2009 Symposium

Ways Of Watching

10th Annual Northeast Historic Film Summer Symposium  

July 24-25, 2009

The 2009 Northeast Historic Film Summer Symposium focused on an investigation of how, where and why we watch amateur and noncommercial films in both the past and the present. The NHF Summer Symposium is a multi-disciplinary gathering devoted to the history, theory, and preservation of moving images. NHF is located in Bucksport, a town of 5,000 on the coast of Maine. Typically, presentations are 30 minutes, followed by 30 minutes of discussion. The symposium is open to archivists, artists and scholars from all disciplines. 

Popular Science Monthly, October 1940

Presentations

From Introspection to Convivial Participation: Departures from Black Box Topology in Contemporary Video Art Display
Cristina Albu, Ph.D. student, Department of History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh

Numerous contemporary artists open up the black box to social interaction. Based on an analysis of spaces of video display and convivial modes of watching, this paper proposes a typology of alternatives to conventional cinematic environments and investigates the rationale for changes in video art spectatorship. View PowerPoint

The Film Collector’s Legacy
Liz Coffey, Film Conservator, Harvard Film Archive

Screening
This screening uses the Harvard Film Archive’s Howard E. Burr Collection as an object lesson about a dying breed, the film collector. Howard E. “Doc” Burr collected film his entire life. In his professional life he was a dentist, socially he was a golfer, but when he got home, his passion was clearly cinematic. He watched at least one film a day. He put on shows for his family and their friends. In the summer, shows would be put on outside, projected on a screen for his family and the children of the neighborhood. He even showed film in the waiting room of his dental practice.  The screening included projection of three gauges of film from “Doc” Burr’s collection on projectors similar to the ones he used at home.

‘Western Ways’ Gone South: George Herbert as Failed Showman
Jennifer L. Jenkins, Ph.D., Division Head, Film and Television Studies, School of Media Arts, University of Arizona

George and Lucile Herbert founded the Tucson-based Western Ways Features Service in 1936. This regional mom-n-pop operation, run out of a 19^th century adobe building, included commercial, portrait, aerial, motion pictures, photo finishing and stock footage production.   Hoping to capitalize on the Arizona landscape and the 1950s craze for all things Western, in 1952 the Herberts formed the Southwestern Motion Pictures & Television Corporation. They produced 18 short subjects for television and two parts of a TV pilot for “Rawhide Riley,” a western set in Tucson. The operation collapsed when their head writer, Tom Bailey, absconded with the company’s funds, estimated at around one million dollars. As the main exhibits in one of the largest financial scams in the state until the Keating Five, these films will be seen publicly for the first time.

In a letter dated 1 June 1908, J. K. Dixon (self-described “Lecturer and Demonstrator to John Wanamaker”) writes to Charles Urban detailing his use of the Urban Bioscope. “I consider that there is no machine made that is comparable with the Urban Bioscope.” Dixon describes the Bioscope as indispensable to the “carrying on [of] my educational work in chronicling historical events” and in showing films in the auditoriums of both the Philadelphia and New York Wanamaker Department Stores, each of which contained screening spaces that could seat 2,000 people. Dixon states that “we have had tremendous success, turning away thousands of people.” In addition, Wanamaker’s son Rodman used film as a means of documenting the dwindling Native American population alongside the extensive photographic documentation undertaken by J. K. Dixon, who took on the role of chief photographer for the “Wanamaker Expeditions.” Together they made two films, Song of Hiawatha (1908) and The Last Great Indian Council (1909), using Native Americans as actors. Wanamaker founded a school within the department store in Philadelphia to educate young employees. This educational mission augmented the already present and popular lecture series using film, as described by J. K. Dixon, that took place regularly within the store’s Egyptian Hall, which John Wanamaker himself described as “this splendid Temple…devoted to the cause of Music and Education.”
View PowerPoint

Purposeful pleasures: social awareness and amateur film practice in Britain, c. 1927 -1977.
Heather Norris Nicholson, Ph.D., Research Fellow at the Manchester Centre for Regional History and Manchester European Research Institute, Department of History and Economic History, Manchester Metropolitan University, England

