GeoJournal 49: 323–333, 2004.© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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At home and abroad with cine enthusiasts: Regional amateur filmmaking andvisualizing the Mediterranean, ca. 1928–1962.

Heather Norris NicholsonMeltham, Holmfirth HD9 5JE West Yorkshire, U.K.

Key words: non-professional filmmaking, the Mediterranean, tourism history, visual practice

Abstract

After the appearance of a portable Kodak cine camera in 1923, home moving making grew steadily in popularity in the yearsleading up to and following World War II. Cine enthusiasts, particularly in the pre-war period, tended to be male, whiteand middle class, although exceptions exist, and they tended to travel with their cameras much as earlier generations haddocumented their experiences in written and artistic form. Despite their amateur status, they were often very professional intheir approach to cinematography and they produced material for a range of domestic and public audiences on varied topicsand in different genres. Specialist publications and the rapid growth of local amateur film societies fostered the rise of anactive non-professional film movement; the result is a highly distinctive although neglected component of film history. Withreference to materials held at the North West Film Archives in Manchester, England, this discussion considers the rise ofnon-professional filmmaking at the regional level during the decades before and after the second world war. Making andshowing home movies is placed within various socio-cultural contexts. The imagery discloses much about visual practice,including filmmakers’ perceptions and their relationships with different kinds of subject matter. The making of holidayfootage, in Mediterranean settings, and its subsequent screening in domestic or public places, connects with broader issuesof visualization, social practice and leisure-related consumption.

Introduction

Visual stories, travel and home movies provide the focus forthis foray into a rather neglected area of geographical fascin-ation with film. Mobility, tourism history and the picturingof places for home consumption link to various areas ofcontemporary geographical interest. The somewhat arcaneenthusiasm of early amateur cinematography, then definedby its own practitioners as the making and showing of mater-ial shot on cine film, emerges from this archival excavationnot merely as a short and unsophisticated episode in filmhistory. Indeed, Stone and Streible (2003, p. 125) stress thevery opposite:

‘The more we study the images, the more their uncom-mon and idiosyncratic nature becomes apparent. Themore amateur, small-gauge films we see, the more werealize how much film history remains unwritten’

As this discussion reveals, the practice of amateur filmoccupies an intriguing place within the changing ways tovisualize the world made possible during the past 150-yearhistory of photographic innovations.

Long neglected as a study of serious study, home moviesare often dismissed as being parochial and of little relevanceas primary sources. Stone and Streible (2003, p. 123) ob-serve how conceptual restraints inhibit research in this area:‘As with works of folk art, amateur films do not fit neatlyinto classification systems.’ Despite the somewhat pejorat-

ive terminology associated with sub-standard, small gauge,amateur, or home movie making, non-professional materialis now gaining recognition within different disciplines (see,for instance, Becker, 2001; Compton, 2003). This discussionhelps to consolidate its status within a mainstream researchagenda for geography and film and also extends earlier re-search. The article starts by locating the overall topic withinestablished discursive fields. Against this conceptual con-text is set my wider interest on amateur cine film as well asthe specific research project out of which the present writ-ing is derived. After presenting new research on amateurcinematography, I return, in the conclusion, to the openingthemes of visual stories and memory making. In the lightof my findings, I discuss how such material contributes toan understanding of leisure and visual-related practices ofconsumption as well as the social processes by which peoplecame to give themselves, and others, identities in the middleyears of the last century.

If, as Urry suggests (2002, p. 149), from ca. 1840,tourism and photography welded together as

‘an irreversible and momentous double helix’,

the advent of moving image dramatically extended linksbetween visualization, travel and the meaning of place. Thecentrality of photography, as charted in works by Ryan(1997) and Schwartz and Ryan (2003), to imperial endeavor,exploration and the construction of geographical knowledgeensured that motion picture making would gain rapid ac-

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ceptance in scientific, educational and popular circles fromthe late nineteenth century. Camera technology contributedto the development of a more mobilized gaze and visualorganizing or, to draw upon Schivelbusch’s (1986) term,

‘choreographing of landscape encounters’.

Innovations in visual apparatus paralleled the increased mo-bility of ‘living in this recently revved-up universe’ (Conrad,1999, p. 94) and differentiated spatial experiences made pos-sible by trains, planes, steamers and motorized transport(see, in particular, Foster, 2003; Osborne, 2003) on linksbetween railways and photography. Observations framedby the camera lens, whether during official missions to re-cord, explore and possess peoples and places elsewhere,or as part of more leisured encounters away from home,swiftly normalized into routine aspects of showing and see-ing the world. Modernity’s insatiable appetite for visualconsumption and mobility was already so well establishedthat Kodak’s development of light-weight cine cameras inthe early 1920s quickly became a travel accessory for moreaffluent members of British society.

Cine photography and tourism, two key aspects of twen-tieth century leisure activity, as well as issues of memory andidentity, interrelate in the following discussion about visualtravel stories and consuming places. Venturing into such ter-rain draws upon established theoretical discursive practice;extensive work by MacCannell (1973, 1992, 1999) and Urry(in particular, 1995 and 2002) underpin this exploration oftourism and visualization. What follows is an examinationof how early cine photography by camera-touting enthusi-asts holidaying abroad may be understood, with referenceto Urry (2002, p. 3), as one distinctive type of touristic col-lecting of signs in the decades immediately prior to masstourism. Co-existent stages in camera technology and leisureactivity provide a window upon tourism history and touristbehavior. Insights on leisure and tourism history by Walton(2000) and Urry (1995, 2002), as well as the latter author’sexploration of different forms of tourist gaze and its imper-ial variant, as discussed by Gregory (2003), have helped tosharpen the focus.

