This essay is in two parts. The first part is specifically about colonial era amateur film, a large amount of which I had worked on as part of my research for the Colonial Film: Moving Images of The British Empire project.¹1 www.colonialfilm.org.uk
The second part attempts to think about some fundamental properties of the amateur film as such, and indicate some of the problems that arise from a consideration of amateur or private film material.

During my research on the Colonial Film project, I came to be sure that much of what seemed true regarding colonial amateur film was likely true of amateur film more generally, and so it was potentially a good place from which to start thinking about wider problems. It also seemed to me that the problems posed by the analysis of historical amateur film are crucial in understanding the privately made films that are so ubiquitous in the era of social media. Amateur film is absolutely central to the ways that contemporary media forms, both social and otherwise, are now employed by major corporations, individuals, and groups; amateur films are therefore central to all aspects of contemporary social and personal life, from geopolitics to the minutiae of personal relationships. And given how important this kind of film-making plainly is, it seemed to me extraordinary that there was so little scholarship which tried to parse out exactly how amateur film worked and works.

For instance, we know how things like editing, camera angles, and types of shot function in professionally made film, how various film-making techniques were developed, and so on; and the wider meaning of the images on the screen is always being negotiated in more or less detail. But neither the process of historical comprehension, nor the development of a formal analysis, has really occurred for the kinds of films made by individuals for their own use, and which we call, in the broadest sense, amateur films. (This is roughly how the term will be used in this essay, though this is just a loose definition that indicates a starting point for identifying a highly disparate set of practices. I use it interchangeably here with ‘private films’, ‘home movies’, etc.; I do not pretend that these ideas are very precisely defined.)

What, for instance, is the meaning of the edit in an amateur film? What even is an ‘edit’ in a home movie? What is a cut? What is the meaning of this kind of shot, or that kind? How are we to understand the field of vision and the identity of the film-maker with regard to the action? Are these even coherent questions, when we speak about a 5 second video made on a phone, or an 8mm reel of a child’s birthday party? None of this has had anything like the attention it very evidently requires. It is not clear what exactly an ‘amateur film’ even is.

It is as though the meaning of amateur film has always been thought to be somehow self-evident – as though it always declares itself openly and gives its whole self over without any need for further explanation. This is not so. I think that the problems attending the analysis of amateur film are more pressing, more difficult, and complex – and at this point probably much more significant – than those attending professionally made cinema film. This is because amateur film-making, in the widest sense, is no longer merely a pastime: it is a complex everyday extension of self, an essential tool of personal becoming, a crucial mode of political engagement, a sophisticated popular art, a mode of interpersonal communication, a facet of journalism, a legal tool, a weapon of wars both informational and kinetic, and more besides. (In truth it always was those things, but some of them only in embryonic or larval forms.)

The codes and history of amateur film only overlap obscurely and divergently with the conventional history of cinema and television. But we ignore them at our peril, because after nearly a hundred years of almost total invisibility, the last two decades have seen amateur film suddenly become a decisively powerful element within the total field of social, political, and personal action. Given this latter fact, it is certainly possible the amateur film of Empire is an especially important source because, in being already tangled with psychological and geographical displacement, political power, and violence, it already encodes much of what makes amateur film as such crucial for understanding our present media predicaments.

本文分为两部分。第一部分特别是关于殖民时代的业余电影，其中的大部分内容是我为“殖民电影：大英帝国的移动影像”项目研究的一部分。¹1 www.colonialfilm.org.uk
第二部分试图思考业余电影的一些基本特性，并指出由于考虑业余或私人电影材料而产生的一些问题。

在我对殖民电影项目的研究期间，我开始确信，关于殖民地业余电影的大部分内容可能更普遍地适用于业余电影，因此它可能是一个开始思考更广泛问题的好地方。在我看来，对历史业余电影的分析所带来的问题对于理解在社交媒体时代如此普遍的私人制作的电影至关重要。业余电影绝对是当代媒体形式（无论是社交媒体还是其他媒体）被大公司、个人和团体采用的方式的核心；因此，业余电影对当代社会和个人生活的各个方面都至关重要，从地缘政治到个人关系的细节。考虑到这种电影制作的重要性，

例如，我们知道专业电影中的剪辑、摄影机角度、镜头类型等功能，各种电影制作技术是如何发展的等等；屏幕上图像的更广泛含义总是在或多或少的细节上进行协商。但是对于个人为自己使用而制作的电影类型，无论是历史理解过程还是形式分析的发展，都没有真正发生过，我们在最广泛的意义上称之为业余电影。（这大致是本文中该术语的使用方式，尽管这只是一个松散的定义，表明识别一组高度不同的实践的起点。我在这里与“私人电影”、“家庭电影”互换使用等；我并不假装这些想法的定义非常精确。）

例如，在业余电影中剪辑的意义是什么？家庭电影中的“编辑”甚至是什么？什么是切口？这种镜头，或者那种镜头是什么意思？我们如何理解电影人对动作的视野和身份？当我们谈论在手机上制作的 5 秒视频或儿童生日聚会的 8 毫米卷轴时，这些问题是否连贯？这些都没有像它显然需要的那样引起注意。目前还不清楚究竟什么是“业余电影”。

就好像业余电影的意义一直被认为是不言而喻的——就好像它总是公开地宣称自己，并在不需要进一步解释的情况下把自己的整个自我都给了。事实并非如此。我认为，与专业制作的电影相比，业余电影分析的问题更紧迫、更困难、更复杂——在这一点上可能更重要。这是因为从最广泛的意义上讲，业余电影制作不再仅仅是一种消遣：它是自我的复杂日常延伸，个人成长的基本工具，政治参与的重要模式，复杂的流行艺术，模式人际交流的一个方面，新闻的一个方面，一种法律工具，一种信息和动力的战争武器，等等。

业余电影的代码和历史与电影和电视的传统历史只有模糊和不同的重叠。但是我们忽视它们是我们的危险，因为在近一百年几乎完全隐形之后，过去二十年见证了业余电影突然成为社会、政治和个人行动整个领域中决定性的强大元素。鉴于后一个事实，帝国的业余电影当然有可能是一个特别重要的来源，因为它已经与心理和地理上的位移、政治权力和暴力纠缠在一起，它已经编码了许多使业余电影对人类来说如此重要的东西。了解我们目前的媒体困境。