Northeast Historic Film hosts discussion of home movies and amateur film

Poets of Their Own Acts: Personal Film 1916-1960 Transcript of screening and discussion with curators and historians held at Northeast Historic Film,

Bucksport, Maine, on May 16, 2012

Vimeo excerpts here, http://filmlandscape.tumblr.com/

Participants: Henry Adams, Case Western Reserve; Steve Bromage, Maine Historical Society; Liz Coffey, Harvard Film Archive; Susan Danly, Portland Museum of Art; Sian Evans, media producer; Michael Grillo, University of Maine; Erik Jorgensen, Maine Humanities Council; Michael Komanecky, Farnsworth Art Museum; Judy McGeorge, friend of Northeast Historic Film; Rob Nanovic, ex-collections manager, Northeast Historic Film; Mark Neumann, Northern Arizona University; Sarah Ruddy, Strand Theatre; Michael Simon, retired scholar; Earle Shettleworth, Jr., Maine Historic Preservation Commission; Toni Treadway, Little Film; Tricia Welsch, Bowdoin College; David Williams, friend of Northeast Historic Film; Steve Wurtzler, Colby College.

Karan Sheldon: I’m Karan Sheldon, one of the co-founders of Northeast Historic Film and I’m really grateful that you’re here. .... We’re looking for your opinion, your input, your experience. I want to give special thanks to The Golden Rule Foundation because they got us this far. Without a small grant from The Golden Rule Foundation we wouldn’t have been able to spend the year thinking about was this even possible? Thank you to the foundation and also thank you to the team, that includes Sarah Ruddy who helped us get--Sarah, newly Ph.D.’d, first thing [applause]--and new staff member at The Strand Theatre in Rockland. That’s a delightful thing. That team that got off the ground about a year ago includes Justin Wolff. Justin is an art historian who is at the University of Maine and he has a colleague here, Michael Grillo.

Michael Grillo: And he’s newly tenured. [applause]

Karan: You didn’t even say anything about that. Libby Bischof from USM, who will be joining us later today, she emailed me last night. And Michael Komanecky from the Farnsworth Art Museum. We’re going to do a short intro and orientation and then really the day is yours. What we’re doing is we are looking at amateur films, personal films, family films, and what we are preparing to do is to interpret them, make them available to the public in the very first fine arts museum exhibition of personal film. It hasn’t been done before. We are looking at the end of the photochemical era as many of you know, that’s now past. We have here a number of people to whom that’s very present because they are trained as film archivists and when we do our introductions people will talk about that. But I think the public also is aware they are now dealing with a digital environment rather than a photochemical environment. What the exhibition would do is allow the public to see what they couldn’t otherwise see because all of these personal films are unique materials, they are what ran through the camera. There are not copies, they haven’t been distributed. We think the audience will find this pleasurable and probably very surprising. So what you can do today is help us think about how to tell the story to the public. And we think it’s a big story. One of the thing that’s interesting to us is that there have been a lot of vernacular still photo shows and many of you might have seen them: they are really big, they are popular, they have beautiful catalogs, it’s a thing. But amateur film has not followed in that way although we are seeing that amateur film is used in fine arts museum contexts in other shows like in Maine Moderns there was 16mm film, which people enjoyed, projected on the wall. And if any of you have been to The Steins Collect at The Metropolitan Museum they’re using film very effectively, people sit down they watch it, they move on. It’s appearing in museums. But what they’re not doing is there’s been no exhibition looking closely at the works themelves. So that’s where we’re turning, what we think is doors beginning to open, and we want you to think about how would the public look these works themselves. Their materiality and the technology that informed what was possible to make them. We’ve begun to envision an installed exhibition, possibly a catalog, and Justin is responsible for helping us think that through and because it’s unavoidable these days, associated online elements. We’re a year in and several years to go. You’re here to help us think about it from the beginning. So today we’re going to talk about the creators’ aesthetic intent, and

Poets of Their Own Acts: Personal Film 1916-1960 Discussion Transcript

Karan Sheldon, [email protected] 1

http://filmlandscape.tumblr.com

http://filmlandscape.tumblr.com

what about our public audiences, what do they want to know about the amateur world and their twentieth century vision and how that manifested itself. I’m not going to go into a lot of history of Northeast Historic Film, although some of you are new to us here today, you’ll find out from our staff members and we’ll do another tour if you missed it. We’ve been amateur film since 1986 and it made its way into the curriculum in Maine so two generations of Maine students now have seen amateur film because of Maine Studies and Native Studies, starting in 4th grade everybody sees the work that went through this archive. From Stump to Ship is canonical now. But what’s different about today is that take has been fully evidentiary, people have only been thinking about are you capturing at the time the film is made. The teachers will talk about the point of view, but they’re really talking about the evidentiary value and very few people are talking about what is the aesthetic language, what is the visual language that’s being used. So this is a significant turn and some of the people who are helping begin this include Steve Wurtzler from Colby. I saw a wonderful paper he gave at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies on introducing amateur film in film theory classes with individuals. I haven’t told Steve this but I did hear from people that this is great, I’ll do it, and I also felt resistance from some people. So it’s not a given at this point. We have 400 amateur film collections here. There’s a lot to draw on. We have the Kattelle technology collection which is one of the world’s best collections of amateur cameras, projectors and related technology. Thanks to Toni Treadway, who helped connect us to Alan Kattelle, who we lost in the last few years. Also to Rob Nanovic who was on the staff bringing the collection in. There are people to talk to about that if you’re interested. We have a really important collection of the journals from the time, the how-to manuals and you probably saw on the tour that’s deep and people may want to see some of that. Today we’re going to look at about a dozen examples: 28mm, 16 and 8, and I want to underline our ground rules, which are that we do not add any internal edits. We think that people should be seeing excerpts as they were edited by the people who created the film. You will see some short clips but we haven’t taken anything out of them and we haven’t added anything to them, they are not edited in any way that is different from the way they were made in 1925 or in 1938. They’re all silent. We do have very very very early sound but we’re not going to be showing those today, it’s another topic. We’re very concerned about the aspect ratio, so we’re going to be showing the films in the 4:3, which is the square like the screen you saw out there, not the 19:6 that things are mostly are made in [now]. I’m now going to turn this over to Michael and Justin to frame some of the questions and to share why they’re interested in this and then we will go right into a 1915 amateur film, which we are projecting from 35[mm] because it’s been preserved. And then we’re going to pause after we see that, it’s about four minutes, for you to introduce yourselves to each other and tell us why you’re interested in this and what you hope to learn or challenge us with. We’re not amplifying in the room, we’re recording, so please speak up and before you say anything please say your name, “David Williams--Why are you showing me this rubbish?” Each time you speak please say your name because I’m going to be the transcriptionist and I know you but I know that I may not get it right. Michael Komanecky, who is the Chief Curator at the Farnsworth Art Museum, who kindly met us twice over the winter, super busy as are all people in museums and all the places that you came from. He has an interest in film and he’s an incredibly generous and I have to say brave man to be doing this.

Michael Komanecky: Thanks, Karan. As I’m sure all of you can recognize Karan is very thoughtful, knowledgeable and highly organized in the material that she’s brought to this project. When she and Sian came, I was immediately intrigued by the idea of doing an exhibition of some sort based on amateur film. And I’m going to digress slightly to talk about my own involvement with film which has indeed been as an amateur. In the course of my research over the years only recently have I begun to delve into film with a study which I hope to turn into a book about the images of America’s missions of the Southwest and how they’ve been portrayed in American art and popular culture. One of those means in popular culture is film. From the beginning of silent film in early, 1910 and onward, a number of films have been made at the missions. D.W. Griffith brought his troupe to California in 1910 and among the very first films he made, five were shot at various California missions, which held a tremendous position and prominence in Californians’ view of themselves and their history. So I was introduced to looking at D.W. Griffith’s films of the missions as well as one of his early films based on an immensely popular 19th century novel called Ramona, which he made into a film in 1910 starring the 17-year-old Mary Pickford. The missions served as a kind of a backdrop to that. I somehow got involved in looking at film and trying to understand what they represented as a means of explicating various aspects of American culture. That remains my interest. It has to do with how we receive and interpret these kinds of images and for me in a larger context of American art. When Karan



came to the Farnsworth with this idea along with Sian I was intrigued because of simply the notion of what these kinds of images could tell us but the almost immediate challenge that presented itself to us was the Farnsworth would be interested in this project because our mission is to celebrate Maine’s role in American art, which is a very broad one given the importance of the artists who have worked in Maine over a period of more than two centuries and continue to work here. I can’t speak to the filmmakers who might have done that, but I can certainly speak to painters and photographers and sculptors. But our mission is unspokenly tied to the idea of certain questions of quality. If someone had come to me with a proposal to do an exhibition on amateur painting of 1910 to 1940 I would say thanks very much but that really wouldn’t interest us. Immediately the issue of what these films are about and who made them and what the intent behind the maker or intents, because surely there’s not a single intent in the making of these films and the questions of the audience for whom they were made. They weren’t made not to be seen; they were made to be seen by somebody. So I said, you know, who knows where this might lead and after seeing a number of the films posted on the website, I said you know this is pretty interesting stuff. I don’t know what we’re going to make of it and we ought to find a way of bringing other voices into the conversation about what it is you do with this material. We’ve gotten to the point thanks to Karan’s work about a way of presenting the material in the galleries, how you would install and present it to the public and that part I’m confident that is the easy thing to sort out. I’m confident that we would get a great reception from the public because so many people have grown up with these films either making them or being in them, so there’s something that connects to their everyday lives, much as photography does because, especially today, everybody can take a photograph. Take out your phone and you can make one. So there’s a more immediate connection to people’s lives than other kinds of art making. Not everybody paints. Not everybody sculpts. Not everybody makes prints. The media of photography, and especially today, film and video are ubiquitous. Everybody anywhere can do it. So I said, You know, there’s something here. I don’t quite know what it is yet but that’s why I’m here today to see how this discussion might be shaped. I’m optimistic about going ahead with the project, hence the conversations about what might be written about the subject, quickly evolved and that too is a reason for having you here today to decide in various ways what one might say about these things to bring this material to the attention of a much broader audience, both public and academic. So I’ll leave it at that.

Justin Wolff: I’m Justin Wolff and I will be brief because I’m really excited to hear today what you all have to say about this material to help me think about it. And I’m the modernist art historian at the University of Maine but my research is on American art in both the 19th and 20th centuries and I’ve just finished a book on Thomas Hart Benton, the regionalist painter, and when Karan first approached me about this project my initial thought was that I would have something to say about the notion of region and regionalism and how that played out in these amateur films. But Karan kept asking me questions over email and in person and by telephone about the aesthetics of these films. As she said in her opening statement that amateur film along with amateur photographs have largely been used as or seen as a form of evidence. And that for a museum exhibition we really needed to theorize and think about the aesthetic issues that are at play in these moving images. And so with some prodding Karan really got me out of the regionalist question, which is still very important of course, I think to the exhibition and to the catalog, and to continue to think about aesthetic questions. So my role so far has been and will continue to be to think about the aesthetics and then to hopefully write an essay for the catalog and that’s something else that really intrigued me about this project and I need to say this, we talked about this with Michael and Jane Bianco at the Farnsworth, the opportunity for a really unique kind of publication, perhaps and in fact I hope, something online because of, I think it’s fair to say, that the cost would be less than producing a book and also because of course you’re talking about moving images and to have embedded videos in the catalog, to put something up online that can really model for other museums what an online catalog might look like and that’s related to this project but it’s almost a kind of an ancillary issue. But it really intrigues me. I think scholarly publishing is in a serious crisis right now and in particular in Art History with the cost of books, both the cost to buy them and the cost to produce them, of course. But back to the aesthetic question and I’ll end on this note, what really strikes me in having watched these films now here in this theater and through the DVDs that Karan has been sending around is the paradoxical quality of these films, which many other scholars have noted. And the way that I would frame it is to refer to it is a kind of strange intimacy, if you will. Because on the one hand these films are very intimate and they bring us into close contact with activities, with lives, with customs and fashions that we all recognize, whether our own present lives or through whatever historical photographs we have in our



possession. And there seems to be a kind of immanence and closeness, the films really bring people and places to life and bring us into a very intimate contact with them. At the same time, though, working against that is this sort of estranging quality of these films that has to do of course with the historic look, the imperfections of the films, the odd speeds and movements of the figures as they’re captured on film. And it’s really quite strange and miraculous and almost magical and it makes the films even as they’re recognizable and bring out certain nostalgia they also make them seem very peculiar and strange. And so there’s a sort of closeness and this faraway quality of the films and you’ll see this as you watch them today. You’ll feel simultaneously that you know what you’re seeing but that what you’re seeing also seems very far away in time and place. And so there’s this problem, I think, at the heart of the aesthetics. I mean in that how do we then explain that quality of these films along with other qualities of the films? How do we explain that quality of the films in the way that we exhibit them and the way that we write about them for a public? This isn’t, we’re not writing a book on theory of amateur film. This is an exhibition for the public so these ideas have to be made accessible, they have to be relevant. That’s really what I want to hear about, how do we take these theoretical questions and make them popular, appealing. And then I‘ll just close on this note, that one, I think, way of doing that of course, is to point the viewers to the relationship between the amateur films that are featured in this exhibition and our own very new experience of making amateur video with all of our new devices, our iPhones, our digital video recorders, YouTube and this whole notion that our private lives now are there to be filmed and put up for other people to see. So that’s one hook, I think, for bringing people into contact with this material. That the impulse of these filmmakers is very similar to impulses that we all are intimate with today. To capture our family moments and so I think that connecting today’s technology--obviously it’s digital--but connecting the revolution of today’s technology to the accessibility of film to the public in the first part of the 20th century will be really important for this project. That’s why I’m here and those are some of our interests and hopefully we can discuss that further as we look at the films.

Karan: Thank you. Libby?

Libby Bischof: I’m Libby and this is Gus; he’s three weeks old so he comes where I go. Karan asked me to be a part of this I think some time last summer. I teach History at the University of Southern Maine. I’m a 19th and 20th century historian. Most of my work is in modernism and friendship and how friendship informs cultural production so I’m really interested in how people’s relationships inform what they make: artists, writers, and other folk. I do a lot of New England history, I teach a lot of Maine History at USM and do a lot of public history as well. Film became sort of more...I write a lot about photography more than anything, but film and home movies became more interesting when Susan Danly and I curated Maine Moderns at the Portland Museum of Art last summer and we had this great film from Clarence White, the son of the pictorialist photographer, that was made in the twenties and thirties, and right around this time period, and we included it in the show as sort of historical context so people could really see what the midcoast was like in the twenties and thirties when all of these modernists were coming up and we premiered the film at a talk that I gave at the Bath Library and there were, Earle you were there that day. There were a good amount of people there.

Earle Shettleworth: The room was full.