The socio-historical and cultural contexts within whichcine film holiday records were produced and subsequentlyconsumed with family, friends and other audiences, meanthat moving images, like personal photographs, are investedwith meanings that disclose issues of perception, identityand memory (Chambers, 2003). Similarly, the interpreta-tion of cine footage often reveals as much about the personin charge of the camera as the subjects shown in the im-age (see also Norris Nicholson, 2002b, 2003b). Within anever-expanding set of debates on identity and memory, par-ticularly useful studies have linked memory to specific formsof visual practice (Chalfren, 1987; Citrone, 1999; Schneider,2003). Guidance has also come from seminal studies of visu-alization (Bourdieu, 1990; Sontag, 1979) and on narrativeand autobiography (King, 2000). Writings on photographyand memory have enriched my own reading of cine foot-age (Hirsch, 1997). Significant differences between cine andstill photography have proved helpful too. Comments byEdwards (1999) emphasize the effect of movement on an

image’s meaning. The flickering presentational form of thecine image, dependent upon projection technology, is quint-essentially different from the materiality of photographs. Nocan of film can ever trigger quite the response as an object tohandle, frame, caress or weep over.

The touristic practice of collecting photographic memor-ies for future consumption encodes the spatiality of social re-lations and the politics of representation. Schneider’s (2003,p. 169) study of early Swiss amateur footage finds, in sim-ilarity to my own conclusions, that the material provides ‘aprivileged site for the negotiation of identity and for devel-oping a sense of family.’ The making and showing of holidaycine films is a twentieth century variant in the wider ‘pictur-ing impulse’ (Schwartz and Ryan, 2003, p. 8) and issues ofgender, class and race influence the processes, spaces, actorsand audiences involved. British, white, male, middle classamateur cine enthusiasts on vacation in the Mediterraneanwere observant outsiders who captured scenes of people andplaces for later viewing. Their actions not only evoke the col-onizing gaze of earlier all-seeing tourists of empire (Ryan,1997) but also the flâneur, the pleasure-seeking strangeron holiday, who wanders unrestricted through physical andsocial space in search of aesthetic stimuli (Mulvey, 1989).

Discussion of flânerie (Clarke, 1996; Friedberg, 1993)may be applied to the mobilized gaze of male and fe-male tourists and are apparent in holiday footage from the1920s onwards. Sontag (1979, p. 55) suggests that photo-graphy, per se, ‘comes into existence as an extension of theeye of the middle class flâneur’ and the cine camera bothreproduces and symbolizes the movement of the strollingsightseer. As Aitken (1997, p. 117) points out in relation toFriedberg’s analysis of the relationship between visual con-sumption and cinematic spectatorship (Friedberg, 1993), theadvent of photography and the cinema paradoxically bothmobilized the gaze and created passive consumers of views.Friedberg’s retracing of commodified visual experience fromcinematic screen to nineteenth century shop display also re-directs our own attention to the cinephile’s fascination formarket views in holiday films. For street traders too, asClarke (1996, p. 30) reminds us, ‘money (was) to be made inthe gaze of the flâneur’, as a result of being on camera duringthe filmed purchase of holiday souvenirs, whether directly orindirectly.

Nascent consumerism manifests itself elsewhere as well:Britain’s amateur film movement, as in North America (Zim-merman, 1995) owed much to evolving camera technologies.Its specialist literature was often influenced by, if not de-pendent upon, advertisements for new products. Amateuractivity illustrates more than the rise of middle class leisure-related spending from the 1920s onwards. The regionalproliferation of clubs, rising membership and networkingexemplify the collective nature of much consumption. Theyexhibit the characteristics of new institutions or ‘sociations’in a time of rapid social transformation (Urry, 2002, pp. 220–221). The publications, events and facilities, operated byamateur cine clubs, became important sites within whichnew kinds of social identity formation could occur in theinter- and post war years.

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The making and showing of films, including footageof family holidays abroad, combined family record makingwith elements of public narratives about identity. Being incharge of the camera not only determined who, how andwhat were on and off camera but also the selective nature andcontent of retrospective memories. The interplay of spatialidentities and authority permeate these holiday narratives;the framing of family members expresses status and control.If an overseas vacation demonstrates social standing, posedgroupings also illustrate what Chambers calls, a domestica-tion of foreign public places into familial space (Chambers,2003, p. 97).

Valorizing amateur footage: A journey into seeing

Contact with one of the UK’s earliest regional film archivesfirst alerted me to the potential of archival footage in bothteaching and primary research. Initial writing sought to high-light the diversity and inter-disciplinary potential of amateurproductions and included articles on material produced bydifferent filmmakers who made films for family, friendsand other audiences (1997a, b). Subsequent thematic ex-plorations considered childhood (2001b), landscape change(2002a), industrial and social issue films (2004, forthcom-ing) and place identities (2001a, c). This article extends ideasabout travel memories, home movies and representationalpolitics (2002b, 2003b) and links Mediterranean teachingand family connections with regionally accessible footage(2003a).

Attention now turns to a collection of amateur footagemade by Lancashire filmmakers on visits into Mediterraneancontexts before and after World War II. The analysis con-siders the making and the subsequent showing of somefifty films, now conserved at the North West Film Archive(NWFA), Manchester Metropolitan University. As the open-ing remarks indicate, cine-related activities link distinctiveforms of visual practice to the histories of tourism, leis-ure and identity formation. The production and viewing ofnon-professionally made films help us to understand mid-century social activities, perceptions and values that encodeparticular ways of seeing and being in the world. Over fivedecades, home movies became a highly popular form of mi-metic inscriptional device, and a variant upon earlier visualencounters with place or different imaginative geographiesof foreignness (Said, 1978). Watching home produced cinefootage was also an alternative to mainstream cinema andan antecedent to knowing the world via television. Amateuractivities thus contribute to our understanding how peopleformed visual impressions as well as exemplifying importantsocial changes in leisure-related consumerism.

