Work Life Revealed Screening Jan 20 4:03 PM

Northeast Historic Film's cinema at the Alamo Theatre, Bucksport, Maine, will host a free screening of moving images of work life on Thursday, January 20 at 7 p.m. The event highlights a year of exploring the moving image archives to describe collections not previously known to the public. The cataloging was supported by funding from the Council on Library and Information Resources Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives program. Teachers and scholars are invited to inquire about the collections for research and use.

Catalogers Katrina Dixon, Karen Wyatt, and Tim Rohe will be on hand to introduce the screening and share their year of discoveries. Among other surprises, the team found a glimpse of actor Humphrey Bogart taken by another theater professional working at Lakewood Theatre near Skowhegan in the 1930s. On screen will be footage from the Charles B. Hinds Collection, 1925 footage of workers manufacturing Hinds Honey and Almond Hand Cream. Other selections will include Maine Sea Coast Mission's Bar Harbor-based service vessel Sunbeam, and Movie Queen, Belfast, one of a series of itinerant productions. There will also be an example of the work of Everett Greaton, who documented Maine in personal and promotional films as the first head of the Maine Development Commission, as well as clips showing the comedic antics of the Motormaulers Club and a breakfast-making robot.

This screening is the first in a series celebrating the 25th anniversary of NHF's founding, with screenings highlighting different aspects of its collections through 2011. A wine and cheese reception for Northeast Historic Film members will be held at 6 p.m. To become a member, call Jessica Hosford, Northeast Historic Film's external affairs director, 207 469-0924, extension 107. Or email jessica@oldfilm.org

Cataloging Throughout New England 11:19 AM

One of the definite pluses of networked online software is the opportunity to engage a cataloging team regardless of proximity. The CLIR Project was glad to welcome Tim Rohe, Simmons College GSLIS graduate student on as a part-time cataloger after his fine work as an intern.

Because we are using CollectiveAccess (and previously used the OpenWebWorks item-level webform created by Jack Brighton), I am able to create copies of pertinent file information and send materials to Tim in Massachusetts. Tim Rohe has been an invaluable addition to the CLIR cataloging team, and his finding aids and item records attest to his original cataloging skills.

Below, please enjoy his recent discoveries:

"I got a weird sense of deja vu the other day while I was working on a film from a former Executive Director of the Maine Development Commission. The footage I was looking at was shot at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. In the film, a marching band passed in front of the Maine pavilion and that’s when it hit me. I could swear that I had seen this before. It turns out that I had. I remembered that another collection I had worked on contained some footage from the 1939 World’s Fair. When I went back and looked at the footage from the previous collection, I was struck by the similarities between the films. It’s very possible that the two cameramen were standing right next to each other when the footage from each collection was being shot. While I was looking through my notes to find which film in the previous collection contained the footage I was looking for, I started to notice other similarities between the two collections as well. Both of them had footage from an event organized by a sporting camp where people dress up in costumes and act out scenes in and around an old narrow gauge train. I looked at a map of Maine and the two creators of the collections lived pretty close to each other. I started to wonder if they knew each other.

Since then, I have noticed other similarities across other collections that I’ve worked on, which started to give me a strong sense of community about Maine. Many of the films from the former director of the Maine Development Commission were promotional films produced by the commission in an effort to entice people from around the U.S. to spend their vacation in Maine, claiming that the state has any kind of vacation you could want on offer. He worked for the State of Maine for forty years and I can see why they kept him around so long: he was good at his job. The films certainly worked on me. After watching all the footage of people skiing down scenic mountains, relaxing at sporting camps on the porches of their lakeside cabins after a fishing trip and enjoying wonderful, fresh food at clambakes and lobster shacks along the shore, I’m sold. I want to go to Maine!"

-Tim Rohe, CLIR cataloging assistant.

Selznick School Presentation 5:16 AM

A trip to Rochester, NY, through snow and wind resulted in a delayed arrival--and departure--Tuesday, December 7, on the way to presenting to the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation class of 2011 at George Eastman House.
The Selznick students participated in discussion of regional moving image archives policies and practices. This class of twelve was particularly tuned in to acquisition and access issues. "How do you generate public interest?" (Justin LaLiberty). "How do you determine the cultural value of materials before acquisition?" (Marissa Haddock). "What do you do for rare materials in poor condition?" (Nikki Shayer).

