Ambitious Amateurs – The Greater Region's Amateur Film Clubs in the long 1960s

Ambitious Amateurs aims to investigate the mass taste of its time through the lens of the participatory cultural practice of filming.
The film makers were consumers of a medium they were co-creating themselves, largely producing for a circle of peers. The aesthetic form of these films and genres, the excess of meaning, as well as the moral political ideals represent central axes of the analysis. Additionally, relations between the club members and their activities in national umbrella associations, collaborations, as well as contexts of transnational encounters (i.e. UNICA, the international association of amateur film clubs) shall be further observed.
This is being executed on the examples of selected clubs in bordering locations in the ‘Greater Region’: Luxembourg, Wallonia (Belgium), Lorraine (France) and Saarland (Germany) - an artificial construct of an economic trade union within the European Union on the one hand, with a shared cultural heritage shaped by the coal and steel industries and their demise on the other.

Besides archive research and Oral History, the film documents themselves are the core piece of the analysis. The topic is of particular relevance for general Culture and Media History, due to the historical evolution of censorship and auto-censorship tendencies regarding sexual permissiveness, political militancy or religious statements in the long 1960s. On the particular European transnational level, the material is investigated considering the issue of Americanisation, respectively the rejection of the latter within the discourse of European film creators and the topical press.
The international comparison additionally facilitates the display of national specificities and diverse temporalities within (Western)Europe.
It currently appears that the demographics of the clubs were transnationally rather homogenous. The comparison of topics, genres, visual and technical styles the authors were interested in and the notable exceptions within the scope, are thus mirroring the zeitgeist of the research period.