Cine enthusiasts from Manchester and south Lancashireundertook Mediterranean journeys for cultural, educational,civic, political and recreational reasons between the later1920s and early 1960s. Holiday footage is the largest cat-egory and also provides some of the most varied coverageof people and activities in different localities. The researchpresented here forms part of a comparative project that

examines outsiders’ visual encounters with specific Mediter-ranean locations using non-professional material producedin different countries. Preliminary work to complementthe regional focus has already begun on the analysis ofMediterranean-related material held at the British Film In-stitute, London. This discussion concentrates upon materialfrom the NWFA. Comments on methodology are confinedto the regional context whilst acknowledging that signific-ant differences occur in cataloguing, acquisition and mostobviously, archive size and overall geographical range. Gen-erally, analysis of regional material involves steps to identify,watch and shortlist, review all associated material and,where possible, follow up any relevant links with inter-viewees, cine clubs and other archives. Hobby literature andother primary sources are also consulted. Data interrogationand questions as to where, when, how and why films weremade and shown, as well consideration of who made andviewed them, have established a strong empirical basis fortheoretically informed interpretation and discussion. Thisarticle is the first attempt to map out aspects of both makingand showing footage from holiday movies that date to theinter- and post-war period. Associated work includes a studyof three filmmakers’ visual encounters with specific Medi-terranean destinations filmed in the period 1927–1939, anunpublished exploration of holiday footage as travel narrat-ive, and a forthcoming analysis of Mediterranean landscaperepresentation (Norris Nicholson, 2003b, 2004).

Amateur enthusiasm and regional activity

Although home screening of commercially produced 35 mmfilms became possible as early as 1897 (Kattelle, 2003,p. 238), home movie making and projecting began in Bri-tain in ca. 1923 when Kodak launched its new portable16 mm cine camera and associated hardware. Initially, am-ateur cinematography, which is a self-defining term usedby cinephiles that places their hobby in relation to pro-fessional activity, gained popularity among those with themeans to indulge their costly and time-consuming leisureactivity. The new enthusiasts were predominantly white,male and middle class and, like their professional coun-terparts, they filmed both familiar and more novel topics.Specialist publications supplied practical tips on equipment,filming techniques, processing and projecting (Hollis, 1927;Strasser, 1936; Gale and Pessels, 1939). Writers suggestedtopics for filming, suitable locations and offered sample filmscripts (Ryskind et al., 1927; Lawrie, 1933).

Promotional material urged amateurs to use equipmentthat would imitate the effects of the commercial cinema. Thesales pitch was explicit wherever advertising helped to fin-ance publication. An advertisement for a mini-camera thatfeatured as part of a promotion for Focal Cine Books, wastypical in its tone:

‘Even the most amateur of amateurs can read, learn andbecome conversant with the tricks of the trade’

(Amateur Cine World – hereafter ACW – 1949, p. 410).Successive innovations in equipment, film stock and pro-

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cessing promised better quality and visual inventiveness.Persuasive advertising, publications, club activities and pub-lic screening of home movies, as well as the activities ofmore independent hobbyists, helped to sustain Britain’s am-ateur film movement through economic depression, war,changing leisure habits and the introduction of television.

Amateur movies were screened in and beyond the home.Reminiscences disclose that family reunions and birthdayparties prompted both the making and showing of films.Details of screenings listed in local newspapers and ACWindicate that films were shown in schools, hospitals, chil-dren’s homes, churches and town halls. Cine footage enabledaudiences to see themselves and other familiar as well asunknown people or places on screen at a time when muchof mainstream cinema presented versions of an increasinglyAmericanized world determined by commerce. It was un-likely, as some commentators claimed, that home moviemaking would help to revitalize a flagging British cinemaindustry (Cooke, 1999, p. 353) but, for some viewers, itoffered a more accessible window upon actuality than Hol-lywood. Possibly, seeing familiar local people in unfamiliarlocations was a means to connect, however, tenuously withthe wider world.

Britain’s cine societies date to the 1920s and one of theearliest was Cambridge Cinematic Society, founded in 1923(ACW, 1949, p. 849). Clubs brought together small numbersof like-minded enthusiasts with time, interests, equipmentand resources to share. Details in ACW reveals how a scatterof individuals gradually coalesced into a network of smallgroups that, unsurprisingly, were most abundant in Londonand other urban areas. The industrial midlands and the NorthWest have some of the longest surviving cine clubs, in-cluding Manchester Film Society (1927), Salford Cine Club(1934), Warrington Cine Society (1936) and Stoke on Trent(1935) (see Figure 1). Typically, activity eased off duringthe World War II. Some individuals continued to make films,depending upon the availability of film stock and their ownwartime commitments. Amateur activity underwent rapidexpansion and diversification from the later 1940s; someclubs evolved as offshoots from existing photographic so-cieties. Others remained as part of broadly based civic orlearned societies, such as the Preston Scientific Society andfurther afield, Hebden Bridge Literary and Scientific CivicSociety.

According to regular listings in ACW, there were atleast twenty cine clubs thriving in the Manchester/GreaterManchester region by ca. 1955. Separate clubs ran in Pre-ston, Oldham, Stockport, Bury, Bolton, Rochdale and Burn-ley. Groups developed in Eccles, Sale, Ray, Leigh, Maghalland Lydiate, despite their relative proximity to one another.Perhaps, the practicalities of attending evening meetings bypublic transport as well as the persistence of strong localidentities were also influential. Clubs set up in the con-trasting localities of Blackpool, Southport and Lytham StAnne’s and were also active in different residential areas ofLiverpool and the Wirral.1

After-school clubs also thrived. For instance, GeorgeWain, an art teacher at Hyde Grammar School and active

member of Stockport Amateur Cine Society and Hyde Pho-tographic Society, ran a club to encourage pupils’ interestin cinema and practical filmmaking (Wain, 1949). Otheramateurs also responded to the interest in film as a teach-ing and learning medium and Sale Cine Group producedmaterial on judo for Cheshire County Education Committee(ACW, 1956, p. 814). Filmmaking also became a timetabledactivity; pupils had three filmmaking sessions a week in oneLiverpool school during the mid 1950s (ACW, 1955, p. 182).Elsewhere, film contributed to the secondary curriculum.The recognition of its educational value built upon earlierclassroom use of visual instruction (in passim, McKernan,1993; see also Ryan, 1997, pp. 183–213). By the 1950s, de-bate on the educational merits of film occurred in and beyondthe pages of ACW.2

Gradually clubs began to welcome junior and morerarely, female members who became involved in their ownseparate productions, rather than being accessories to thecast, catering or production team for men-only filmmakingunits (ACW, 1951, p. 1026). Women’s activity was oftenin an administrative or social role, rather than as practicalfilmmakers. Iris Fayde, writing regularly in ACW in the early1950s, urged for women’s greater club involvement in publi-city, front of house and box office duties for film shows andas projectionists. Analysis of these comments and the settingup of specific all-women film units forms part of a wider sur-vey of home movies and gender, class and regional identitybetween 1930 and 1960 (Norris Nicholson, in progress).

