Doing Amateur Film. Social and Aesthetic Practices in Austrian Amateur Film from the 1920s to the 1980s
Project funding: OEAW Austrian Academy of Sciences (DOC team)
Project Duration: 01.10.2016–31.10.2019
Project Team: Sandra Ladwig (Institute for Visual and Media Arts, University of Applied Arts); Sarah Lauß (Institute for Art Studies, Art Education and Art Mediation, University of Applied Arts); Michaela Scharf (LBIDH)
Project Partners: Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History (LBIDH) (until February 2019: Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Society, LBIGG), Vienna; Institute for Visual and Media Arts, University of Applied Arts, Vienna; Institute for Art Studies, Art Education and Art Mediation, University of Applied Arts, Vienna; Department of Cultural Sciences, University of Gothenburg; Kinothek Asta Nielsen, Frankfurt am Main; Northeast Historic Film, Bucksport, Maine; Austrian Film Museum, Vienna; Theatre, Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow
In the interdisciplinary Doc-Team project “Doing Amateur Film,” the aesthetic forms and social practices in Austrian amateur film, from its inception in the 1920s to its marginalization by the emerging video format in the 1980s, are examined. Ambitious amateur films from the collection of the Austrian Film Museum and other international archives (such as the Kinothek Asta Nielsen) are particularly focused on to explore the cultural and historical potential of amateur films and generate new perspectives on the phenomenon.
The project adopts a praxeological approach and inquires into the manifold social practices that permeate amateur filmmaking, as well as the associated aesthetic methods and their historical development.
As part of the project, three dissertations are being produced, one of which is at the LBIDH. Sandra Ladwig’s dissertation, titled “Leisure as a Phenomenon of Modernity in Austrian Amateur Film from the 1920s to the 1980s,” attempts to grasp amateur film practice as a visual leisure culture and to ask what aesthetic varieties amateurs develop in this specific context. In her dissertation in art history titled “Motivwahl als kulturelle Praxis im österreichischen Amateurfilm der 1920er- bis 1980er-Jahre” (Choice of Motifs as Cultural Practice in Austrian Amateur Film from the 1920s to the 1980s), Sarah Lauß views amateur filmmaking as a practice of cultural signification with specific thematic and formal characteristics, focusing on the examination of motifs and their recurring use in the form of image types. Michaela Scharf (LBIDH) has narrowed down the original topic of her cultural-historical dissertation “Practices of Subjectivation in Austrian Amateur Film from the 1920s to the 1980s” to the years 1938-1945. The new working title of her dissertation project is “Social and Aesthetic Practices of Self-Reassurance in Austrian Amateur Films from the National Socialist Era.”
