A successful screening and study day on amateur film 'Seeing with Different Eyes' took place on 25 April 2004
15 Aug 2013
A successful screening and study day on amateur film Seeing with Different Eyes took place on April 25th 2004 with support from the Faculty Research Support Fund. This European exchange was organised by Ine van Dooren, Moving Image Archivist of the South East Film & Video Archive in collaboration with the Filmarchive Smalfilmmuseum, Hilversum, The Netherlands. It took as its theme the developing field of scholarly attention to amateur film and the growing recognition of it as a research resource.
Amateur film forms a significant part of Europe’s cultural heritage and has a vital role to play in social connectivity. Dating primarily from the 1920s onwards when new technology enabled individuals, families, communities, organisations and artists to make films for the first time, these films - both fiction and non-fiction - engage with all aspects of everyday life, work and creativity. Seeing with Different Eyes explored how film archives, professional film-makers and researchers re-imagine amateur film.
The event took place at Cinematheque, Lighthouse Media Centre, Brighton, and the programme of short film screenings and artists’ presentations had a strong international component. Featuring material made by Finnish, French, Swedish, Dutch and Luxembourgian amateur and professional film-makers as well as those closer to home in Sevenoaks, Bognor Regis, Brighton and Folkestone, the films also took place in Poland, and featured unique colour footage of Balinese maestro dancer, I Ketut Marya.
The discovery of this last extremely significant collection among SEFVA’s holdings by SEFVA’s Preservation and Production Officer Nick Clark has resulted in a creative partnership with The Bali Film Promotion Board. This collaboration was successful in obtaining a grant from the Pacific Asian Tourist Association to enable digitisation and the gathering of additional interviews and contextual research. A special screening programme in Bali is scheduled later this year. In fact much of what was shown was either recently discovered, recently restored, or in one case, newly provided with a musical score.
This first of what it is hoped will become an annual event also featured as work-in-progress, a collaboration between SEFVA’s Ine van Dooren and Brighton-based media artist Tim Didymus, which considers the archival and historical re-appropriation of amateur and family film collections, within the public domain of study and re-use. Sam Lanfear-Jones (School of Historical and Critical Studies, University of Brighton) and Doctor Martina Roepke from the University of Amsterdam both presented interesting and ground-breaking doctoral research.
