Amateur Cinema: The Rise of North American Moviemaking, 1923-1960

From the very beginning of cinema, there have been amateur filmmakers at work. It wasn’t until Kodak introduced 16mm film in 1923, however, that amateur moviemaking became a widespread reality, and by the 1950s, over a million Americans had amateur movie cameras. In Amateur Cinema, Charles Tepperman explores the meaning of the “amateur” in film history and modern visual culture.

In the middle decades of the twentieth century—the period that saw Hollywood’s rise to dominance in the global fi...