The postwar growth in membership prompted clubs torefurbish or move into new premises. One Surrey-basedcommentator vividly captures the sense of activity nation-wide: ‘At most club shows during the past two years, therehas been such additional improvement in either presenta-tion or equipment until it seemed that saturation point musthave been reached’ (ACW, 1951, p. 280). Typically, clubsheld regular meetings fortnightly and their programs in-cluded lectures, gadget evenings, workshops and film shows.Members held sessions to critique their own material and,perhaps more popularly, screened home movies. OldhamLyceum Cine Society, for instance, announced its inten-tion in late 1949 that ‘in future only amateur films will beshown since these proved far more popular than the pro-fessional productions screened last season’ (ACW, 1949,p. 585). Periodically, clubs showed earlier material if olderprojectors survived, as at Ray Amateur Cine Group, wheremembers reported on a screening of 1930s footage that were‘mostly religious and instructional’ and ‘despite their age,found to be in good condition’ (ACW, 1951, p. 181). Cineclubs screened films made by members from other clubstoo, including international visitors and held events to raisegeneral public interest. The search for new audiences wasactive, particularly through the 1950s and in 1951, LythamSt Anne’s Film Society screened films at summer camps for‘six hundred children from the poorer districts of Manchesterand Preston’ (ACW, 1951, p. 832). Some practitioners onlyoperated outside the club scene, and the Institute of AmateurCinematographers promoted the setting up of contact groups

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or ‘cine circles’ that might bring these ‘lone workers’ looselyinto the amateur film movement (ACW, 1951, p. 379).

These insights into cinephile activity point to the vi-brancy of collectively organized recreation and new non-traditional ‘sociations’ (Urry, 2002). Age and gender di-visions persisted within these hobby-orientated social net-works despite the familial subject matter that featured inmany productions. Club members sometimes teamed upwith local drama groups, to make cine versions of literarytexts or other interest groups. Stockport Amateur Cine So-ciety and the North Cheshire Cruising Club collaborated inmaking a film that contributed to the ‘Save the Canals’ Cam-paign in the 1950s (ACW, 1955, p. 182). Routinely, clubstackled topical issues including traffic problems as at War-rington, civic anniversaries or aspects of local history and,during 1953–54, the Coronation (ACW, 1954, p. 82).

Practical involvement in filmmaking was sometimes per-ceived as a step toward critical appreciation of feature films.The magazine Close Up reported on Manchester Film So-ciety soon after the club’s launch in1927: ‘our main objectis practical experiment. . . we feel that unless amateur filmproduction on a large scale comes to stay, the cinema willnever get a critically informed public’.3 The society was notalone in the belief that ‘an ounce of practice is worth a poundof theory’ and tensions between film appreciation and prac-tical filmmaking sometimes meant that groups disbandedand re-formed.

Clubs varied in their interests. Some concentrated on par-ticular types of camera and film stock according to soundor silent, black and white or color and different film gauge.Stanley Ellam, a cine enthusiast from South Yorkshire, re-calls his own technical shifts. He began filmmaking in 1936,but ‘on a salary of four pounds a week, 16 mm was outof the question. . . (and he) decided upon the alternativeformat, 9.5 mm.’ During the 1940s, he recalls that Koda-chrome (9ASA) ‘went off the market and ‘regulars’ werepermitted four black and white films per year.’ Later, as amember of a cine circle attached to Leeds Camera Club, hewas labeled by 16 mm users as one of the ‘bootlace boys’,like other recent converts to the narrower gauge Standard 8equipment (Ellam, 2001, p. 7). Inevitably, evolving cameratechnologies and broader socio-spatial change affected thehegemonic middle class structures of early club activity.

Amateur interests stimulated hobby-related reading.Early publications combined articles on home movies withwider coverage of film-related topics. Close Up, launched in1927, sets articles on international cinema alongside tech-nical tips, club news, and reports on film censorship bylocal Watch Committees. Early specialist literature some-times adopted quite an intellectual and proselytizing tone.Many practitioners, however, display conventional attitudesin their portrayal of authority and social and spatial relationsand the treatment of family, holiday and civic subject matter.

Film shows also occurred outside the club circuit; atillustrated public talks, for instance, cine footage replacedlantern slides or epidiascopes. The combination of informat-ive and amusing footage recorded for domestic and widerdisplay hints at a visual equivalent to the recreational ra-

tionale so favored by social, public health and educationalreformers of an earlier generation. Given the contemporaryconcerns over the reductive effects of popular cinema, espe-cially films from Hollywood, upon the ‘most impressionablesections of society’, such activities may have been, in part, ameans to justify middle class leisure pursuits (Hartog, 1983;Cooke, 1999).

Portable screens and projectors made possible a newform of home entertainment. Family and friends watchedthemselves on the same screen as the celebrities and an-imated cartoons now available to hire on film for homeprojection.4 Amateur cinematography fits into the home-centredness of many people’s lives and the surge of interestin domestic hobbies during the inter-war period. Its sub-sequent widening social appeal links to the rise in model-making, amateur radio and home improvements that becamepossible as increases in leisure spending combined withlarger living space (Constantine, 1983, p. 27).

