Amateur Filmmakers Research Articles

Commemorating the Great War on Film: Veterans, Pilgrimages and Amateur Filmmaking

This article explores the work of four amateur filmmakers from the Canterbury area, between the late 1920s and early 1970s focusing on the films relating to the battlefield visits of First World War veterans and their families. It argues that film provides a fascinating insight into veteran behaviour and culture. Of particular interest is the manner in which the films reveal the continuities and developments in the behaviour of ex-servicemen. The films of the late 1920s and 1930s reveal a highly masculine culture which remained closely aligned with military ceremonial and codes of conduct, whereas the later, post-1945, films show the veterans with wives and family members engaging in a wider range of activities. The article also sets the films within the culture of amateur filmmaking of the time discussing equipment, techniques and exhibition, thus engaging with an element of film history which remains under-explored compared with the degree of research commercial cinema has attracted. The article is supplemented by a short film providing excerpts from all films discussed.

Hidden in Plain Sight: Attending to Women’s Amateur Filmmaking Histories at the Irish Film Archive

This article aims to identify various ways in which women’s amateur filmmaking becomes obscured in both film archives and in the academic scholarship on film and filmmaking. Recognising that amateur film is marginalised and undervalued in relation to commercial and professional filmmaking, the article uses the case study of one Irish amateur filmmaker to identify the processes and practices that have resulted in her work being obscured and overlooked. The filmmaker, Sr Maureen MacMahon, was practicing amateur filmmaking from the 1960s to the 1970s and her work is held at the Irish Film Archive. Investigation of Sr Maureen’s filmmaking drew from a variety of sources including the films and film materials, film metadata recorded at the archive, newspaper archives, an archive held at Sr Maureen’s religious order and an interview with Sr Maureen. Analyses of these materials has resulted in three findings: firstly, the dispersal of materials and information pertaining to Sr Maureen across multiple sites posed challenges for our construction of a coherent narrative about her; secondly, Sr Maureen turned her hand to many creative and pedagogic activities beyond filmmaking, and, in her own estimation, she was an arts educator more than a filmmaker; and, finally, the films are not easily categorised as they are generically and stylistically diverse, making auteurist approaches difficult. Drawing from these findings we discuss the challenges that this creates for foregrounding women’s contributions to film.

Back into Focus: Women Filmmakers, the Amateur Trade Press and 1960s British Amateur Cinema

AbstractWhile recent scholarship has helped uncover specific stories of women in different commercial cinema industries, there remains a lacuna around the role of amateur women filmmakers within national amateur contexts. Where male amateur filmmaking has often been linked to a range of solitary or group‐based leisure pursuits, we cannot make the same assumption about women amateur filmmaker’s involvement in social groups, not least due to the gendered nature of domestic and non‐work activities in the post‐war era. This article considers the representation of women's creative labour across the 1960s within a dominant and patriarchal trade journal, Britain's Amateur Cine World. Combining feminist and digital humanities approaches allows us to analyse data from this magazine to reveal recurring debates and tensions around women's amateur creativity, with particular concerns around domesticity, leisure and the gendered nature of technology.

Beyond the “Exhibition Straight-Jacket”: How British Amateur Film Clubs Created an Alternative Distribution and Exhibition Network, 1923–1933

This article explores an overlooked third strand of the 1920s British film industry's distribution and exhibition practices: amateur filmmakers. Our analysis of the UK amateur networks that were created through the 1920s and into the early 1930s offers a challenge to accepted ideas that British cinema exhibition was limited to a small number of metropolitan mainstream or independent art cinemas. By tracing the amateur cinema's move from an interaction with mainstream exhibition venues to the introduction of a national amateur network, we offer a more nuanced understanding of amateur-film culture and its community-led model of distribution and exhibition.