Libby Bischof: People were fascinated with the film. It was a nine-minute clip, people were just completely transfixed, and they were mumbling back and forth and talking to each other. “I remember the steamship, I remember when that came down or that looks just the same as it did now.” And I think the intimacy and the immediacy of film and triggering that nostalgia and that connection for people is really important, so for me my interest in this project is the personal connections that people feel with it, how people used film in their daily lives, why these men and women took these home movies. Were they just acts of preservation? Were they acts of preservation, or were they keys to their own memory so that they could come back to these and pass them down through family members? With, when I got involved this project with Karan I also got involved in their World’s Fair film project that they were doing with the Eastman House and the Queens Museum of Art and I was teaching a World’s Fair class and my students worked a lot with the World’s Fair film also from this same time period. It was amazing using it in the classroom. That’s another thing that really interests me: historians are so text bound, right? And I at least delve into images a little bit more, but I think



film, and amateur film especially, especially the work films that you’ll see are just so underused and under accessed. It’s really amazing primary sources for students and educators and I think that’s another thing that can really be brought out here because the classroom just sort of comes alive; you can talk all you want about the New York World’s Fair and I took my students to Queens and we walked around but to see Earle’s dad’s movies as they’re going and you could totally see where Earle came from cause your dad took pictures of buildings all the time. You can really see a person’s legacy, it’s kind of amazing how interested he was in architecture and then how you are and everyone from Maine whose films we had made sure to go to the Maine Building and take the requisite shot of that. “We came all the way here and we’re back in Maine.” That really fascinates me what the film reveals about the maker as well, so I’m interested in the regional aspect and the personal reasons for making these. They’re magical and it’s funny in a modern classroom where you’re trying to keep the attention of your students and they’re used to loud and fast movies with amazing digital shots. To sort of...they’ll sit there and watch silent film of trout fishing in Maine or on the steamer coming up, some of those earliest Maine films bringing up the wooden lobster pot or digging for worms or making ice or the spud one, is my favorite. But it’s amazing how it will bring peple into the material in an entirely new way and I think it will play that way in a museum setting as well. That is our interest. Gus might provide a little...what do you have to say about it? You can’t even see. I’m excited about what people have to say about them today and excited to have you watch them. Some of them are really incredible. And we had very visceral reactions, Justin and I, when we sat and watched these the first time, to some of them. I think that’s interesting too, how people have emotional reactions. Euh, that’s creepy, or why would you film that, or that’s amazing. I’m interested to hear that today as well. As long as we last anyway.

Karan: We’ll move into the third row or sit on the sides and Phil in the booth is going to roll our first very early amateur film, 1915. It was originally shot on 28mm film, we’re showing it at 16 frames per second and it’s about four minutes long. Feel free to speak up, respond to what you see on the screen. Please say your name first.

Alexander Forbes, Naushon Island sheep, 1915

Justin Wolff: Karan, would you say a word about how you selected some of these films that we’re looking at today? What sort of criteria were you using to make the selection?

Karan: Justin is asking me, Why are we showing you these pieces? And there are several answers. One is that we wanted to show you a range of work. The staff has had the opportunity to do film preservation, to select, because with the volume of material we have here we have to choose what to do film-to-film preservation on, that’s often driven by the fragility of the material, how rare it is. This piece is from a quite large collection by Alexander Forbes and we have an ongoing relationship with the family. That’s another criterion: if we’re able to circle back with the family and learn more about the content and I just met with a third generation cousin who had projectors to give us and when I went to the house I was allowed to see every possible still photographic medium. Alexander Forbes shot on everything and that is all still in the family but I think that it indicates that there’s a context to these amateur works and we want to have you think about that.

Michael Grillo: Can I ask about the technology?

Karan: MIchael Grillo asked about what the technology is and people in the room who know much more about the 28mm system than I do. It was originally a Pathe Kok French system.

Michael Grillo: Is it hand cranked? It doesn’t appear to be that’s the reason that I asked.

Karan: I believe it is hand cranked. It was developed in 1912. What we’re seeing here is a skilled operator, very thoughtful camera placement. Clear ideas about editing and lots of Forbes family members and employees on Naushon Island.

Rob Nanovic: They’re all in-camera edits, too. I think that’s another thing. This is Rob Nanovic. As we watch these we should try to think about how the technology evolved. That was on a tripod and you saw some



crude pans but as formats got smaller people could carry them around in their cars and could be a little more liberal with what they shot.

Karan: Because the film itself was expensive [and] this Pathe Kok kit was very expensive, only very wealthy people had them. The next clip you’ll see is from a Blue Hill family that still has their apparatus in the house. All of the furniture that they purchased from the Paine Furniture Company in Boston, it all came up at once including the camera and the projector. As Rob says, people were thoughtful about what they were going to shoot and they showed it probably to close family and friends and some of those are our harshest critics. So they probably thought about, have I included the people I should include. Yes, Michael?

Michael Komanecky: A whole range of questions arise for me about this. I’m not sure I agree with your assumption about for whom it was made. I don’t know who the people are in the film, what do they have to do with sheep? Is this an excursion, is it a group of people actually working to raise sheep?

Karan: The Forbes family still owns Naushon in the Elizabeth Islands. Anybody here know about that? It is an extended family that also has cattle in Wyoming and they’re a very agriculturally-oriented family. The family member who we just met with is now in the, he just got his degree in environmental ecology and he studied Naushon Island and he told us more about the sheep. It was a family business; at that time they had 1,500 sheep on this island, year round. It was a business. They hired people to do it. Something like the Rockefellers have done here with the island cattle thing, they want to demonstrate how to incorporate agricultural economics into a rural situation, so I would say it was one of the larger hobby farm situations. We don’t think that the film was particularly used outside of the family, but the family is certainly large enough that it could have been screened a few times. [see Naushon and sheep, including Bowdoin and Thomas Jefferson, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naushon_Island.]

Michael Grillo: Can I make the observation, I think the narrative structure of it suggests that it is meant for outside viewers because it clearly establishes the island first. It establishes the island with the boat scenes and then moves to the sheep so this does suggest that this was needing to place it.

Karan: Justin, thoughts on that?

Justin Wolff: No. Other than I was recently on a ferry boat going past the island and you can see massive steer. I didn’t see the sheep because I was too far away. It’s still an active farm.

Karan: And it has the farm structures, it doesn’t have the number of employees that it used to but it still has the family involvement and people maintaining it as a farm.

Justin Wolff: And one thing about whether or not there’s even an answer to it I don’t know, that long-held shot of the fence post where it’s obstructing the view of the people on horseback, what exactly is the operator trying to accomplish? Is it aesthetic, is it a framing device, or is it a practical sort of “Look at the wonderful stone wall and the way that we’ve incorporated this fence into it?” Because it’s an awkward shot. You don’t see the horses, you just see the figures behind the wall and the fence sort of floating and then they come through that passageway, the most dramatic aspect of the footage, and while we may not be able to recover intentionality there, how do our own sort of visual memories affect how we make sense of something that’s framed in that way? Those are some of the questions that really interest me about that footage.

Karan: Susan?

Susan Danly: I was interested in this quality of narrative in there as well. I was looking at it initially it seemed to be a lot about formal issues that you were just describing. But the scene as the riders are coming through the gate is very long held, and there’s a sheep that gets knocked over, I don’t know if it’s dead or what, and I’m sitting here...



Libby Bischof: I’m thinking the same thing.

Susan Danly: Why isn’t anyone stopping to help? I’m filling in these narrative bits to the film. I have no idea whether that was the intention of the filmmaker, but I can imagine that if you’re dealing with questions for the audience this is one that you would want to address in some way in trying to describe the film. And the other question I have for you is do we actually know who the filmmaker was? Is there a body of work to compare this to? Karan: Yes, Alexander Forbes was a physician, he was also an explorer, a mapmaker in Labrador. He sailed his vessel, the Ramah, all over the world and we have a very extensive finding aid online about him. He was an eminent personality, there’s a big biography of him and his papers are in Boston. It’s quite a large film collection.

Susan Danly: Alexander Forbes.

Karan: And then I just found out last month that he has many other still photos, quite a few of them from Naushon Island and I asked the family to please keep us posted where they go. They want to keep them in the family and I said we may be very interested in them because they include, for example, stereo views of Naushon, family drama things, lots of experimental and early color still photos. So getting into Alexander Forbes there’s a lot. Michael?

Michael Komanecky: I can’t look at the subject of this film without immediately recognizing that one of the most ubiquitous images of late 19th century French art is sheep. Pastures. And French art has a great deal to do with the respect for and idealization about the pastoral tradition and French agriculture a myth that prevails in France today. But there are vast numbers of either reproductive images of French art available and American art or American etchers, and Susan and Henry could both comment to this. And making the kinds of images that are among the most popular in American culture in the late 19th and early 20th century. So somehow the subject matter, I think, is being informed by familiarity with that as well as the personal circumstances.

Susan Danly: The odd thing about it, though, is the introduction of the horses. So if you don’t know where the siting is I think most people would assume that this might actually be out in the West.

Karan: And this family does have this dual West-frontier [east coast] thing.

Susan Danly: It makes perfect sense.

Karan: We could spend a lot of time on Forbes but I would like us all to get to know each other--and not to shut you off because I need to know more about what you think and I’m delighted that this particular piece has some interest value. If we could start with Judy, and people just say who they are, where they’re from, what brought them here.

Judy McGeorge: I’m Judy McGeorge, I have been on the board of Northeast Historic Film. I am here really as a friend of Karan and David’s and the organization. I wanted to say about this piece, I got interested here because my grandfather did a lot of home movies and I noticed he was always making the kids go up the slide and down the slide, make them dance, or make the dog move. I just think this was shot, he selected this for the action. I mean there’s movement. This is pure delight in being able to capture movement, for me. And the fact that they were interested in sheep. David?

David Wiliams: I’m David Williams and I have a split professional career. I design greeting cards for the Borealis Press, which uses photographs from the thirties to the fifties, mostly English. I do a lot of searching for photographs. And I’m a mechanic, a woodworker, and a generalist restorer. I’m fascinated by film of all kinds, mostly to see the things that Karan talked about, the aesthetics and things that are very secondary to me. I’m very interested in the record. I watched this morning a film of a guy in what looked like a ‘36 Packard



getting gased up and just to see the windbreaker that’s belted in the back with a center pleat. (laughter). But I always want to know, what’s the story, I want to know who these people are and what’s going on is really important to me when I watch home movies. And I love more than anything to see records of activity like MIlton Dowe’s, I saw one this morning of a tractor that was made of an old car, a ‘28 something-or-other, and he was hauling hay with it. I just love to see that stuff and that record of our world that’s just passed us. But you know that you can watch, it’s moving. And maybe the one thing I can do today because I’m probably the only person here who never went to college, maybe I can speak a little bit more for the general public and people want to see when they go to an exhibition like this and I hope that maybe this exhibition can be split in two, the scholarly part and the purely engaging part for people when they go to the museum.

Karan: Sarah?

Sarah Ruddy: I’m Sarah Ruddy and I’m arguably a person who went to too much college, depending on who you ask. I was involved in this project with Karan at its inception. I’m here today because I’m interested in where the project has gone. I’m also an American modernism Ph.D., I’m particularly interested in literary and visual culture between the wars and ideas of documentation and self-representation in relation to economic factors and material history. So I have some questions that have already come up, I will try to intersperse them, I will try not to spit them all out at once. This to me is, today I’m getting caught up with a project that I am very interested in and care very much about and also get to listen to art historians and cultural historians speak instead of just literary scholars about this material and see where those languages converge and how they differ. That’s very interesting to me and hopefully it is informative to the project as well. Thank you.

Karan: Thank you, Sarah. Henry?

Henry Adams: I’m Henry Adams, I’m a scholar in the American field. I’ve written about American art from the 17th century to the present. My most recent major book is about Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock. I’m a bit of an interloper because I’m really the guest of Michael Komanecky and he sort of dragged me here. But I do write an art blog for Smithsonian Magazine and this would be sort of a great topic for a story. And I do find this material fascinating. With this film I guess I was impressed by the quality of the photography. I mean it looked like some of the scenes you see in Western movies and so forth except it didn’t have a plot in the normal sense of the word.

Tricia Welsch: I’m Tricia Welsch from Bowdoin College Department of Film Studies. I work primarily on Hollywood films so I always feel like an interloper when I come up here but I have absolutely loved bringing my film students here over the years and would like to draw a closer, stronger relationship with Northeast Historic Film. My students respond enormously positively to the early early stuff, movies like this and it always surprises me and pleases me. I’ve extended discussion of the very very early films in film history class so that we barely get to the coming of sound by the end of the first semester. I’m really excited about the possibility of doing an exhibition at Bowdoin. Don’t know where that would be, or where that will go because of amateurism in an art museum are at issue here--but I’m very interested in film aesthetics and that is how I come to this.

Erik Jorgensen: My name is Erik Jorgensen and I’m Director of the Maine Humanities Council. I’m really interested in this topic. I was actually taken by what Michael, I think it was Michael, said, the notion that we would never ever consider doing an exhibit of amateur art in the mid 19th century or mid 20th century. I thought about that; it was a fascinating thing because I think these films, the amateur nature of these films is precisely what makes them so interesting. I just love the sense, obviously the evidentiary element of it is really interesting to me. I think, as a person who is interested in history. But I love the place and the intimacy and the surprise and the alternative universe that you get by looking at these films, this glimpse of looking into people’s lives. And I think we have to just come out and say nostalgia, which is oftentimes a dirty word in the historical world, but I think it’s a really interesting question. And I’ve certainly seen in my own work the electric quality of these kind of texts when you show them in a public setting. I used to work in the historical society business and these guys would come down and you’d pack the house whenever Northeast Historic Film would bring a selection. It almost didn’t matter what it was. I think everyone took something different



out of them, whether it’s looking at the pleated windbreaker. I looked at the gate in that film and I said to myself that’s definitely a New England gentleman-farm gate, you wouldn’t find that at a real farm, probably. I think it’s really exciting and I think it’s going to be a fabulously successful exhibit.

Sian Evans: I’m Sian Evans. I’m on the board at Northeast Historic Film, and also a filmmaker. I work in documentary and I do not make up stories. I don’t understand why you would bother because the real world is so interesting. I would say that I think we talk often about the ability of narrative work to create identification and pull you in. I think that the most interesting thing about these early films is that there is so much space in them for us to be pulled in and we just don’t have the dialogue about it. I’m listening so I want to hear your development of the vocabulary that describes that. The only other thing I want to add is that from my perspective I thought perhaps and I’m completely making something up, but I thought perhaps that the people in the clip on Naushon Island might be family, because of the women, and that he was waiting at the gate to catch them coming through and that’s why you have the shots. It’s completely speculative.

Rob Nanovic: I’m Rob Nanovic, I used to be the collections manager here and I got to spend some time with Alan Kattelle and his camera collection when we were wrangling it up to come up here. He was a great guy to talk to and to share his house with. Just like people have been saying that these films were made to be exhibited, Alan collected cameras to exhibit them. He had a little display case in his house and he had groups come in and he would show them off and he would always tell a story about every camera, he had detailed note cards which came up with the cameras, too. And I think it’s interesting how technology is the driving force behind what people could film and actually related to that, I think the sheep were an afterthought too because the camera was so close to them. Initially I thought that he was trying to figure out how to shoot because he was almost too close to the sheep, they were just blurring by. So you might be right, he was looking for other people.

