Moving History - a guide to UK film and television archives in the public sector

Case Study - Ryan Shand

Ryan Shand is a Research Associate on the project ‘Mapping the City in Film: A Geohistorical Analysis’ at the University of Liverpool, U.K. He completed his Ph.D. in the Theatre, Film and Television Studies department of the University of Glasgow, U.K. His thesis was entitled ‘Amateur Cinema: History, Theory, and Genre (1930-80)’, which drew largely on primary material from the Scottish Screen Archive and related museum sources. The project established a critical dialogue between university-based Film Studies and the archive sector, via a series of case studies of influential groups, individuals, and movements. Prefaced by a chapter entitled ‘Theorising Amateur Film: Limitations and Possibilities’ detailing the domination of amateur cinema studies by discussion of the ‘home mode’, he suggested that work to date has obscured an understanding of films made by cine-clubs within the highly organised film culture of the British amateur cine movement.

The main body of the thesis consisted of four chapters exploring the most popular generic practices of ‘institutionalised’ amateur filmmakers. Ryan argued that these production strands were formed by discourses circulating within amateur film journals, ‘how to do it’ manuals and amateur film festivals. Amateur cinema was viewed throughout as a parallel cine movement existing alongside professional practices, enjoying an ambivalent relationship to inherited professional standards. The final chapter, ‘Amateur Film Re-Located: Localism in Fact and Fiction’, proposed a fresh theorisation of ‘local’ amateur production within a national film culture, marked by distinctly cosmopolitan connections.

This research was made possible by an award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Ryan’s current research focus on cine-club culture in Liverpool, which will be traced through archival film from the North West Film Archive and private collections, print materials from various sources, and interviews with amateur cine participants.

Selected References:

‘Theorizing Amateur Cinema: Limitations and Possibilities’, The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 8, 2 (Fall 2008) University of Minnesota Press, ISSN 1532 3978 (forthcoming)
‘Amateur Cinema Re-Located: Localism in Fact and Fiction’, Ian Craven (ed.) Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cine, Cambridge Scholars Press (2009) (forthcoming)
‘A Review of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories’, Screen 49:4, Winter 2008, Oxford University Press (forthcoming)
‘A Review of Subjects and Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader’, The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 7, 1 (2007) p. 107- 110, University of Minnesota Press, ISSN 1532 3978. Also available at: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/the_moving_image/v007/7.1shand.html

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