An image of a family watching a home movie about a child and a dog playing accompanies these lines in Kodak's promotion of lightweight cine equipment to British audiences in early 1929. With her bobbed hair and a low-necked printed dress, the eponymous Helen epitomises the young, modern female cine user. She embodies the ambivalence of womanhood in a new age of consumerism and represents the ambiguities of interwar middle class femininity. Kodak's advertising strategy promises the transformative power of consumption; evolving visual technologies make filming possible – even for women. Helen side-steps male incredulity and the challenges of childcare without nanny or governess support to invite Punch's readers into a domestic world where movie-making routinely helps ‘to keep the family together’ (Anon. 1929b) and safeguard ‘youth, colour, frolic, movement – stolen intact from time’ (Anon. 1931a: 3).

Helen, like other fictive women amateur filmmakers, recurs in Kodak's outreach to an early female amateur market: ‘Simply to hold this beautiful instrument – elegant as a jewel case, compact as a novel, is to begin to feel the thrill of making movie pictures’ (ibid.). Language and imagery construct prospective users and target purchasers, emphasising the equipment's apparent feminised suitability and appeal via jargon-free terms (‘the hidden motor [that] begins to purr’) and ‘wonderfully easy’ operation (of ‘the little trigger’) that is stress-free and ‘thrilling’ (ibid.). Fortunately for Kodak's sales, camera use expanded beyond the drawing-room world evoked by these colour advertisements, and cine film's visual novelty attracted broader female interest. This book examines how that outreach occurred; where and how women made and showed their films; and what those experiences reveal about the women holding the cameras and the profoundly changing twentieth-century world they captured on screen. As taboos and patriarchal structures receded, societal and geo-political changes enabled and necessitated women to live, work and behave differently from their predecessors. At home and abroad, their self-expression and social purpose found fresh outlets via amateur filmmaking, the newest branch of photography.