Sian Evans: And that sheep wasn’t dead. That sheep popped its head, I was watching. [laughter]

Susan Danly: Susan Danly, I’m the senior curator at the Portland Museum of Art and as Libby mentioned we worked together on an exhibition project and only stumbled across amateur film as part of that and what intrigued me about that process was we used nine minutes out of four or five hours of film. So we wound up being the editors, not really knowing what to do as an editor, because we were trying to figure out what of the three and a half hours we were showing what were the nine minutes we could capture in this film that would relate to our exhibition upstairs. It’s a very different role than a documentary film or something like that. It’s just another way that I think these films can be useful. But I’m here to learn of ways I’ve never even dreamed about. Because we do have a theater, a 200-seat theater at the museum and it’s getting more and more use. And I’d to see the film program expand in a way that ties in more directly with programming that we do at the museum, with exhibitions that are about the fine arts and in many ways I kind of think about this film as I might think about a folk artist who might not necessarily have any training but has an aesthetic and an approach to making this object that puts it definitely in the art world.

Earle Shettleworth: Earle Shettleworth, I direct the Historic Preservation Commission in Augusta and am the state historian. I’ve been fascinated with the history of photography since I was a child and in the years I’ve been with the state I’ve amassed a large collection of documentary photography that relates to Maine. More directly to Northeast Film, just recently I donated my father’s collection of home movies that he made between 1930 and 1950. He was Earle Shettleworth, Sr., he was a businessman and most of that period he was in Maine. It was a thrill for both my sister and myself to receive back the CDs, the re-recordings of the films, and for the first time I was able to see that complete body of work all at once, viewed it early this year. It broke down into two areas. I think he was interested in documenting events. Libby mentioned he went to the World’s Fair in 1939 and there’s about an hour of color film of that, but also parades and political events and floods and all of that, particularly in the 1930s. But also there are the intimate family scenes as well. The most moving thing for me was to see footage of film, I saw many of these films when I was young back in the 50s. But to actually see footage of film that I’d never seen before that was somehow embedded in this collection, a view in 1935, shortly after my parents were married, where he is scanning the dining room and all the family members are in the dining room and it was the most eerie, powerful and moving thing to



experience, a) because I’d never seen it before, but b) because I was seeing many people who I never knew in life but who were there in that film.

Steve Bromage: I’m Steve Bromage from Maine Historical Society. We’ve collaborated regularly with Northeast Historic Film over the years and we’ve worked together using the amateur films in a variety of contexts including we’ve co-hosted Home Movie Day for a number of years, which has brought people in and gotten an interesting mix of individuals from the general public both sharing what they have and observing, watching what other people bring. It’s got many elements of entertainment, place. It’s a kind of fascinating dynamic. We’ve also worked and have some of the digitized material from the collection on our Maine Memory Network where it’s part of online exhibits and it’s accessible, kind of going out in outreach to a lot of general public, to students and the others. And we’ve also worked to include their film, films from the collections here in our physical exhibits in the museum in Portland. We’ve been playing and thinking, you know, consciously, how to make use of these films and it’s an important partnership. And the film is clearly important and it’s something that resonates with people and they connect with the intimacy and it’s a really valuable tool in helping people connect to stories and themes you’re trying to explore. We also think a lot in our own institution just about the museum experience at a whole variety of levels and what the opportunities provided by just plain access to collections online or otherwise, what happens in the gallery, what kind of experiences you’re trying to facilitate and foster, whether it’s education or provocation or the need to be conscious in that. So we’re thinking about that in terms of what we’re in our building and how we move forward and how you use your full complement to tell stories and engage various audiences. So that I think the conversation is really relevant to that. To the big question you’re positing about how the public interacts, or what they need to see from these films, I think a lot does have to do with curatorial intent and what the goals for the exhibit is and again whether is opening people’s eyes to the new medium whether it’s education whether it’s an aesthetic kind of experience. So I think determining what the museum experience is will help shape the questions and the presentation and the context for it.

Michael Grillo: I’m Michael Grillo. I’m a 14tth century art historian, which is sort of strange. People ask why go into history, you get into these types of things. I’m primarily interested in narrative structure that’s what I write about principally. Visual culture, narrative structure. And personally I grew up in a projection booth so I have a Cinema Paradiso background. What really interests me about amateur film is this is a relatively unique medium in the sense that when we talk about amateur painting, what points of reference do painters have? Well, they have the world around them and a little other amateur painting, maybe a few museum experiences. When you say something about film, what experience do they have? They have a dominant cultural medium which really plugs them into a very distinct language of film. I won’t argue here that I think this film was incredibly sophisticated and very much, in camera editing and that thing had a very distinct narrative flow. I won’t go into why I think the gate is there. It’s distinctly...

Justin Wolff: Not the gates of hell?

Michael Grillo: No. I’m primarily interested in audience reception and what drives amateur filmmaking because the points of reference are so tightly shared between creator and audience.

Reel 2Michael Grillo continued: The expectations are a shared expectation. The points of reference are very frequently points of reference that are shared. Certainly I’m interested in, and what I don’t know enough about, are things such as the manuals. Tom Johnson when making his film on the 1939 World’s Fair couldn’t figure out why everybody did the shot of the obelisk and sphere. [Trylon and Perisphere.] I almost called it an orb. Why they couldn’t, they cut the camera off before it reached the top and there were all sorts of theories about hand-wind cameras, the amount of time and all that and finally he found literature that did the “Please, when you’re photographing this do not shoot the top because that’s the future aspirations.” So there was a guide to how to film this thing which everyone had plugged in on and these are the things that mostly interest me here are what are the common drivers in the aesthetic that are really socially-driven in a mass medium.



Liz Coffey: I’m Liz Coffey, archivist at the Harvard Film Archive. I worked here about ten years ago and I worked at the Rhode Island HIstorical Society, which is another regional film collection. I also do Home Movie Day every year and I shoot Super 8 myself sometimes. I enjoy watching amateur film for purely entertainment reasons. I’m not academic at all even though I work at Harvard. It’s very pleasing to watch, I enjoyed the sheep very much.

Steve Wurtzler: I’m Steve Wurtzler, I teach cinema studies at Colby College, at least for the last two years. And Karan invited me up because I’ve been incorporating home movies into two of my courses, historically since I taught at Bowdoin back in the 90s in my documentary film class, but also most recently in my film theory class.

Mark Neumann: Hi, everybody, I’m Mark Neumann. I’m a Professor of Cultural Media Studies at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. I discovered Northeast Historic Film in 2000 when I was at the University of South Florida and started coming up to do research on amateur film. Since then I’ve become increasingly more involved in NHF. I still do research and I’m gathering material, written some pieces about some of the films in the collection and now I’m on the board of directors and I’ve been organizing our summer film symposium for the past 8 or 9 years. This year the theme is called Wunderkino 2, last year was Wunderkino 1. The theme this year is the varieties of cinematic experience, derivative of William James on religious experience. And Steve [Wurzler] is going to be presenting this year, I was happy to find out recently. He’ll be presenting a piece at the symposium, that’s in July.

Karan: We have flyers out front, I hope everybody will put it on their schedule, July 26-28. Lobsters included.

Mark Neumann: I have a deep interest in these films. Just listening. Part of what’s interesting me is how people trying to figure out what these things are and how we make sense out of them. To kind of tie that into your point a little bit, you know the idea that there was a group of amateurs who were coming into this with a great deal of passion and enthusiasm, in a culture where motion pictures were growing up at the same time. Amateur film really had the potential to be something different but as you can see from those guidebooks out there there was this pull toward professionalism that always became this kind of critical wedge where people who were making amateur films, it was continually pointed out to them, continually reminded how they were inadequate in comparison to things they were seeing. To me now we think that independent cinema is something very new. And it’s not. People had their capacity to make their own films and were writing fiction films and creating fiction films since the early decades of the 20th century. To me, that’s the part I’m most interested in is how do we rescue the things that are unique and kind of mysterious about these films. Whether it’s the things that might be regarded from professional aesthetic standards as mistakes but in many cases people were playing with dominant narrative, playing with the kinds of stories they were seeing and refashioning them in their own views, from their own economic perspectives. Telling stories that exist, that are ancient stories, retelling them with a kind of twist. So I think there’s a lot to be gleaned from even viewing this sample of films today. I just happened to be here for this so I was able to come today. I happened to be in Bucksport for this symposium. I’m really interested in hearing how people try to make sense out of these. That’s, I don’t know about intentionality. It’s very difficult to look at an artifact, to look at the evidence and say what were the intentions of the filmmaker. But I do know that what we see in them now is very significant because that’s how these films are going to sustain some sort of longevity. Those are just a few initial thoughts about this and I’m really glad to be here today.

Toni Treadway: Hi, I’m Toni Treadway and I think I’ve died and gone to home movie heaven to be in this room with you today. And I applaud Northeast Historic Flim and Karan and David for pulling things togethr to make it happen. The reason it’s heaven for me is because I see the past and I’ve tried to see the future for a long long time. And my partner, Bob Brodsky and I have worked with home movies since forever it seems, he as both an amateur and a professional photographer and cinematographer. And both of us in technical services for about 35 years now. Where we’ve been for a long time thinking and feeling very alone initially that these were important materials. Important to the culture, important to keep and fold into the culture repeatedly. And for a long time I’ve wished for a session and a way to fold in people who come from a wide variety of experiences and disciplines so that the various disciplines and thoughts could add to a real



fundamental understanding of how to think about these things, the kind of research that we can urge scholars to do, the kind of added fields in databases that haven’t been created yet, the ways creative people can get them out there to regular people and back again. The ways I see, for instance, colleagues in the archives in Europe with state funding even in the face of crisis doing things like if they have two eyes from anywhere in Europe on a piece of film of World War II that confirm a space, a time, a date, a situation that’s on screen they consider it adding to the record as real evidence and contribution from just regular people on the Internet seeing something. All sorts of thigns are possible and the future is wide open. In the past a variety of, whether you be a 14th century scholar or whether you’re someone who’s not been to college who’s been thinking a long time about images, pulling in that level of expertise to say how do we do this? We’re really making this up as we go along and I’ve been really pleased to see Northeast Historic for twenty something years doing some great trials and tests and twelve years now of the summer symposium thinking out loud, it’s really really great having an extended family taking this seriously, so I’m really glad to meet you all. I just wanted because Bob [Brodsky] couldn’t be here today he did ask that I add one word to the thought that is really important to him. This is a guy who sat in the dark with these little films for a long time and seen a lot of footage that even I haven’t been privy to. Way more expert than I. He wants to add the word gesture because he finds that gesture is something that is recorded in motion picture and that can be folded back in and is tremendously important. I think it was Earle who said in his family films to see that dining room full of all the elders in the family, some of which he’d never met. You get to see simple gestures like how someone turns their head or the distance they stand from the person they’re talking to. A movement of an arm. There are things that can feed back, particularly in families and in the larger culture that tell us where we were as people in relating to each other. And particularly important to silent film that so much of this material comes to us as.

Karan: Thank you everybody. We are going to roll into a film that is about gesture, shot by a man who was born in 1862. This is Snow White, we have talked about it at the symposium. Several people, Patty Zimmermann and Bill O’Farrell, who were very expert in amateur film think that this is one of the earliest [amateur] North American dramatic works. Please roll and please feel free [gap at 11:25]

F.B. Richards, Snow White, 1916

Rob Nanovic: I’d like to chime in on what Mark and Toni said about amateurs and that’s what we’re talking about. There’s really nothing amateur about a lot of these filmmakers except for the format. The format was an amateur format. These were, there was no film school then-- and so these people were learning how to do it on their own and so it’s a very expensive trial and error hobby. And so they used guidebooks to get them there but a lot of people, like Maxim was no amateur. He kind of wrote the book himself. So that will be interesting to see his film.

Toni Treadway: It’s Toni and I would concur that the distinction amateur and professional is sort of historic and sort of arbitrary and perhaps we should talk about things that are commercially distributed like Hollywood films versus things that were otherwise distributed.

Rob Nanovic: I think calling them personal films is actually a more accurate title.

Libby Bischof: Buf if that’s his title, he referred to himself as an amateur in the [title], which is interesting too.

Toni Treadway: Well, amateur has its roots in the word loving.

Karan: And people who have worked with amateur still photography know that there is a lot of literature there.

[laughter as people continue to watch Snow White. Whispered question, “is that a woman?”]



Erik Jorgensen: It’s wonderful to think about the nature of this kind of a project. The amount of elaborateness and the amount of time it required and the amount of energy involved. The idea of how you spend your summer in this class community.

Karan: That was Erik; if everybody could say. This is Karan, for me this film allows us to talk about the relationship of motion picture film to amateur theatricals, to tableaux, to very traditional family and community entertainment. That was a core and a throughline and coexisted and had quite a complex relationship with film. There were families that did plays, that was a big summer thing and some of them got into filming them and wrote scripts for what they were going to film.

Michael Grillo: Do you have any idea how much theater was in the area?

Karan: Blue Hill, where this was shot, and Surry were very big traditional amateur theater centers for a long time.

Michael Komanecky: This is Michael. That’s a tradition that goes back to the 19th century in America, Dublin and Cornish art colonies produced these sort of quasi-antique Roman pageants for each other. With few photographs made of them, as far as I know, and no film. They’re pretty prevalent.

Toni Treadway: It’s Toni again, I’d like to see you infiltrate this film into a dance archives or movement archives group of people who think about motion and movement a lot.

Erik Jorgensen: The wind is great.

Sian Evans: This reminds me of the European pantomime.

Toni Treadway: I don’t know technically if this is helpful, I’m clearly seeing a tripod here and a left-right movement from it. The image unsteadiness has to do with the materials themselves. In other words the camera’s not moving on purpose. The film has over the years shrunken a bit.

Libby Bischof: It’s Libby. I want to know which version of Snow White they’re using, cause I would not have identified. [laughter as dwarfs come on, comment “Well timed.”]I love the cut tree limbs in front of the stage to sort of camouflage it.

Michael Komanecky: How long is this piece?

Karan: It’s about ten minutes.

Michael Komanecky: This is Michael. That means it’s about the same length as a D.W. film Griffith from the period.

Karan: This is quite a production. And this is from the Richards family where we have only three or four pieces. They did one that’s called A Round of Calls in Blue Hill, which was formal and seems like a 19th century activity again; they went and paid visits, greeted by families. They have a very short look at the Kneisel Hall players, the original Kneisel Hall musical performers. And I also believe that they have the Ogontz School in Philadelphia, the school that Amelia Earhart went to.

Toni Treadway: What year is this?

Karan: This is 1916.

Michael Grillo: May I ask a question, Michael here. May I ask a question about spool length, reel length?