Introduction

Introduction Haidee Wasson (bio) Long before the shifts wrought by the current plethora of electronic and digital formats there was an array of analog formats fueling media change. The contributors to this dossier focus on but one of these: 16mm film. First standardized in 1923 and widely used for over fifty years, this format bred a paradigmatic family of technologies that evolved into a dynamic, expansive, multi-modal media system, catalyzing lasting transformations in film art, theory, and practice. These essays honor 16mm’s centenary with scholarship that begins to map the international scale, scope, and continued impact of this uniquely important format. Recent scholarship in media studies by Lisa Gitelman, Jonathan Sterne, and others has rejected ahistorical and ontologically static definitions of media, urging the adoption of better ways to assess the shifting technical as well as industrial and aesthetic dynamics that constitute phenomena we tend to name with big, broad terms such as telephone, cinema, and television.1 Sterne proposes that we focus on formats. According to him, formats are “particular historical instantiations” that can help us to understand the rules that determine how “a technology can operate.”2 They result from “a range of decisions that affect the look, feel, experience and workings of a medium.”3 Formats then are also more than technical clusters. They are also cultural, aesthetic, institutional, and political. The product of intentioned thought, negotiation, debate, and norms, formats also shape subsequent technological, aesthetic, and experiential phenomena. More [End Page 146] specific and narrowly conceived than the general media categories that undergird so much media history and theory, they help to make particular media applications, experiences, and uses more easily legible. Applying this to film history, for instance, demonstrates that cinema has long consisted of many formats that have changed over time. Big, loud, small, silent, color, architectural, and portable modes of cinema have co-existed. Each becomes a productive entry point to help us think more thoroughly about what cinema has long been—a complex multi-formatted medium. Initially marketed in 1923 as a filmmaking system for amateur film-makers, and as a film rental service for viewing movies reduced in size from industry-standard 35mm film prints, 16mm was born of the technological ferment that was integral to Hollywood’s rise. It was conceived as a complement to the industry’s equipment and business models. By the early 1920s, the American studios had built a blossoming empire on a form of entertainment that required centralized, rationalized modes of production, big audiences, and thousands of brick-and-mortar points of sale: movie theaters. Let’s call it big-box cinema. Yet all along, an unlikely crew of engineers, equipment manufacturers, chemical companies, community activists, artists, and theorists imagined something different. They foresaw a future wherein moving images and sounds would also thrive—beyond Hollywood—everywhere else. For them flashy feature films and spectacular picture palaces were but a prelude to the myriad other forms and functions yet to be discovered. As such, 16mm equipment developed in notable contrast to the industry’s heavy, expensive, and specialized cameras and projectors. This new system was comparatively portable, affordable, adaptable, easy to use, accessible, and programmable. Crucially, its film stock was not only smaller and hence lower cost but also non-flammable, unlike the 35mm cellulose nitrate stock that was used to produce and exhibit theatrical films into the 1950s.4 This foundational shift to acetate film, whose chemical-industrial roots are explored in this dossier by Alice Lovejoy, eliminated the threat of fire in filmmaking, storage, distribution, and projection, allowing 16mm prints to move (and accumulate) more freely; they could be shown just about anywhere. Collectively, the technical capacities of this new format enabled a significantly more horizontal ecosystem for making, circulating, and using film, laying the foundations for decades of explosive growth in the United States and around the world. Scholars of film have long known that 16mm was essential to facilitating modes of filmmaking that were both apposite and opposite to dominant commercial cinemas; these included amateur, home, documentary, independent, and experimental films. An emerging field of scholarship is building on this, demonstrating that 16mm also catalyzed film activity across business, industry...

Building Community Through Queer Learning Disability Amateur Filmmaking: Oska Bright Film Festival and Queer Freedom

Much has been written on the intersection of disability and sexuality since the publication of <i>The Sexual Politics of Disability</i> (Shakespeare et al., 1996), however scant literature refers to these issues as represented on the screen, where it can be argued representations have the most power to shape perceptions. Disabled characters in media narratives are invariably represented as lacking in any sexuality or negation of heteronormative gender and sexual expressions.<br /> In 2017, Brighton-based learning disability film festival Oska Bright (OBFF) launched their Queer Freedom (QF) strand as an intervention in this lack of queer representation within learning disability narratives. In 2017 and 2019, QF featured films made by or featuring queer people with learning disabilities and autism, including Glasgow-based queer femme filmmaker Mattie Kennedy. Devised by OBFF Lead Programmer and queer filmmaker Matthew Hellett after meeting Kennedy at a previous OBFF, Hellett believed he had a responsibility to create a space for these unheard voices.<br /> This article mobilises Bonnie Honig’s feminist refusal method of inclination and bell hooks’ theory of talking back to explore how OBFF and QF have enabled Kennedy and Hellett to create space and claim their visibility as queer learning-disabled filmmakers through a process of mutual affirmation. Learning-disabled people have historically been segregated from society, so in the spirit of Foucault’s heterotopia, by coming together to form a community of people who affirm and encourage other queer learning-disabled people to make their voices heard, they are refusing their assigned societal segregation.

