For archivists and scholars of small gauge and amateur film, the past few years have seen several causes for celebration: 2023 and 2022 marked the centenaries of 16mm and 9.5mm film, respectively, and 2021 marked the 20th anniversary of the Small Gauge Symposium, hosted by the Small Gauge Film Preservation Task Force at the 2001 Association of Moving Image Archivists 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 film, and provided one of the first platforms to actively address collection development and preservation issues relating to these largely overlooked formats.
Much has happened since those initial meetings over 20 years ago, and archives and organizations across the world have emerged to support the preservation and study of small gauge, amateur, and nontheatrical film. Many archives and institutions have expanded their collecting missions to include more small gauge and nontheatrical film, while several regional film archives have been founded to hone in specifically on one or more subgenres as their areas of focus: home movies, amateur films, educational films, industrial films, medical films, science films, ethnographic films, and more. The Orphan Film Symposium, the Center for Home Movies, the Association of Moving Image Archivists Small Gauge and Amateur Film Committee, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Nontheatrical Film and Media Scholarly Interest Group, and the Amateur Cinema Studies Network are just a few examples of the many organizations and international communities that have emerged to connect archivists, scholars, technicians, and artists in their efforts to preserve and celebrate small gauge and amateur film culture—and their efforts have been largely successful, as evidenced by the growing field of scholarship devoted to these unique, previously neglected, materials.
In light of this recent scholarly excitement and archival activity, and the significant growth of our subfield over the past three decades, it seems appropriate to take stock of where our field has been and where it is going. Our preservation priorities and archival practices have changed significantly since the late 1990s, as has scholarship coming out of small gauge, amateur, and nontheatrical film studies and their many subfields. Indeed, our whole media landscape has been altered, and 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. The digital turn has 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.
As such, this special issue of The Moving Image hopes to bring together archivists, technicians, artists, scholars, researchers, and students to celebrate the accomplishments of our field and the colleagues and institutions who have spearheaded and championed it over the last few decades, while furthering our understanding of the field’s own histories, methods, actors, and trajectories, examining our most pressing current issues and concerns, and spotlighting priorities and directions for the near- and long-term future of small gauge, amateur, and nontheatrical media preservation.
Suggested topics include (but are by no means limited to):
– the history of small gauge, amateur, and nontheatrical film studies
– international outreach and networks of collaboration – documentation standards and resources for research
– videotape, digital media, and the meaning of “small gauge” today
– race and gender in amateur and nontheatrical film – access, discoverability, and online visibility
– programming, projecting, and reactivating small gauge film
– the ethics of home movie preservation
– copyright, right of publicity, and right to privacy
– centenaries for small gauge and amateur film
– 9.5mm, 28mm, and other non-16mm/non-8mm formats
– personal and community archiving
– preserving amateur media, from home movies to zoom meetings
– collection development
– diversity and inclusion
– artists’ filmmaking and nontraditional film elements
– student and non-professional filmmaking
– equipment repair, maintenance, and obsolescence
– film archival education and training
