident in the city’s public institutions, commercial centre, manufacturing hubs and rapidly spreading suburbs. Of course, class defined the realities of the private and public spaces available to young people; the gracious streets lined with the villas of middle-class Melburnians were in sharp contrast to the living conditions in the pinched and semiindustrial neighbourhoods of the inner city. In all locations, young people were particularly abundant. Indeed, taking age as a key factor in society, it is noteworthy that almost half of the white population of Melbourne in the 1870s comprised those 14 years and under. A central theme of Sleight’s analysis concerns the relationship between the city of Melbourne with its ‘growing pains’ and the children and youth who lived in it. At a broader level, ‘Young Australia’ was both a matter of political and cultural discussion in the upsurge of nationalism leading to Federation in 1901, as well as a highly visible demographic reality. There were considerable anxieties expressed in the Australian colonies, and then the nation, about the ways that ‘young’ Australia differed from ‘mother’ England and the older societies of Europe. These ideas were to frame the representations of and official responses to the Australian boy and girl, and to underpin how the role of children was broadly understood in terms of their future prospects for productive citizenship. In a series of thematic chapters that follow a loose chronological thread, Sleight draws on the concept of ‘youthscape’ to chart where young people gathered in outdoor Melbourne. They played in open spaces, walked and travelled by tram to visit friends and ran errands. The freedom of the working-class ‘street urchin’ from appropriate adult supervision was of concern to social reformers, even leading to an unsuccessful bill in the Victorian parliament to impose a curfew on young people in the city after dark. Melbourne’s urban spaces were seen to nurture gangs of unruly working-class youth, who engaged in minor and major criminal or anti-social behaviours. Known as larrikins, these young people e mostly boys but some girls e gathered in ‘pushes’ or gangs, and had their own ways of dressing, walking and talking. Larrikins were to
161
be later redeemed by the forces of nationalism and works of popular literature as a distinctive and well-meaning Australian ‘type’, but in late nineteenth-century Melbourne they exemplified the related ‘problems’ of young people and criminal activities. Moral panic about the real and imagined threat of the larrikins highlighted the tensions so often played out in public space between young people and adult Melbournians. The lives of young people in Melbourne were increasingly controlled through the legal system and social expectations. The introduction of universal education removed children from the streets and put them in the classroom; by the age of 14 years, working class boys and, increasingly, girls, had moved into paid employment. A strong chapter on the experiences of young people as workers is a reminder of their economic contributions to the city. The regulation of street trading for children at the end of the nineteenth century was to correspond with an increasing representation of young people as consumers, too often tempted by the delights of the city to spend, rather than save, their pennies. The adult world in the Australian colonies included the duties of national and empire loyalty, so it is not surprising that children were incorporated into public displays and enactments of allegiance. These included processions in support of causes such as temperance, to celebrations for major events such as including Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee or the realization of Federation. From 1911, compulsory military training for boys aged between 12 and 18 years resulted in enormous street parades of 18,000 boy cadets through central Melbourne. Indeed, the national imperatives of child rescue campaigns were poignantly evident in a publication by the Gordon Institute for Boys in 1916. Above a series of photographs of young boys ‘rescued’ from the harsh life of the streets, the question is posed: ‘Were These Not Worth Saving?’ The answer below reads ‘Some of Our Former BoyseNow at the FronteDoing their Duty to Empire’ (p. 210). Sleight’s ability to delve into the historical experiences of young people has led to a vividly written, well-illustrated and instructive book about childhood in late colonial Melbourne. However, the value of this study is more encompassing than its case study might suggest. Sleight’s approach and findings have important implications for deepening our understandings of the historical, social and spatial relationships between young people and urban space, and how these have evolved over time. Kate Darian-Smith University of Melbourne, Australia http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.02.013
Heather Norris Nicholson, Amateur Film: Meaning and Practice, 1927e1977. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012, xiii þ 279 pages, £70 hardcover. Heather Norris Nicholson’s study of the emergence and practice of amateur film in Britain, a topic on which she has become an expert over two decades, takes a social historical approach to its subject. As a sometime geographer, she seeks to position regional amateur cine practices e especially in the north west e within broader trends of British society and culture. The book pays particular attention to the role of cine clubs and to the hobby press, on which e along with a selection of the films e it also rests substantially for evidence. By these means she sets out ‘to reclaim amateur activity from its once rather marginalised position as clichéd, substandard and of little interest’ (p. 17). The book covers the years 1927 to 1977, a period which spans the flurry of