Time Bomb from the West: Video, the Advertising Industry, and Consumer Culture in Late-Socialist Czechoslovakia

Time Bomb from the West: Video, the Advertising Industry, and Consumer Culture in Late-Socialist Czechoslovakia

LATVIAN AMATEUR DOCUMENTARY FILM, 1970s–1980s: FAMILY, COMMUNITY, TRAVEL, AND POLITICS IN THE FILMS OF ULDIS LAPIŅŠ, INGVARS LEITIS, AND ZIGURDS VIDIŅŠ

In the 1950s, amateur filmmaking had become a well-established feature of everyday life in the Soviets Union. However, in contrast to the state film industry, no centralized governmental body existed to control amateur filmmakers. As a result, state ideology was not always the primary motivation for making amateur films. The works that dared to experiment invariably emerged from the periphery, and the Latvian SSR became one of the citadels of the Soviet amateur film movement. Drawing upon the amateur film collection held at the Latvian State Archive of Audiovisual Documents, this paper will identify and analyse the various functions that amateur documentary filmmaking performed beyond its ostensible mission of transmitting Soviet ideology, and examine its role in creating alternative political, social, and cultural meanings, and prospects for national identity development and heritage preservation. It will primarily focus on the documentaries by Uldis Lapiņš, Zigurds Vidiņš, and Ingvars Leitis made in the 1970 and the 1980s, and look at how they used everyday matters – such as family, community, and travel – to express artistically as well as to address broader social and political issues of life in the post-war Soviet society.

Streaming steam

Building its present identity from the reimagined recollections of a past age of industry, the steampunk movement’s array of antiquated yet spectacular machines have become hallmarks of our fascination with technology’s history. In this article, I will trace the movement’s retrofuturistic sensibilities through a wave of short films and web series that set themselves within worlds that are constructed from anachronistic devices that belong to neither the past nor the present. Instead, these are texts that, whether constructed by amateur filmmakers, professionals - and a range of practices in-between - use their science fictional identities to disrupt the seemingly linear trajectory of our media’s historical progress. Through them, the aesthetics of nineteenth-century photographic techniques and special effects are reimagined through the lens of current streaming platforms, modern computer-generated imagery and a new breed of maker cultures who desire to conflate cutting-edge innovation with the first wave of invention and experimentation that breathed life into our visual media. Most significantly, however, by exploring the proliferation and popularization of neo-Victorian machinery within the vast array of short films that have been both distributed and produced through highly digitized practices, the steampunk genre will be used to examine representations of craftsmanship and “making” that have become embedded within contemporary popular culture.

Evolution of the Russian film festival movement: trends, forms, themes, and genres of children and adult amateur filmmaking in the XX – XXI centuries

The subject of this research of this article is the trends, forms, themes and genres of children and adult amateur filmmaking on the context of development of the national film festival movement. The author traces  the evolution of the Russian film festival movement, which is reflected in trends, organizational forms, themes and genres of children, mixed and adult amateur filmmaking in the XX – XXI centuries. Methodological framework of this research is comprised of the dynamics of formation of the experience of emotional-value perception of the visual image of reality (B. M. Nemensky), content analysis, comparative, genre-thematic, statistical, historical-culturological analysis of the themes and genres of works of amateur filmmaking of the Soviet and post-perestroika periods presented at film festivals. As a result of the conducted research, the author divides the traditional filmmaking into enthusiasts of cinemagorahic art and amateur videographers; outlines the organizational forms and development trends of the Russian film festival movement; highlights the thematic peculiarities of modern amateur filmmakers that consist in the successive, traditional, new and lost themes of children and adult amateur films. The traditional amateur film and modern amateur video genres of screen works are determined. The novelty of this research lies in nontraditional approach, as well as comprehensive analysis of the problem of modern development of the amateur film festival movement. The main conclusions are as follows: 1) the division of traditional amateur filmmaking into two groups: enthusiasts of traditional cinematographic art and amateur videographers – creation of the works of new and traditional themes is substantiated by sociocultural peculiarities of modern development of the amateur film festival movement; 2) It is noted that the lost thematic groups, such as the Soviet legacy, would be revived in the works of modern authors; 3) there is an important feature in the development of modern amateur videography in the context of film festival movement and establishment of the new genres.

