Experimenting in circles: Agfa, amateur cinema, and the art of R&D

Focusing on small-gauge film technology, the article moves from 16 mm film practices to develop a twofold exploration of film and camera as conceptually interlinked in what we term a mutual cycle of experimentation. In this interesting dynamics, the industrial complex’ influences are negotiated by the filmmakers’ creativity, leading to the production of relevant yet unresearched experiments. Italian filmmaker Ubaldo Magnaghi’s city symphonies provide a rather illustrative example: active in the early 1930s as an independent filmmaker, between 1930 and 1933 he produced 5 films sponsored by Agfa, who was expanding its market in Italy. Symphony of Life and Work (1933), the most astonishing film of this series, was rewarded with the first prize in the first experimental and amateur film contest at the Venice Biennale in 1934. Magnaghi’s experimental films were thought to stress the material resistance of cameras (an Agfa Movex 30) and the filmstock (Agfa Isopan reverse), and they were meant to promote Agfa technology, to the extent that even the projector Agfa Movector was mentioned in the credits of each film as an integral part of the promotional technical equipment. The article will shed light on the affordances offered to the filmmaker both in terms of the specificities of the film stock and of the camera involved in the production process. Such a virtuous cycle connecting production and creativity is metaphorically reinforced on the aesthetics level in Magnaghi’s film, characterised by a reiterated circling camera movement. In fact, these formal circles made evident extreme gestures of bodily adaptation to the Agfa Movex 30 ergonomics (with a highly innovative oval shape), meant to expand the range of its operability and to stress the industrial improbability of its technical components. Inspired by this, we aim at crafting a study that assembles the various components of the filmmaker’s work in a rounded film experience, underlining the nature of small-gauge cinema as a non-neutral yet empowering practice able to create a complex room for critical analysis eliciting new ways of looking, problematizing and therefore thinking reality.