Although the heyday of home-movie making in Britainwas in the decade or so following World War II, its form-ative years were during the late 1920s and 1930s. In thisperiod, not withstanding Britain’s class tensions, economicsituation and increasingly tenuous position as an imperialpower, amateur filmmakers recorded themselves at homeand abroad with great impunity. Many British cinephilesadopted documentary-style approaches, although examplesof non-professionally produced animation and fiction alsoexist. When now considering this footage, we see that itwas as much a constructed version of reality as was theapparent realism favored by professional producers. Am-ateur films shot abroad are, as Schneider (2003, p. 167)has discussed, ‘entrenched in colonial or late-colonial ideo-logy.’ They told stories, negotiated and presented identitiesfor home consumption in different ways. Both making andscreening involved the twin aspects of being a social activ-ity and a media event. The shooting and the showing eachinvolved performing elements of cinema. Operating the pro-jector at home, and being narrator to silent movies, echoedthe authority of holding the camera on location. Notwith-standing the generalizations possible, the meanings of thesevisual stories, travel memories and negotiated identities varyaccording to the people and places involved. Let us now turnto the amateur filmmaker as tourist.

Framing tourism

From the earliest days of cine photography, people traveledwith their cameras. Overseas footage depicts holidays andvisits associated with work, education, charity or otheractivities. Travel provided varied opportunities for visual in-cursions into other people’s lives and surroundings and muchof its visual imperative comes from its ‘oscillation betweenfamiliarity and strangeness’ (Schneider, 2003, p. 171). Al-though known people are often filmed in unknown places,for some filmmakers, family scenes on holiday attract lessattention than the opportunities to record unfamiliar sites andsituations. A filmmaker’s gaze often extends from a posedfamily group in the foreground to more unusual scenes.

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Holiday poses convey different meanings: distinctive loca-tions are seemingly domesticated by their appropriation asfamilial display space; elsewhere, family individuals appearto be visual devices for discrete filming of adjacent humanactivity.

Mediterranean holiday footage reveals that cinephilestold different stories about themselves and the places theyvisited, thus helping to differentiate between different typeof male tourist gaze and the experience of being away fromhome. Like their contemporaries, amateurs represented inthe NWFA collection tended to mix family and place-relatedimagery. Elements of instructional travelogue in which fam-ily members only have minor walk on parts combine withmore personally orientated holiday home movie intendedprimarily for family consumption. Generally, filmmakers’intentions determined the sights and significant holiday mo-ments to record. Sometimes, the filmmaker’s gaze upon theunfamiliar seems ethnographic in its documentation and theresultant quality of footage depends upon technical com-petence and sense of audience. Occasionally, as discussedelsewhere (Norris Nicholson, 2001), the recollections of afather’s ever-present cine camera could convert a vacationinto being on location.

Mediterranean holiday films illustrate the changingnature of more sunshine-orientated tourism in the middledecades of the last century. In the 1920s and 1930s, cine en-thusiasts tended either to tour by car or travel by cruise ship.Images of overland touring or holidays afloat for two to fourweeks, prior to the Holidays Act of 1938, confirm that earlyamateur film making, like foreign holidays, was a privilegedactivity. Lancashire’s early traveling cine hobbyists includedarchitects, doctors, chemists and other professionals as wellmembers of the region’s new middle classes whose wealthderived from industry and commerce. By contrast, from thelate 1940s, regional airport facilities helped to widen parti-cipation in package travel. Public sector employees rankedamong those camera owners with new opportunities to haveforeign holidays. Enterprising teachers made films of schooljourneys by coach and by air to France, Spain and Italy dur-ing the 1950s and a growing number of white-collar workersrecorded their package holidays on film.

Holiday footage reveals the gradual repositioning ofpleasure peripheries around the Mediterranean. Thanksto the availability of itineraries, guide books and well-established infrastructure, new versions of alpine tourismevolved as more leisurely and visual modes of mountain ap-preciation became available to the middle classes (Towner,1996; see also Pemble, 1987). Two amateur films by Dr JohnBarker Scarr, Touring Europe by Car and Europe as We SawIt, June 1938 Parts One and Two attest to the emergenceof self-drive continental tours to northern Italy and beyondduring the 1930s.5 Even though most cine equipment lackedthe focal depth for effective panoramas, filming the familycar at the top of a labeled mountain pass was popular. Per-haps, driving so high, and far from home, and recording theachievement in all-encompassing gaze, approximate earlierforms of visual mastery and, to borrow Pratt ’s phrase, ‘themonarch of all I see’ tradition (Pratt, 1992, p. 216)?

During the late twenties and early thirties, films ofsouthern European destinations link occasionally with inde-pendent journeys by train but primarily with Mediterraneancruise holidays (Figure 2). Such holiday footage includesthe Barker Scarr family’s successive spring cruises films onSS. Arandora Star in 1933 and 1934 and Sunshine, SeaBreezes and Strange Places, made by George Warburton,whose family owned a large regional bakery. Harold andSidney Preston, employees in the family owned tailor busi-ness in Stockport where their father was mayor 1927–29,documented many cruise holidays. Their films include RoyalMail Line Cruise. M.V. Asturias (22500 tons) to Spain,Madeira and the Canary Islands, 1928, Orient Sea LinerSS Orama at Sea, 1932 and Orient Sea Liner SS Orama atSea, 1933.6

The panoramic coastal views recorded by these film-makers show how shorelines have became transformed bymass tourism. Skylines and street scenes reveal how thepredominant character of seaside resorts still derived fromthe neo-classical styles of facades, promenades and squaresdeveloped in the late nineteenth century. The elegance,grandeur and fashionable connotations of French and ItalianRiviera locations repeatedly attract filmmakers’ interest bothwith and without family members framed in the view. It is,as if some vestige of celebrity status derives from being onscreen in the same location, even prompting Barker Scarr tosome imaginative filming of illuminated buildings and thereflected lights of cruise-ships. Notwithstanding the use ofblack and white film, his wish to capture some of this visualexcitement and to share it back home is palpable in the pan-ning shots and carefully framed evening views of casino andtheater-goers.

