Cinema Studies and its Canon

Transcription

1 Hidden Archives of Amateur Cinema9c Material: Making Orphan works accessible to scholars Howard Besser Director, NYU Moving Image Archiving & Preserva9on M.A. Program hmp://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/ Hidden Archives of Amateur Cinema9c Material: Making Orphan works accessible to scholars- Cinema Studies and its Canon Amateur & related Orphan Works: their characteristics & values Recent attempts to make these works more accessible Impact on Scholars and Scholarship 1 2 Cinema Studies and its Canon We have tradi9onally studied Great Works Cinema Studies has focused on great works, great authors Close study of cinema9c works requires a copy that one can view over and over The most studied works have been those that are most available (pre VHS that meant those in archives) Archives have not collected non theatrical works seen as ephemeral (Amateur, Orphans, Industrial/Sponsored, ) 3 4 Amateur & related Orphan Works: their characteristics & values 5 Ephemeral media from everyday life (each a different genre/text) Works that document everyday life Amateur films Home movies Anthropological footage Daily news and Newsreels Other raw footage and out takes Works that reveal the priori9es of powerful social forces Industrial films Government films Works created to influence us Educa9onal films Adver9sements 6 1

2 Images with Sound are cri9cal to understanding our cultural heritage Triangle Shirtwaist Factory hmp:// 0:27 We are shaped by the cultural icons of our childhood (Leave it to Beaver, Lassie, James Bond, police shows, Mickey Mouse, Road Runner, ) We are also shaped by the adver9sements, industrial, and educa9onal films of our childhood (Maytag repairman, How to be a good homemaker, ) To understand our 9me period, people in the future will need to have access to the cultural ar9facts of our 9me (imagine trying to understand 1950s and 1960s gender dynamics without pop cultural views of the family) Besser-IFA Hidden Archives, 3/25/ Pre WWII small town life (6:53) hmp:// 7:42 Master Hands (1936) hmp:// iv 2: Instruc9onal Films (0:50 2:13) hmp:// Duck and Cover Sponsor: U.S. Federal Civil Defense Administration, 1951 Downloaded 2002 from Prelinger Archive hmp:// 11 Besser-IFA Hidden Archives, 3/25/

3 Babe Ruth Home Movie Discovered (Wed Mar 23 NYT) hmp:// Collector RC Raycral has asserted over home movie shot in 1927 Everyday photos become historically important Everyday Facebook pages become historically important ( We are all Khaled Saeed ) Earliest attempts to make these works more accessible 1987 (1/2)

4 Earliest attempts to make these works more accessible 1993/1995 (2/2) Earliest Accessibility slightly precedes Scholarship (1995) Pressure for Accessibility & Scholarship go hand in hand (but without Archives) Orphans Orphans Orphans Films

5 Orphans Orphans Sponsored Films Field Guide 300,000 Industrial & ins9tu9onal films were commissioned by businesses, chari9es, educa9onal ins9tu9ons, and advocacy groups Interest in these developed through stock footage, Prelinger Films, Ephemeral Films, Interest grew much wider when 1,000 from Prelinger collec9on were put onto archives.org More intense interest from Orphans Film Symposium More scholarly interest Field Guide Scholarly Recent attempts to make these works more accessible: Center for Home Movies Office at Library of Congress Na9onal Audiovisual Conserva9on Center Non profit fundraising organiza9on hmp://

6 Home Movies have made inroads with tradi9onal film preserva9onists Saving our film heritage should not be limited only to commercially produced films. Home movies do not just capture the important private moments of our family's lives, but they are historical and cultural documents as well. Consider Abraham Zapruder's 8mm film that recorded the assassina9on of President Kennedy or Nickolas Muray's famously vibrant color footage of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera shot with his 16mm camera. Imagine how different our view of history would be without these precious films. Home Movie Day is a celebra9on of these films and the people who shot them. I urge anyone with an interest in learning more about how to care for and preserve their own personal memories to join in the fes9vi9es being offered in their community... Mar9n Scorsese Home Movie Day Home Movie Day Began in a few ci9es August 2003 Has grown exponen9ally HMD now throughout North America HMD now also Worldwide DVD from Home Movie Day