These questions are addressed in the case of the Norma Willard Collection footage, which was originally accepted at the archives with a donation of a VHS videotape showing three young people with a kayak and a three-section rowboat. Research determined that the unique footage related to a significant marine architect, Norman Skene, and our online finding aid points others to his publications. Happily in the course of this project our executive director recontacted the donor who still had the original 35 mm. film and was pleased to donate it to Northeast Historic Film. The print has been accessioned and will be sent to the laboratory for film-to-film preservation. Here is the collection record for the Norma Willard Collection.

During the day's presentation we talked about descriptive practices and our use of the PBCore data structure standard. The item-level description will help expose the content to the public and will provide important metadata for finding and managing the future digital copies of the 1921 work.

Bemis and Shurcliff, excerpts 2:19 PM

The Alan Bemis Collection contains 47 reels of 16 mm. film shot by Alan Bemis and Sidney Shurcliff between 1927 and 1948....
The collection contains a group of Motormauler films, conceived and shot by Sidney Shurcliff.

Alan Cogswell Bemis (1906-1991) was a professor of physics at MIT, and was director of MIT's Weather Radar Research Project. He worked on guided missile technology during World War II and retired from MIT in 1972. The Bemis family spent part of every year in Maine, building their summer home "High Head" on Naskeag Point in Brooklin in 1937. For further biographical information about Alan C. Bemis, see the donor file, which includes his "Random Recollections" which were dictated in 1988 and 1989. The Collection File also includes a biography created for his Harvard class reunions, a list of owned cars, and recollections of family fun. A copy of The Saga of the Motormaulers, by Bemis and Sid Shurcliff written in 1980 which describes the making of the Motormaulers film series, is also included in the collection.

Sidney N. Shurcliff, who photographed and edited the Motormauler films in this collection, was a classmate of Alan Bemis's at Harvard. His father, Arthur, and Frederick Law Olmsted, founded the Harvard School of Landscape Design, the first professional program of its kind in the world. Arthur Shurcliff was the landscape designer for the gardens of Colonial Williamsburg. Sidney N. Shurcliff received his education as a landscape designer at Harvard, and joined his father in practice in the 1930s, expanding the office to become Shurcliff, Merrill & Footit. He is notable for being instrumental in the revival of interest in Olmsted's work. Papers of Arthur A. Shurcliff and Sidney N. Shurcliff can be found at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Frances Loeb Library Special Collections. Sidney Shurcliff was a frequent guest of Bemis's in Maine, and also edited many of the sailing/cruising films in this collection. The papers include information about Sidney Shurcliff's interests in movie-making, sports and automobile racing.

The Motormaulers Club

The general plan was that the Club would meet once a year. Each member was to show up with a $10.00 automobile which he would contribute to the outing. Sid Shurcliff would dream up a movie scenario involving a chase of some kind.
We would prepare the cars by removing all the glass (if indeed they had any). For sending cars off banks and for head-on collision we would rig a throttle control that could be yanked wide open as the driver bailed out at the last moment. Marshall was a maestro at high-speed bail-outs, but we all took our turn. The bail-outs were made on grass to minimize bruises.
The whole operation, as well as being a pole of fun, took much planning, and two weekends for each one. On the first weekend we did little motormauling, but took all the character and plot-development shots. Then, on the second weekend we got going on the fender-benders and big final crashes. As anyone knows who has done any movie editing it is a tremendous and demanding job. Sid did it all. What a great result!

The Saga of the Motormaulers, written by Alan Bemis and Sidney Shurcliff in 1980, which can be found in the Collection File.
Excerpted from the finding aid, researched and written by Karen Wyatt and Katrina Dixon.

Provincetown, 1916 11:04 AM

frame enlargement of an unknown woman painting, Oregon Historical Society/Eugene Stoeller Collection, Provincetown 1916

Provincetown, 1916 Film

A story in the New York Times about painter Charles Webster Hawthorne, his oldest living model and his art school barn, prompted us to contact the current owners of Hawthorne's barn, Joshua Prager and Ricky Opaterny, about Northeast Historic Film's film containing footage of Hawthorne teaching his art students. Prager and Opaterny have formed a nonprofit organization to support the preservation of the barn, which was built over 100 years ago and used for most of that time for painting classes. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Today we talked about film preservation--as the moving image record of Hawthorne and other artists such as Hans Hoffman, of Provincetown's people and landscape, will be part of the story of the barn going forward.

