Category: Preservation

Archivist’s Alley Goes to AMIA 2018, Pt 3: Bob Curtis-Johnson, Alaska’s Moving Image Treasures and Strong Indigenous Voices

Getting to meet and chat with Bob Curtis-Johnson was super cool. I probably could’ve hung out with him for hours. To be honest, even emailing with Bob is awesome- I get to find out whether he’s spotted polar bears or not and what the temperature and light situation is. Which is like…so different from my life here in LA. Plus? I know from talking and hanging out with him at this past AMIA that he’s handling all that AND contributing in a huge way to the archives and preservation world so…my mind just sorta goes WOAH !!!!!
I don’t know how I never met Bob before this past AMIA. We must’ve been dancing around the same committees and people for the last 8 years and just never connected. I am just so happy that we were able to do that here.

His company, Summit Day Media, is based out of Anchorage and that was so exciting to me (it still is)! I was so thrilled to be able to talk to him about the amazing work that he accomplishes regularly and the insane lengths that he and his colleagues go to really make a difference in people’s lives and to work with communities to help preserve their histories.

I hope you enjoy listening to this conversation as much as I loved having it. Bob and the people he works with are all super rockstars. Huge fan of Alaska, now. Big fan. <3

This time we have some REALLY incredible photos from Bob so as usual, just after the link for the podcast download, don’t forget to check out his bio and these amazing pics & the information. Just great!!!

Bio:

Bob Curtis-Johnson is the owner and principal consultant for SummitDay LLC located in Anchorage Alaska, specializing in audiovisual media preservation for clients that include corporations, museums and archives in eight U.S. states. SummitDay has over a decade of experience in mass digitization project management, digital media management, storage environment assessment, a/v media assessment, and development of preservation and disaster plans. Bob has also produced, directed or edited dozens of documentaries, commercials, and artistic and sponsored films for National Geographic Explorer, Black Entertainment Television, The Discovery Channel, PBS and othersL

Links: 
http://summitdaymedia.com

https://fm.kuac.org/post/drums-winter-interview

 


This is a shot of SummitDay staff Mike R. Martz and Keenan Troll performing quality control verification on preservation files (2018).

Picture of Bob Curtis-Johnson and his friend Anagi (pronounced “ON-a-way”) Whitlam Adams (now deceased), taken in Utqiagvik (known at that time as Barrow), Alaska, at a Nalukataq whaling celebration. Bob notes that, “Anagi was an artist and carver, former whaling captain, and a film donor.”

This is a 2009 photo of staff and family members from the Inupiaq Heritage Center in Utqiagvik, at the summer whaling celebration. Chris Danner (in the sunglasses) was part of the staff and also a member of a successful whaling crew that season. The Inupiaq have lived and whaled in this region for 10,000 years, and hunting is a deeply important part of their culture as well as a crucial component of their food security.

UKSUUM CAUYAI is a film of Yup’ik values and culture and is of a different group than the Inupiaq (people pictured above). This is the film mentioned in the podcast.

Archivist’s Alley Goes to AMIA 2018, Pt 2- KBOO Radio, Radical Audio Culture & the Community Archiving Workshop

Meeting and getting to hang out with Marti and Erin was definitely one of my highlights of AMIA in Portland this year.

While their collection was an audio collection (and this is unusual for AMIA- usually the collection that the Community Archiving Workshop selects each year is a moving image collection) the KBOO archive is incredibly worthy of our preservation and of any kind of assistance that could be given or any volunteer efforts towards their ultimate survival.

One of the things that has remained with me since our conversation is how adamant they were about KBOO as an independent institution and yet how deeply rooted in the community and its history. But not the history that is surface-level. It goes way deeper. KBOO and its activities and participants are tied into what seems to be a kind of underground Portland history.

The world that is reflected by the programming at KBOO is not quite the Hip Voodoo Donuts landscape that Portland has become known for. What I loved about this was that the work that Marti & Erin told me about (and what the Community Archiving Workshop was to be helping them preserve during the conference) was chock full of queer voices, activists, POC and turned-on locals participating in a homegrown organization bent on creating a positive audio hub for family, friends and strangers in this northwest area. I dug it!!!

As usual, the bios for my amazing guests (including some SUPER GREAT LINKS are right under the podcast link.

Erin Yanke is the Program Director at KBOO Community Radio where she is also works on the training program, on podcasting, and with the Youth Collective. She is also a documentarian, working with audio, print, and video. Recent projects include the 300 page art book Dead Moon, First 100 Days event series Educate, Agitate, and Organize; Bright Spark a podcast about harm reduction, and the film Arresting Power: Resisting Police Violence in Portland, Oregon.   

Marti Clemmons is the Archivist at KBOO Community Radio.  For six years, she has been a library technician at Portland State University Special Collections and University Archives where she continues to process, digitize and make Portland history accessible to the public.  
She is interested in using archives as a place for Queer activism.