Karan: For 28mm I don’t know. Who here would know that? We’ll have to get back to you. [400 ft. magazines, Kattelle p. 61]

Rob Nanovic: It’s in the Kattelle book, I read it recently.

MIchael Grillo: That last jump struck me as a reel change.

Erik Jorgensen: This is Erik. Does the club house still exist?

Karan: Yes, Blue Hill Country Club still exists.

Rob Nanovic: Are they still dancing? [laughter]

Steve Bromage: This is Steve. It’s interesting to think about all the different cultural reference points, some of which are probably discoverable and some probably aren’t. So that’s film, there’s the painting referred to earlier, there’s local theater and other things we can’t pick up on. The impulse to riff off of whatever your current cultural impulse is. Because if you look at YouTube there are so many amateur videos that people are making, whether they’re doing a spoof of something on television or in movies, and there’s a very similar impulse. So to think about all the context and all the sources that are feeding the filmmakers here.

Karan: This is Karan. Steve, it’s a really good point and we do serendipitously and through hard work discover some of those quite obscure, now, references. For example, Sian, working with Martha White and the E.B. White film--there was a sequence of a young boy in a chair reading a book and moving in that chair. And nobody today would know that it came from a cartoon, a series of cartoons, by Gluyas Williams.

Sian Evans: In The New Yorker.

Karan: So how to treat that in a contemporary public exhibition where bringing to people’s attention, for example, here dance references, what was the style of dance and you all enjoyed the Miss Olympia expressive dance experience on the tennis court. But what is obvious to people looking at it and what do you want to bring in a subject expert to tell you about dance in 1916?

Michael Komanecky: This is Michael Komanecky again. A couple of things strike me. It’s so clearly you can call this amateur or personal but this has professional aspiration and it’s informed by professional, familiarity with the professional film and dance and whatever. And the second thing that’s tied to that because of the maker and the location, it’s to me so clearly intended for a culturally elite audience. Look at the setting, it’s Blue Hill Country Club. You wonder what the other members of this country club were doing and thinking, were they there, did they witness this, was this talked about? It took some permission to come here to do this. There was some social interaction around the very making of this thing.

Michael Grillo: This is Michael Grillo. To follow up on that, when we use that term amateur ubiquitously we too readily place it into a very consumer amateur Kodak market of the fifties and sixties when before, what you had said about the expense of such a thing, yes this is the rusticator set and very distinctly the cultural references in which they operate, is a much more, what shall we say, a much closer group.

Libby Bischof: This is Libby. That’s an interesting point. If this is being staged for the actual filming or if it’s something that’s being filmed and there’s another audience watching it at the same time. That would be really interesting to know.

Steve Bromage: And also back to your uber question, what do you have to say about this in the exhibit, that depends again on the curatorial intent. Because you could pick out points: dance, movement, theater, who the participants--if it’s a local history audience, who the participants are. There are so many different stories you could extract from that. So selecting how it fits into the broader context of your exhibit determines which threads you pull.



Libby Bischof: Is that the prince? [laughter]

Steve Bromage: The president of the country club.

Erik Jorgensen: This is Erik again. It has a look to me like an annual event. I bet they had an annual theatrical thing. I’m in a club that does these sort of things seasonally. And they always have the same party every year on July 4th and the same thing happened. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what this was.

Libby: That wouldn’t be hard to find out.

Erik Jorgensen: I bet there’s some record of that.

David Williams: I’m David Williams. I worked for a man in Wilmington, Delaware, a member of the DuPont family and in the twenties he made films of plays that DuPont kids put on, wrote themselves and put on and the films were. I asked him once how often they were seen and he said by hundreds and hundreds of people because they showed them to the powder mill workers, they showed them at parties. They wanted everybody to see them. They wanted to be just like the movies.

Michael Komanecky: This is Michael. It has a title and an “End.” That’s following the professional public film tradition of the moment.

Karan: Titles are a big part of these personal films. People titled them, they did them themselves, they sent them out, and that helps us greatly today but we also have to think about what that meant then.

Michael Grillo: I would argue that you can comb out some intentionality because it does have an established common language. That which is so driven by the industry, so I think that does give us a means of combing out what intent is.

Justin Wolff: The another question of intentionality and humor. I noticed for instance the first show of the sheep, not everybody but many people in the room chuckled. The minute they saw the sheep jumping. In something like that in this audience we’re seeing it as partly satirical but I wonder if that was intentional or not. What is it about some of these amateur films, is it the amateurism in fact that often makes us chuckle when we see them today? There’s a really interesting problem with contemporary audiences and the notion of humor and intentionality. I’m not sure how that plays out in all the films but it’s something that interests me.

Michael Grillo: This is Michael Grillo again. Getting modern audiences to look at older, I’m sure this is a common experience of many of you, getting audiences to look at black and white silent, there’s an initial discomfort that comes forth in that giggle. But you’re right, how do you feather that out further, is that slightly ironic or not?

Steve Bromage: To that point, whether in some cases we’re probably chuckling looking back ahistorically but then there will also be moments of universality where we chuckle and people then chuckled at the leaping sheep and it’s a common thread in some way too, potentially.

Earle Shettleworth: Just to build on your point about the silent black and white. The phenomenon of the film The Artist and then suddenly when we least expect it that kind of film would rise again.

Tricia Welsch: It’s Tricia. There are a lot of efforts to film stories that were familiar in very early film history. This is very very similar to other things that are out there. Many of them made professionally about ten years earlier so it’s not very far off the professional mark, in fact. If you look at other early adaptations of fairy stories or literary works the would however cut out a lot of important episodes so that the expectation was that you already knew the story. They would only show big scenes and you would string together the



connective material. Here there is an effort to represent the whole story, which is fairly interesting and can be done in a short span of time. Unlike say, Rip Winkle who has many many many adventures that are extracted briefly. Films made about a decade earlier, professional films. These look just like those films except for the sort of funky beards That’s the only thing that to me gives it away as less than actually up to the standard of contemporary literary adaptations.

Karan: Are you ready to look at some other films? And to answer Justin’s why did we pick these? One of the things that’s very difficult for us today is to be careful about how we are layering on our definition of what is a genre, or what the expectation was--when we really don’t know at the time. So are saying that this relates to pageants or pantomimes but it’s going to take a lot of work to determine what it was then, can we find we find the program? So that’s where we need to scope in, is that what we’re after? Are we really doing fantastic spade work, having selected this as being worthwhile to determine--because that’s not what we do day in and day out at the archives. We’re trying to rescue things that are going to end up in the dump and here we are with some things we think are beautiful and give people pleasure. All the same we need to provide a framework: this took place in the workplace, this is at an elite country club. Now I’m going to roll through a couple of things, the first is from a work place in Portland, Maine. We have for a long time done what we’re calling work life films, thinking that they’re important. This was shot by the man who was the second generation at the Charles B. Hinds factory and we’re going to roll a short excerpt, just over a minute, from the A.S. Hinds Collection.

Charles B. Hinds, A.S. Hinds factory, Portland, 1925

Earle Shettleworth: What we’re manufacturing here is a lotion called Hinds Honey & Almond Cream, which was devised by a druggist in Portland in the late 19th century and became internationally famous product in the late 19th and early 20th century and made the Hinds family millionaires. In 1920 they built a large, what they called a laboratory, it was really a factory, this is what we’re seeing the interior of, was designed by John Calvin Stevens, built on Forest Avenue right at the entrance to Baxter Boulevard. It still standing today, it’s right across from USM.

Libby BIschof: How close would the camera have had to be to these people?

Karan Sheldon: He’s shooting with a 16mm camera, it was a very good one because he’s shooting interiors with not a lot of light. So he’s right across the assembly line from that young woman.

Libby Bischof: Four feet?

Michael Grillo: Does somebody have an idea as to what kind of lens lengths were common at the time? [In 1925, Cine Kodak model B, lens 20mm, f/6.5. Kattelle p. 344]

Karan: Yes, we can give you that.

Erik Jorgensen: What was the year of this again?

Karan: 1925.

Erik Jorgensen: It’s fascinating to see the an improvised factory here.

Karan: The Hinds Collection is very large, lots of family and also their civic engagement. They lost a son in an automobile accident. They underwrote, I am sure Earle knows all about, the camp and were a big part of the camping movement. We’re interested in that because it’s an excellent example of people in a work environment in an urban place where he clearly knew the people and he wanted to show the whole process. And the entire reel is about 25 minutes showing you the executives out to the loading dock.



Justin Wolff: This is Justin. That clip we just saw really I think frames nicely the question of curatorial intent. One could give museumgoers entry into that clip by talking about labor, about technology and also just about community.

Karan: This was a work from a reel called This and That by Hiram Maxim who founded the Amateur Cinema League.

Hiram Maxim, Scarf Dance, 1925

Michael Grillo: This is Michael Grillo. One of the things also to ask when you’re asking genre questions are what are some of the emerging genres. Certainly when we start talking the notion of a documentary in a conscious sense as opposed to Lumiere Brothers but getting it into Flaherty, the 1920s, the notion of making documents as historical capsules I think may help...

[laughter about scarf dance]

Steve Bromage: This was the problem before electric clothes dryers.

Libby Bischof: This is a trick film?

Karan: This is a trick film. Bob Brodsky and Toni Treadway, I took the 1925 16mm film to them and I said what’s going on here and Bob said in that period if you put your camera upside down it would allow you to have the emulsion on the correct side when you ran it through the projector and it were as if you were running it backwards. It’s a trick film and many “running the film backwards” films you saw in your own family home movies, you know, diving onto the diving board or sliding up the slide. But this one has an element of subtlety to it, in that you’re not quite sure of the physics of what’s happening and before I saw it transferred I really wasn’t sure, how much is this a trick film?

Erik Jorgensen: This is Erik. We used to a have a [still] collection at the historical society where I worked of vaudevilles shots from one of the trolley parks, Merrymeeting Park. There were these great fan dancer people with towelly-like things that looked like this in sort of stop motion. This is a very interesting picture I think to see this with the motion going on. It really looks like one of those still photographs you’d see from that period.

Susan Danly: This is Susan. I’m just wondering, was there something blowing that piece of fabric around? It doesn’t seem like there would be enough wind to generate that much motion.

Karan: If you look at their clothing, they seem to be wearing, at least Mrs Maxim is wearing silk and you do see there’s quite a lot of wind and that piece of silk fabric is also very light and we think that it’s just the natural wind and it looks like extreme motion because you’re seeing it reversed. If you saw it in its natural form it would look like very much like some of the dance things or early dance with fabric, Loie Fuller. It was a trope, of dancing with light fabric for effect. It’s one of those things where we have to ask ourselves is it funny because you have the portly matron doing something that she’s being asked to do and their daughter Percy Maxim in a suit also outside the house. Is it funny? Is it interesting because we can’t quite figure out why that fabric is moving so much? What do we do with something like this that existed on a reel that was called This and That, we have before that some very closeup of a cow and a mule, and then some other random things after it. But this is a piece of film and it survived from 1925. I find it aesthetically pleasing.

Steve Bromage: It’s interesting. This is Steve. We all have predilections to do something and to quantify or define these in our own brains in certain ways, this is something to laugh at, this is something to marvel at. It reminds me of one of the experiences at Home Movie Day a couple of years ago where somebody brought in and they had this great film of a wedding in the 1950s and everybody was, the whole crowd was tittering about isn’t this wonderful, magical to have this of your parents. The film goes off, the lights come up and the whole discussion was about the incredibly painful divorce that came and how that defined everybody’s life.



[laughter] Our assumptions about this is a happy moment. The meaning of that is something that we want to take and project upon these films ourselves.

Sian Evans: This is Sian. I just want to add something. I am the first person to champion the passionate extemporaneous, the impulse, the instantaneous and spontaneous. But this is very referential and there’s a body of work from Paris of women on stage with 30 feet of silk looking like flowers and this is so clearly connected to that.

Michael Grillo: To follow that I think there are other trends. Chaplin did a lot of in camera tricks such as reversing a scene, following it back. And if you’ll consider even how things go viral today, once a trick is known and used then how it is then picked up and replicated umpteen times over, so I think you have two factors here of certainly the social-- of yes, ladies dancing with silk is a popular subject, meeting yes, reversal and running backwards allows the following type of aesthetic. Both of those trends coming together.

Karan: Thank you. And it’s concise. There’s enough of it, there’s not too much of it. There it is. Which is one of the drivers in today’s program. I was looking for things that are concise because I think that Michael gave us the heads up that when people come through a museum they are thinking they’re not going to be there that long, we will provide benches but they want to see it and see the next thing. Anybody would like a bio break before we do the next bit? Want to take a stand-up and get a drink and then come back or keep going? Nobody’s running for the exits. Happy, happy. Keep going. We are working with personal films and we’re taking the personal films into the public. We have been doing that habitually for 25 years but we have not done that in this kind of setting, so we’re going to now show you two pieces and want your opinion on how to treat that. So if you would please roll the short clip from the Snowden Family Collection? It’s from 8mm color outside a house in Stonington, Maine, the donor is from Bucksport and we have asked for more information.

Snowden Family Collection, Stonington, ca. 1960

Michael Grillo: Beautiful stock.

Libby Bischof: It’s an early episode of Hoarders.

Justin Wolff: Is his beer just waiting on the front step for him?

Tricia Wlesch: Home delivery.

Michael Komanecky: And when does this date from?

Karan: About 1960.

Erik Jorgensen: He just looks very conscious with the beer.

Toni Treadway: Performative.

Steve Bromage: Must take days to get the staging right.

Erik Jorgensen: Chopping block.

Michael Grillo: I’m curious at this point how much is driven of what expectation of what rural Mainers are?

Karan: That was Michael Grillo asking a question and we could maybe roll back and see it again if you’d like to, or it might be seared into your mind sufficiently.

Libby Bischof: That was interesting, I would watch it again.



Karan: 1960. Might it be possible to show that again, please?

Susan Danly: This is Susan. What’s the relationship between the maker and the people in it?

Karan: The filmmaker is a Deer Isle family and most of the rest of the collection, which is a lot of 8mm Kodachrome is of family activities. And then we believe this is just other people in Stonington, who they filmed. I don’t know their relationship and that’s why I have asked them to tell us more. [see Snowden notes at end of transcript]

Susan Danly: So are the other snippets of film quite so pointed in the physical setting?

Karan: No, they are not.

Susan Danly: so they are more normal activities, like day to day stuff.

Karan: Well, this is where we wonder what’s “normal”? If you look at a work like Owl’s Head (Rosamund Purcell) this and people who have lived in Maine towns.

LIbby Bischof: I’ve seen this in Maine before.

Earle Shettleworth: Earle Shettleworth. There’s a long tradition of recording this. You go back as far as the 1880s or 1870s there are stereo views of Western Maine and there’s a series on Rangeley and included in it there was a kind of a little settlement of very poor people who were living in shacks with debris around them and they were photographed as curiosities. This is, someone used the word eccentric a moment ago and that’s exactly what’s happening, there’s this long tradition in Maine rural culture or for that matter Appalachian culture. The Beans of Egypt, Maine.

