Amateur film preservation in the context of the Association of Moving Image Archivists

Human Studies Film Archives, Dept. of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, estab-lished. Pam Wintle collects and preserves amateur films as documentation of cultural and histori-cal activities.

The National Center for Film and Video Preservation estab-lished by the AFI and NEA. Stephen Gong and Gregory Lukow provide guidance on creating regional and specialist archives.

Bob Brodsky and Toni Treadway publish film-makers’ manual, Super 8 in the Video Age. 1982-85 NEA National Services grants awarded to B & T to tour media arts centers to help small-gauge artists.

An amateur industrial, From Stump to Ship, 16mm restoration funded by Maine Humanities Council. In 1986 Northeast Historic Film founded. Cineric donates 35mm preservation 2002, NHF exhibits new print at the Library of Congress in 2003 and MOMA in 2005. In 2004 Janna Jones’s article on the film in AMIA journal The Moving Image.

Fast Rewind: The Arch-

aeology of Moving Images conference in Rochester, NY, panel on home mov-ies includes filmmaker Alan Berliner and NHF’s Karan Sheldon. Fast Rewinds orga-nized by Bruce Austin at RIT in 1989, 1991, and 1993.

East Anglian Film Archive Masters Course starts; David Cleveland founded the Archive in 1976—holdings include family and per-sonal films and videos.Photo courtesy Jane Alvey.

1981

1982

1984

1985

1989

1990

Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) emerges out of the Film/Television Archives Advisory Committee.

The first annual conference of AMIA takes place in New York, there is an amateur film panel: Stephen Gong, Micheline Morriset, Karen Ishizuka, Pam Wintle.

Création à Paris de l’Association Européenne Inédits. (Unpublished, i.e., personal or amateur film)

1993

1994

Publication of the Report of the Librarian of Congress, Film Preservation 1993: A Study of the Current State of American Film Preservation. Written submissions from these archives focused on home movies: Japanese American National Museum, Oregon Historical Society, Northeast Historic Film.

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, opens. Raye Farr developed exhibition videos; amateur film is part of the archival and inter-pretive record.

1991

1995

Dr. James Billington, Librarian of Congress, adds Zapruder Film (1963) to the National Film Registry. Other amateur titles on the Registry are added, in 1996 Topaz (1943-45), home movie footage taken at a Japanese American internment camp, and later these:Cologne: From The Diary Of Ray And Esther (1939)From Stump To Ship (1930)Multiple Sidosis (1970)Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse (1940)

Publication of book, Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde 1919-1945, by Jan-Christopher Horak in which he discusses earliest avant-garde filmmakers and also the Amateur Cinema League.

Publication of book, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film by Patricia Zimmermann (from a 1984 Ph.D. dis-sertation). At the AMIA conference in Toronto her plenary, Democracy and Cinema: A History of Amateur Film, is part of the centennial of cin-ema series.

1992

Formation of AMIA Amateur Materials working group. In 1993 name becomes Inédits interest group. Chairs Pam Wintle, Karen Ishizuka, Micheline Morisset.

Small Gauge Film Symposium with four days of workshops, screenings, and pre-sentations related to film of all kinds on small gauges in Portland, Oregon, as part of the AMIA annual conference.Photo courtesy Janice Simpson, AMIA

Orphans II, Documenting the 20th Century, includes Nico De Klerk, Netherlands Filmmuseum, with Dutch East Indies ama-teur film, and panel with Melinda Stone on California Amateur Film Clubs; Karen Glynn, Mississippi Mule Race Movies; Andrea McCarty, Making The Movie Queen. Greg Lukow gives a paper on the history of the Orphan metaphor.Photo courtesy Dan Streible

2001

2002

AMIA’s Small Gauge and Amateur Film interest group cre-ated to continue work begun by Small Gauge Task Force and Inédits interest group; chair, Snowden Becker.

Home Movies and Privacy, NHF’s second annual sym-posium, presenters Patricia Zimmermann, Mark Neumann, Eric Schwartz, and Eric Schaefer. In the first year William O’Farrell, Chief of Moving Image & Audio Conservation at the National Archives of Canada, spoke on the Amateur Cinema League, with a 1939 Hiram Percy Maxim Memorial Award globe.

Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film shows at Moscow International Film Festival and Whitney Museum of American Art; orga-nized by Anthology Film Archives and Deutsches Filmmuseum.

Karen Shopsowitz produces My Father’s Camera, www.nfb.ca/fatherscamera

L. Jeffrey Selznick School, Rochester, NY, Dwight Swanson lectures students on small gauge and amateur film and regional archives. The preservation school began in 1996; every year since 1997 an invited speaker from NHF lectures and screens amateur and regional film.

