Moving Image Review Online • Symposium 2010

SYMPOSIUM 2010
Filmic Representations of Indigenous Peoples
Friday, July 23 – Saturday, July 24

By Symposium 2010 Committee

Scholars, particularly during the last two decades, have sought to understand cultural representations of Indigenous peoples. In Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Culture, anthropologist Elizabeth Bird explains that when we seek to understand popular constructions of the Native more clearly, we are then better able to counter the mythmaking process and transform those representations.
    The 2010 Northeast Historic Film Summer Symposium will explore how amateur and noncommercial filmmakers around the world have created a wide range of representations regarding Indigenous peoples and cultures. We are interested in presentations focusing on interpretations of moving images that will improve our historical, cultural, global and critical understanding of how filmmakers working outside of the mainstream have been informed by, contributed to, and countered popular representations of Indigenous peoples.
    Potential topics include, but are not
limited to:
• Travel films and their audiences
• Defining the Indigenous
• Documenting lost languages and
     practices
• Privacy and informed consent
• Self-documentation
• Indigenous peoples as filmmakers
• Issues of the sacred and profane
• Native Independent Media
• Screening practices
• Oral narratives and life histories
• Ethnographic films
• Control and definition of the image
• Repatriation of records
• Rights of the “subject”
• Ethnomusicology and visual representation

Symposium 2009
For information on the participants and topics of Ways of Watching, the 2009 Symposium, please visit www.oldfilm.org.

NHF board member Jim Henderson, Bjørn Sørenssen and Cecila Mörner.

Cinematographer at Taos Pueblo, circa 1910-1920. Western History/Genealogy Dept., Denver Public Library.

      The NHF Summer Symposium is a multi-disciplinary gathering devoted to the history, theory, and preservation of moving images. Typically, presentations are 45 minutes, followed by 15 minutes of discussion. The symposium is open to archivists, artists and scholars from all disciplines. NHF houses a 125-seat cinema with 35mm, 16mm, videotape, and DVD projection. We especially encourage presentations that include interesting moving images.
       We prefer e-mail submissions. Please send 250-500 word abstracts outlining your paper ideas to the symposium organizers at the address below. We are happy to discuss your presentation ideas with you in advance of a formal submission. The Symposium Program Committee (Snowden Becker, Univ. of Texas, Janna Jones, Northern Arizona University and Mark Neumann, Northern Arizona University) will begin reviewing proposals on April 1, 2010.
     Please email questions and submissions to NHF2010@gmail.com

Learning from the Symposium: Discovering Grängesberg

By Virginia Wright

The picture shows the entrance of the Grängesberg archive. In the background, enlarged frames of a 9.5 mm film from 1932.

Here is how they collect and preserve films in Sweden: The head of the one-year-old national film archive appears on a broadcast of Sveriges Television just before the popular weather forecast and promises viewers DVD copies of any collections they donate. Within weeks, the archives is swamped with amateur film. An important source of knowledge about the people of Sweden in the 20th century is born.
    “We took in hundreds of films – one million meters of footage,” Tommie Hildman, director of the Film Archive in Grängesberg, said of that 2004 effort. Today the archive has three to four times that amount and is tended by a staff of seventeen working in a rehabilitated iron miners’ shower building. Its annual budget is $1 million.
    We learned about the Film Archive in Grängesberg from Dr. Cecilia Mörner, the head of media and communication studies in the School of Humanities and Media Studies at Sweden’s Dalarna University College. In July, Mörner attended our Summer Symposium, where she spoke about her study of home movie collections, part of a project aimed at improving collaboration between the Grängesberg archive and the Swedish Film Institute, which oversees it.
    During her stay in Bucksport, Mörner and a colleague, Bjørn Sørenssen, an art and media studies professor from Trondheim, Norway, toured NHF and compared notes on our facility and those at Grängesberg and Mo i Rana, Norway. “We agreed that everything looks more fancy in Grängesberg and Mo i Rana,” Mörner writes via email. “They are bigger, the equipment is brand new, there are more people and so on. Still, it seemed to us that so much more is going on in Bucksport. The symposium is one example: We think that it is great that the archive cooperates with scholars in this way. We were also impressed by the amount of DVD films that have been produced at the archive, by the lovely theatre and by the fact that the staff seemed to be so creative, skilled
and devoted.”

Börje Risberg, a film technician, working at one of two CTM Debrie film scanners.

Sweden, The Way it Was
Hildman tells us the Grängesberg archives was founded in 2003 to fulfill a government initiative to collect, preserve and make accessible noncommercial, nonfiction films documenting Swedish life between 1930 and 1980. The collection comprises 16mm, 8mm and 9.5mm films. There is no videotape – at least, not yet. Hildman expects Grängesberg will accept video someday.
    Most of the archives’ moving images come from museums, companies, and institutions and include industrial films showing, for example, the manufacture of boats, bicycles, cars, and trucks. “These movies show how Swedes lived and what Sweden looked like fifty years ago,” Hildman says. The archives accepts home movies provided they are 1930s-40s vintage, chronicle many decades in a family’s life or document subjects of broad interest among Swedes.
    While Grängesberg and NHF share a dedication to film preservation, they differ in their focus and scope, Mörner observes. The Grängesberg archives includes films from all over Sweden. NHF is a regional archives and, unlike Grängesberg, it collects both commercial and amateur moving images in a wide range of formats. “Another big difference of course is that Grängesberg has 100 percent government funding, which is a great advantage in many respects,” Mörner writes. “On the other hand, it means that the archives is totally dependent on the grant and, thus, on the willingness of the politicians. If the government would decide to withdraw the grant, the archive would collapse immediately. That is not likely to happen in Bucksport.”

Ways of Watching
Charged with gauging the academic value of Grängesberg home movies, Mörner chose eight collections from Västmanland County in central Sweden and analyzed their most prominent themes. The examination presented a quandary: How could she know for certain if a film documented, say, the lifestyle of a pair of left-wing green revolutionaries if she didn’t know who made the films and why? Her subsequent interviews with all but one of the filmmakers changed her initial interpretations of the movies’ content and characters. She detailed her findings at our Summer Symposium, whose theme was Ways of Watching. (As for those presumed green revolutionaries, their back-to-the-land activities reflected religious beliefs, not environmental concerns.)
    Mörner continues to pursue her studies into the slippery meanings of private movies. Next fall, she will interview donors of films depicting harmonious family life in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, “a period when the nuclear family was criticized and challenged in the media, not least in Swedish films.”