Through the 1950s, the earliest air package cine enthu-siasts traveling to the newly emerging resorts of southernSpain and northern Italy recorded small settlements in thethroes of road construction and small three or four storyhotel development. Hubert Weiner’s Holiday to Ibiza andOur Honeymoon and also Recorded Reminiscences by JackWells record color images of sunbathers lying on beachesbetween fishing boats and illustrate coastal economies intransition.7 Tourists stroll past family homes passing racksof freshly made spaghetti and drying clothes. Behind longstretches of sand, swathes of potential building land stillretain their agricultural use. With the exception of Capri,long favored by the wealthy and famous (including theLancashire-born wartime sweetheart, singer and celebrity,Gracie Fields8), much island tourism in the Mediterraneanremained fairly embryonic in nature until the 1950s and waslimited to the occasional roadside stall. Scenes of womanand barefoot children collecting water from public taps inIbiza and elsewhere in the Balearics, filmed by the Pre-ston brothers in Orient Sea Liner SS Orama at Sea, hintat the widespread poverty in localities that tourism wouldtransform within two decades.9

Signs of sun-oriented tourism are still fewer in holi-day imagery from the eastern and southern Mediterranean.Even during the mid 1950s, most visits by Britons to NorthAfrican or eastern Mediterranean destinations were as part

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of cruise itineraries, although footage occasionally docu-ments a flight plus car tour. One of the most curious holidaysinvolving flight in the early post-war period involved takingalong the family car. Few details survive, but it seems pos-sible that military air transporters might have continued tofly briefly under commercial license and were soon super-ceded by the emergence of package holiday travel. CharlesChislett, a cinephile from Rotherham, whose prolific out-put is discussed elsewhere (Norris Nicholson, 1997a, b)records this transitional phase on a holiday to Syria butonly in papers associated with his films rather than on cinecamera.10

Outside Europe, cruise passengers usually limited theirexplorations ashore to the immediate vicinity of the port. InNorth Africa, horse-drawn, guided carriage tours providedmoving platforms that offered reassuring separation fromcurious passers-by. Height, as from hotel balconies, terracesand on board ship, made possible long shots of street scenesand architectural details. Repeatedly, cine footage from the1930s documented unhurried walks through modernizingand older colonial urban districts. The amateur enthusiastin search of visual novelty was the equivalent of the ‘flaneur(who) finds the world ‘picturesque’ (Sontag, 1979, p. 55).The pastiche styles of Moorish gothic and spiky silhouettesof palms and other unfamiliar vegetation against uniformneoclassical facades attracted the curiosity of strangers, asdid the varied informal roles of public open spaces, suchas open markets and meeting places, which served as primelocations for tripod-using commercial portrait photograph-ers. These unofficial views of everyday life that differedfrom the sights valorized by guide books recur in the filmicrecord of many localities.

As Urry (2002, p. 10) and MacCannell (1999, p. 192)remind us, anything can potentially attract tourist attention.The filmmaker’s gaze is similarly observant on vacation.Familiar processes of urban change appear different whenrelocated into unfamiliar settings. Wooden scaffolding atconstruction sites, empty building lots (and their tethereddonkeys), washing clothes and buying goods feature inscenes of Algiers, Casablanca, Ceuta and elsewhere. Tra-ditional medina morphology, land use and visual charactermay be gleaned from Warburton’s Sunshine, Sea Breezesand Strange Places and other footage of historic districts inAlgiers, Sfax or Tangier.11 From the captions and imagery,the exoticism of local activity and costume prompt mostvisual curiosity. A long sequence in Barker Scarr’s Medi-terranean Cruise: SS Arandora Star, May 1933, is entitled‘Tangier, the fancy dress town of Morocco’. Its framing oflocality and residents seems to be rooted in the represent-ational politics of Oriental tourism. In Orient Line Cruise.Tetuan and Ceuta, 1932, the Preston brothers capture re-peated views of passers-by from above or as they recededown busy alleyways or into courtyards. Amateur cine prac-tice abroad not only helps to replicate earlier practices ofoverseas pictorial exploration but also reinforces prevail-ing popular notions about the mystery, confusion and aliencharacter of non-European urban space.

Despite long established travel routes associated withoutsiders’ interests in the southern or eastern Mediterranean,the region is not represented in the NWFA’s amateur foot-age. Hallé Tour 3, 1946–1953 and Turkey, June–July 1957,made during overseas tours of the Manchester-based HalléOrchestra, reveal that provisions for inland tourism wereslow to develop. While the enthusiastic filmmaker, Cheshirelandowner and Chairman of the Orchestra, Sir GeoffreyHaworth and his wife were chauffeur driven (perhaps in-dicating that car hire was not yet readily available), themusicians traveled by public bus. Even in 1957, separatetravel arrangements, together with the filmmaker’s personalinterests, resulted in the footage comprising many more andvaried scenes of farms and livestock than the recurrent im-ages of players, venues and instruments at the start and finishof bus journeys!12 Elsewhere, films suggest that coach travelalso spread slowly on the Mediterranean’s southern shores.Unlike the day excursions and airport transfers by coach tothe fast expanding Spanish resorts depicted in Holiday toIbiza and Our Honeymoon, a group tour of Morocco in 1954involved travelling with a guide and six cars as recordedin Jack Wells’ film, Sunny Morocco. A Conducted HolidayTour.13

Amateur footage suggests that tourism activity remainedrelatively unchanged during the final decades of colonialismin North Africa. As early as 1928, overnight stays in smallurban French colonial hotels facilitated the occasional excur-sion to an inland oasis, as recorded in a fascinating sequencein southern Tunisia (see note 11). More typically, trips intothe hinterland involved a short train excursion, as recordedin Orient Line Cruise. Tetuan and Ceuta, 1932, by the Pre-ston brothers. By the late fifties, visitors still found relativelyfew facilities, particularly away from the coast, despite thepockets of earlier activity associated with French artisticcircles in such localities as Marrakech, Casablanca, Algiers,Oran, Bizerte and Sidi bou Said. Indeed, beach resort de-velopment had yet to await the more settled socio-politicalconditions and new economic opportunities possible afternations gained independence.