7 Center for Home Movies Summit Very simply put, the ques9on is: what would be needed (to do, have, spend, work around, etc.) in order to undertake a mass digi9za9on project involving home movies and video from public and private collec9ons online for free public access over the next five years? Secondly, what impact would the availability of these collec9ons have on their use and analysis? Center for Home Movies Summit Quote from Summit How can we go beyond simply saving materials and make history and culture per9nent? I think home movies and amateur film might be just what we need to link archives with an ever growing public. They're inherently populist without being simplis9c. They're documentary in all its chaos and purity, yet express an infinity of en9cing narra9ves. They lend themselves to apprecia9on and analysis in a wealth of domains, many yet to be imagined. As the biggest chunk of the vast and mostly unknown body of nontheatrical moving images, they offer scholars many life9mes of inves9ga9on. Intensive work with home movies will also change archival prac9ce and workflow, and I think it will help archives garner the public support they need in order to flourish. Rick Prelinger 39 Center for Home Movies Portal Project How can we rela9vely quickly put online 1,000 hours of home movies and make them useable for study? Technical issues Metadata issues Intellectual property issues Sustainability issues Adop9on issues Workflow 40 Portal Project Taxonomies example (1/4) Possible Genre categories: Milestone film (weddings, bar mitzvahs, Christmases, birthday par9es, etc.) Family at Leisure Family business/livelihood Public events Travelogues/Community portraits Amateur Dramas Art Film Portal Project Taxonomies example (2/4) Possible Tropes by Human Behavior Coming of Age/Childhood Development /Milestone Moment The "Check out our stuff" mo9f Self documenta9on/self aggrandizement "Oh no he didn't! Images of the Beloved Mugging for the Camera Trainspoyng Look Ma, no hands. "Look, an animal! And it's so close I can feed it a potato chip!" Human Diversity as Curiosity

8 Portal Project Taxonomies example (3/4) Possible Tropes by Recurring Imagery Parades Public Events The Road Gardens Special Weather Demoli9ons and Construc9ons 43 Portal Project Taxonomies example (4/4) For each Trope, Genre, etc., think about applying literary studies techniques: How would we define each of these? What core elements need to be present? How frequently does each occur, and under what condi9ons? What types of variants are there within a given trope or genre? How do the tropes or genres relate to each other? What other tropes or genres have not yet been defined? 44 Prelinger Collec9on Prelinger sub collec9ons Prelinger Tag Cloud Prelinger Archive Mash ups 244 films What happens when you make close to 2,000 ephemeral public domain films freely available on the Web? People make art and more films are born! Here s a sample of films created with Prelinger Archives footage and uploaded to the Internet Archive. However, Rick Prelinger suspects thousands more are uploaded on other video sites

9 Texas Archive of the Moving Image Challenges for Scholars Everyday materials don t have the long history of scholarship that classic types do. This makes building on other scholars works difficult, and makes conven9onal scholars suspicious of work in this arena. Corpus of everyday life material is scamered, limle is in repositories, and much of what is in repositories is s9ll in analog form No agreement btwn scholars or btwn scholars and repositories about units of measurement or structure (no TEI equivalent), no taxonomies of tropes and genres (no AAT), nor metadata to apply to content; as yet, very limle studies of these as texts Very limle consistent metadata to search across Challenges for Scholarship Shils to this new area of study Changing paradigms; Re shaping of film history Broadening what cons9tutes the content/subject of study What is collected by archives heavily influences what is studied (favoring a great works approach) What is easiest to study becomes favored (length of 9me to analyze, jus9fying your work and produc9vity to campuswide tenure commimees, qualita9ve vs quan9ta9ve, ) Slowly began (mainly in Europe) in 1970s, with Roger Odin studying amateur cinema from a semio linguis9c point of view in conjunc9on with Ciné Club screenings When home movies become too well made, the polish comes at the expense of conviviality in the family, and the detached professional eye replaces the loving eye of the rela9ve (usually the father) but the real opening of this as a new scholarly field happened in late 1990s/early 2000s Evidence of shils Na9onal Film Registry 1997 PR Na9onal Film Registry 2003 PR

