First, this has been a really amazing collection of clips, and a great experiment as a way to get people viewing and talking about amateur footage. We need to find a way to do this all the time. I'm not even kidding. Second, Snowden, thank you for your generous words! I'm not sure I deserve them, but I appreciate the support. I think you raise some fundamental questions about amateur film, and while I don't presume to have answers, I've found all your posts thought-provoking enough to hazard some guesses here. My approach to this material comes out of my dissatisfaction with the "official" views of the fair. I was interested in the perceptual experience of the fair, and home movies answered these questions for me in a way no other record had up to that point. So I was guided by the subject matter, but also by the films' style. (I think I may be outside the party in that regard - whereas most people try to ignore the standard home movie style to get to what is being shot, I'm focused on how they're shooting whatever it is they're looking at. But maybe I'm wrong. I'd love to hear other examples of people investigating home movie style in a similar way - and not as in the relation of amateur footage to Hollywood, but as you say, why parades are so popular etc.) I'm intrigued by the striking similarity of these films more than anything. Which is to say, they all suffer from the same kinds of "mistakes" and I see that as evidence of the effect of the space of the fairground on the individual. That's how I came to find myself counting splices and mapping the routes people took through the fairgrounds. But this is a very specific case study, and perhaps not all that useful to others in approaching amateur film. And then of course there's Cyrus. I didn't set out to find "the best", (as I say above, I was really interested in how they were all the same) but it jumped out at me. My jaw dropped from the opening shots. It was clearly that different. And this has then set me off on another path - figuring out who he was, what his other films were, why he was making them when he did, but then stopped, etc. And I think this is perhaps a partial answer as to how we move forward. We have the luxury of so much of this material surviving (as opposed to say, early cinema) but that doesn't mean we have to all approach it in the same way. Hopefully what we do will intrigue and interest others, who will then seek out their own projects, and the mining will be done in many different directions simultaneously. Maybe that's too haphazard for some, but it doesn't strike me as all that different from the rest of film studies. And, I should say, it *does* matter to me that we talk about these as films. And more than that, that we are as technically specific as possible. For example, it matters to me to know that a film was shot on 8mm versus 16mm, because I think it is relevant to understanding the film's style. Of course there are many factors that affect a film's form, but whether you are lugging around a 16mm camera in 1939, versus an 8mm matters. As does knowing (or deducing) the use of a tripod, the kind of film and how it was manipulated (magazine or no? switching between black and white? lots of splicing or are those stops and starts of the camera? etc.) As to how many films I've seen, I'm not even sure. Dozens, probably? Not yet a hundred. The great boon of the collections at NHF was being able to see all the work of one filmmaker, because then it was easier to see a style emerge, which then either was sustained at the fair or, more likely, was blown all to hell when they got in that crazy scene. I *do* love world's fairs. But that's because they're a lot like parades. (only better ;)