Amateur Film and Video
I’ve been experimenting with film and video since 2020. I work primarily with super 8mm and have begun hand-processing my films. I use the word amateur to describe my practice as a way of reclaiming a personal relationship to visual aesthetics within a culture saturated by mass media. Though the work is not separate from the images I’ve consumed, amateur signals a refusal of profit-driven ends, treating the medium as a playground for reworking influence and forming alternative associations. It also embraces my low cinematic tastes, including the horror genre and media with explicit and coded queer references. As the avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren once said, “‘[A]mateur’ has an apologetic ring. But that very word—from the Latin amateur—‘lover’—means one who does something for the love of the thing rather than for economic reasons or necessity.”