The Lumières' first screening of moving pictures in 1895 featured home movies of parents feeding their toddler. But the centennial of cinema has glorified nationalist narrative-whether of the U.S. or France-and exterminated all other cinemas as alien. Exiled from the centennial, the hundred-year history of amateur film exposes a pivotal cultural struggle over who creates images. Amateur film reborders cinema more democratically. It migrates away from high art monasticism into confrontational activism about media access. As transnational corporations flood the world, the local and amateur can offer spaces not just for consumer markets, but for re-imaginings. Amateur films register how identities are nationalized, engendered, and fantasized. They retaliate against the distorted blackouts of official history with unfinished memory: facts divulge psychic fantasies, fantasies unmask realities. To screen amateur films publicly suggests siding with the fragment over the narrative spectacle, the accessible over the impossible, everyday sloppy images over Hollywood's slick delusions. Tonight's amateur films curated from the Pacific Film Archive Collection reclaim public space for amateur films-affirming their importance in rethinking the centennial.-Patricia Zimmermann The PFA's collection of amateur films ranges from home movies shot by PFA Director Edith Kramer's father to turn-of-the-century footage of Sutro Baths; travel films of Hawaii, China, and around the Cape; and home movies with glimpses of Lon Chaney, Derek Jarman, Buster Keaton, and Alma Spreckels. Patricia Zimmermann is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana, 1995), and Professor, Department of Cinema and Photography, Ithaca College.