Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes

Zoë Viney Burgess

This anthology offers the first systematic exploration of 9.5mm amateur film culture, practice and consumption, from its launch in 1922 to the present day. It breathes new life into our understanding of participatory media and its origins in the early twentieth century, revealing how a web of experiences gave rise to a vibrant ecosystem of collaborative storytelling and grassroots cultural movements that continue to shape our understanding of media participation. The collection brings together the work of emerging specialists, early-career researchers, and respected scholars from anthropology, film, media studies and international film archival networks. The 16 chapters in this volume offer fresh insights into early participatory media culture and confirm the ongoing influence and impact of 9.5mm film on global media studies. The interdisciplinary approach and wide‐reaching perspectives make it a valuable resource for cinema and media curricula, film archival projects, cultural and media anthropology, visual sociology, as well as gender, memory and migration studies.

9.5mm Film and Participatory Media Before the Digital Age

Marcus Banks

Is one of the ﬁrst comprehensive contributions to the rapidly developing cross disciplinary scholarship that connects visual studies with South Asian historiography. The key purpose of the book is to introduce scholars and students of South Asian and Indian history to the ﬁrst in-depth evaluation of visual research methods as a valid research framework for new historical studies. The volume identiﬁes and evaluates current developments in visual sociology and digital anthropology relevant to the study of contemporary South Asian constructions of personal and national identities. Owing to its wide-ranging theoretical methodology, from concepts of visual perception to media semiotics, Visual Histories of South Asia covers a rich thematic agenda with contributions ranging from ethnographic research to gender studies, ﬁne arts analyses, theoretical and methodological questions, economic structures, international politics and contemporary cultural patterns. Owing to its wide-ranging theoretical methodology, from concepts of visual perception to media semiotics, Visual Histories of South Asia covers a rich thematic agenda with contributions ranging from ethnographic research to gender studies, ﬁne arts analyses, theoretical and methodological questions, economic structures, international politics and contemporary cultural patterns. In charting the theoretical and historical advances in visual and historical studies dedicated to South Asia, and by addressing issues of private and national memory within regional, national, and contemporary South Asian iconography, from the mid-seventeenth century to the early twenty-ﬁrst century, and the thirteen contributions selected for this volume are of immediate relevance to visual theorists and historians, sociologists and cultural anthropologists, as well as to students and scholars of South Asian history and culture.

Visual Histories of South Asia

Susan Aasman

Amateur Media and Participatory Cultures aims to delineate the boundary line between today’s amateur media practice and the canons of professional media and film practice. Identifying various feasible interpretative frameworks, from historical to anthropological perspectives, the volume proposes a critical language able to cope with amateur and new media’s rapid technological and interpretative developments. Conscious of the fact that amateur media continue to be seen as the benchmark of visual records of authentic rather than mass-media-derived events, Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes and Susan Aasman pay particular attention to the ways in which diverse sets of concepts of amateur media have now merged across global visual narratives and everyday communication protocols. Building on key research questions and content analysis in media and communication studies, they have assessed differences between professional and amateur media productions based on the ways in which the ‘originators’ of an image have been influenced by, or have challenged, their context of production. This proposes that technical skills, degrees of staging and/or censoring visual information, and patterns in media socialisation define central differences between professional and amateur media production, distribution and consumption. The book’s methodical and interdisciplinary approach provides valuable insights into the ways in which visual priming, cultural experiences and memory-building are currently shaped, stored and redistributed across new media technologies and visual channels.

Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes

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