The conference Techniques du cinéma amateur: problèmes d’archives, problèmes d’histoire, organised by Benoît Turquety and Stéphane Tralongo, was held from 28 to 30 November 2018 at the Université de Lausanne.

Digital cultures, as they scale back the boundaries between filmmakers and audiences, appear to be giving a central role to amateurs in the present-day media landscape. They invite us to consider the practices of amateur cinema that have grown up since cinema’s earliest days, at times in very sophisticated forms. What is at stake, then, is to reveal a richer, more complex and more protean presence of cinema than the traditional history of (professional) cinema has shown us.

This international conference, taking place from 28 to 30 November 2018 as part of the FNS research project “Histoire des machines et archéologie des pratiques: Bolex et le cinéma amateur en Suisse”, sought to re-examine the issues and methods of constructing the history of amateur cinema and its techniques, in particular through that essential research space, the archive.

Making good use of the collaboration of the Swiss Film Institute and its partnerships with Interreg [??]EntreLACS and TECHNÈS, this conference brought together scholars and archivists around the specific problems amateur cinema poses for film history and theory. Filmmakers also attended and spoke of their work with the film camera as a tool of artistic creation.

The program of the conference Techniques du cinéma amateur: problèmes d’archives, problèmes d’histoire