The Alice Cinema on the Yale University campus hosted an ideal of an Amateur Movie Day event. Afterward we realized Connecticut is also apt place to celebrate Amateur Movie Day. Its residents have included Amateur Cinema League founder Hiram Percy Maxim (Hartford), ACL members and award recipients Cynthia and S. W. Childs (Norfolk), and the venerated Robbins Barstow (Wethersfield), who made movies from 1936 until his passing in 2010.*
Brian Meacham (Yale Film Archive) put it all together, programming eight films from four sources. Although the university was on spring break, an attentive audience filled nearly two thirds of the seats. We were happy to see Andrea McCarty (head of media preservation at Yale Library and a past Orphan Film Symposium presenter), Wilson Oliveira (media scholar, here from Brasil on a Fulbright), and doyen of film studies Dudley Andrew in the house, among the New Haven cinephiles. One of those responsive audiences that applaud after each film. The Alice (yes, named for pioneer filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché) opened in 2021 yet still feels brand new: splendid projection in a bright, clean screening room of unique design.
Below are the Meacham program notes, with added links to stream five of the movies.
Amateur Movie Day
Yale Film Archive | March 13, 2025
Dancing Flowers (Dir. John Ott, 1941-46, 1:37) Provided by Chicago Film Archives
A stop-motion film of primroses dancing to a Strauss waltz. According to John Ott’s autobiography, My Ivory Cellar: The Story of Time-Lapse Photography, this film was conceived one evening when he “dreamed up a wild idea of controlling the light, temperature and moisture to make the leaves of the plants move in different directions.” John Ott made this film over the course of five years while he was an officer at First National Bank of Chicago in the early 1940s. In order to control the movements of the flowers, Ott created special flower pots with automated heating elements, water tubes, and wheels. The heating elements were turned on at the proper time to wilt the leaves down, then the plants were given just the right amount of water to revive them again. A battery of lights was programmed to attract the leaves from side to side. The pots were pulled around on a track at a speed of about one half inch per hour.
I’d Be Delighted To! (Dir. S.W. Childs, Jr., 1932, 12:34) Preserved by the Yale Film Archive
In the fall of 2016, the Yale Film Archive received a collection of more than 200 reels of 16mm amateur film productions and home movies made between the 1920s and the 1950s, made by S.W. Childs, an amateur film enthusiast and third-generation Yale alumnus. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts on July 4, 1904, Charles Starling Winston “Winkie” Childs, Jr., grew up in Norfolk, Connecticut, and made amateur film productions and home movies beginning in 1923. A charter member of the Amateur Cinema League, Childs made films on a variety of subjects, in black and white and color, including early experiments with synchronized sound and customized intertitles. His best-known production was the silent short I’d Be Delighted To! (1932), which received a number of awards and was named to the Amateur Cinema League’s “Ten Best” list for 1932.
In the film, we see a man and woman prepare and enjoy a romantic dinner. The filmmakers capture everything from the telephone invitation to bathing, dressing, preparing food and making drinks, and the couple sharing a post-dinner cigarette, with one catch: you never see the couple’s faces, only their hands and feet. The film is a miniature epic of creatively lit and shot scenes, for which Childs was admired and recognized.
Unidentified Theisen No. 1 / [In Youth Beside the Lonely Sea] (ca. 1926, 4:32) Preserved by Library of Congress. Music composed 2022 by Mikhaila Alyssa Smith (NYU Screen Scoring Program for the Orphan Film Symposium)
This idiosyncratic artifact remains a mystery. Its source and title have never been established. Earl Theisen, a film and photo technician who became a collector and self-made historian of early cinema, acquired this print in the 1930s while an “Honorary Curator of Theatrical Arts” for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. His collection later went to the Academy of Motion Pictures, which in 1970 transferred this nitrate print to the American Film Institute, which placed it in the Library of Congress for preservation. The initial inventory called it “Theisen — Polyvision Test,” mistakenly presuming its triptych design derived from the French three-screen system used in Abel Gance’s 1927 Napoleon. From there, the LOC assigned “Unid. Theisen no. 1” the title [Triptych Poem]. Since 2001, the film is often given the title [In Youth, Beside the Lonely Sea], the 1893 poem whose text appears on screen. Is it an amateur production? Possibly. The sophisticated visual effects would have been aided by the new optical printing technology of the mid-1920s. The first acclaimed artists of the emergent amateur film movement were experimenters James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, who built their own optical printer in 1926-27 when making their debut production, The Fall of the House of Usher. With no indication this triptych was a commercial production, it feels at home in the milieu of 1920s avant-garde-meets-amateur cinema.