10 Na9onal Film Registry 2005 PR The 450 films in the Na9onal Film Registry represent a stunning range of American filmmaking, including Hollywood features, documentaries, avant garde and amateur produc9ons, films of ethnic and regional interest, and animated and short film subjects all deserving recogni9on, preserva9on and access by future genera9ons. 55 Na9onal Film Registry 1989 began; Post 2003, significant decrease PR emphasis on well known Hollywood films 1998 Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse (Barney EllioM & The Camera Shop in Tacoma, 1940) 1999 Master Hands (1936) 2000 Let's All Go to the Lobby (1957) 2001 Cologne: From the Diary of Ray and Esther (1939); The House in the Middle (1954) 2003 Fox Movietone News: Jenkins Orphanage Band(1928) 2004 Duck and Cover (1951); Kannapolis, NC (1951) 2006 Think of Me First as a Person ( ) 56 Scholarly Works published 1980s Prior to mid 1980s, only a few books outside of Eastern Europe, mainly histories or hobbyist 1986 Journal of Film and Video special issue on Home Movies and Amateur Filmmaking 1987 Chalfen, Richard. Snapshot Versions of Life. Bowling Green State University Popular Press (with a chapter en9tled Cinéma Naïveté: The Case of Home Movies ) Scholarly Works published 1990s 1992 Schlager, Franz. Amateurfilm in Osterreich: An Beispielen des Personlichen Gebrauchs. Vienna: VWGO, Zimmerman, Patricia R. Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film. Indiana University Press 1995 Odin, Roger. Le film de famille: usage privé, usage public. Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck 1997 Kapstein, Nancy, ed. The Jubilee Book: Essays on Amateur Film. Charleoi, Belgium: Associa9on Européean Inédits 1998 Citron, Michelle, and Jonathan Clements. Home Movies and Other Necessary Fic9ons. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1999 Odin, Roger. Le cinéma en amateur. Paris: Seuil Post 2000 too many to count Public Exhibi9ons with Catalogs 1981 Home Made Movies: 20 Years of American 8mm & Super 8, curator J.Hoberman, May 1 June 30, 1981, Anthology Film Archives, NYC 1998 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Founda9on for Art in Cinema, and San Francisco Cinematheque. Big as Life: An American History of 8mm Films 1998 Museum of Sydney. Places of Memory: Sydney Home Movies. Glebe, N.S.W (produced in collabora9on with the Na9onal Film and Sound Archive of Australia) Challenges for Pedagogy Courses are not yet taught on this subject Interes9ngly, a canvas of a dozen university departments housing scholars with mul9ple publica9ons on non theatrical films other than documentaries found only one (NYU) with a course devoted to the subject Only a rela9vely small number of works have made it into any long term accessible loca9on like an archive Populist movements have striven to circulate these, but these groups have no longevity, and the works are olen gone when a teacher wants to re use them Some of these works are taken down due to lack of clarity on Copyright issues

11 Distance Learning: Viola9ng Con9nued accessibility of Works Youtomb monitoring 435,900 YouTube videos 23,712 videos taken down for alleged copyright viola9on 109,428 videos taken down for other reasons hmp://youtomb.mit.edu/ YouTomb Copyright is a Serious Issue We can t see the one 9me stream of restored Metropolis at this very moment Hidden Archives of Amateur Cinema9c Material: Making Orphan works accessible to scholars Ephemeral films have not been systematically collected by film archives, which have traditionally focused upon great works ; instead these works form hidden collections either spread across many thousands of individuals, or concentrated in the hands of hundreds of collectors These works have ignited a strong and growing scholarly interest which has started to disrupt the Canon But growth in scholarship has been hampered by lack of consistent access to this material Recent efforts to make this material more accessible have taken place outside both traditional archives and outside the Academy 65 Hidden Archives of Amateur Cinema9c Material: Making Orphan works accessible to scholars hmp:// hmp:// hmp:// hmp:// hmp:// and books/ the field guide to sponsored film hmp://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/howard/ hmp://