05/14/2025
Wanted to post this DRAFT of our schedule because it is shaping up into a pretty AMAZING weekend of ideas, confessions, oddities, and testimonials.
My ENORMOUS thanks to the Symposium Committee: Brian Real,Mark Neumann, Kimberly Tarr, Liz Czach, Tanya Goldman, Dino Everett and Travis Wagner!
Northeast Historic Film Summer Symposium
COLLECTORS / COLLECTIONS
July 17-19, 2025
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Northeast Historic Film / Alamo Theatre
Bucksport, ME
SCHEDULE
Thursday, July 17 (time TBA)
Dinner at the Alamoosook Lakeside Inn
Join us by the lake for a magical and traditional evening of Maine delicacies, inspiring conversation, camaraderie, fun and games. But watch your intake! We start EARLY on Friday morning!!! There will be coffee!!!
Friday, July 18
7:30 am - Alamo Lobby
Registration, Coffee, Breakfast, Chat
8:00
Welcome, and…
Our Morning Serial:
Captain Celluloid VS The Film Pirates (1966)
Pt. 1 – The Master Duper Strikes (20 Mins.)
Old and Other Media
8:30
Trace Glau (Northern Arizona University Cline Library)
Twentieth Century Postcards: Travel Logs Before Travel Blogs
When was the last time you sent or received a postcard? Postcards were an important part of twentieth century communication. Drawing from a collection of over 1000 postcards covering from 1900-1999, the presentation will discuss the postcard images, various linguistic notes, seeing history thru the postcards, and personal stories. Using the postcards in an academic environment provided a surprising primary source for students to explore. In addition, a special group of Maine Postcards will be featured including some ‘then and now’ comparisons. Participants will be invited to share their experiences with postcards or the postcard images of Maine.
9:00
Marko Djurdjić (York University)
The Music or the Misery: Alan Zweig, Vinyl, and the “Burden” of Record Collecting
Utilizing Shuker's (2017) Wax Trash and Vinyl Treasures and Maalsen and McLean's (2017) “Record collections as musical archives” as critical texts, this presentation will examine the contrasts and contradictions of my own record collecting obsession through the lens of Vinyl (2000) and Records (2021), Alan Zweig’s complementary filmic treatises on record collecting. On the one hand, my collection has been a millstone, these 12-inch slabs of melted, pressed wax indicative of my unchecked purchasing and consumptive habits; on the other, it’s a conversation starter, a point of pride, a limb. My collection proudly betrays my love for the objects on which the sounds of my life are contained; if it didn’t, I’d hide it from view, with only Zweig and the noise to keep me company.
It’s Personal
9:30
Joe Gardner (Northeast Historic Film)
The Kravitz Archives: Bits and Pieces from a Quarter Century of Internet Shopping
Thanks to discovering eBay in high school, I started a 25+ year journey of collecting films, photos, and other memorabilia from some of my favorite old TV shows and movies. Since becoming a real live media archivist, I’ve been able to digitize and share many films online as “The Kravitz Archives.” This presentation will show some of my favorite clips, including 1960s Jim Henson commercials, mystery home movies from 9.5mm, a film my mom spliced together in high school, and a long forgotten kinescope with Lucille Ball and Vivian Vance introducing The Twilight Zone.
10:00
Buckey Grimm (Researcher)
What the Deuce Do I do with this?!
With Home and Amateur Movies getting renewed exposure we have seen a proliferation of Footage become available on various markets. The placing of Home and Amateur films into an appropriate repository is in many cases challenging. Sometimes it is defined by region, other times the subject matter can provide us with the clue of where it belongs. However, there are many instances when the final disposition of material is less clear. Using samples of Footage from my own small collection we will look at some of these challenges and how to potentially overcome them.
10:30
Steven Haines (Pittsburgh Sound + Vision)
From the Cellar to the Cinema
Archivist and programmer Steven Haines introduces you to Pittsburgh film culture past and present. Over the last decade, using an archival activist approach of locating the nearly forgotten films and people of the region’s cinematic history, Steven has helped cultivate a people-first film culture which collapses boundaries between archives and cinema, spectator and participant. This presentation will conclude with an interactive performance in which everyone in attendance will be invited to be a part of a 16mm projector.
