This paper analyses Amateur films from the collection in the Austrian Filmmuseum made by Austrian entrepreneur families – many of them Jewish – in the interwar period. The films made by these families depict those specific activities that reflect the desires of subjective modernity in the 1920s and 1930s and thus embrace the practice of amateur film. The paper discusses which types of subjective modernity are depicted in those films through fashion, sporting events, new lifestyles, and travel and investigates the ways in which these subjects and events are displayed by analysing novel forms of representing the body, gender relations and social or cultural differentiation via the analysis of the images in terms of a semiotic study of the material.

Organizer (Conference): International Institute of Social History (IIHS)
Organizer (Panel): Marie-Noëlle Yazdanpanah
Panel Chair: Siegfried Mattl