The adjustment of specific Mediterranean localities totourism is also clearly evidenced through amateur cine foot-age. Even where land use remains unchanged, the touristpresence visibly prompts different opportunities and be-havioral changes. Guides, drivers, postcard and souvenirsellers stand in strategic positions as visitors approach froma gangplank or launch. Small, impromptu quayside souvenirmarkets develop around a cluster of animal drawn goodscarts. Enterprising traders sell from small boats alongsidemoored cruise ships where boys sometimes dive for coinstossed from the deck. Local people’s response to the camerapresence likewise seems to change although generalizationsrequire caution. Scenes of holidaymakers posing with streetsellers, fruit pickers, farmers or officials become less fre-quent in the imagery. Individualized encounters lessen astourist levels grow. Another shift seems apparent in NorthAfrican settings where an initial tendency for many men,as well as women, to shield their face from the cameragradually disappears from films. Various reasons might ac-

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count for this apparent change including growing familiaritywith different forms of photography, contact with Alliedtroops during World War II and greater assertiveness to-wards Europeans in the years leading up to the granting ofindependence.

Conclusion

Amateur holiday films were products of distinctive andchanging social milieux. The Lancashire material revealshow discrete strands of leisure activity intermeshed betweenthe late twenties and early 1960s. The long-establishedpatterns of recreational travel to the Mediterranean that his-torically had been limited to the elite, became available tomore people. Cinematography broadened its appeal and theprofusion of cine clubs across north west England, as else-where, reflects the post-war growth of popular interest inhome movies. This regional focus importantly helps us toset middle class leisure pursuits within a broader frameworkof better known aspects of domestic recreational activity as-sociated with working class lives (Kidd and Nicholls, 1996;Walton, 2000). Many holiday films also contribute valuablyto our understanding of early mass tourism as they documentwhat holidaymakers wanted to recall and share about theirexperiences abroad. Cine photography, like earlier forms ofvisual practice, became an integral part of how people exper-ienced and recorded being away from home. Its details oftencomplement existing documentary, printed and oral sourcesabout the historical evolution of tourism development andbehavior in specific localities.

The value of much of the studied footage lies in the indi-vidual and subjective views disclosed about traveling to andbeing at different destinations. Sequential images of touristbehavior stretch our understanding of poses into perform-ances for the camera. The cine camera did more than extend,prolong and mobilize the tourist’s gaze. It became both aprop and a mask behind which its user could hide, and alsoa shield against those individuals who, in Kaplan’s phrase,might look back (Kaplan, 1997, p. 5). Successive imagesoften reveal the processes of appropriation or negotiation as-sociated with one or more people looking at the camera. If asingle image approximates, according to Pelizzari, a ‘pho-tographic utterance’ (2003, p. 57), then edited sequencesof moving pictures help to convey contextual understand-ing even if details are often open to different interpretations.Their apparent capacity for realism endowed moving imageswith unprecedented power as visual evidence and, for theirusers and consumers, novel ways of mediating knowledgeabout self and others. Amateur cine enthusiasts helped toreinforce particular ways of seeing and being seen. In ret-rospect, cine technology’s compression of time and spacerepresents a vital transitional stage between the stillness ofpreceding visual practice and the fluidity of today’s imagingprocesses.

Modern tourism, like the rise of amateur film activity,also illustrates changes in consumer activity. Evolving pat-terns of tourism consumption, including ‘the developmentof pleasure cruises’ (Brunner, 1945, cited in Urry, 2002,

p. 25), are discernible in the pre- and early- post-war years.People moved to, through and beyond different localities inresponse to trends in technology, leisure time, recreationalinterests and marketing. Cine-using tourists were only aminority among the wider traveling public, although theyare the forerunners to today’s vast numbers of sun-seekingcamera wielding holidaymakers, but they constitute an evol-utionary phase in twentieth century consumer activity. Theirpropensity to collect, select and project moving pictures ofdifferent places encouraged vicarious visual consumption byarmchair travelers but perhaps, encouraged others to becometourists too.

Like many hobbies, the rise of cinematography triggerednew commercial activity. Promotions promised ways toimprove the making and viewing of home productions.Amateur ambitions were fed by advertising, specialist pub-lications as well as the technical assistance offered throughcine club activities. Undoubtedly, clubs offered support,companionship and opportunities to screen amateur mater-ials, but their equipment evenings also encouraged peopleto buy new gadgetry for home use. Moreover, the emer-gence of cine photography as a predominantly, although notexclusively, male interest, that could combine with fam-ily life strengthened its potential marketability to a middleclass audience. Unlike the practice of many other hobbies,movie making was ideally suited to family involvement assubject matter or audience; in so doing, father, husbands orbrothers both memorialized and publicized aspects of fam-ily life.14 Interestingly, cine photography conferred a publicprofile upon what Chambers (2003, p. 101) calls the ‘smal-ler, privatized mobile (and) geographically and sociallymobile family’ of modern suburbia. Family representation,whether at home or abroad, had particular poignancy in theaftermath of both wars. Such public emphasis coincides, ofcourse, with mid-century practical and ideological socio-changes that were to profoundly affect traditional householdformation.

Amateur enthusiasts were producers as well as con-sumers. Their choices determined subject matter for futurerecollection and viewing. Their filmic portrayals framedpeople and places in specific ways. While earlier outsidershad recorded their Mediterranean journeys and encounters intext and image (see for instance, Pratt, 1992; Buzard, 1993;Jacobs, 1995; Chard, 1999), cinematography made possiblea new mode of visual encounter. The editing and screen-ing of holiday footage preconditioned what others might toexpect to see or associate with different parts of the Medi-terranean. Equally, the non-representation of specific placesalso helped to screen out lives and landscapes in a con-structed invisibility. The combined practices of sightseeing(Gregory, 2003, p. 225) and sight showing produced ima-ginative geographies of the Mediterranean that portrayed apatchwork of knowable places that seemed to convey, byimplication, the inaccessibility and alien character of otherinhabited spaces.

