. Sewell, Rose and the Aesthetics of Amateur Cine Fiction
. Sewell, Rose and the Aesthetics of Amateur Cine Fiction
Deprived of the resources deemed essential to work in the mode, and supposedly squandering the amateur’s unique expressive potentials in shameless imitation of professional counterparts, Ralph Bond dismisses the amateur fiction film as trading only in ‘trivial occurrences’. Despite such scepticism amongst avant-gardists, and encouraged by support from less high-brow cine-movement ‘insiders’, amateur filmmakers in Britain maintain unbroken commitment to the fiction film from the 1920s. Research in the archive and amongst active cine clubs not surprisingly therefore reveals fictional work of considerable intellectual reach, technical quality and creative ambition. This chapter therefore acts as a prelude of sorts to the case studies offered later in the volume: it examines discussion within the cine movement as to how an acceptable relationship with the professional fiction film might be achieved - without compromising amateur values, what has been seen in this light to constitute an appropriate amateur fictional form, and what the realisation of such ambitions in some representative films tells us about the peculiarities of ‘preferred’ amateur aesthetics more generally.
Keywords: Relational aesthetics, Amateur Cine World, Sectoral style
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