11:00
Brian Dunbar (AVI Systems, NY)
Moving Memories: The Troublesome Process of Relocating and Preserving a Personal Media Collection
The act of collecting visual media is often a deeply personal one. The curation of every title, the careful evaluation of each unique edition, and the emotional attachment to every item all present significant challenges when it comes to relocation. As the collection grows so do the emotions around every decision. This presentation explores the journey of moving my personal collection of movies, both home movies (VHS and Hi-8), and mass-produced collectibles (DVDs, Blu-rays, and Laserdiscs), into my new apartment in Brooklyn from various locations and the process of organizing, moving and preserving them.
11:30
Lunch and guided tours of the archive (those interested, please meet near stairs)
1:10
Captain Celluloid VS The Film Pirates (1966)
Pt. 2 - Nitrate Fury (15 mins.)
The Forest, the Trees, etc.
1:30
Joceline Andersen (Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC)
This Video Will be Periodically Updated: Road Deactivation (1996) and No-longer-useful cinema
Road Deactivation, a 1996 video about the forest products industry, was produced as part of a 2-day course on applying sustainable practices to the building of logging roads in BC. This video was digitized as the only donation to my project that tracks collections and collectors of forestry film and video produced in British Columbia in the 1980s and 1990s. Looking at tropes of the forestry training film, and examining questions of utility, waste, and the afterlife of video in remote infrastructure-light resource towns, I will discuss the preservation challenges of this project, and the next steps I’m taking to recover audience recollections of viewing.
2:30
Loren Pilcher (SUNY, Buffalo)
Rural Spectacle or Agricultural Demonstration? Outtakes of Pine & Turpentine Beauty Queens
Outtakes from 1951 included in a collection of films made by the Georgia Agricultural Extension Service feature beauty queens—young white women crowned as part of pine and turpentine festivals in rural communities in Georgia. Compared to many of the instructional films made by the service, theses outtakes capture rural Georgia communities candidly, rather than in scenes staged scenes for agricultural demonstration. Yet, as this presentation will explore, the footage still establishes an institutional perspective toward rural populations that emphasizes gendered performance of agricultural productivity even as it engages white femininity as a communal spectacle.
FILM IS DEAD. LONG LIVE FILM!
3:30
Introductions and Panel Discussion
4:00
Film is Dead. Long Live Film! (2024) Peter Flynn (104 mins.)
Dinner on your own
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Saturday, July 19
7:30 am - Alamo Lobby
Registration, Coffee, Breakfast, Chat
7:45
Captain Celluloid VS The Film Pirates (1966)
Pt. 3 – Satan’s Coffin (10 mins.)
Research Methods
8:00
Samuel Backer (University of Maine, Orono)
Summarizing Early Hollywood: Using AI to Explore the Library of Congress’s Motion Picture Copyright Collection
While many films from the silent era have vanished, all trace of them has not disappeared. Indeed, early cinema produced huge amounts of text that can tell us about otherwise lost movies—advertisements, reviews, financial documents, and more. Computational methods allow us to analyze such massive archives at scale. For this project, I worked with undergraduate computer science majors to explore tens of thousands of silent film synopses held by the Library of Congress. We worked to build a viewer around images of these documents, allowing users to search, compare, and analyze—ultimately returning lost cinema culture to historical understanding.
9:00
Sarah Cantor (Keeneland Library, Lexington, KY)
And They’re Off! Preserving Horse Racing’s Past, Present, and Future at Keeneland Library
Keeneland Library was founded in 1939 with a donation of several thousand volumes on the history of racing and today, is the world’s largest repository for the Thoroughbred racing industry. While the Library primarily collects books, periodicals, and newspapers on the industry, it also houses over five million photographic negatives and prints and is the most significant collection of still images for the history of racing. The Library accepts donations of DVDs and VHS tapes that comprise documentaries, interviews, racing, sales, and industry footage, educational films, and home movies. This presentation will explore the value of moving images of horse racing through documenting communities in these films. Additionally, the Library maintains assets for Keeneland’s Broadcast Services, but there is no plan, and no funding, for digitization of moving images beyond demand driven projects. This presentation will also address how various issues affect access and preservation at Keeneland and throughout cultural institutions that preserve horse racing’s history.