Michael Grillo: Marshall Dodge is by this point.

Earle Shettleworth: That whole vein of humor.

Sian Evans: This is Sian. In Millinocket, my mother grew up in Millinocket and there were town drunks. Everybody called them Sweet Pea and Orange Blossom.

Steve Bromage: That’s why watching the film is very disorienting because it feels very exploitive. Maybe that’s relativistic or whatever but. You don’t know how to watch it.

E.B. White, Joel White and Raffles the dog, circa 1940

Karan: That’s Steve saying it’s potentially exploitive. This is Andy White, you will recognize him. This is his farm in Brooklin.

Sian: Karan, do you know who’s shooting?

Karan: Probably Katharine doing that shot. Mostly it’s E.B. White shoots.

Sian Evans: Did his son ever shoot?

Karan: Not that I know of.

Michael Komanecky: When was this made?



Karan: This was made in the 1940s. That’s Joel White, who passed away about 15 years ago. [1931-1997] And he lived in Brooklin and was a yacht designer and boat builder.

Liz Coffey: This has been transferred a little slow. I mean the reason it’s moving like that isn’t how they shot it.

Karan: That was Liz saying it was transferred a little slow. Sean Savage did the transfer; we used it for Home Movie Day in Portland with Martha White doing a live narration.

Comment: Beautiful.

Toni Treadway: We sometimes err on the side of too slow for several reasons. One is it does smooth out some of the shrunkenness of the film. Also if you’re digitizing in the future it’s easier to move things a little faster than it is to move them a little slower if they’re inadvertently transferred too fast--without loss or gain of bad artifact on the film. [comment about onscreen action and laughter] Things like this, I would argue this shot is not too slow, the problem is how much time can you spend on the film. Cameras except for certain cameras that have had the professional intervention of being synched, crystal synched, don’t lock to one speed. They often drift around 16 frames a second down to 14 frames a second and and up. It takes a certain eye to see the difference. We frequently, this is Toni talking, I’m sorry. We frequently look at somebody walking. If they give us a shot with somebody walking you can figure out what the right frame rate is. Or somebody, in the case of jumping down off the hay wagon. But without that it’s hard to say. In the case of the scarf dance we went with the fabric in the wind on the dress of the matron because that was, it’s hard to determine from the motions what might be the correct speed the film was filmed at, or intended to be shown at.

Erik Jorgensen: This is Erik. That was the White farm? The gentleman farmer from New York sitting his in Brooklin. It’s very beautifully, clearly it has a landscape, aesthetically thought through. I was just going to say in regard to the other film too, about the gentlemen from Stonington, I did notice that the bottle was stoppered the whole time.

Toni Treadway: In that film right after you recognize that the bottle is stoppered and they’re sort of fake drinking out of it, there’s a look at the camera.

Erik Jorgensen; Yeah, that’s right.

Toni Treadway: That carries some meaning for me and I don’t know if I’m reading into or not. You need more eyes on the thing and more research to know.

Liz Coffey: The story I in my head is they lure them out with the beer bottle and then the guys kind of hammed it up. They’re making a movie of us cause they think that we’re drunks or whatever. And then they’re fooling around. Because it the end they seem, “What, what, what you guys looking at?”

Erik Jorgensen: Do you think they signed a release? [laughter]

Karan: Those two pieces evidently for everybody are about class in personal film, about exploitation, possibly. About what do you prepare for, how much are your subjects being instructed in what to do in front of the camera and how they relate to you behind the camera. And we offered the Stonington film just to help us with some parameters on discomfort. If you could tell us should we talk, as we are, as we are going to go through the family to determine who those people were in Stonington, we find out who their descendants are, are they comfortable with this appearing in a show? Is that something that we want to do? Because it is about things that are recorded. Very many times there is a sense that amateur film leaves out a lot. Well, we’re now over years of collecting, finding out that there’s not that much, actually, that’s left out. That was a preconception that we’re disproving. That are funerals and there are angry divorce things and there are people who agree to be filmed in situations you might think otherwise. There is also incredible beauty. I find the



man’s trousers in that and the arrangement of the stuff stacked outside and how the cats are crawling over it really interesting to look at. So we’d like a little bit of direction from you on how to weigh those different elements--yes, Susan?

Susan Danly: Excuse me, Susan. Another question on the aesthetics. For the color film can we assume that the color has changed from the time that it was made? There’s a distinctive blue cast to everything. I don’t know if that was original or if it’s something that has happened if the film has changed over time.

Karan: Photochemistry is very complicated. Photochemistry is very very complicated and it’s something that Liz works with every day. There are some things that you’ve got easy answers on because we’ve got this and it’s faded terribly to pink and we know what that is. We don’t know now about how that was processed, how it was shot. We can tell you what the stock was then, we can compare it to other things in that particular collection, but I think that we are going to be oriented towards not imposing our contemporary thought as to what it should look like because that would be like overcleaning a canvas. And I’m sure that some of the other archivists here will have an opinion on that.

Susan Danly: It seems to me though that for a modern audience, a contemporary audience, looking at that you need to be able to explain that this color may not be the original color. So our perception of it could be completely different.

Liz Coffey: It could be the original color of the film but probably not the original color of the actual scene. So like they didn’t actually look like that in real life but the film may have made them look like that.

Karan: What you’re bringing up is a really key question, Susan, that we are going to be talking a bit more about, which is that everything that we will be showing in the museum is a surrogate. So the films that were used by individuals and families were for the most part reversal film: What ran through the camera is what was processed, what was shown. There was only one artifact. So it would be sacrificial to show that in the museum. In some rare instances you might. If we had a duplicate something we might. Very unlikely.

Susan Danly: I don’t quite follow what you meant by sacrificial.

Karan: That means if you show it you’re putting it at hazard. I’m saying that the original reversal film, we’re unlikely to show it in the museum.

Susan Danly: Would you be showing in other instances the original film?

Karan: Very unlikely.

Susan: It would be shown digitally.

Karan; We’re most likely to show it digitally. Or, and this is being done quite a lot now in contemporary art, people are showing film on looping mechanisms to project film with light passing through it, and so that’s an option also. We could show film but it would be a copied film. That’s a topic for this. And Michaels’ saying no way, we’re not...

Michael Komanecky: I don’t think it is a topic. You say that’s what the case is, people will understand it’s a necessity to preserve the original and I don’t think there’s any question that will come to the visitor about the appropriateness of doing that.

Karan: Susan’s bringing up an important point, how do we bridge the difference between what Liz is saying: the day in March 1960, versus what was recorded at that moment in March 1960 on reversal Kodachrome, versus what the intervening 60 years did to it. And that there will be some subjective decisions made.



Sian Evans: This is Sian. But people are used to that; the difference between a color world and a black and white film and the speed issue and people are aware of the speed as well: the jumping old films. I think people, everyone in our culture is used to a spectrum of representation, quality of representation, I know archivists are attuned. Look at YouTube, that’s terrible, but nobody cares. They accept it.

Michael Grillo: This is Michael Grillo. I think the question is, which balance do you strike? Prompting an audience to view these as historical films, “Oh, that’s 60s color,” versus trying to recreate for them there world of how would it have been viewed in the 1960s. What would have been the color--correction before storage and everything else intervened. And this is the standard restorers’, conservators’ question. Having it a discussed question is crucial.

Karan: Yes, it’s crucial. And when we said in the original proposal that there would be transparency here we do need to talk about it and there will be a catalog topic because going forward with fewer and fewer film laboratories everybody’s making those decisions in their digital processing and presentation. Mark Neumann had a comment.

Mark Neumann: I have an app on my iPhone, it’s called vintage 8mm. And when I film things with that app it looks like that if I choose the 70s setting. [laughter] I want to go back to your other point which I think is more important, about public presentations. I think that in exhibiting something like this one of the techniques that’s used, where I live in Flagstaff there’s a lot of Native American museums, artifacts from different ruin sites. You’re probably familiar with this technique in terms of the presentation, which is there’s nothing definitive anybody can say about the pots and things they put on exhibit, but what they do is try to raise a whole series of questions to let people draw some conclusion about how they think. And I think that in a case like this, rather than be definitive, I think you show it. I don’t think you keep it in the vault because it could be potentially offensive to somebody. The idea is that this is part of that spectrum of amateur film, and so to raise the kinds of questions about is this voyeurism, is this something that you find difficult to watch, is this exploitive? is this something that is a performance? Like any art object you find in a museum it really boils down to the interpretation that the viewer is going to make about it. But to use the context of the exhibition as a way to pose some questions; is the camera, as Susan Sontag wrote, a passport to film anything you want? Well, certainly it is. People treated it that way . But how does it make you feel to watch something like this with the camera fixed on somebody from a lower economic class?

Sarah Ruddy: I don’t think because I was wanting to say before, this is Sarah, this particular film actually brought up a lot of questions for me. In terms of the presentation of the film. And then, Karan mentioned that these were definitely discussions of class. It’s obviously on screen in that clip but I think also in just the narrative that you’ve presented here the narratives of the clips, of what the clips are about and where they come from, really foreground ownership. They really foreground the ownership of the equipment and sort of the cultural ownership of the people who this film belongs to. So we know that somebody is an insurance executive, we know who the rich and famous people are in these clips and in the narratives that we’re seeing. That’s the narrative that we are presented with. And I think in art more generally that’s pretty much how it works. You always know something is from the collection of so and so and it’s important that we know that so and so owned this or was an executive at this or at that and I think that’s something more, kind of a larger, the way we present art question. That this clip certainly brought up. Because I’m really interested also in just the way that you’re choosing to present, to introduce each of the clips to us, by collection. And is that the only way that we can do it? You perhaps need to do that for reasons of credit and actual ownership, not in a Marxist sense but in an actual pragmatic sense. But I think I’m interested in how all these films are going to be presented in the exhibition; I’m interested in what kind of context will be built around them. What kind of narrative is going to be used to present each of the clips. Is it going to look like this or is it going to be more describing what’s happening in the clip or is it going to be about the state of the film or the degradation of the material. Or is it going to be about who owned the camera. Those are interesting questions to me.

Karan: Thank you, Sarah. Very challenging at this moment. Libby?



Libby Bischof: Of all the films we watched this morning this is the one I want to watch again. I would watch it three or four more times because I feel like I didn’t [Gus noise], I feel like there was so much to see and I want to keep seeing it and seeing it more. But to a contemporary audience, initially it came to me, I thought of the show Hoarders, that so many people watch, that has a complete fascination with that. And then I don’t know how many of you have seen the independent film, The Way We Get By, about the Bangor airport. It also referenced me to that immediately, to the older gentleman’s home with all the cats and they had to clean it out and he allowed them to film it, too. It was a very intentional thing; he was clearly not proud of the way that he was living but he let the filmmakers in to see that. And that was interesting to me as to what someone, what does this say about Maine, what does this say about the filmmaker, to me I want to know what’s the situation here, was it “Well give you this beer if you come out and we’ll leave this for you?” Or how much were the people sort of in on it.I don’t know if I watched it again I could figure it out but I want to. [End reel 2]

Reel 3

Michael Komanecky: There’s no single narrative in any one of these films and I think the duty I would feel in presenting to the public is that fact. There are so many factors about who made it, why was that film made of the two Maine characters stumbling out of their shack and for whom? It screams out, for whom was this made? And what was the intent? We may not know and that’s something one may have to admit repeatedly in whatever films are chosen. The larger question to me, one that has to be acknowledged from the get-go, is that you’ve got how many films? You could choose an infinite number of variations of films and they’re going to say different things together and individually. This is just your first shot at it; this is not the end of a discussion about what these things can mean to an audience. Another issue that strikes me is something about a presumed authenticity that comes with still images certainly, at least initially in the history of photography, that there was some reality there. All these images are fictive, they’re an artifice. That’s as true for a 17th century painting as it is to me to any one of these films because there’s intent, conscious or unconscious, on the part of the maker. That has to be addressed in the conversation too for the visitor. The third thing that strikes me, I’ve never sheared sheep, I’ve never ridden horses like that, I’ve never swirled a is not to over-interpret these films in terms of telling people what they should think about them. There are obvious issues of class, social class, performance, I think that creativity is an underlying theme and I think it’s interesting that some of these supposedly amateur films are being done by people who are pretty intentionally creative and you know one theme there is that of the wealthy eccentric, which is parallel to something you find in England where people like Fox Talbot who were independently wealthy who, you know, translate cuneiform and invent photography and have these weird hobbies that turn out to be quite important. And there’s also the issue of play and how it relates to work. For the Forbes family you feel that this whole sheep farm has to do with what their values are as a family in terms of a lot of issues of the environment and work and staying connected with the land and that kind of thing. But I think just to go back to the first thought, I think you don’t want to over-interpret them. What’s interesting about this project is that it gives people an opportunity to bring their own reactions and in fact if you did this as a show one of the most interesting aspects might be to somehow gather or poll audience reactions to these films.

Justin: Mark was making the point earlier, and I think it’s really important, that this not be a didactic exhibition about “look at how class is treated in Maine,” but on the other extreme I think we all find it frustrating whether in written scholarship or in exhibitions when it’s just question after question after question. There’s a balance that has to be struck there. I think clearly this is a really unique opportunity to have the museumgoers not just think about these films but somebody said just five minutes ago or so, how they think about their own amateur filmmaking. Their own archives, their family albums, even these videos they shoot on their iPhones. I think that’s really a wonderful opportunity that this exhibition holds. And I was going to suggest too that if we’re thinking about some sort of online catalog and having a strong online presence for this exhibition to be able to get audience members to interact whether through a blog or an electronic comments section would be enormously important. And easy to do, I think.



Steve Bromage: So much of that exhibit context is making people make your museumgoers connections to their world, whether that’s to Maine. I like Susan’s points very much. You know, or to the art or the thematic or their own interaction and use of technology. So it’s making silk thing around, you know, in the wind, I’ve never posed for a film, I’ve never posed or acted in a pageant that was filmed. I don’t have any genuine connection to almost anything that’s been presented in these films yet there’s some presumption this is amateur and this is how real life is.

Justin: You never had beer in the morning?

Michael Komanecky: Not yet. Again, it comes back to this presumption of some kind of authenticity. Well it is, but I don’t think it’s the one that is assumed. That’s what makes it so interesting to me.

Karan: Mark has a comment. I just want to interject that that’s what’s so powerful about this is that we are confronting these expectations that there is that lexical, evidentiary value here. When I counterpropose, absolutely not, these are all very much made objects about which we can speculate but we are all bringing to it our own experiences of different kinds. And really what we want to do is present some safe way for people to realize that given that this is an immense potential holding, many of the people who will come have their own home movies that they’ve never shared with anybody and it’s out there and there are very few organizations that have been collecting it. So it’s new and whatever we say is going to shift from the moment we put it up to the time we close. People’s understanding of what it is is going to change. So it’s extremely dynamic. Not to say dangerous in some ways. Mark?