The Moving Image, the AMIA journal, first issue. Edited by Jan-Christopher Horak; two issues per year. Many articles and reviews in the later editions relate to amateur, small gauge and regional film.

New Zealand Film Archive exhibition, 8Super8 with 8mm and Super 8 cam-eras, projectors.

2003

www.filmforever.org, a Website for home film preservation spon-sored by AMIA, goes live. By Jean-Louis Bigourdan, Liz Coffey, and Dwight Swanson, edited by Bob Brodsky, Toni Treadway (www.littlefilm.org), David Cleveland, Robin Williams, East Anglian Film Archive.

Film History: An International Journal special issue, Amateur Cinema & Small-Gauge Film, edited by Melinda Stone and Dan Streible.

First international Home Movie Day (sponsored by AMIA): meet filmarchivists, learn longevity benefits of film, see fam-ily films.www.homemovieday.com HMD was organized in 2002 by Snowden Becker, BryanGraney, Chad Hunter, Dwight Swanson, Katie Trainor.

1996

1997

The National Film Preservation Act, 1996 version, reautho-rizes the National Film Preservation Board (NFPB) for seven years and creates the feder-ally chartered private sector National Film Preservation Foundation. AMIA gets a seat on the NFPB.

Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF) conference in Cartagena, Colombia, symposium Out of the Attic: Archiving Amateur Film. FIAF Journal of Film Preservation preceded meeting with an Open Forum on amateur film and followed in 1998 with Jan-Christopher Horak’s article about the symposium—on taking amateur cinema seriously.

Publication of Jubilee Book, Essays on amateur film by l’Association Européenne Inédits.

New York Women in Film & Television’s Women’s Film Preservation Fund (WFPF) first year, makes amateur film preservation grant to the Southern Media Archive. Karen Glynn preserves Emma Lytle’s Raisin’ Cotton (1938-1941). WFPF later supports amateur film preservation at NHF and the Louis Wolfson II Media History Center. www.nywift.org

1998

1999

National Film Preservation Foundation, charitable affiliate of the National Film Preservation Board, gives first Laboratory-Archive Partnership grants; recipi-ents include Smithsonian Institution (Groucho Marx Home Movies); Northeast Historic Film (Albert Benedict Home Movies); Southern Media Archive (Thomas Collection).

Big as Life: An American History of 8mm Films, Jytte Jensen, MoMA, and Steve Anker, SF Cinematheque, 1998-2001 exhibition and catalog.

Getty Research Institute symposium organized by Karen Ishizuka, The Past as Present: The Home Movies as a Cinema of Record. Genesis of book in press, Mining the Home Movie: Excavations into Historical and Cultural Memories edited by Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmermann.

AMIA Miami, Maryann Gomes from the Northwest Film Archive attends her first AMIA conference; helps start the Regional Audiovisual Archives interest group (RAVA).

NFPF receives funding for Treasures of American Film Archives, includesamateur film fromJapanese American National Museum, Minnesota Historical Society, NationalMuseum of American History,Northeast Historic Film, West Virginia StateArchives. The four-DVD set is reissued in 2005.

The Reel Thing IX: Laboratory Technical Symposium Montreal, Toni Treadway presents 8mm Logging in the High Sierras (1939) and a sound 8mm film held by the Smithsonian Human Studies Film Archive, Native American dancing in New Mexico.

AMIA Montreal confer-ence, group screening, The Richness of the Regions: Projecting a Global Picture of the Twentieth Century.

2000

Library of Congress and National Film Preservation Board fund AMIA-convened Roundtable on Small Gauge Film Preservation, hosted by Grover Crisp at Sony, to advance the US National Film Preservation Plan by collaborating on selecting and preserving amateur and small gauge film.Photo courtesy Janice Simpson, AMIA

The Reel Thing X: Laboratory Technical Symposium in LA, Toni Treadway presentsTopaz, Cineric’s 8mm film to 35mm blowup; an excerpt of 1930s Czech home mov-ies copied to PAL DigiBeta and thence to 35mm; William O’Farrell presents 9.5mm work including Hints, a Pathex film.

Publication of Alan Kattelle’s book, Home Movies: A History of the American Industry, 1897 – 1979, currently selling on Amazon.com for $210 and more affordably at www.homemoviehistory.com

First Orphans Film Preservation Symposium at the University of South Carolina, Saving Orphan Films in the Digital Age organized by Dan Streible. A screening, A Home for Home Movies, with Alan Berliner and Péter Forgács.