"Fire from the Skies should be a ringing challenge to amateur movie clubs and individual personal filmers across the country. For it is a competent, compelling and altogether mature contribution to the cause of civilian defense. It was produced by the Long Beach Cinema Club with no more facilities than are available to all of us. The added ingredient which put the production over was interest; they wanted to do it — and did ! The dynamic leadership of Mrs. Mildred J. Caldwell, ACL, former club president and coordinator of the present film, is felt throughout its footage. Telling a story of incendiary bomb protection, the picture tells it from the woman's angle, that of the housewife who, before all others, must fight to protect her home. The film employs shrewdly every artifice of the motion picture craft — color, sound, music, narrative and special effects. All are handled crisply and with confidence. The continuity is dramatic but informative, the camera work effective and the sound track exciting in its contribution to the visual message. Fire from the Skies need offer no apologies amid the too small company of America's civilian defense motion pictures." Movie Makers, Dec. 1942, 506.
"A bird picture." American Cinematographer, Feb. 1937, 80.
"Una historia sobre el acoso sufrido por la juventud por parte del mundo de los adultos. La posición alternativa del grupo [de realizadores] se hacía explícita desde las primeras tomas, en donde los créditos aparecían escritos en las paredes de una casa en ruinas, omitiendo los apellidos y dejando solo los nombres de pila de quienes participaron" (Vázquez Mantecón, 2012).
"A story about the harassment suffered by the youth from the adult world. The alternative position of the group [of filmmakers] was made evident from the first shots, where credits appeared written on the walls of a house in ruins, omitting last names and leaving only the first names of the participants" (Vázquez Mantecón, 2012).
"Short wide screen amateur film made by George Ives, a Chicago Metro Movie Club member, and edited by Kenosha Cine Club member Ron Doerring." Chicago Film Archives
"The most stylistically experimental film among Kaneko’s works but also one of the most self-reflexive Japanese films of the interwar period. In this film, Kaneko featured the process of 9.5mm filmmaking by means of visual experiments and abstraction. By constructing the film in a way to trace the process of shooting, self-developing, editing, and projecting a film, he manipulated montage and multiple exposures as well as the use of light and shadow, while he elaborated the use of close-up shots that captured film devices and the filmmaker (presumably Kaneko himself) at work... Many advanced amateurs considered the process of filmmaking as an essential part of defining the idea of amateurishness. Unlike commercial productions that involved many casts and crews, amateur productions had the privilege of creating a work individually by going through the entire process of filmmaking, which allows the filmmaker to make every decision on his or her own. Kaneko’s Film Study 9 1/2 visualized this process by reflecting his artistic sensibilities." - Noriko Morisue, "Filming the Everyday: History, Theory, and Aesthetics of Amateur Cinema in Interwar and Wartime Japan" (Yale University: PhD Dissertation, 2020): 111.
"Film Editing, an exposition of this topic, is a single subject in the series, You Can Make Good Movies, produced by the Harmon Foundation of New York and photographed by Kenneth F. Space. This film presents the successful use of a medium to explain its own working and is divided into two parts — first, the mechanical operations involved in editing and splicing and, second, the methods used to present simple cinematic ideas through cutting. The clear and well ordered presentation of this subject is noteworthy. The first part of the film is characterized by a number of excellent, unusually large closeups showing the operations of scraping the film, applying cement, splicing, etc. In one or two of these closeups, however, the significant action was partially obscured, as in the case of closeups showing the application of cement to a splice, where the cork at the end of the brush got in the way. In general, however, the presentation was very clear and well photographed. Other methods than those shown could have been employed to produce the same results, but, in an instructional film of this nature, it is taken for granted that only one method can be presented without confusion." Movie Makers, Dec. 1939, 636.
Total Pages: 299
Amateur Cinema