“How strange so many Amateur movies still seem to reflect yesterday’s world… (and)  are in fact thoroughly old-fashioned in a world bristling with social problems and fractured values where nobody is sure of anything and many people are desperately searching for some answers…” Readers of Ian Watson’s regular column in Movie Maker were familiar with his strongly worded sentiments about the state of Britain’s amateur cinema movement and its relationship to wider societal change. From the mid 1920s onwards, amidst other more personal family and holiday records, numerous amateurs used film as a means to engage with topical concerns and to create more purposeful or socially-engaged material.  Such purposeful filmmaking may be considered also alongside other prevailing socially-concerned activity and Britain’s documentary movement as well as issues of media representation and regional identity.

From the 1920s through the 1960s, community groups across the United States often projected films on disparate topics – such as gardening, dental hygiene, geography, and seatbelt safety – as part of a single evening’s film program. Instead of seeking to acquire a specific form of knowledge, non-commercial film viewers may have attended these screenings out of a historically- and medium-specific desire for pedagogy as an end in itself. This presentation will approach the question of how audiences watched non-commercial films by examining the production of “medical ways of watching” through instructional films made for the laity as well as for medical students and physicians from the late 1920s-1960s. I will compare two versions of a 1929 film co-produced by Eastman Teaching Films and the American College of Surgeons: Acute Appendicitis (Lay Public) and Acute Appendicitis (Professional) By comparing these two films, their respective publicity materials, and documentation of specific exhibition venues, this talk will analyze the ways that both lay and professional audiences used nontheatrical educational films to gain access to authoritative discourses of scientific visuality through the act of film spectatorship.

As films began to be adapted for use in many schools nationwide, and as a new distribution network for 16mm classroom films was established, educators launched numerous studies to see just how much students could actually learn from this new educational medium. Many of these academic studies used scientific methods to test student comprehension of subjects with and without the use of motion pictures. A well-known 1929 study by Ben Wood and Frank Freeman, for example, using Eastman Teaching Films (and sponsored by the Eastman Kodak Company), found that “the motion picture film contributes to both [direct and indirect] aspects of the child’s education.” Dozens of similar studies were published by the mid-1930s, they contain careful and detailed accounts of how films were used in the classroom, and they overwhelmingly reach positive conclusions about the effectiveness of visual education. For all their scholarly thoroughness, these studies do not take into account the concept of the “resistant spectator.” How were motion pictures intended to be viewed in classroom situations? How might they actually have been viewed in ways that run counter to these intentions? What happens in the gap between classroom film and pupil? My paper will include images and clips from a number of early classroom films, including Planting and Care of Trees (Eastman Teaching Films, 1928), which contains a segment in which a film is shown to a class. View PowerPoint

What You See is What you Get: Watching Swedish Private Film Collections from the 1960s and the 1970s
Cecilia Mörner, PhD, School of Humanities and Media, Dalarna University, Falun, Sweden

Some years ago the Swedish government decided that non-commercial 16 mm, 9,5 mm and 8 mm films, including amateur films, should be filed and accessible for scholars. In 2003 a special film archive was established in the small town of Grängesberg. Hundreds of private film collections have been donated since, and in 2005 I had the opportunity to analyze some of them (published in 2006 in Swedish with Mats Jönsson, Självbilder: Filmer från Västmanland, Stockholm: Svenska Filminstitutet). One major problem with analyzing private film collections is that they usually lack written documentation, that is, textual analysis must include guessing in terms of who is who and why people behave in certain ways (even if the lack of detailed information about a specific collection does not prevent overall, culturally determined inferences like the fact that all of the collections are focused on versions of ‘the sunny side of life’ rather than everyday life). So, last summer I interviewed some of the donators of the collections I had previously studied in order to get some complementary information. In this paper I re-analyze the film collections, focusing on the discrepancy between how I conceived them before and after the interviews and using theories of “place” – for example French historian Pierre Nora’s theory about milieux de memoire and lieux de memoire – as a framework. The presentation will include moving images from the collections. View PowerPoint