In the New York Times story, Doris Bryant Makas, who was born in 1910, remembers going with her mother to sit for Charles Webster Hawthorne. Doris's daughter, Elaine, describes the painter's context:

Provincetown had a large Portuguese immigrant population back then, and Hawthorne mostly hired Portuguese models,” Elaine Makas recalled. “But it’s likely he knew my grandmother and her hardships at the time. She was desperate for money, and he would have known she was a tough, single mother and maybe that’s why he called it ‘Motherhood Triumphant.’

The film identifies an elderly man as "A type of Portuguese fisherman that is fast passing," a following scene, "Overhauling the nets," shows three men working on fish nets in town.

Martha McNamara, Ph.D., Wellesley College, director of the New England Arts and Architecture program, is responsible for lectures, workshops and symposia as well as teaching. She is an American Studies scholar with a regional specialty in the arts and architecture of New England, teaching a seminar this spring on that subject. She is interested in the 1916 Metro Pictures travelogue. In conversation with our CLIR visiting team, McNamara said,

It's this incredible clip of Provincetown at the turn of the century with great footage of the plein air arts school out on the Cape run by Charles Webster Hawthorne. The rest of the school is even more captivating to me and more helpful for my class this spring because it really gets at this question of how New England is represented. There is an aerial shot of Provincetown with schooners in the harbor, crooked narrow streets, these characters, old people in old clothing. It depicts New England as a bygone place. The idea of New England as a quaint place that time has forgotten is a generator of the tourism industry. This one clip brings it all together, the vision of New England as a backwater, the artist come up from New York runs a plein air school: the creation of the image and the image creators.

See Yourself as Others See You 8:05 AM

A pictorial blog post today on landing back from the Association of Moving Image Archivists/IASA conference. Northeast Historic Film team members Joe Gardner (tech services) and Katrina Dixon (media cataloger) attended their first AMIA conference and played key roles in our hidden collections itinerant film presentation. Joe prepared and ran moving image clips. Katrina presented on her experience describing "See yourself" films. See previous blog post. Special thanks to Martin Johnson, NYU, for his comprehensive chronology with great examples.

Christa Williford, Program Officer at the Council on Library and Information Resources, attended the session. At least 50 people were in the room; many knew of itinerant film creators--and had pursued research on luminaries such as H. Lee Waters and Melton Barker.

Karan Sheldon, Martin Johnson, Christa Williford, Katrina Dixon.

Andy Uhrich, University of Indiana, loaned his laptop so we could play DVDs between showing slides.

from left: Dan Streible, Regina Longo, Liz Coffey, Caroline Frick Page, Melissa Dollman. Moving image preservation colleagues in the room.
Below, cover of the Spring 2010 issue of The Moving Image, journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, an itinerant-themed issue. Marsha Orgeron and Devin Orgeron, editors; Teri Tynes, managing editor (appreciate the cover, which we used in our presentation).

Scholarly Engagement Site Visit 7:49 AM

Kelly Miller (University of Virginia Harrison Institute) and Tim Stinson (North Carolina State University) spent the day on October 29 in a Scholarly Engagement Site Visit. They were investigating past and prospective interactions with our Moving Images of Work Life cataloging project and broader issues. Conversations with scholars included Martin Johnson, NYU Cinema Studies, Karen Alexander and Bill Leavenworth, University of New Hampshire fisheries historians, and Martha McNamara, Wellesley College Art and Architecture.

Katrina Dixon, media cataloger, here on the left next to Bill Leavenworth, Karen Wyatt, media cataloging assistant, and other Northeast Historic Film staff members participated in the morning discussion and facilities tour led by Gemma Perretta.

The chief topic was how our moving image materials are used and their value to researchers, teachers, public programmers, and the public. Alexander and Leavenworth have been working with primary source materials relating to 17th century fisheries and are moving into the modern period looking at documentation of coastal fisheries. The film record provides evidence relating to forage fish, clupeidae such as Atlantic herring.

Martin Johnson and Martha McNamara underlined their challenges in finding film for their work. "Moving images gave not been given the scholarly attention they deserve. This project will enable people like me to use them for teaching and other activities," said McNamara, who joined us on the phone from Wellesley College. Her spring seminar for art historians, "New England Arts and Architecture," will use our 1916 Provincetown travelogue. Besides the plein air painting class, the importance of the film is how New England is represented as a land time has forgotten, a backwater--to discuss in learning more about such image creation and the image creators.

Our thanks to Karen Alexander, Martin Johnson, Bill Leavenworth, and Martha McNamara for their knowledge, skills, imagination, energy, and time.