The Portrayal of Claustrophobic Behaviours and Events in Film

The recent outbreak of Covid-19 as a global pandemic has taken a toll on people worldwide. Based on an article from Malaysiakini, the number of calls to the Crisis Preparedness and Response Centre (CPRC) increases significantly everyday indicating the large community who faces emotional and psychological distress during these hard times. Some have even related the situation as claustrophobic events. For creative content creators, claustrophobia can be an attractive story but requires different and complex techniques of presenting it. Therefore, in order to effectively inform amateur filmmakers on claustrophobia, this research focuses on the claustrophobic events portrayed in four nominated or award-winning films which simulates real claustrophobic events. The target audience for this research will be focused on amateur filmmakers and young content makers who are a vessel to help educate audiences on claustrophobia in a right manner. It is important to do a critical analysis on how successfully films have relayed this message to their audience with their visuals alongside with relatable stories and characters. Film has the ability to bring spotlight to claustrophobia for it is a perfect tool of education and definitely for entertainment, escaping from reality. This is supported in a Forbes article where it claims that there is an increased consumption of digital content from mobile apps to movie and music streaming due to the world’s population under lockdown. By studying how films portray the message of claustrophobia, it will help amateur film makers and short film content makers to have further information to relay their message effectively to their audience

From loss to reconsideration: rethinking silent film historiography through amateur cinema

ABSTRACT If we understand cinema only as commercially produced and exhibited films then we are bound to a silent film history marked by loss and irreversibility. But what if we expand our conception of cinema to the numerous film experiences that happened beyond the commercial screen? This essay poses this question with the hope of initiating a transnational reinterpretation of silent film historiography through noncommercial cinema. I focus on two Catalan amateur filmmakers from the late 1920s and early 1930s, Lluís Gisbert and Llorenç Llobet Gràcia, , to show how silent film practices continued to develop beyond commercial cinema in the films, writings, and screening venues of amateurs throughout the world for decades after the release of the first talkies.

Ensaio sobre o experimental no curta-metragem brasileiro contemporâneo

Emprestando dos escritos e o estilo do Jairo Ferreira, o ensaio retoma o que já foi o exercício experimental no país e investiga o que o passado pode dizer sobre o que significa inovar no presente. O curta-metragem foi essencial para a iniciação no cinema dos grandes nomes do Cinema Novo: Cacá Diegues, Glauber Rocha, Rogério Sganzerla, Paulo César Saraceni – todos experimentaram no formato menor. Embora hoje seja ainda verdade que muitos dos novos cineastas começam fazendo carreira em festivais com filme curta, cineasta amador não é sinônimo de cineasta experimental. Os festivais de cinema do país institucionalizaram o termo “experimental” como um dos possíveis gêneros de realização de um filme. Por meio da análise de três curtas-metragens nacionais realizados entre 2010 e 2017, o ensaio busca investigar o que é realmente a atividade de cinema de invenção no Brasil hoje. São apresentadas, ainda, hipóteses sobre a intersecção das cenas de produção de filme curta e a de filme experimental como ambas práticas marginais ao grande público, que é majoritariamente alimentado pela lógica narrativo-industrial do cinema mainstream. Entre pensamentos da história das artes, a reprodutibilidade técnica e a emancipação do cinema, o ensaio traz também o debate de arte versus indústria, ou o trabalho de artistas e o de fazedores de filmes.

Looking Back, Moving Forward

The Melbourne Women in Film Festival (MWFF) is a four-day event in Melbourne, Australia, that supports and celebrates the work of Australian women filmmakers. Launched in 2017, the festival emerged from our desire as screen academics to increase the visibility of both professional and amateur women filmmakers and their work. Despite a strong history of grassroots and state-supported women’s creative cultures in Australia, women have remained marginal within the domestic screen industry. Women filmmakers are also underrepresented within the global festival circuit. This article traces the curatorial practices underpinning MWFF since its inception. We describe our approach to running a locally based, women-centered film festival; how we define “women” and “women’s filmmaking”; and how our programing choices support our festival ethos. We also contextualize our event as one that both continues and is in dialogue with women’s screen culture in Australia, particularly the one-off Women’s International Film Festival held in 1975. Locating our festival in this historical context, we argue that retrospective screenings play a particularly vital role at MWFF in achieving our festival aims. We recount our inaugural festival in 2017 and explain the significance of retrospectives in building a legacy for women filmmakers and making their achievements visible to the next generation.

