Matt St. John
Earlier this month, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) staff hit the road to attend the Association of Moving Image Archivists conference in Milwaukee. The annual conference brings together archivists, librarians, educators, students, and other professionals, addressing ways to preserve and provide access to moving image materials. Over three days of catching up with colleagues, discussing new preservation strategies, and learning about our peer institutions’ projects and collections, we also had the chance to spread the word about some of our ongoing projects.
WCFTR director Eric Hoyt presented during the session “Archiving Television: A Preview,” which highlighted work from the upcoming book The Archivability of Television: Essays on Preservation and Perseverance. The other panelists sharing material from their chapters were Owen Gottlieb (Rochester Institute of Technology), Ruta Abolins (University of Georgia/Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection) and Hugo Ljungbäck (University of Chicago). Like the book, the AMIA session grappled with the history and challenges of preserving television, with case studies ranging from the creation of the Peabody awards archives to the treasures of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s television history (including appearances by the actor Willem Dafoe as a college student!)
Eric’s presentation centered on our newly launched website Saving and Sharing Early Television. This collaborative project brings together work from the WCFTR team, especially project assistants Lesley Stevenson and Pauline Lampert. The website features exhibits about WCFTR’s Faye Emerson and Ziv Television collections, stemming from research by graduate students Maureen Mauk and Olivia Riley. The project centers on two programs in particular. World of Giants, a Ziv Television production, focuses on a special agent shrunk to miniature size, and The Faye Emerson Show was one of the first-ever late-night television shows and, for decades, one of the rare shows with a woman as the host. Part of the surprising story that unfolded with these collections is the unusual copyright status of the two series – a situation that allowed us to digitize and share the programs. Researchers can view clips, photographs, and sample episodes, with introductions that contextualize the archival items and how they relate to the history of the two programs and television as a whole.
WCFTR also presented on one of our major grant projects, highlighting the collaborations involved in “Expanding Film Culture’s Field of Vision: Processing and Sharing the Collections of Amos Vogel, Jump Cut, Angles, and the Wisconsin Film Festival.” WCFTR director Eric Hoyt, assistant director Mary Huelsbeck, and manuscript specialist Matt St.John joined our colleague Olivia Babler from the Chicago Film Archives (CFA) for this session. This gave us a chance to describe the vast range of materials present in the four collections from the project, which is funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, as well as our exciting collaboration with CFA.
The Chuck Kleinhans and Julia Lesage papers/Jump Cut records at WCFTR offer an extensive history of their work as scholars, teachers, and journal co-editors, but they also made home home movies and experimental films, which are preserved in the Kleinhans and Lesage collections at CFA. Olivia and the CFA team have graciously agreed to work with us to share some of the short films on our in-progress Expanding Film Culture’s Field of Vision website, alongside digitized materials from our manuscript collections. We’re grateful to the CFA team for their collaboration, and we look forward to sharing the records of Kleinhans and Lesage’s prolific careers with examples of their films.
During the panel, we shared a sneak preview of some scanned papers and films that will appear on the website, including flyers for Milwaukee screenings of women’s films (from the Elfrieda Abbe collection), trailers from the Wisconsin Film Festival, and a trailer for Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16 society. We’re hard at work on the item scanning and digital exhibit creation for the project, and we’re excited to share more from the Jump Cut, Elfrieda Abbe/Angles, Wisconsin Film Festival, and Amos Vogel collections soon.
Thanks to the AMIA conference organizers and attendees for making our time in Milwaukee a rich, memorable, and thought-provoking experience! And thanks to Rebecca Hall from the Chicago Film Archives for the photo from our “Expanding Film Culture’s Field of Vision” panel!
The Saving and Sharing Early Television website can be found at https://avdh.commarts.wisc.edu/s/earlytv/page/home.