The filmography of Amateur Cinema League Ten Best films, referenced several times in recent posts, can be found in this issue of Film History. Its author Alan Kattelle (1919-2010) left an important collection of films, cameras, papers, and ephemera to the archive of Northeast Historic Film. His legacy also includes the essential reference book Home Movies: A History of the American Industry, 1897-1979, published in 2000 and still available for purchase at NHF.
The other contributors to this 2003 collection have all continued to research, publish, curate, collect, preserve and make movies about home movies and amateur films.
Here's the 2003 Table of Contents, with updates about contributors.
Film History, vol. 15, no. 2, Small-Gauge and Amateur Film (2003): 123-272.
edited by Melinda Stone and Dan Streible
Dwight Swanson, "Inventing Amateur Film: Marion Norris Gleason, Eastman Kodak, and the Rochester scene, 1921-1932"
⇥ ⇥ His Facebook posting of December 5, 2014: "My curatorial project for the year, Home Grown Movies (an online collection of films from Home Movie Day 2013), begins anew with a home movie of Elias Savada in costume as Sputnik on Halloween in 1958. Thanks to Eli for his help and his commentary. We'll be posting new films every week for the next few months at www.homegrownmovies.org."
Anke Mebold and Charles Tepperman, "Resurrecting the Lost History of 28mm Film in North America"
⇥ ⇥ Mebold co-edited Film History 19.4, Nontheatrical Film (2007). She is now a film archivist and restorer at Deutsches Filminstitut. At the 2006 Orphan Film Symposium she presented an unidentified 28mm fire insurance industrial film (ca. 1924), restored for the occasion by Peter Limburg and Haghefilm. At the 2012 symposium, she presented the DIF restoration of a 1921 German feature Die Hochbahnkatastrophe (The Elevated Train Catastrophe).
Heather Norris Nicholson, "British Holiday Films of the Mediterranean: At Home and Abroad with Home Movies, ca. 1925-1936 "
⇥ ⇥ In 2012 she published the book Amateur Film: Meaning and Practice 1927–77 (Manchester University Press).
Alexandra Schneider, "Home Movie-making and Swiss Expatriate Identities in the 1920s and 1930s"
⇥ ⇥ At Orphans 9 in Amsterdam, she presented a video program she curated with Wanda Strauven, "Children as Media Archaeologists." In September 2014 she became Professor at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.
Dan Streible, "Itinerant Filmmakers and Amateur Casts: A Homemade 'Our Gang', 1926"
⇥ ⇥ began a term as director of NYU's Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program in 2014.
Janna Jones, "From Forgotten Film to a Film Archive: The Curious History of From Stump to Ship "
⇥ ⇥ She located a surviving Ten Best film, Navajo Rug Weaving (E. Tad Nichols, Tucson, Arizona, 1945), which is housed at Northern Arizona University, Cline Library, Tad Nichols Collection, 1931-2000. Jones's essay "Starring Sally Peshlakai: Rewriting the Script for Tad Nichols's 1939 Navajo Rug Weaving," appears in the new book Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web, edited by Laura Rascaroli and Gwenda Young, with Barry Monahan (Bloomsbury, 2014).
Jesse Lerner, "Consumed by a Fever: The Small-gauge Cinema of Orizaba's Sergio Tinoco Solar "
⇥ ⇥ Sandra Rosental and Lerner released the feature-length La Piedra Ausente (The Absent Stone, 2012). Using archival materials (including home movies), animation, and contemporary interviews, the documentary explores how, in 1964, the Aztec monolith known as the Tlaloc Stone was moved from Cuatlinchan to Mexico City -- and how the carved stone has become an icon of national identity. Trailer here.
Laura Kissel, "Lost, Found, and Remade: An Interview with Archivist and Filmmaker Carolyn Faber"
⇥ ⇥ While making her documentary Cotton Road (2014), Kissel found Amateur Cinema League leader in the Beijing Documentary Film Studio archive, associated with the title Shanghai in Torment (also the title of a 1937 book). During the 2010 Orphan Film Symposium, Kara Van Malssen interviewed Carolyn Faber (media librarian at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) for NYU MIAP's "MISL" project Moving Image Specialists in Libraries: ("I had been collecting home movies . . . .").⇥ ⇥ With filmmaker Penny Lane, Frye used the Super 8 home movies (more than 500 reels shot by White House aides H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Dwight Chapin during 1969-73) as the basis for the documentary Our Nixon (2013). Bill Brand's BB Optics did the preservation of the original films for the National Archives. At the 2014 Orphan Film Symposium, Brand and Benedict Olgado presented "Restoring the Fragments of On the Way to India Consciousness, I Reached China (Henry Francia, 1968)," excerpts of which can be viewed here.
Melinda Stone, "'If It Moves, We'll Shoot It': The San Diego Amateur Movie Club "
⇥ ⇥ Dr. Stone is a professor at the University of San Francisco. She tracked down a pair of the amateur cinema Ten Best awardees made in San Francisco: Moods of a City (1972, Westwood Movie Club) and Tuneful Wings (1975, Dorothy Orr & Othel G. Goff). Stone's screening of the former at the 2011 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar inspired Walter Forsberg to initiate our project about amateur city symphony films. Movette Film Transfer digitized the 16mm print of Moods of a City for the project.
Alan D. Kattelle, "The Amateur Cinema League and Its Films"
⇥ ⇥ Read about his life in David Weiss's In Memoriam of 2010.
Margaret A. Compton, editor, with Katie Trainor, Karan Sheldon, Dwight Swanson, and William O'Farrell, "Small-gauge and Amateur Film Bibliography"
⇥ ⇥ In 2013, Margie Compton appeared on NBC's national newscast with a 28mm home movie from the University of Georgia. It includes 1919 footage of a "plantation league" baseball game involving teams of all African American players. Watch the NBC Nightly News video here.
 |
| Pebble Hill Plantation Film Collection (ca, 1917-1976), Walter J. Brown Media Archives, University of Georgia Libraries. |