Small-Gauge Colour Visions: The Role of Amateur Filmmakers in Italy’s Transition from Black-and-White to Colour

Small-Gauge Colour Visions: The Role of Amateur Filmmakers in Italy’s Transition from Black-and-White to Colour

Exquisite wonder: Colour film, realism and the Yankee voyage, 1936–38

This article looks at rare Kodachrome film taken across Oceania, mostly shot by a skilled amateur filmmaker, Edmund Zacher, to document the circumnavigation of the famous clipper Yankee. There are three intertwined lines of inquiry traced here. The first explores relations between US imperialism, moving image media and a popular imaginary, considering how experiences of virtual travel engage with cultural ideology. The second examines how this footage may be interpreted: how might critical frameworks brought to bear on amateur non-fiction differ from those commonly applied to professional and narrative fiction film? A key reference point is the theory of cinematic gesture developed by Giorgio Agamben, who expands on the work of Gilles Deleuze and his notion of the movement image. This stress on gesture and on the mediality of moving images leads towards a third key area under consideration: colour and the (then) new medium of Kodachrome. Homing in on relations between colour stock and motion picture realism, this study explores the ways that Kodachrome colour might have affected broader perceptions of the world itself.

Beyond place: rethinking British amateur films through gender and technology-based perspectives

Archiving practices of amateur film collections tend to foreground the evidentiary value of such films, stressing visual records of local or national culture through the capturing of specific events or locations. This article looks at two projects which offer alternative approaches to this traditional stress on place-making, focusing instead on different production practices, technological choices, and aesthetic approaches. The Women Amateur Filmmakers in Britain project revealed a rich vein of women-produced films that spanned seven decades of the twentieth century and featured films from a variety of genres (drama, comedy, animation, documentary, travelogues) and modes of production (single author, team, husband-and-wife collaboration). The second project, ‘The Eastmancolor Revolution and British Cinema, 1955-85’, identified and digitised seven amateur films that utilised a range of different colour processes. This article offers a reflection on these two projects, and their different approaches to understanding aspects of British amateur film collections. Intellectually distinct in terms of subject matter, the projects share a methodological interest in the challenges around identifying and selecting ‘appropriate’ films for digitisation, locating contextual materials around the production of each film, and engaging a wider audience with non-place-based amateur archival material.

Making women amateur filmmakers visible: reclaiming women’s work through the film archive

ABSTRACT This article considers the place of women’s amateur film within regional and national film archive holdings through a specific case study of the ‘Women Amateur Filmmakers in Britain’ project at the East Anglian Film Archive (EAFA). Reflecting on the process of cataloguing and presenting this collection, the article will explore the challenges of making women’s creative filmed work visible, suggesting that women’s amateur films exist at a crucial overlap of archival oversight and cultural stigma. We argue that prevailing associations of archive film with space, place and location could prevent feminist-led projects from gaining traction in the contested world of exhibition where locality often overshadows other thematic or stylistic approaches. We argue that only by reconsidering the types of films that are prioritised for preservation and presentation can women’s films be made fully visible.

КИНОПРОИЗВОДСТВО ТОМСКИХ РЕЖИССЕРОВ-ЛЮБИТЕЛЕЙ КАК ПРОСЬЮМЕРСКАЯ ПРАКТИКА

Regional amateur film production is discussed in the article. The specifics of this phenomenon are determined by two factors: the territorial affiliation and the unprofessional nature the amateur filmmakers activities making films outside the official film studios systems. The spread of film ama-teurism in the 21st century is driven by the development of digital technologies that simplify the film production process. However, the place and importance of amateur filmmakers in modern culture are not adequately investigated, which actualizes this study. The purpose of the article is to reveal the specifics of the production and artistic activities of Tomsk amateur directors. The author's hypothesis is that regional cinema is not only a form of amateur creativity but also prosumers activity. The novelty of the study is determined, firstly, by the attention to the film industry of the Tomsk region, secondly, the original author's approach, considering the activities of amateur directors in the context of the new production paradigm of prosumerism. The methodological basis of the study is the sociocultural approach, film appreciation and study of empiric material (short features, indie cinema, documentary, web-series). The study is constructed as follows: signs, which point to the prosumer character of the Tomsk cinema environ is identified. As a result a set of assertions confirming the involvement of amateur film makers in new forms of DIY practices is formulated. 1) Amateur filmmakers multifunctional activities redound to the blurring of the distinction between production and consumption. 2) It is not in doubt, that is voluntary labor, but the fact that it is unpaid labor is not an essential condition, due to the large economic costs of film production. 3) For Tomsk's amateur directors an unstructured and decentralized organization of the production process is typical. 4) Almost all filmmakers have their own or given means of production. 5) The product specifics (film text) are determined by the individual optics of the author and by his regional belonging. 6) The transformative role of film amateurism is expressed in influencing the identity of its participants and in shaping the cultural identity of the region. The authors conclude that the activity of Tomsk's amateur film production contributes to the cul-tural specifics of the region, influences the development of regional identity, and contributes to the formation of new social ties. This non-profit environ based on the personal enthusiasm of people inter-ested in creative self-realization leads to the prosumers practice extension as a way to overcome the negative manifestations of a consumer society.

