Amateur film and amateur media practices have attracted increasing interest in recent decades
in the context of the visual turn. Questions of agency participatory and political militant
film practices and of representations of self and other are of interest as well as the
institutions and networks of amateur productions. This special issue of zeitgeschichte
contributes to this field of research by examining international and transnational developments
of amateur films in the period after the Second World War. The collected contributions analyze
national specifics and regional shapings of practices as well as cultural constructions in
amateur film and video they trace transnational entanglements of amateur media and tackle
cross-border amateur filmmaking and internationally and globally shared discursive references
and uses of metaphors in video activism. The authors elaborate parallels to organizational
structures in amateur film practices in specific sociopolitical and cultural contexts and
discuss aspects of memory and the appropriation of hegemonic visual cultures in individual film
practices.
