BHS/WABI Collection
The majority of Northeast Historic Film's collections of moving images consists of regional film and videotape from Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont. Included are collections from local television stations dating from the 1950s to the 1990s, industrial films, silent dramas and independent works. A particularly strong emphasis is placed on amateur films and home movies.
Home movies are an important cultural and historical record that were too often neglected in the past. Not only do home movies offer intimate glimpses of family activities, they also capture unique events and places long gone.
Northeast Historic Film has been a leader in raising an awareness of the need to preserve these films and make them accessible.
WCSH Collection
Thanks to a National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) grant, the majority of NHF's television newsfilm collections are now accessible to the public. Awarded in 2000, the NHPRC grant provided the funds necessary to catalog and create accessible video copies of four decades of television footage. Produced by stations in Bangor, Lewiston, Portland and Presque Isle, the images in these collections constitute Maine's surviving television record from the period 1953 to 1996. They depict events that are locally, nationally and even globally significant. From urban renewal in Bangor to the controversial 1965 Clay-Liston heavyweight bout in Lewiston, these stories preserve a sense of how Mainers lived in the second half of the 1900s.
The Goodall Summertime: The Story of Warm
Weather Profits, Goodall Mills Collection
The moving image collections at Northeast Historic Film also contain many industrial works created by and for corporate and industrial entities. The newly-preserved Goodall Mills Collection consists of 16mm industrial films which document the Sanford Mills and Goodall Worsted Company in Sanford, Maine. Included in the collection is The Goodall Summertime: The Story of Warm Weather Profits (1932). Framed around a fictional story about the owner of a menswear shop eager to increase sales, the film describes the manufacturing process and gives tips on how to market and sell the company's Palm Beach Suit. A 2002 grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) allowed for new negatives and release prints to be created from the original elements in the collection.
photo courtesy Mary Kelly
and the Stewart Family
The amateur collections at Northeast Historic Film contain edited and unedited home movies, as well as the home movies of professional cinematographers.
Within these collections is the Archie Stewart Collection, which consists of 174 reels of 16mm reversal film and 19 videotapes. An active member of the Amateur Cinema League (ACL), aeronautics enthusiast and second-generation Buick salesman, Archie Stewart (1902-1998) began shooting 16mm film in 1926. Stewart recorded his automobile business with the life of garage workers, salesroom activities, auto shipments, and the family's new cars. Unlike most amateur filmmakers, who continued to shoot silent film, around Christmas 1935 he acquired a 16mm sound camera and used it to document family activities. In 1937 he also published one of the first articles on amateur sound in the ACL magazine Movie Makers. The Archie Stewart Collection at Northeast Historic Film contains over 75,000 feet of 16mm film.