LINKS:

General KBOO https://kboo.fm/

50th anniversary historical interviews https://www.50yearsofkboo.fm/kboo-stories-project

Some favorite programs
From the  Grassroots https://kboo.fm/program/grassroots

Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Kush https://kboo.fm/program/kabhi-khushi-kabhie-kush
Rose City Native Radio https://kboo.fm/program/rose-city-native-radio

Threshold Shift https://kboo.fm/program/threshold-shift
The Confessional https://kboo.fm/program/confessional

Archives & Intersectionality: Linking the Personal to the Professional–Panel from AMIA 2018, Portland, OR

The panel that I presented this year at the annual AMIA (Association of Moving Image Archivists) Conference in Portland, Or. As a longtime member, I have been trying to get a panel accepted for many years but social justice and moving image archives have not always…been seen as congruent. I have always always always believed that you cannot discuss one without the other. They are the reel to the film. The lens to the projector. The 1 to the 0 (in digital).

This year I was HONORED to have some of the most talented and amazing colleagues and friends I know come to speak with me on the most meaningful and important issues within our community: issues of race, gender, sexuality, personal identity, and power and how these have influenced their work, their lives and their experiences as moving image archivists. Two of my panelists you may have met previously if you are a regular Archivist’s Alley listener: Brendan Lucas is the Outfest Legacy Project Manager and you would have heard him on my Outfest Legacy Project Managers episode!  Erica Lopez is continually referred to on this show due to her amazing work with the Fuentes Collection and discussion on Latinx home movies as we discuss here. Ina Archer is INCREDIBLY BUSY so I haven’t gotten her on the show, but it will happen! But she is an incredible writer, artist and is now a media conservator at The Smithsonian National Museum Of African American History & Culture (NMAAHC). You can check her out here.

Please forgive me on the video quality. It was recorded off my laptop because my actual camera decided it didn’t want to play nice. But you can hear everything except the young woman’s question at the very end (apologies) who was asking about some international issues and terms like diversity and inclusion and…I don’t think that my response was very good. I spoke with her afterwards and we sorted things out. I feel a little awkward about that! Thanks to Brendan for taking the mic and repeating the other announcement during the short Q&A bit.

I hope you enjoy and if you have any questions or would like to follow up on this, plan a panel with me or discussion on this kind of conversation with me (I already have some in my head) or would like to get in touch with my guests to tell them how amazing they are…feel free to contact me at archivistsalley@gmail.com

Patricia Ledesma Villon: The Challenges of Home Movies & the Complexity of Asian American Representation

This episode is the official Home Movie Day episode and it is extremely exciting! As you may recall, other guests have discussed the critical value of home movies. The exceptional Snowden Becker  was a guest and she is one of the actual founders of Home Movie Day, Erica Lopez came on and spoke on her vital and unique work on Mexican home movies, and Lynne Kirste  was a guest and we examined the way classic Hollywood depicted themselves in the home movie genre and why those films are such incredible gems in their own right.

I couldn’t be more excited to have Patricia Ledesma Villon be representing and speaking about home movies for Home Movie Day, 2018. In my eyes, she is exactly what the archiving and library world should be embracing and looking for in their new hires and future generations. If you are an employer reading this, take my advice: the qualities Patricia has are those you want. Passion, honesty, conviction and dedication.

As she and I discuss on the show, home movies are not simple nor are they just about fun nostalgia. Many times they are incredibly challenging and they can produce great discomfort in the viewer. This is one of the very important aspects of this moving image genre.

When home movies are shown, class, culture and representation are key elements and should always be part of the presentation. Yet this is rarely done. Home movie texts can always be enjoyed on the basis of narrative or nostalgic pleasure- they are so much fun and so pleasurable to watch– but it does them a disservice to deny their complex historicism and social meaning. Patricia’s work as an intern with CAAM and her own archival scholarship stand out in this manner as she introduces powerful ways of examining these critical moving image works, especially vis-a-vis Asian American communities.

Finally, although we touched on the importance of hiring people of color during our discussion, Patricia emailed me afterwards to emphasize that we should highlight black, indigenous, queer and disabled archivists in our community, especially as we remember the cultural significance of Home Movie Day.

Her bio & some REALLY TERRIFIC links are below, as usual. Hope your Home Movie Day rocks!!

PATRICIA LEDESMA VILLON is an archivist based in Oakland, California. A Bay Area native, she has worked for several Asian media nonprofits in the area. Patricia most recently interned at the Philippine Film Archive (formerly known as the National Film Archive of the Philippines) where she digitally restored a short film submitted to the 2017 Short Film Festival of Switzerland. She is currently interning at the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM) where she works on Memories to Light, a project preserving the home movies of Asian American families on Super 8, 8mm and 16mm formats. She received her B.A. in media from the University of California, Berkeley and is a member of Low Light Darkroom and Black Hole Collective Film Lab, a DIY member-run analog still image and motion film collective.

