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The
National Film Preservation Foundation awarded NHF $16,380
in June 2009 to preserve selections from three collections
of 8mm and 16mm film shot by American amateur filmmakers
from Maine: Raymond Cotton, Milton Dowe, and Adelaide Pearson.
Hiram Historical Society Collection Raymond Cotton
Home Movies
The Raymond Cotton films provide a portrait of
the rural town of Hiram, Maine, created between 1935 and
1939. Raymond Cotton was a grocery store owner, a blueberry
farmer and a member of the local fire department. He went
on to hold the post of Hiram’s town clerk for nearly
50 years. Through his deep involvement with the community,
recording births, marriages, and deaths, he became involved
with the Historical Society, eventually becoming the town
historian.
In 1939, while filming his wife
and daughter on the banks of a rain-swollen river, a dam
broke and swept them all away. Cotton survived, but his
wife and daughter drowned. He lost his camera in the harsh
waters and never filmed again.
Through an in-kind grant awarded
by Cineric, Inc., the New York film laboratory, Northeast
Historic Film preserved the first two reels of this collection,
March of Time and Fields
of Blue. New funding will preserve the remaining
two black and white 8mm reels (400 feet total), containing
Family Album, a series of intimate
portraits of Cotton’s family and friends in their
domestic life in and around Hiram, a compilation of snowplowing,
ice cutting, and log driving footage, and a play at the
Mt. Cutler School featuring Raymond Cotton’s daughter.
Raymond Cotton’s home movies
were donated to Northeast Historic Film in 2004 by the Hiram
Historical Society. (See MIR Winter 2006, Page 4.)
Palermo Historical Society Collection
Milton Dowe Home Movies
The collection of films created by Milton E. Dowe
serve as exemplary amateur moving images documenting the
social and civic activities of the community of Palermo,
Maine, and the surrounding towns between 1937 and 1954.
High-quality images of alewife harvesting during the fishes’
migration upstream, haying, local fairs and short, creative
productions employing trick photography and animation techniques
are edited together with descriptive intertitles by Dowe,
a well-known local historian. (See MIR Winter 2007, Page
1.)
Milton E. Dowe owned a grocery store
100 miles northeast of Hiram in Palermo, Maine. In 1954
Dowe published History of the Town of Palermo Incorporated
in 1804, and in 1996, the year he died, published Palermo,
Maine: Things That I Remember.
In all, Dowe produced nearly 3,400
feet (over 8 hours), of 8mm film. This grant provides for
the preservation of the first three reels or 450 feet, which
are all black and white. These reels include footage documenting
a vacation up river by canoe to cook a grand sausage and
bean supper, snowplowing with a Cletrac tractor, fire engulfing
various buildings and structures, followed by members of
the Maine Forest Service extinguishing a controlled forest
fire, and a small alewife fish harvesting operation.
Milton E. Dowe’s home movies
were donated to Northeast Historic Film in 2007 by the Palermo
Historical Society.
Adelaide Pearson Collection
The films of Adelaide Pearson provide a perspective
on people living in communities around the globe. Pearson,
a lifelong philanthropist and social progressive, dedicated
her life to the promotion of art and exploration of culture.
Traveling the world with her partner, Laura Paddock, Pearson
documented quotidian activities in Thailand, Guatemala,
Algeria, and Palestine from 1931-1940.
NFPF funds will be used to preserve
two color reels of Pearson’s 16mm films (800 feet).
Calcutta to Bangkok focuses on
the craft of local artisans, simultaneously offering a keen
eye on architecture and dress in 1930s Siam (Thailand).
The second film selected, Nice/North Africa,
captures a French street parade, dances, and some village
life in Algeria.
Adelaide Pearson’s home movies
were donated to Northeast Historic Film in 1997 by the Blue
Hill Public Library. 
Kimberly
Tarr, New York University
Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program
graduate, writes
While serving as a graduate student intern at
NHF during the summer of 2008 I was first introduced
to the Adelaide Pearson Collection. One of my
charges over the course of that summer was to
select archival gems to screen before features,
a staple in the Alamo Theatre known as the “Archival
Moment.” While searching for a clip one
week, I stumbled upon a 16mm color film featuring
Mahatma Gandhi. David Weiss, NHF Executive Director,
mentioned that the Pearson clip might very well
be the first known color footage of Gandhi. My
interest was immediately piqued: who was this
woman who traveled the world in the first three
decades of the twentieth century documenting her
adventures and how ever did she gain access to
modern India’s founder?
With access to her personal
papers – journals, scrapbooks, and other
ephemera – as well as the nearly 8,000 feet
of 16mm film held at NHF, I learned as much as
I could about the life and work of this largely
unknown amateur filmmaker. Working with my colleagues
at NHF, we applied for – and received –
a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation
to preserve 800 feet of Pearson’s films.