Probably, for most cinephiles enjoying Mediterraneanholidays between the late 1920s and early 1960s, the re-gion’s strategic position in international affairs was far from

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their minds. Naval vessels and shoreline fortifications werelittle more than photo opportunities except where wartimeexperience possibly contributed further significance.15 It isinevitable, perhaps, that we ascribe meaning to the fre-quency of specific uniforms, insignia and armed officials thatoccur in footage from different times and places. Yet theirseemingly cursory inclusion often suggests that, for mostfilmmakers, they were either not important or, alternatively,not easy to film. For the most part, the snatched fragmentsof overtly political imagery – regimental movement, militarypersonnel, borders and guarded premises or the occasionalbanner or demonstration – only exemplify the visual ac-quisitiveness, or boldness, associated with being a tourist.Admittedly, some filmmakers did tackle specific ideologicalcommitments at home or abroad, as instanced by the Quakerfilmmaker, John Cuthbert Wighman, who filmed charitywork with children in Spain, Russia, Jordan and elsewhere(Norris Nicholson, 2001b, and, in progress).16 No such con-cerns influenced the cine-carrying tourists from Lancashire;their holidays were escapist, particularly from the urban andeconomic conditions of northern industrial Britain and sotoo were most of the images they offered afterwards to theiraudiences.

Amateur-produced imagery coincided with an ever-expanding visual repertoire offered by newsreel, cinemaand broadcast media (Higson, 1995; Aldgate and Richards,1999). Its circulation, among family, friends and specificpublic audiences, forms part of an understanding of histor-ical trends in twentieth century visual consumption (Denzin,1995). Holiday footage is only one aspect of hobby produc-tion but it helps to situate amateur activity within broaderspatial and socio-cultural considerations. Ownership rein-forced social relations for everyone involved in the processesof making, showing and watching cine footage. Being incharge of the equipment denoted status and ascribed othersto positions either on or off camera. The micro-geographiesassociated with cine footage disclose how visual practicemediates prevailing notions of gender, class and ethnicityand identity formation.

Arguably, the desire to frame the world through cinefootage also offered orientation at a more abstract level.Unprecedented patterns of speed, mobility and communic-ation brought disorientation as well as new opportunities forknowledge and experience. Modern leisure-related travel,unlike other movements of ordinary people prompted by mi-gration and conflict, usually involved a safe return. Tourismconferred status but also reassurance. The enthusiastic adop-tion of new photographic technologies suited to the makingand sharing of visual memories and travel narratives maybe indicative of deeper unease. Vicarious encounters withunfamiliar places and situations helped to make the worldmore understandable even as familiar lifestyles, livelihoodsand landscapes were changing fast. Perhaps the wish to cap-ture in moving imagery scenes for future recollection alsoexpressed a desire for stability and stasis during decades ofprofound political and ideological change. Just as leisureand consumption assumed new significance in the shapingof identity, hobbies, holiday experiences and family memor-

ies helped in the negotiation of modernity. Holiday movies,in diverse ways, sanctioned how filmmakers and their audi-ences might place themselves and others in an increasinglyuncertain world.

Acknowledgements

This research is funded by the British Academy and theKrausna-Krausz Foundation. Thanks are due to various re-viewers for their constructive suggestions, to archivists atthe British Film Institute and, in particular, to staff atthe North West Film Archive (NWFA), Manchester Met-ropolitan University, England for their support in makingmaterials available for research. I also acknowledge the per-sonal encouragement offered by the late Curator, MaryannGomes, who died three months after the start of this re-search. Her long commitment to the safeguarding of archivalfilm by, for and about the lives of ordinary peoples helpedto develop a regional archive of national and internationalsignificance.

Notes

1The current deposition of regional cine society archives atthe NWFA permits on-going work to elucidate club mem-bership patterns that will include, where possible, interviewswith surviving early members.2For instance, Church and Film promoted the use of filmand other visual aids in teaching and missionary work in andbeyond Britain.3Unnamed author, 1927: Manchester Film Society. Com-ment and Review, Close Up 4: 69–72.4Personal communication with the author, September 2002.5Accession nos. 3810 and 3813, NWFA.6Accession nos. 3802, 3805, 3808, 3809, 1019; 1964D,1967D, 1187D, 1894, 1938D, 1943D, 1945D, 1955D, 1956,1958D, 1960D, 1961D, NWFA.7Accession nos. 4161, 4163 and 4468, NWFA.8Gracie Fields Collection, Gracie, Accession nos. 1551 and1552, NWFA.9Accession no. 1938D, NWFA.10Charles Chislett Collection, Yorkshire Film Archive, York.Personal communication with the founder of the archive,Peter McNamara, September 1997.11Detailed scenes of Sfax occur in On the Banks of the RiverAude, made in ca. 1928 by an unknown member of thePreston Scientific Society photographic section, Accessionno. 2069, NWFA. Personal communication with anothermember’s daughter, September 2002.12Accession nos. 1574 and 1582, NWFA.13Accession nos. 4161, 4163 and 4472, NWFA. Amateurviews of resort development concur with scenes in a 1964promotional package holiday film, Go Gay with Gay Tours,Accession no. 2249, NWFA.14Valuable discussions with Professor Alan Kidd, ManchesterCentre for Regional History, drew attention to issues of

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scale, setting, family involvement and technology in rela-tion to filming, motor-cycling, cars and other predominantlymale-oriented middle class regional leisure activities duringthe inter-war and early post-war years. A longer study ofregional filmic practice in socio-cultural context is currentlyunder consideration and entitled, Framing the North: im-ages, identities, meanings ca. 1925–1965.16Ascribing meaning to the presence or absence of subjectmatter with political, military or ideological significance isparticularly difficult. Its absence may imply that a filmmakerwas cautious or asked not to take pictures rather than a lackof interest. The apparent cursory interest may have been adevice for masking or diverting attention, through, for in-stance, relegating uniformed people to the background andplacing a family or monument in the foreground. Dr JohnBarker Scarr includes seemingly unrestricted footage ofMussolini’s headquarters, apparently taken from a vantagepoint across the street, during his extensive filming of Romein SS Arandora Star, May 1934, Accession no. 3808, NWFA.Harold and Sidney Preston both served during World War Iand their film footage includes various scenes of navalvessels that they chanced upon during flotilla reviews, inpassage and at different harbors in the Mediterranean. Forsome early filmmakers, documenting military subject matterseems a variant upon the more innocuous modern activity oftrain spotting. Their details attest, however, to the growingpresence of uniformed personnel in different Mediterraneancontexts before and after World War II.16John Cuthbert Wigham, Society of Friends, British FilmInstitute Catalogues.

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