162
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 44 (2014) 145e162
amateur club formation in the late twenties and the 1970s when a variety of technological and social changes dramatically altered the amateur scene. After an introduction that gives a tour of the book’s territory in miniature as a way of advocating the significance of its topic, it divides its material into substantial chapters on the clubs, the magazines, then on how the films represent family life, local events, working life, and travel, and ‘socially engaged’ filmmaking, before a final chapter reflects on potential future directions for studying amateur films as the potential of digital streaming is realised, and in the context of the amateur cineastes of the YouTube generation. The book’s strength is in its core seven chapters, in which Nicholson uses an impressionistic layering of empirical description drawn from publications and oral history interviews to convey the spirit of amateur filmmaking. For example, in the clubs chapter, she draws on the history of several such organisations, including those at Bury and Warrington. We see how, in the early decades, amateur cinematography drew on conventions and practices of amateur photography. She shows the importance of competition-running and prize-giving within this particular amateur culture. This chapter, and the succeeding one on the amateur press, are chronological surveys, usefully illustrating at a distance how the broader social and economic history of the last century affected, and found expression in, amateur films. It is in the five chapters on different subjects that we gain a sense of what the films actually looked like, as here she gives some valuable descriptions of selected individual examples such as Lucy Fairbank’s Views and Personalities (1935), which featured the citizens of her home town, Wellhouse, or Pilkington’s Colliery Boys go on Holiday, seemingly made for a particular mining company to show their organised response to 1938 legislation on paid holidays. The division of material between these chapters would seem to be Nicholson’s own; she perceives a tendency for amateurs to start with family subjects and then to branch out into local views, with some enthusiasts then opting to specialise in particular subjects, such as, for example, Sam Hanna’s sixty years of recording rural trades. For this reader, the bookending scene-setting and concluding chapters are a little disappointing. For what is at heart a plea for the significance and interest of a particular genre of material, the text does tend to veer off into generalities precisely where the reader might wish for the closer engagement with the broader literature that might help the book develop beyond its empirical core. Here, the endnoting also becomes rather evasive, with gestural references to whole texts, without page numbers. Occasional references
throughout the book to authors including Michel de Certeau and John Berger are suggestive only, where a more intensive discussion might have helped make an even stronger case for the interest of the material. One area of potential future development might be to undertake a more sustained discussion of what amateur status entailed and meant in filmmaking; an investigation of how the protagonists thought about their status, what it meant socially, and how existing literature on the amateur mode relates to her subject. Instead, Nicholson has chosen to diffuse such discussion throughout the volume. So, for example, we learn in passing of links to other amateur activities, including amateur dramatic societies, and of film competitions run in association with other hobby activities, including one by Autocar magazine. There is also sporadic mention of individuals e including Kevin Brownlow and Peter Watkins e who ‘went professional’, and discussion of relations with television, where occasional screenings of amateur films and ‘how to’ series were gleefully received by the amateur press. But such scattered discussion of such a core aspect of her subject feels like a missed opportunity, especially for those readers who might come to the book out of interest in the first term of her book’s title more than the second; that is, those who are interested in what amateur cine activity tells us about the role and status of amateurs within culture, more than simply what amateur filmmakers did. We might wonder, for example, what amateur filmmakers had in common with those amateur thespians, for example or, to take another example, amateur astronomers, or birdwatchers, and how they differed from them. In other words, what was specific about film in all of this? Equally, what did it mean when amateurs treated the same subjects or genres that paid filmmakers also assayed? How, for example, does the Bury Cine Society’s Our Town compare with Paul Rotha’s A City Speaks or John Taylor’s The Londoners? Such a comparison would reveal what, in a particular case, is specific about the amateur view. In sum though, in this book, by showing the range of amateur films, Nicholson most effectively makes the case for their potential in many kinds of historical and geographical research, not just as records of people and customs, but specifically as cultural artefacts inflected by lay sensibilities. We owe her a vote of thanks for opening-up the territory with this charming volume. Tim Boon The Science Museum, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2014.02.004