Mark Neumann: What Sarah was saying about how do you present this as part of a collection and I think, you know, when it becomes most relevant, that that’s the most relevant piece of information. For example the scarf dance piece from the Maxim Collection; Maxim is a really interesting character. He’s an inventor, he invented an electric car, he founded the amateur movie makers society [Amateur Cinema League]. In this year, the same year that he makes this scarf dance he is playing with trick photography and Mag the Hag, his other film, the whole premise is based on that idea. This is a particular period in the films that he’s making when he’s doing these experiments. And then ultimately putting together a much longer story that has a very modern twist, but based on doing tricks inside the camera to get the effect that he wanted. So I think that that kind of stuff, you know, putting that context around it, to me there’s not any questions about the scarf dance, in terms of should we watch this or not watch this. Of course we should watch it.

Tricia Welsch: I’m really scratching my head though as I think how to make any, all right I’m going to say the word, coherence, out of these films as exhibited together. And the only thing that I see is the notion of performance as a rubric that could hold most of them, but not the Hinds factory. And it strikes me that...unless you really extend what performance might mean. It does strike me that we might need some kind of rubric unless you think of this as the one time to get everybody to see all the things that amateur film could be and do. I’m just putting this out there in a really unformulated way, maybe, but I don’t know that an exhibit that does everything it could possibly do is going to do that well. It strikes me that the kinds of structures that you’ve had, say, in the summer symposia, where you needed to come up with a rubric to hold a number of things together might work better for the kind of exhibit, for a really successful exhibit. We’ve had a lot of questions about leisure and performance, and who owns the cameras and whether these people are farming for pleasure as opposed to ...and whether the guys are drinking for the camera or not drinking. I think there’s a lot of ways you can invite people to think about almost all of these films. Again, the outlier for me, as gorgeous as it was, was the Hinds factory. And if you go further down the work and labor route, I think you maybe change what coherence you might have in these films.

Karan: Susan?

Susan Danly: For me, they all pose really interesting questions about Maine. And Maine, not just inward-looking Maine, but Maine in relationship to the rest of the world. And it’s not anything that a single filmmaker intended but when you put them together as an anthology each one of them asks a very different question and raises really interesting and compelling visualizations about what it meant to live in Maine at a



very particular time. It’s Maine but it’s also linked to very historic moments in time. And that deals with the people who made the film, the people who act in the film, culture, whether it’s urban or rural, they’re great. And they make history, as Libby said at the beginning, beyond something that you take out of a history book but something that is a way of understanding history in a very different way.

Rob Nanovic: Performance is exactly the word that I was thinking of, too. And I think if those guys, the two whatever you want to call them, if they didn’t want to be filmed they would probably just have thrown the bottle at them. They were hamming it up and they said, basically should we keep going? It was an awkward, kind of went too long and it’s almost like people, when the camera’s on you you want to look your best, I think. You don’t want to be caught doing something wrong. It’s evidence.

Michael Grillo: To try to find a theme in this I think we have a responsibility, people are coming to this type of exhibition with a notion, a fixed notion of what amateur film means. I think just that word amateur is going to guide them to have certain expectations. I think using Maine as sort of the locus in showing the diversity of it is an excellent suggestion because we have seen an incredible variety with different intentionalities, different strata, different intended audiences. And I think to show exactly the breadth of what amateur can embrace, it points to the issue of here we are in some ways, it’s the standard historian’s thing: by the canon you select is the type of narrative that you tell. But I think the issue of when we use the word genre in some ways what we’re seeing here is a variety of genres. And to get that really clearly, the breadth of that territory out there will help, I think, will work together to clarify that these are continuously problematic. They work in relationship to each other and set out different territories. So the notion of having ongoing questions I think is going to be by exactly the sort of fragmentary nature ,or the purposeful fragmentary nature of the collection or of the presentation in itself.

Karan: I know some people have to leave after lunch and wonder, a few people I haven’t heard from at all. Henry?

Henry Adams: I would just wanted to say one thing, which is it seems to me one of the most important things those connections, I think, is what we’re doing. But I keep looking for further definition from you about what the goals of the exhibit is. Is it just to raise the awareness about amateur film and what it might tell us? Is it about the aesthetics, because to your earlier point, Michael, you have a thousand films to choose from, the exhibit will be a complete construct, you’ll pick five of them or you’ll pick twenty and the number that you pick and the range you pick are going to determine what people take away from it. And whether you say here, these are examples of different motifs in amateur filmmaking or, so it’s exemplary in giving people a flavor of the diversity, or whether you feel committed to finding some coherent themes that run across the amateur films. I don’t know. That’s curatorial...

Justin: That is precisely where we are. (Laughter). That is precisely where we are. Do we do it by genre or do we come up with five or six uber questions that might even not be explicit but implicit or explicit, I don’t know, that guide how we group the works and the order in which they might be seen in the space. So yeah, it’s just great. We’re trying to figure that out.

Steve Bromage: One other question too. Now there’s a ubiquity because of YouTube and digital about being able to see these things, it’s less about access and being able to see something you haven’t seen anything like before than the relationship between what you could see at home and what you can present online in a component, versus how you display things and what the communal public experience of seeing these in a public place, projected or displayed--I think is an interesting tension.

Karan: We do have to break. Thank you for giving us a really exciting morning.

LUNCH

Karan: Phil, in the booth, our hero, gets a hand. And the post-lunch crowd, coffeed up. Ready to go. You all did really well in saying your names before you spoke for which I’m very grateful and if anyone wants a copy



of the transcription when it’s ready I’d be glad to email it to you too. Welcoming a new member of the group, Michael Simon, who was a Beloit College professor of photography. So glad that he is here today. He has written on snapshots and that as you know, we thought of this morning, vernacular photography, the everyday, it’s one of the things we’re thinking about. We’re missing a couple of people Mark Neumann didn’t come down, I guess people will filter in. We talked about performance this morning. We talked about intentionality. I want to shift now to talk about landscape because I know nothing at all about landscape in the fine arts but it seemed like it was something that people do with their cameras. Tourism and photography go together so we are going to at look at three pieces. One is from a collection, Albert Conley from Freeport, Maine, that Rob Nanovic said, “I’m so happy you’re showing Albert Conley’s stuff.” One of the reasons we’re showing it is that it was assembled by Albert Conley from multiple automobile trips in Maine over time. This is one of the things people do is they get a subject and they put it together. So we’re going to look at jusr a little bit of Portland by Albert Conley. And then Phil will go directly from that into the two Jameson pieces and Judy McGeorge was instrumental in introducing us to the family in New Hampshire from which this film comes and when we discuss it we can hear more about them, Brown Hill Farm, their relation to Concord, New Hampshire, and what were they doing in Enid, Oklahoma? So if you could roll those Conley and Jameson, I’ll close the back door.

Albert Conley, Automobile trips in Maine, 1928-1934, Portland sequence

Earle Shettleworth, Jr: That was Congress Square, this is Monument Square. Portland.

Karan: That was Earle Shettleworth.

Earle: This is Congress Street. In fact, that building to the right is where Maine Historical is now. Now we’re looking at what was the tallest building in Maine, the Fidelity Building, Monument Square.

Karan: There’s more circus footage but I stopped because I have an obsession with circuses but that’s not what we’re doing right now. ‘

Jameson Collection, Brown Hill Farm, Bow, NH, 1926

Erik Jorgensen: ...half-heartedly swatting, where is this?

Karan: This is Brown Hill Farm in Bow, New Hampshire.

Libby Bischof: The swatting seems very ineffective. Are they supposed to be eating it? [Oxen eating hay]

Michael Grillo? They have great intentionality. (Laughter) Where is this, please?

Jameson Collection, Enid, OK, 1927 [Champlin refining company, see http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/C/CH001.html]

Karan: This is Enid, Oklahoma. It’s a petroleum refinery. And it’s shot by the same person the next year.

Libby Bischof: And was he traveling?

Karan: I believe that he was there probably as an investor. Because he went to several Oklahoma locations, mostly related to extractive industry.

Libby Bischof: I wonder if he had to get permission to film when he was at these places.

Karan: Libby, it’s a good question.



Erik Jorgensen: Back before the days people thought about that.

Libby: Lewis Hine used to have to apply to take pictures inside factories and things like that. Where are the workers?

Sarah Ruddy: I wonder how much of that had to do with moving images being not quite understood as a permanent format. Why it would be easier to get permission, why people wouldn’t care about your taking moving pictures. Whereas still images were thought to be much more monumental.

Susan Danly: You couldn’t print a moving image; you were just going to take it home.

Sarah: You were just going to take it home, or we don’t even know what this is really, it’s just a fad and it will go away. Like iPhones.

Erik Jorgensen: I suppose if you were an investor people would say, Oh sure, take pictures. We want your money.

Tricia: Perfect for industrial espionage.

That’s right.

This is a pan.

Michael Grillo. The issue of what carries as technology succeeds, what carries authority by nature of its technology and currency as technology, I think possibly plugs into why film at a particular moment might be viewed as more voracious than photography.

Karan: Thank you, Phil. Judy McGeorge and I viewed the Jameson 16mm films and took extensive notes, which are available to you as a Google Doc if you want to see them and a lot of it is downtown Concord, New Hampshire, and the family, and there’s wonderful New Hampshire footage and then there’s this industrial, which seemed so related to the pan of the Bow, New Hampshire, farm to me. That he’s panning the environment, he’s capturing what you see there and what you see when you go to a petroleum refinery is completely different-- but at the same time relates to what many people were painting as you get to this period of the 1920s and 1930s is the industrial form. And we don’t know what his intent was, it could have been industrial espionage; unlikely. He was probably at that level of these were friends of his who were running this refinery and he was probably going to put some money in and own a part of the operation. So it was for him part of the landscape that he owned in the same way that the Bow farm was the landscape that he owned. And I find it interesting because it’s quite different from a lot of the other amateur films that are inside a factory or workplace that this was so much from up above and being, I mean it’s really the panopticon definition. He saw the whole thing and he took it home with him.

Earle Shettleworth: I think a couple of thoughts on those films. One, obviously as far as the pastoral one is concerned, that is just filled with classic 19th century rural pastoral motifs. That’s Currier and Ives America and it appears in prints and paintings all through the 19th century, a celebration of rural life and haying is a particularly strong motif in that regard. As to the industrial, a couple of thoughts: One is that we have a very different view now about these industrial landscapes, but in the 19th and early 20th century, they were a matter of great pride to people. This was the sense of American accomplishment that we could create this extraordinary complex that did something, that was involved with manufacturing or refining. So I think that it’s maybe not only the sense that he might be a stockholder or know friends who were involved in it, but it’s also just the fascination of it. You know, and bringing the images back to show other people because hey, out in Oklahoma, this is what they have, you know. This is a thing of wonder.

Karan: Yes, it’s a monument.



Earle Shettleworth: And I think your point too about film capturing that landscape. Imagine how many still photographs would be required to replicate that same amount of information that we got from those few moments of film. It’s really quite amazing, the difference.

Karan: Thank you. Michael?

Michael Simon: I would very strongly argue the same point. I suppose, I have the distinction that I feel the oldest in the crowd, but in the twenties and the thirties or even before, if you think of Bauhaus architecture and what people thought was, that’s a mixed metaphor, the shadow of the future it was all industrial, which connected with this person planning to invest or having invested in this establishment that would be a connection. But I also think that as soon as people start to photograph or make a film holding the camera, something changes. And the preconceived ideas melt into the visual interest of the person who holds the camera. The impetus may be conscious but as soon as that is gone it’s not like somebody doing a feature film where the director has to be conscious through the whole schmeer. It takes over, I think the enjoyment of seeing that young woman poking the oxen was an important part of it. And I also feel that between the two world wars the fascination with the old and the fascination with the new cohabited in a way that we cannot today imagine.

Karan: Thank you, Michael.

Earle Shettleworth: To add to that, that’s reflected very much in the painting between the wars. There’s a whole school of American realism, which is both rooted in rural life like Grant Wood and at the same time the industrialism of Charles Sheeler, for example.

Karan: When we first saw these films, which was not more than a year ago, I envisioned, could you have two projected images at the same time, showing Bow, New Hampshire, and Enid, Oklahoma? And as we were warned this morning, do not over-interpret. Michael?

Michael Grillo: I think to show the two together, one of the things you will ferret out of that is exactly that notion of the panopticon vision that you’ve cited. Regardless of the fodder, no pun intended, the cameraman is going to shoot it in this manner because it has that sense of truth, it does that 360, it shows the whole environment. And that would allow for these things to become comparable, seen through the same lens. The question I would have in the Jameson Collection: is the Enid, Oklahoma, exceptional, or do you have other, what shall I say other genres, other subjects? Does he do mostly bucolic? Does he split industrial/bucolic?

Karan: He does do other industrial; there’s mining and he does visit other industrial places.

Michael Grillo: Does he do more bucolic as well?

Karan: He does more of his family, because it’s personal film. Overall there’s way more family, I would say. Judy?

Judy McGeorge: There’s family, there’s kids in parades, wonderful winter scenes, it’s really beautifully shot.

Michael Grillo: The reason I ask is this will give a lens on whether we are talking that this is tying into a major movement of the time. UK literature does this in the 1860s and 70s and exactly, we do it between the two wars. Is this a moment that other people of that time would have looked at and seen exactly that point, or is this just the luck of what’s surviving?

Karan: Liz?

Liz Coffey: Well, it seems that these are the only ones that are not from Maine, so I’m not sure that you would end up with them in your final museum piece, but if you have; in terms of exhibiting things if you



have things on screens that are sort of next to each other anyway you wouldn’t have to have them cheek by jowl. But if you had them in adjacent spaces people would definitely make the connection between them if they’re labelled with the collection name or whatever. They do look really beautiful together.

Judy McGeorge: I do think you’d have to point out the reason that Enid was selected to be included was because of the pan and not...because when David [Weiss] explained that when we showed it [in New Hampshire] it would have been totally out of context if we’d shown it in New Hampshire when we were showing New Hampshire films and suddenly have Oklahoma. And David explained that he put it in there because he noticed with the same filmmaker the technique was what he was showing, not the subject matter.

Liz Coffey: The way that people’s film clips are is not all in the same state, so I’m sometimes concerned that dealing with a collection has to be so site-specific to their home. Most of the time they brought their cameras with them when they went somewhere else; vacation or work or wherever. That’s a topic that comes up a lot when we’re talking about regional film. Just putting that out there.

Karan: The next creator we’re going to show includes his travel film West. So I think that it’s the idea of that we’re dealing with a core of regionally-based work. But as you say, people traveled, they were informed by things they saw in other places, they lived lives that were mobile and the camera is something that relates very well to travel. And I’d like to see that in here. I really look forward to Earle and others seeing the full [Conley] Automobile Trip in Maine. Because how people use their camera when in motion is delightful; when they are traveling. What do they choose to bring back?

Earle Shettleworth: Karan, in conjunction with that, obviously people taking these early movies in the travel, in the automobile period beginning around 1910, but also at the same time they’re using their Brownie cameras as well. We find in our collection of photographs that there are a large number of albums that begin to appear of small hand-held personal Brownie photographs that are of automobile trips at this same very period.

