The Cine Technician (1939)

14 THE (IX E-T E( II X I C I A X April-May, 11,37 Experiences of an Amateur Film Maker By W. N. McLAREN At a meeting oj The Royal Photographic Society on December 8th, 1936, Mr. W. .V. McLaren, an A.C.T. member, gave the following account {reprinted from "The Photographic Journal," by kind permission of the Editor) of his experiences as an amateur, and showed two films made when he was a student of the Glasgow School of Art. The meeting was held in connection with the Exhibition of Kinematography , and was arranged by the Association oj Cine-Technicians. I WAS an amateur for about four years before becoming a professional, and in my spare time I still carry on amateur work on sub-standard film, because, although an amateur is limited in technical equipment, he has a freedom in certain respects which is not possessed by a professional. He has a freedom of choice of subject matter and treatment of subject matter, and there is no censorship of 16 mm. film. The only dictatorship that exists in the case of the amateur is the dictatorship of a limitation of technical means ; but that in itself is not a bad thing. Often limited resources call forth greater ingenuity in the Dancing Patterns as background for Rumba Dance , amateur ; circumstances encourage him to think of fresh ways of doing things which, if he had more resources, he would not consider. I am going to show you two of the films that I had a part in making and to describe very briefly my experiences as an amateur with an amateur group.' When I was a student at the Glasgow School of Art there was an amateur group composed of about four people, who were very enthusiastic and willing to devote all their spare time to making films, and there were also about a dozen people who were interested and anxious to help. We had one CineKodak, a B.I',. Junior model, with a 50-ft. capacity and a 1.9 Kodak anastigmat lens. We had for lighting equipment two 1000 watt lamps in stands and reflectors. We had to work within MO. The first question we had to decide was the subject matter of our film. There were a hundred and one suggestions made, because, like all amateurs who are about to make a first film, we did not realise the difficulties. After much discussion, I managed to convince the rest of the group that we should treat the material at our own doorstep, for the very good reason that we knew this subject matter well, it would be easy and cheap to film. South American Tango and we should be working amongst people whom we knew and could rely on for co-operation. There were about four hundred students in the Art School, and the institution catered for all branches of art — painting, sculpture, design, architecture, lithography, pottery, embroidery, metal work, modelling, and so forth. That was a very wide and varied subject matter from which to choose, and we thought of many different ways of treating it. We could deal with the subject matter in an impressionist way ; we could treat it in an instructional way, by taking one particular subject in the school and showing the processes involved in that subject ; we could treat it in a sociological way, by showing the school in its relation to society, the function that it has as an institution, and in an historical way, by showing how the art students and artists had in previous centuries served the dominant ruling class, such as the Church, at one time, then the aristocracy, then the rising merchant class, and to-day, the industrialists and manufacturers, and showing how the Art School curriculum is adjusted to suit its present function and also how there are in the curriculum to-day, remnants of outworn functions of former centuries. For our first film we chose the simplest method, an impressionistic treatment of subject. Thus our purpose was not to show the exact nature of a process, as in an educational film, or the accurate relationship of a set of factors to a situation, as in a sociological film ; our purpose From the Waltz