 
Here are some links:
 
About Low Light Darkroom and Black Hole Collective Film Lab: https://lowlightblackholelab.org/
 
About Memories to Light: https://caamedia.org/memoriestolight/
 
Kip Fulbeck’s home movie collection featuring Santa’s Village on Memories to Light: https://caamedia.org/memoriestolight/2015/12/30/throwback-thursday-kip-fulbecks-santas-village-visit-in-1972/
 
Dawn Bohulano Mabalon’s home movie collection featuring Stockton’s Little Manila on Memories to Light: https://caamedia.org/memoriestolight/project/bohulano-family-collection/
 
African American Museum & Library’s “Representing Ourselves: Black Home Movies for All Audiences” on Home Movie Day Saturday, October 20 from – 2:00-4:00pm: http://oaklandlibrary.org/events/african-american-museum-library-oakland/home-movie-day

 

 

Lynne Kirste- Home Movies at the Academy and the Brilliant Power of Representation

Welcome to Season 2! I am so excited to begin this season with my friend and colleague Lynne Kirste of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. While many of you may only know the Academy for That Awards Show, this institution does way more. Lynne is only one of many other wonderful humans that I know and treasure there. But what she does is (to me) particularly special and unique which is why I was so excited when I was able to welcome her to the program and why she is the first guest on this new season!

Last season we spoke about the topic of home movies with the illustrious Snowden Becker and the fabulous Erica Lopez, these women are critical engineers of the home movie world and introduced major discussions that I invite you to revisit if you have not listened to those episodes. The home movie/amateur film genre is one of the most critical areas of our profession.

Here we go a step further into our classical film past. What Lynne Kirste does at the Academy as the Special Collections Curator is truly mindblowing. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed spending time with a woman who I consider to be a true mentor and, like Snowden and Erica, is one of the great talents of our moving image archive world. Below the podcast link you will find her very rich bio and some great links! Please check them out!


Lynne Kirste Bio:

Lynne Kirste is Special Collections Curator at the Academy Film Archive, where she cares for materials that include the Archive’s extensive collection of home movies. She joined the Archive staff in 1997 after earning her MFA in Film Production from UCLA. Lynne believes it is crucial for archives to collect, preserve, share and provide access to moving images by and about people who are not well represented in mainstream media. Lynne has spoken about this topic at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, the Outfest Fusion Festival, the Stan Brakhage Symposium, the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, the Society of
Cinema and Media Scholars conference and many other forums. Lynne is passionate about sharing material from the Academy’s collection. She has curated over twenty home movie programs and presented them with live commentary to audiences at a wide range of venues, including the Academy’s Linwood Dunn theater, the Turner Classic Film Festival, Walt Disney Imagineering, the historic Old Town Music Hall, the British Film Institute and the Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia in Bologna, Italy.
Lynne’s publications include articles in Mining the Home Movie, edited by Karen Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmermann, and the Cinema Journal. She provides commentary for a home movie selection on the DVD set Treasures V: The West, produced by the National Film Preservation Foundation, and talks about LGBTQ home movies in the documentary Reel in the Closet.
Lynne is proud to be a member of the Outfest Legacy Advisory Council and of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, where she chaired the LGBT Committee for several years.

Links mentioned in the show & other recommendations to check out!!!!

Japanese American National Museum Home Movie Collection

JANM’s main website

http://www.janm.org/

Home Movie Clips from JANM’s Collections

http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/nikkeialbum/albums/270/

This link takes you a page featuring the Dave Tatsuno Collection Album (plus a list of other JANM home movie collections on the right side of the screen under the heading “More albums by HNRC.”) You can’t click yet on the large image in the player. There is a text description below that image. Below the text you will see the “Slides in this album” thumbnail photos. Click on any thumbnail photo and it will link you to the actual home movie clip that you can now play in the viewer. After you’ve loaded one clip, you can click on the numbers above the screen to see the next clips.

You can click on any of the other collection albums to view their clips.

It’s easy and totally worth it!

Latinos and Latinas in Hollywood

Hollywood Home Movies: LA/LA Special Edition (2017 Academy program)

This review discusses the program’s content and points about Latinas and Latinos in Hollywood.

http://www.thevintagecameo.com/2017/10/hollywood-home-movies-lala-special-edition/

Negro Leagues Baseball

Kansas City Monarchs vs. Indianapolis Clowns, featuring Reese “Goose” Tatum

https://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening-room/t1-negro-leagues-baseball-1946

Complete footage and information from the National Film Preservation Foundation site.

Satchel Paige pitching for a team of Negro League ballplayers in an exhibition game against Major League players in 1948.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyjLJ96iFBM

Click “read more” on the YouTube page for an excellent description of the footage.

LGBTQ Home Movies

Trailer for Reel in the Closet, a documentary about the historic value of LGBTQ home movies with some amazing clips.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9yiA-SRjgw

Outfest Legacy Project for LGBT Film Preservation

https://www.outfest.org/about-the-legacy-project/

Mona’s Candle Light Bar – a “bohemian” bar in San Francisco, circa 1950 – preservation of home movie with sound (very rare to find an early sound home movie) that features drag king Jimmy Reynard and singer Jan Jensen.

https://archive.org/details/monasCandleLightCa1950s

People with Disabilities in Film

Interview with Marlee Matlin (2017)

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-marlee-matlin-oscars-20170202-story.html

Think of Me First as a Person

This wonderful home movie/documentary by a father about his son who has Down Syndrome is on the National Film Registry.

http://www.thinkofmefirstasaperson.com/film.html

https://amateurism.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/preserving-think-of-me-first-as-a-person/