Libby: A lot of these quote-unquote Maine films are shot in Maine by people from away or who are summer folk, too. So I think that if you’re talking about regionalism then you have to think about that as well, that a lot of these are travel films of those people. Do the films that people from Maine shoot in Maine look different from the films that people from away shoot in Maine? Are the sites different? Are the way they use the camera different? I think that’s interesting as well. An age like Earle’s talking about of travel and tourism, especially automobile tourism that makes Maine and other places so much more accessible to people. You can go there and back in a day, take your camera.

Rob Nanovic: Can I just comment on the Conley? This is Rob. Before we move on. I’m glad in particularly that you showed that clip because I think one thing that audiences really want to see is things they can relate to and seeing Congress Street and Monument Square and all that really is a Wow factor, just to see an item they recognize in a totally different setting. The traffic in a pedestrian zone now. In 2007 Steve Bromage set up a 207 interview for Home Move Day and I showed that clip and Rob Caldwell and whatever her name is were “Wow!” just because they saw their building. Something that hits home that they recognize.

Karan: I think that Earle delightfully, in doing what I call home movie Karaoke, gave us the sense of how important the camera motion is--that only by knowing that’s the tallest building in Portland do you realize how important it is that he tilted all the way up. So it’s important that we keep that kind of thing in mind because most members of the audience probably won’t notice.

Libby: You get that with a lot of the world’s fair films, too, a lot of site specific: I’m going to pan because that’s what to do with this wonderful thing.

Karan: Because it was wonderful and now it wouldn’t necessarily be a wonderful thing for most of the people who were born after that period. We will move on to a traveler. Charles Norman Shay. He’s one of the few living people in the roster today. A Penobscot Tribal Elder who has been here, donated his films to



Northeast Historic Film, as many of you know has a book and we’re going to show two selections from his home movies, if you could roll it. Thank you.

Charles Norman Shay, Indian Island and Charles Norman Shay, American West

Libby: Is there a date for this one?

Karan: No, we don’t have an actual date, we have circa dates.

Libby: Is the collection big?

Karan: Medium sized. That is he.

Libby Bischof: Did he shoot in the war?

Karan: He did not shoot in the war.

Liz Coffey: What’s he got in his pocket?

Erik Jorgensen: Is that a duck decoy?

Karan: And that’s his wife. His mom, this is in Indian Island.

Libby Bischof: Were you there the day he spoke to teachers?

Erik Jorgensen: No, I missed that.

Libby Bischof: It was amazing, an amazing speaker.

Erik Jorgensen: Did you have these films?

Libby Bischof: No, that would have been neat.

Karan: She’s from Vienna, Austria.

Susan Danly: What’s she wearing on her head, is that beading?

Libby Bischof: The modern and the traditional in this is really striking.

[various comments, sub-audible]

Sarah Ruddy: This is the most pedestrian question ever, in the previous film the board that they were walking over, does anyone have any idea if that was set up like a stage of some sort? It looked like there was this unnecessary board between a bunch of steps.

David Williams: Maybe because it was muddy and they went between those buildings a lot. Something like that.

Michael Grillo: I think we’re looking at an adjustable lens here.

Karan: Yes, you have a zoom.

Erik Jorgensen: The saturation of colors is just beautiful.



Earle Shettleworth: Amazing period cultural artifacts. The cooler, the plaid cooler. I remember those. [Laughter]

Libby Bischof: The radio.

Earle Shettleworth: The Volkswagen. The little stand, everything.

Tricia Welsch: This is going to be a Coke commercial, right?

Karan: It’s actually a beer commercial.

Speakers not known: Charcoal. The radio. He loves to zoom on her.

Libby Bischof: He is zoom-happy.

Michael Grillo: He is so pathologically driven by what the capacity of the camera is of the time and really featuring that.

Speakers not known: Potatoes. The Scotch cooler, that’s right.

Susan Danly: The clothes are great, they have nothing to do with camping. They could be out in the back yard.

Speakers not known: There’s beer. Look at that steak. Huge.

Libby Bischof: Early product placement. Beer turns [laughter]

Karan: Then she gestures, go away or shut up. He told her to turn the can.So don’t you think we deserve a major exhibition just on the basis of those two?

Absolutely. Those are wonderful.Will Budweiser sponsor?

Karan: Thank you, Phil. Can we have house lights?

Erik Jorgensen: This is Erik speaking. I do think the inclusion of later imagery is very important. I think the minute YouTube comes in suddenly moving pictures for today are just everywhere. But now, because of YouTube as recently as the 70s seem distant past because we don’t have that immediate kind of access to those images any more. So I think it’s great to have something form the what is that, late 50s, early 60s?

Karan: We can date it from the car although he does, in the collection overall he takes American cars overseas and here he has a European car in the American West, so I wouldn’t hang it too closely on the cars themselves but from the age of his son we can get to this.

Steve Bromage: Why do you say the American West? You know that’s the West?

Karan: Yes, we know that’s the West because we see him driving around in Colorado and we know that they took a vacation out West. Any other responses to those two pieces?

Justin Wolff: That to me is the iconic tribal image right there, that last clip. I don’t know how you could tap into a collective unconscious memory more than that. Everybody was pointing out things that they remembered.



Karan: Again, I think that when I was trying to answer what I picked for today, I was looking for concision and this is so concise in so many ways. They have a very small car that now people are going back to. They put everything in that really small car, every object that you see.

Liz Coffey: And they sat really close to it.

Karan: And they sat really close to it. But being able to look at his relation to his family in Indian Island and he now owns that teepee and runs it as a tribal museum--and his life story. But how sweet it is that that film survived and can be preserved. It’s just very powerful to me because I think that you don’t have to know a lot of background, you can just look at it and enjoy it and then see where it leads you.

Justin Wolff: Would he be someone who would speak about that film at a museum event?

Libby Bischof: He came to speak to Maine Humanities Council teaching American history event that we were doing, actually with various veterans, so his book must be out by now I would imagine was a result of someone else writing a book about Maine veterans and not including the Native American veterans in the book at all. So he did a piece on Native American veterans and then came and spoke about his life. Not a dry eye in the place but just an absolutely fascinating speaker who has traveled all over the world too. Just a really interesting life and really interesting relationship with his own tribal culture too. He doesn’t travel as much so it would probably be a one-time thing. The tribal historian brings him down. He would be a great speaker if someone would. Don’t we have more film from Old Town, did they come from him, of tribal dances.

Karan: We do have more.

Justin: Were they his?

Karan: I’m not sure they’re his.

Michael Grillo: This is Michael Grillo. The question of nostalgia which came up a little bit earlier, as you get into the 60s films and 50s films will become that much more heightened. Certainly the pieces that this audience responded to identified this audience as a certain age. And I’m not saying that’s bad or good but I think that’s something that’s going to have to be taken into measure in terms of how this thing is placed and strong a card that will be.

Karan: Yes, Steve?

Steve Wurtzler: It seems to me there are ways in which this film aesthetically to me conforms to almost the ultimate home movie in that it depicts a domestic scene, it depicts travel, it has that eye popping Kodachrome saturated colors. It’s characterized by this near-obsessive panning and excessive use of a zoom lens. So there’s a way in which it seems to stand in aesthetically for all of those things that come to mind with amateur cinema and domestic cinematography. And there’s a way in which the other films that we’ve seen can be read against this to show the breadth of cinematic practices across the ages. So that the pastoral view of the hay wagon is a kind of broadening of what our sense of a home movie is, if this is the paragon of home movies.

Karan: Cool. Thank you. Shall we see the next piece that also can be read against this? Arthur Libby Race shot in the Boothbay area, a little bit in Boston, and we’re showing you just two minutes from about an 18-minute piece which I would like to be able to show in its entirety to people because it evolves beautifully. We will give you a sense of what it is on Heron Island with a bunch of guys.

Arthur Libby Race Heron Island excerpt, 1939

Speaker not known: Is this the drinking expedition?



Karan: This is [gap]. So this needs to be retransferred at the correct frame rate and also deserves preservation.

Toni Treadway: Goes next to the scarf dance.

Libby Bischof: I wonder if they test that after a certain amount of drinking.

Erik Jorgensen: Is that Damariscove in the background?

Earle Shettleworth: I think so. I think I saw the life saving station.

Karan: We don’t think that’s water.

Libby: Is the note that he chaired the Committee on Prohibition meant to be funny.

Karan: Yes, it is.

Michael Grillo: So this is the quintessential a Maine drinking town with a fishing problem.

Steve: Guys laying back in the background. (Laughter.)

Libby Bischof: This is a different part than the part we saw.The town fathers.

Karan: So the family member is in Portland seasonally. I asked his permission to show this. I think it’s a fantastic document. The full thing: the fellows leave from a club. The man who made it, Arthur Libby Race, managed a club on Heron Island and Earle probably knows about that club.

Earle: To be honest with you, I don’t. A type of summer thing.

Karan: A summer thing with an Indian name. He managed that club and then he went to Boston. And he went back with his buddies. This is a film he shot of how they drink chowder and become progressively drunker as it goes and at the very end they’re trying to get back on to the boat at low tide. And there’s a very very very long ladder and they have to rope themselves and be lowered and the suspense is fantastic. It’s a favorite piece but it also includes this sense of the homosocial environment that is challenging because you’re seeing guys behaving very much like they’re not thinking about being recorded. They’re enjoying themselves, they’re not thinking about the camera at all. Because they’re really close to the guy with the camera. So we had thought that we were restricted from showing it by the donor because there’s one scene in which a gentleman drops his trousers, bends over, and another man comes and puts seaweed on his buttocks and they all laugh. They think it’s really funny. We thought that they did not want us to show it because of this. And it turns out that’s not the case of all. We’re quite welcome to show the piece. So Im really glad you enjoyed it. I will tell the donor that it went over really well.

Erik Jorgensen: We think no less of those gentlemen.

Liz Coffey: I think that people would stick around for the whole thing.

Karan: Liz says they would stick around for the whole thing.

Libby Bischof: The other funny thing about that is I think with the modern technology, people recording things with cell phone cameras it’s sort of. I always tell my students I’m so glad I didn’t have Facebook when I was in college, not just because of the distraction but I can’t imagine going to every party you ever attended is now a photo documentary online that everybody can see. And this is sort of an early version of that, which is kind of interesting, which I think people would kind of relate to that way as well.



Karan: Yes, Michael?

Michael Simon: One thing which in our liberal age is not an accepted topic and it is the social awareness of the subject, the photographer indirectly, these men were much more comfortable in front of the camera than the people in that color clip. And I think that is a fascinating issue--of how people see themselves and what is their self-image and how it reflects to their position within society.

Karan: Michael, could you tell us more about that? Could you say what allowed you from just watching that short clip to say that the men were comfortable in front of the camera?

Michael Simon: They wave rags, which I certainly am not a local but I have lived here well over a decade and I have extensive conversations with locals while I went every Sunday to the local dump, picking. I had a couple of conversations very similar, where people said I would never take anything on the dump because I grew up poor. And I have one cohort with whom we were energetically pulling things out of the dumpster and he came from a hell of a lot more money than I, but neither of us were self conscious of that. Who the hell cares what people think? But when people feel that they are down on the lower level of the social pyramid they are very self conscious and that Native American family we saw in the color clip were extremely conscious, except the young girl who was dancing. I think that is an important issue because ultimately we all are searching for our position within the social structure and what films are around whether family movies, snapshots or going to the theater and seeing Cher or even better Wilbur the Pig.

Mark Neumann: This example is a good one, I’m not sure I would use the phrase comfortable in front of the camera. What I think happens is that these things are happening, and then somebody is recording them. I think that the camera calls forth this kind of performativity because of its presence. Karan, this is one of the things I tried to argue in that “Home Movies on Freud’s Couch” essay, with the difference that the men killing the deer over again after it was already dead. You know that the camera is this device that calls forth something that is simultaneously real and unreal. It is the thing that brings forward their creativity. Sitting on the stones and playing the ladder like it was a cello. I am not sure that that’s just happening and they’re comfortable to have the camera record it. I think they stage these things because the camera is there. And it doesn’t mean that it’s fiction; it means that this is a way of drawing something out, that the camera draws something out, a level of performance and creativity that allows us to witness what’s going on.

REEL 4

Mark Neumann: In other words there’s more camaraderie because the camera is there. There’s more invention. They’re making it up on the spot. It’s improvisation.

Justin Wolff: I would add to it that the camera increases the camaraderie. It loosens the boundaries; there’s the sense that whatever happens it’s just a performance. It won’t matter.

Mark Neumann: It’s happening but it’s not really happening.

Earle: Just to add to that, in the broader sense this film is a great document of what went on in the 19th and well into the 2oth century, the exclusive male camaraderie. We’re talking about the interminable hunting trips, fishing trips, chowder clubs, outings and so on. From my own knowledge of Portland history alone, there were a whole series in the 19th and early 20th centuries of these exclusive male groups that would go out, whether it was painters or whether people who were the Venerable Cunner Society who would catch the cunners and bake them on the Cape Elizabeth shore. This was very much a part of the social structure of middle and upper middle class Maine in that time.

Steve Bromage: I saw that less as performance than capturing a camaraderie and fraternalism that probably existed. That probably is not so different than what they would do drunkenly or otherwise without the



camera rolling. So maybe they hammed it up a little but I imagine that, whether it’s a prep school or an old Yankee camaraderie kind of thing, it was how they interacted with each other in these kind of settings.

Michael Simon: I completely agree. The camera can bring out only what is there. And that’s why of course actors get so much money, they have so many variations within them. But for ordinary folks who are not accustomed to it, I would have said those guys might have clowned it up and made jokes in a boardroom. They have the self confidence and the self awareness which....I did several experiments making photographs, not moving pictures but still, of people and there were much more famous people than I who did similar things who discovered that by putting people in front of the camera and leaving them without direction they acted as themselves. And that’s my whole point, that sure the camera changes, it’s another person, with a more or less objective eye--but what it brings out is what is within the actors.

Mark Neumann: I would agree with that. The presence of the camera is an invitation to bring that out, perhaps with an amplified way, but it’s already there.

Rob Nanovic: Don’t forget who’s behind the camera too, that’s another issue.

Michael Grillo: Could I ask a question, how would you compare this film with the film we saw before lunch of the two guys in the junkyard with the beer?

Karan: Michael [Simon] came after lunch.

Michael Grillo: The issue of the performative nature, please this is one in which clearly everyone is standing in front, no one is caught by the camera, they are performing to the camera. And that was a constant in the other one as well. And yet we’re having a very different conversation about what their comfort levels are, whereas I did not see the, if they were lower class people, being necessarily uncomfortable in front of that camera. So I’m wondering, I certainly understand the argument you’re making, but whether the camera does give a certain amount of that fifteen minutes of fame that almost is anticipated, cutting across classes.