My research culminated in a Master’s thesis
at New York University and I was delighted to
share my findings at the 2009 NHF Summer Symposium
in a presentation entitled “‘Round
the World and Back Again: An Examination of the
Production and Exhibition of the Adelaide Pearson
Film Collection.” The newly preserved Pearson
films will debut in April at the Orphans Symposium,
where I look forward to sharing the life and work
of Adelaide Pearson. |
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Institute
of Museum and Library Services
Inequality in public education: the
Massachusetts legislature repealed the Racial Imbalance
Act of 1965, another decade of protests and maneuvers
followed. April 29, 1974, 16mm newsfilm frame enlargement,
WCVB TV Collection. |
The
Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded a National
Leadership Award of $487,681 for Advancing Digital Resources
to the WGBH Educational Foundation. The two-year grant will
support work by four partner organizations: Northeast Historic
Film, Cambridge Community Television, the Boston Public
Library, and the WGBH Media Library and Archives –
with the latter as the lead organization, creating the Boston
TV News Digital Library: 1960–2000. The project must
raise over $350,000 in cash matching funds.
We aim to develop the first online
resource offering a city’s commercial, noncommercial,
and community cable TV news heritage. The collaboration
will use, test, and demonstrate open source tools and create
an online library offering 40 years of urban moving image
materials, resulting in approximately 70,000 news records.
Karen Cariani, WGBH Media Library
& Archives, Tom Blake, Boston Public Library, Susan
Fleischmann, Cambridge Community Television, and Karan Sheldon,
Northeast Historic Film, are the organizational coordinators.
Consultants Steve Cohen, Tufts University Department of
Education, and Mark J. Williams, Dartmouth College Film
and Television, will advise the project.
Northeast Historic Film is looking
forward to the collaboration, which will help provide resources
for tackling the WCVB-TV Collection, almost
4 million feet of 16mm newsfilm from 1970-1979. From 1972
to 1975 the primary access point is the date it was shot.
Starting in 1976 most of the film cans contain an assignment
list; each of the estimated 1,500 assignment lists details
an average of 15 stories, of which maybe 9 were shot on
film.
Problem-solving with our peers will
give us the muscle to create descriptive records, clarify
legal issues, and expose the long-hidden documentary records
to the public. (See MIR Winter 2009,
Page 2.)
The Institute of Museum and Library
Services, a federal agency, announced this $17.9 million
round of National Leadership grants supporting 51 institutions
in October. The Boston TV News Digital Library was chosen
to appear at the top of the release. Anne-Imelda Radice,
IMLS Director, said, “We believe that museums and
libraries play an important role in building a competitive
workforce and engaged citizenry. We are equally confident
that these institutions will elevate museum and library
practice through this work.”
Davis Family Foundation
Our Davis Family Foundation funded project, Essential
Information: To Provide Better Service, $15,000 to support
electronic accessioning, will be completed in December.
Gemma Peretta, collections manager, working with Seth Kaufman,
creator of CollectiveAccess, an open source application,
planned and carried out the conversion to a new software
implementation.
With the accession module operating and a beta version of
a collection level descriptive module, we are well positioned
to begin our item level cataloging initiative.
In conjunction with the launch of our Website redesign in
the new year, we will premiere the new Online Collections
Guide, the front end of the CollectiveAccess database. Our
thanks to the Davis Family Foundation for having the vision
and generosity to help us get to this happy place.
Women’s Film Preservation Fund
Frame enlargement, Dream (1972), Jane
Morrison Collection. |
By
Gemma Perretta
In
October 2009 we finished a 2007 Women’s Film Preservation
Fund grant, completing the preservation of three films by
Maine filmmaker Jane Morrison. Dream
(1972), Fang Gang (1973) and Lipstick
’74 (1974) were all made on Super 8mm
film with magnetic sound tracks.
The preservation started at Brodsky
& Treadway in Rowley, Mass., where the sound was transferred
to 16mm full coat magnetic stock and Digital Audio Tape
(DAT). Chace Productions then used the DAT to create 16mm
optical sound track negatives and Cineric, Inc., created
new 16mm internegatives and sound release prints.
We have transferred the new 16mm
films to video and they are available in our study center
for viewing. While Morrison’s lengthier documentaries
and fiction films have been more widely screened, her Super
8mm works are a rich complement with intimacy unrivalled
by the larger productions. As such, they unquestionably
give us a better sense of who Jane Morrison was. Thanks
to the Women’s Film Preservation Fund for their generous
support and to our skilled preservation partners.
National
Science Foundation
Language Keepers
The National Science Foundation awarded NHF an initial grant
of $260,935 to support a project entitled “Advancing
Audio-visual Documentation of Passamaquoddy Group Discourse
with Archive Access via the Web as an Integrated Video and
Dictionary Database.” Ben Levine and Dr. Robert M.
Leavitt serve as Co-Principal Investigators on the grant
with NHF Executive Director David Weiss.
Language Keepers, the name by which
the project is known in the speaker community, addresses
a central dilemma in documenting endangered languages: the
decline and loss of public group discourse. The work continues
a Native-language documentation methodology developed in
the Passamaquoddy communities of Maine.
There are two components to the
new grant: First, the project uses the video documentation
itself as feedback to participants to stimulate reflection
and further discussion, creating a revived community dialog
in Passamaquoddy. Next, the existing conversational video
corpus of transcribed, translated, and subtitled “whole
conversations,” plus new conversations to be filmed,
will be reconceptualized as a nonlinear, Web accessed, video
database archive.
This video database will be linked
to the existing online dictionary database. Viewers will
then be able to create clusters of video and dictionary
entries that contextualize the meaning of an item, conveying
deeper cultural and linguistic understanding. This resource
makes the linguistic complexity of Passamaquoddy more accessible
and enables the development of innovative materials for
teacher training, language learning, and research.
For more information please see
www.languagekeepers.org
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