Home Cinema and the Typologies of Film Reduction

Reduction copies of American and European films came into existence together with the beginning of the small gauge format. The Pathé Kok and Edison Kinetoscope copies of works originally shown on 35mm brought these films back to (commercial) life in the setting of the home theatre. Film producers made use of small gauge formats to prolong the commercial life of their films. This strategy experienced a great boom in the post-war period (starting in the 1950s) as the amateur film market was flooded with reduction copies of mainstream films. Amateurs purchased and screened these films in their home theatres and sometimes even appropriated them in their own films.

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