10:00
Agata Zborowska (University of Chicago/ Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)
Reel Identities: Home Movies and Oral Histories of Polish Diaspora in Chicago
This presentation proposes a study of a collection of analog home movies and related oral histories of the Polish diaspora in Chicago created as part of my research and archival project conducted in partnership with Chicago Film Archives. The project juxtaposes home movies – “ordinary” motion pictures made for family and close friends – with interviews with their creators or family members to uncover the “not-so-ordinary” capabilities of this underused data source for studying minority groups. It focuses on Chicago, the largest hub of the Polish diaspora in the US and a significant center of Polish culture.
11:00
Oscar Becher + Lindsay Miller (Vinegar Syndrome)
Deep Inside the Dr Ted Collection
The Reverend Dr. Robert “Ted” McIlvenna was truly a jack of all trades – his legacy, however, is perhaps best represented as a preeminent collector of erotic cinema. The origins of his collection began in the second half of the 20th century with his acquisition and usage of stag films as tools for experimental desensitization “happenings” within San Francisco’s Glide Church, but eventually his collection expanded into distribution, production, and even, ultimately, s*x education. To Dr. Ted, his collection was made up of s*x-films, not p**nography or s**t, but something to be studied, learned from, and incorporated into healthy outlooks on life.
This presentation aims to showcase highlights and oddities from deep within the multiple subcollections discovered within Dr. Ted’s expansive half-century-long obsession with accumulating anything and everything related to s*x on celluloid.
12:00
Lunch and guided tours of the archive (those interested, please meet near stairs)
1:15
Captain Celluloid VS The Film Pirates (1966)
Pt. 4 – Unmasked (10 mins.)
1:30
Travis Wagner (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
A Kind of Fusion That’s Taking Place Between Art and the Format”: The Collecting and Curatorial Practices of Retroconversion Artists
This preservation explores a phenomenon defined as “retroconversion art” or the deliberate placing of contemporary media onto obsolete formats. In particular, this presentation examines the role of VHS collecting and curation in retroconversion art by discussing findings from interviews with a handful of retroconversion artists and by exploring the retroconversion art as a media culture across social media and e-commerce platforms. Specifically, the presentation will note key media artifacts critical to retroconversion art and identify how information and resources about these artifacts get shared within retro conversion art circles. The presentation will include brief screenings of sample footage from noteworthy and prominent retroconversion art projects.
Searching, Showing, Telling
2:30
Julian Antos (Chicago Film Society/Music Box Theatre)
The Lester Log: As Retold by Julian Antos
The Chicago Film Society has been working with film collectors since its inception, unearthing rare prints which would otherwise never see public audiences. No collector has been more fruitful, perplexing, frustrating, and humbling than Lester. In this presentation, we explore what happens when a somewhat crazed film collector and a somewhat crazed nonprofit organization meet. Half cautionary tale, half success story, the Lester Log begins with a frantic phone call regarding a basement storage space full of film, and spans multiple basements, storage units, and failing automobiles. Our relationship resulted in multiple preservation projects, film screenings, and plenty of disappointments.
3:30
Andy Uhrich (Washington University Libraries)
Film Collectors' Creative Reuse of Their Collections
Beyond accusations of media piracy, the common complaint against private film collectors concerned their secrecy. However, many were regularly screening their prints to audiences ranging across the private and public spheres.
This presentation examines the creative reuse of collectors through the figure of Robert Chatterton, who operated on the fringes of the film industry in production, exhibition, and archiving for over four decades. He combined all these skills into the compilation films and live lectures that he called film chats. Through these screenings, Chatterton exemplified the multiple creative roles collectors played when providing access to their films.
4:30
Andy Graham (Kinonik)
Kinonik: Sharing 16mm with the Portland, Maine, Community
This presentation discusses the operations and activities of the non-profit Kinonik in Portland, Maine. Founded in 2016, Kinonik operates as an archive and microcinema for deaccessioned and donated 16mm prints. This presentation will discuss the organization’s origins, sourcing of prints and equipment, programming work, and other concerns characteristic of building and managing a film collection and sharing its content regularly with local audiences. This presentation strives to foster a collective conversation about keeping alive and spreading enthusiasm for analog media collections among the communities in which our archives exist.
-closing remarks and dinner on your own-