vimeo.com/1063317785
Modern Design (ca. 1941, 2:22) Provided by Chicago Film Archives
Two men (amateur filmmakers Robert Davis and Harry Hilfinger) lip sync to the song “Modern Design” by Johnny Messner and His Orchestra. [Enjoy it at Instagram.com/chicagofilmarchives.]
Veriu Vesne [I Believe in Spring] (Dir. Vladislav Tsukerman, 1962, 9:50) Courtesy of the filmmaker. Digitized by NYU Libraries. Introduced by Maria Vinogradova.
First-time director Slava Tsukerman made this prize-winning independent short with fellow students at the Moscow Institute of Construction and Engineering, where they founded an amateur film collective. He wrote a simple story of young love, told without dialogue. Tsukerman recalls shooting the film in April 1961, while cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was becoming the first human in outer space. Its success led to Tsukerman’s admission to Moscow’s famous film school, where he studied with no less than cinema pioneers Lev Kuleshov and Aleksandra Khokhlova. Later immigrating to New York, he made the cult film Liquid Sky (1982). Finding a pristine 35mm print in the Daniil Zheherun Collection (Cinema Plus, Moscow), historian of amateur cinema Maria Vinogradova reunited the filmmaker with his debut work.
Seductio ad Absurdum (Dir. Cynthia Childs, 1940, 24:26) Preserved by the Yale Film Archive
In June 1929, S.W. Childs married Cynthia Cheyney. The couple made a film documenting their wedding, titled The “Cynniewink” Sets Sail (1929), and beginning with this amusing wedding day portrait, a new production company was born. Under the “Cynniewink” banner (a portmanteau of Cynthia and Winkie), they created ambitious amateur productions including Seductio Ad Absurdum (1940), directed by Cynthia, about a wife’s daydream of infidelity on her anniversary. The film features an extensive cast, interior and exterior scenes, and the use of numerous in-camera editing techniques. Together, Winkie and Cynthia shared the work of directing, staging, and acting in their films, and their love was the catalyst for an impressive and fascinating trove of amateur cinema in the mid-20th century. vimeo.com/460173532
Back Alley Rip-Off (Dir. Don McIlvaine, 1970, 8:01) Provided by Chicago Film Archives
An unfinished narrative film by artist Don McIlvaine, shot in the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago with local actors. It follows two men that win a sweepstakes lottery, and the people who want to take the winning ticket from them (including a mobster and a man who wants to use the money to improve the neighborhood). The Art & Soul Gallery and several of McIlvaine’s murals can be seen. Back Alley Rip-Off is discussed briefly in Rebecca Zorach’s 2019 book Art for People’s Sake: Artists and Community in Black Chicago, 1965-1975. Zorach describes that McIlvaine “wrote a treatment and portion of a script and shot sample scenes” and that “the script is inspired both by local context and by the sense of possibility in Hollywood’s newfound interest in Black subject matter that spawned the blaxploitation trend.”
Shooting of the Girl on the Beach (Dir. Fred Strauss, ca. 1963, 4:35) Provided by Chicago Film Archives
Comedic amateur film made by Central Cinema Photographers club member Fred Strauss depicting the chaotic production of a film of a woman on a beach. Strauss humorously acts out all of the roles except for “The Girl” (played by Mary Ann Kuch). Stream at vimeo.com/534620044.
Find more information about Amateur Movie Day at amateurcinema.org/index.php/AMD
Note
* The Amateur Cinema Database also lists notable filmmakers John Harms (Stamford), Warren Levett (West Hartford), Bruce Lindsay (Windsor), John Riley (Newington), Edward McCarthy (Wetherfield), George Valentine (Glenbrook), Roy Wilcox (Meridan), W. R. C. Corson (Hartford), and Herman Dow and E. H. Sparks (Bristol).