Justin Wolff: I don’t if this even begins to answer your question, Michael. This is Justin. But one of the differences between those films of course is that for the one we just saw, we can think about these gentlemen, as there’s quite a few transgressions there. They have traveled across the waterway to the island, they have excluded all domesticity, all feminine presence, and they have the camera. And all these things I think are bringing out this performance from them. The sense that they have crossed these kinds of boundaries and spaces. Whereas with this other film, I presume that they are at home.

Michael Grillo: I’m not sure of that.

Sarah Ruddy: In the first film it’s the performance that does the crossing; the fact that this one group of people is performing for this other group of people crosses this giant chasm. Which is very interesting. But I also think that the homosocial aspect of the second one is not transgressive at all, so I don’t how that sort of complicates what you just said.

Justin Wolff: Relatively it’s not transgressive. I don’t think they thought their activity was subversive but there is a sense of getting away.

Sarah Ruddy: You answered my question; I agree with you.

Karan: One thing that I want to bring up in the discussion of this film and the other is the textures, if we take the human beings out of it, the fabric, the rocks, the seaweed, all the things that make up that environment are so rich, even without the people. I felt the same way about the Stonington film: that if you just said I’m going to watch this all afternoon and not look at the people, it would be full of fantastic interactions of the flotsam and the way that we are when we’re at the shore, or when we find things that other people think are garbage. And I don’t think that those things were prompted specifically and that’s one of the



topics that’s been underlying my thinking about this exhibition--is that so much of this is serendipitous. That there’s the camera, it happens to be on, and these things are there without having any real value as objects at the time but we’re able to see them really differently because of the passage of those 50 years and because we’re trained. And if we’re in a museum environment we’re going to want to look at those objects and how they are--as if it were things that have been selected specifically for our gaze. That’s one of the reasons I’m quite interested in very short pieces because I want people to have the opportunity to look at them multiple times, to look just at the people and then to look at what’s happening around them, to look at how they move. And then some pieces, like this one, they’ll have an opportunity to watch at length. Because one of the things is that we’re all trained viewers. And we’re focusing, but when people are in a gallery they’re in motion, there’s a lot happening around them. They’re not quite sure what they’re looking at--and it might take a while. So one of the things we should think about now if you’re interested in talking about it is do we want to see these pieces repeated and looped with a little bit of black, so the opportunity to see on one screen the same thing multiple times? I get one nod from Liz.

Libby Bischof: Yes, that’s how I envisioned it. Did it envision it in a different way with different films on the same screen?

Karan: I think the way I’m envisioning it now is a screen with one thing on it, looped.

Sian Evans: Could you see it at different speeds? Karan: I don’t think that we would want tos how things at speeds that they weren’t intended to be shown at.

Sian Evans: We’re often seeing films that were not the way they were originally. It does change the viewing experience especially to repeat. Like sports replays. There’s a cultural ...in repetition. I understand that you don’t but I’m actually playing devils’ advocate and I look at things especially things that are moving fast I look at them a different way the second time.

Karan: I think that that gives us the opportunity to manipulate the pieces if we’re going to think of apps and other online things to say OK if you want to slow this down, if you want stop. But I think in the gallery setting to show it to the best of our ability the way it was made to be shown.

Sian Evans: Then are you talking about a loop?

Karan: Yes.

Toni Treadway: I personally would love to approach a new clip as a one-time thing with the option personally to choose to run it again but not as a forced continuous loop running over and over again.

Libby Bischof: Your choice is moving to another picture?

Toni Treadway: My choice would be a button you could push.

Libby Bischof: But what if there are 25 people in the gallery watching the thing at the same time?

Michael Grillo: Could I make a suggestion and please I am extemporalizing. Possibly if we begin to develop genres and I think we are, whether you could one or two or three pieces of one genre at one station that would be sequenced and in some ways saying this is an example. This is not the paradigm, this is an example and at the next station, lo and behold, a very different genre, or a different time, or whatever. And that way you would begin to prompt their minds of just the sheer wealth of numbers. And yet also prompt how much, no matter how much in our individual creativity, that we are consciously or unconsciously within very distinct parameters that are shared by a lot of people within a particular time. In other words, that travel film was quintessential ‘60, linking whatever the-- but there are many of this and we have many of them. If you had two or three of those that might underscore....



Susan Danly: Your use of the term “station” is interesting because one of the things I was thinking about before we took our break at lunchtime was the issue of scale from the screen. These things were originally made to be shown this size; now we like at films on the teeny tiniest things. It’s not the same. And how, as you try to introduce the connections to the digital age, you’re obscuring the historical context that these things originally showed at.

Michael Grillo: But they were meant three by four, three by five.

Toni Treadway: Three by five feet maximum in 8mm.

Michael Grillo: Minor correction but I like your point very much.

Susan Danly: I just think it’s something that you have to think about, so if you’re viewing these things at a station where it’s smaller than that you’re viewing it in a very different way than it was originally meant to be seen.

Karan: We have on the way out there are two frame enlargements and they were two of the standard home screen sizes, 22x30 and 30x40. And it really will depend on what sizee galleries we have. Jane Bianco and Michael Komanecky said that the 22x30 works for them. We were there in the gallery and unrolled them and walked them around in the particular gallery. But I can see that there’s a place for the bigger 30x40, which a lot of homes had, and we have those screens here.

Steve Bromage: Both of these points get to the notion of truth and we’re presenting these in as accurate or authentic ways they would experience. But the looping, if it’s on a constant loop and you walk into it, it’s tough if there are 25 people in the gallery. But if you walk into it and you’re not experiencing it on the one hand, and that in terms of space and curation it would be interesting to try to project them accurately to the size that that particular technology would have done if this was filmed at a certain time and you could have watched it this way, to try to replicate that might be an interesting riff on all this.

Susan Danly: Are you thinking of multiple screens?

Karan: I have an exhibition plan at 19 screens and the Farnsworth is thinking more like 9 or 10. Susan Danly: Would you be seeing the other screens simultaneous to the one that you’re focusing on?

Justin Wolff: These are flat screens on the wall. Flat screen monitors.

Karan: Or projection. I’m not an exhibition designer and we’re not even trying to get into exhibition design here because it really will depend on the space, so Michael says, “Black box, I hate it,” but there will be some call for a space where you just see the thing that’s in front of you. I think that’s necessary. But I also think that there will be ways to have a smaller two to three feet back, where we will through some kind of walls, half-walls, whatever, some kind of partitions. Because we also have these other objects to be shown. It is complex; we don’t know how we’re going to do it.

Justin Wolff: Michael Komanecky had mentioned an interest in contracting a third-party exhibition designer for the exhibition space. It’s not a massive space but presumably there are designers who have designed exhibitions of moving images who will have some practical solutions. But I think the really central question Karan’s asking here is about what should be projected on any given screen. Or shown on any given screen. Would it be a clip on loop or would ti be multiple images, back to Michael’s point. My instinct, and that’s all it is, is that if you have multiple films on one screen that it might trivialize them a little bit. And it might in fact reinforce some of the things we’re trying to pull these films out of. Which is they’re just this infinite archive of things. Instead of bringing into for better or worse the museum’s sanctified space, of standing in front of something and looking at it, there really can be a lot lost and gained in whatever way this goes. I think it’s a



really important question. That’s my instinct, that to have multiple films running on the same screen, that they’ll get lost. People will move away. When I go to historical societies and things, if I have a sense that there are six or seven more films to look at on this monitor, euh, I’m going to move on.

Sian Evans: How are you contextualizing those? Because if you’re creating a darkened environment, or a unidirectional environment for a clip, how are you bringing in other information?

Liz Coffey: I agree with you because I think that each on its own screen makes each one like its own art work. One painting, you don’t usually look at four paintings stuck in the same frame. And also you would be able to have the context right there on the wall next to it, like with a painting.

Justin Wolff: And rather than recreating the archive experience in the museum setting, this is an archive, this building here. And that’s not what the Farnsworth is; it’s a museum.

Michael Grillo: Can I just respond very briefly? In some ways I hate to use this, it’s so self-indicting, I do want to trivialize the notion of auteur. I’m trying to groom out genre. I know that you’ve had the same experience; you teach a survey class and you have certain canonical images and then you get to the museum and realize that was one of 250 images and maybe we should pull off of that as the paradigm. So I think it’s a philosophical...

Justin Wolff: I think it’ s a big question.

Susan Danly: One thing specific to the Farnsworth is they do have a small theater and I would hope that they involve the theater setting as part of this.

Justin Wolff: And The Strand.

Susan Danly: You can take advantage of the multiple ways. One of the things that the small station, or whatever, can do is maybe to reinforce some of the points that we’ve been discussing today, being a little artificial if you try to consider them in the context of the entire film, but if you want to make a little point--or you want for example to contrast the rural and the urban--you could, in fact, take advantage of the point. You could take a small snippet of something they’ve already seen in their full context.

Karan: I agree. Michael, over there.

Michael Simon: It is a question, are you trying to reproduce the original experience, in which case you will keep the size the way it would have been shown? Or if you are trying to make something that is a new statement, I thought it would be fascinating like the color piece we saw with the strong Kodachrome colors, to have a setup with coolers and other plastic items and within that context show that film. If you cannot find items you can always have large prints like for that industrial film in Enid, Oklahoma, it speaks about a time. I think you have to decide what you want and what is your purpose. Are you trying to reproduce the home movie experience, or are you trying to show a slice of perception from a different time?

Karan: Several other people wanted to talk and I know we’re getting to the end of the day. Mark?

Mark Neumann: Just a quick thought. In terms of organizing the material, I think if you look back at the symposia themes, the past eight years maybe, there’s a number of themes there that would serve as a vehicle for organizing like--

Erik Jorgensen: Fun would be a good one, a lot of these are about fun.

Mark Neumann: Leisure, City and Country, Work and Leisure, I think was one of the themes. Privacy.



Karan: I think what today tells me really strongly is that this is a deep subject. There is a lot there and that you took today to help us begin to think about it is the most important thing. And I think whatever happens with the first outing with amateur film in a museum setting we give medals for the first museum that’s brave enough to do it because even with the committed and invested and you’re our friends, it’s still quite unclear what it’s going to be. But I am so convinced that it’s just the beginning and the first institutions that take this on it’s going to be big. It’s going to be big because there’s so much still uncollected and there are now huge initiatives in Europe in particular and I’m getting information all the time. Now for example in Austria there is a 7000 amateur only motion picture project to determine what are the themes and tropes. [http://geschichte.lbg.ac.at/en/amateur-film-archeology] That’s all they’re doing. Big money, they’re analyzing all these things to come up with what they see are the themes. So however we start, it’s going to build, there are going to be a lot of people interest. We don’t have to do it “right” the first time but your being here today means that you’re part of the gang who are going to help us get it going. There are a lot of ideas about how to do it, for example, create the grid. “We think that 15 screens is optimal, we can provide some content. You in Chicago have the Chicago Historical Society, you provide content, we can help you with how to interpret your stuff, use our stuff if you want it. We can ship out our cameras and projectors but you have yours there.” So it’s starting something. We have a wonderful record. Thank you, Darryl, thank you Josh. (Applause). And l’ll share that with you, let me know.

Tricia Welsch: I just wanted to say if you are talking about moving into an art museum venue it might be worthwhile asking the art museums for what other content they already possess that they could bring into relation as well. I know when I talked to the Bowdoin Museum people they said, “We need to think or what do you know about what we already own that could be on other parts shown with this material?”. And I of course had no idea at all. Art museums might want to see this in relation to their own collections as well.

Karan: So that’s a procedural question, because I really don’t know how curators think. One thing I know is they think five years out and more, so we gave ourselves a five-year window to get our act together here. But how to have those conversations so that people don’t think that its wrapped up and all decided, when it’s not. What we have is ideas, smart people, content with rights, technology, and access to the rest of the world that’s doing this. What we don’t have is any ideas about what their interests might be. We did talk with Michael about lectures and discussions, we’re starting to talk about a catalog, we have some people interested in writing for the catalog, we know we could spend a lot of money with online stuff and apps, if anybody wanted to get on board with that. But how to have those conversations with other institutions, that’s pretty much what I’m ready to do now, with your help. Yes, Libby?

Libby Bischof: One of the nicest things about today was today: sitting around and watching and discussing while watching. You do it at home while you’re watching TV if you’re sitting with someone and you kind of talk things out. It’s funny to watch people do it at the movies and some people like it and some people don’t. I think that would be a really nice thing to go along with the exhibit wherever it is. Just to have general people who were interested in watching some of these things and having a facilitated conversation about it, I think people would really enjoy that. One of the better exhibits that I’ve seen since I’ve been in Maine was a sort of random one at the York Historical Society when they were doing the Maine Folk Art Trail and they had the townspeople curate the show. They invited all of these people in to discuss whether or not folk objects were art and they included their conversations as part of the exhibit. Fascinating what people picked was and wasn’t. Susan mentioned folk art earlier today; this lends itself to those kind of conversations. I think interested people would be willing to have at The Strand or at the Farnsworth theater, or something like that. Because it’s fun. I just looked at the clock and I can’t believe it’s 3 o’clock. They day went really quickly. I think the interactive piece might be kind of neat.

Karan: I think that’s a really great idea. And we started out in the 1980s with the Maine Humanities Council showing amateur film. It’s the kind of relationship that people show up for.

Justin Wolff: As my final word today, other than thank you all for sharing your wonderful ideas, is my sense from this crowd is there’s a lot of interest in this material. If you have the time or interest in helping plan a museum exhibition... it’s clear that there are so many issues around this material that it’s not all going to be



dealt with in this one exhibition. But that the opportunities for programming around an exhibition like this: discussion screenings at The Strand, lectures, symposia, so I would encourage all of you who are interested to find ways to participate in that. We have to think about fundraising for some of those kinds of things and grants, I see so many programming opportunities. I think there’s room for people to participate in many different ways in this project and I hope you all will.

Karan: Thank you everybody, we really really appreciate it.

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The two men in the Snowden Family Collection selection shown on May 16 were identified by Pam Gray, donor, with help from her husband and sister. The man in the foreground (no hat) is Weston Hall. The man in the background is Bill Hicks or Bill Heggs. It was probably filmed at the Stonington, Maine, dump, which was right off Sunset Avenue. The dump is no longer there. Bill Hicks/Heggs did not live there, he was just visiting. Weston Hall was a Stonington native, Pam says. The sequence was probably filmed by Pam Gray's brother, Robert Snowden.Weston Hall "took up residence in a little shack right at the entrance to the Stonington dump. He was a scavenger. He would flag you down at the gate; he utilized what he could." He ended up in the Penobscot Nursing Home. "Most likely he ran a wood stove for heat." Robert Snowden, who likely shot the film, "used to go up and take a six-pack of libation to Weston Hall. That was what he did, he would have been there every once in a while." Robert Snowden is deceased. "Bobby had taken those pictures. He lived in New York after high school. He worked for Duryea in Montauk, lobster transport. Then he owned a garage. It might have been from [Pam Gray's] sister's movie camera."



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Northeast Historic Film hosts discussion of home movies and amateur film