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Dissertation im Rahmen des DOC-Tearn-Projektes ,Doing Amateur Film' Ziel des Projekts ist die Aufarbeitung, Kontextualisierung und Analyse weitgehend unbearbeiteter Archivbestiinde an osterreichischen Amateurfilmen sowie die Akquise von bisher völlig unbekannten Sammlungen aus Privatbesitz. This dissertation will explore crucial aesthetic modes of amateur filmmaking from its beginning in the late 1920s to its displacement caused by video technology in the 1980s. Rather than providing a complete diachronic and linear historiography of Austrian amateur cine activity, this thesis will establish spotlights – understood as modes that comprise and express specific aesthetic and social functions – to grasp the different usages and aesthetics over the decades. As both leisure time and amateur film culture were part of the rapid development of modern society it is about to clarify how the media practices incorporated and reflected the ambiguity of modern leisure time experience. Filming allows one to register, order and re-organize the lived reality in all its disorder and complexity, the medium enables a transposition of vulnerable aspects of life into a tolerable narration. Therefore, amateur filmmaking might be considered a practice that shapes, transforms and defines the experiences and ideas of leisure time, and the film itself leaves traces as potentially material expressions of these previous expectations and immediate experiences. (Sandra Ladwig)