Conflitos: Fotografia e violência política no Brasil, 1889–1964

Former Brazilian president Washington Luís's famous dictum, “The social question is a matter for the police,” expressed the sentiment of elite politicians during the last years of Brazil's First Republic (1889–1930), when few citizens were eligible to vote and coffee barons and other oligarchs ruled the country with an iron fist. The dire conditions of former slaves, rural peasants, and the urban poor—both freed people of color and recent European immigrants—generated popular dissent of all kinds, which was quickly met with the police's baton and the soldier's bullet. The state's brutal response to all forms of protest largely reflected the defense of a rigidly hierarchical and unequal society and a political system that offered few channels for effective legal petitions to power holders by those seeking social justice.This volume captures the nature of that political violence through an examination of social conflicts from the beginning of the republic in 1889 to the 1964 military coup d'état, drawing on a rich array of beautifully reproduced images from the Moreira Salles Institute, the largest and most diverse private photography collection in Brazil. Carefully curated and thoughtfully framed through essays opening the book's three sections by leading scholars—Angela Alonso, Angela de Castro Gomes, and Heloisa Murgel Starling—the book documents regional revolts, naval mutinies, pacification campaigns, and diverse insurrections.Some of these social conflicts have produced iconic images of the Brazilian state's callousness. One becomes freshly unsettled in observing the empty stares of the 400 African-descended women huddled together, many with their heads shrouded with rough peasant cloth, who had just survived the Canudos massacre of the 1896–97 federal government campaigns against religious leader Antônio Conselheiro and his followers (pp. 80–81). The worn faces and the dark skin of resting soldiers in the municipal park of Itapira during the São Paulo revolt of 1932 against the central government, who seem exhausted from marching or perhaps a recent skirmish, reveal their humble social origins (pp. 248–49). Throughout this work one notes how the state time and again forcibly mobilized the poor to fight the poor.In Brazil, as elsewhere, photography in the early twentieth century became an instrument of the victors, documenting the demise of the vanquished and circulating those images in newspapers and other print vehicles, and later in newsreels, to show the power of the state and the consequences of rebellion. The image of the severed heads of rural bandit Virgulino Ferreira da Silva, popularly known as Lampião, and ten of his men, displayed artfully on four steps at the entrance to a rural home with leather half-moon-shaped cangaceiro hats, ammunition belts, and two Singer sewing machines meticulously placed nearby, sends a clear message to the viewer (p. 295). Yet rebels also employed the same medium to promote their strength, power, and persistence, as in the posed photo published in a popular newspaper of Lampião's partner, Maria Bonita, elegantly seated somewhere in the barren sertão affectionately petting a dog, or in the group picture of leaders of the Prestes Column, from the late 1920s, sitting comfortably with their legs crossed wearing high leather boots and conveying a calm determination to continue their trek through the backlands of Brazil in their challenge to the country's ruling elites (pp. 210–11, 303).Cameras also recorded physical destruction of both rebels and the state. In a surrealistic photograph, a boy and a girl sitting in what seems to be a living room whose ceiling has been shattered by federal troop bombardments during the São Paulo revolt gaze passively into the lens with rubble all around them (p. 185). Out-of-focus 16 millimeter frames by an amateur filmmaker register the burning of the National Student Union headquarters in Rio de Janeiro during the 1964 military takeover (pp. 394–95). Papers are scattered all over the ground. Two young men are hurling something (are they rocks or firebombs?) into the burning building.The authors of the essays show the varied political uses of these images as they appeared in magazines and newspapers. Their narratives leave no doubt that one of the purposes of this collection is to reveal the raw nature of political violence that challenged “the social question”—that is, the demands for economic, social, and regional inclusion for those cast to the margins by sectors of society and a state that favored other social classes.One regrets that the volume stopped in 1964. Perhaps the images of Brazil's most recent military dictatorship are too familiar to a generation of intellectuals who might purchase the book. Yet in a moment when elected politicians and a new president have become dictatorship deniers, those photos documenting police repression and brutality during the two decades of military rule regrettably will become germane again and more potent, perhaps, than they were in the immediate past.