The WCFTR blog highlights collection news, projects, and services with posts by staff, student assistants, and volunteers. We also cover WCFTR events and events with our campus partners.
Recent Posts
Love, Links, Archives: Sharing the Wendy Clarke Collection
Throughout the Love Tapes, Wendy invited participants into a small booth where they talked for three minutes about what love meant to them. The people who shared their views and experiences represent a wide expanse human experience; African Americans, Asian Americans, Puerto Ricans, and people of many other races and ethnicities all recorded love tapes. Members of New York City’s gay, lesbian, and transgender communities are also well-represented in Clarke’s work. The Love Tapes and much of Clarke’s work represents a model of participatory media culture that preceded the Web and the proliferation of social media; she offers a challenge to traditional cinematic canons and the narrow subset of voices which have traditionally been privileged. The WCFTR is pleased to be able to share the collection–now digitized, searchable, and richly described–with new audiences, allowing the voices within it to speak to us again.
April 10, 2025
Revisiting Early Programming at Cinema 16 with Viewing Notes and An Online Playlist!
Tanya Goldman In this blog post, Tanya Goldman continues to examine materials from WCFTR’s Amos Vogel collection. Digitized materials discussed below – and many more! – are available on the Internet Archive thanks to a …
March 17, 2025
Help: Afram and Black Capitalism
The Fall 2024, Volume 94 edition of The Velvet Light Trap opens with the article, “Help: Afram and Black Capitalism” by Will Hair. The essay provides a formal and historiographic unpacking of Help, a 1970 ABC television production …
February 21, 2025Reconstructing the Postwar U.S. Campus Film Society Movement with the Amos Vogel Papers
Tanya Goldman The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) is one of many institutions that house materials related to the great cineaste Amos Vogel (1921-2012). A man of capacious tastes and eager to …
February 17, 2025
Lost & Found: Jean Béranger’s “Lafcadio” (1948)
Zachary Zahos In the course of an average day, archivists at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research handle one-of-a-kind materials, whose historical value draws researchers from across the globe. But rare is the …
February 7, 2025WCFTR Receives NEH Grant for “Project Ballyhoo”
Ben Pettis The Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) has received a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for a project titled “Project Ballyhoo: Analyzing Publicity Text …
January 14, 2025
New at the Media History Digital Library: The Wilkinson Pressbook Collection
By Zachary Zahos The Media History Digital Library has recently returned from a trip to that most fabled and misunderstood decade, the 1960s, with a treasure trove of freshly digitized film pressbooks in tow. Newly …
January 6, 2025
WCFTR at the 2024 Association of Moving Image Archivists Conference
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, …
December 18, 2024
Understanding Visual Culture Through Silent Film Collections – Journal of e-Media Studies
Staff and researchers at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR) are eagerly anticipating some well-deserved time in the coming weeks and holiday breaks to explore latest advancements in historiography and digital humanities …
November 26, 2024
Wrangling Date Metadata in the Media History Digital Library
For over a decade the Media History Digital Library (MHDL) has supported film and media studies by providing online access to trade papers, fan magazines, and other primary source materials. Lantern, the search platform for the MHDL, provides full-text search for millions of pages within the collections. I have worked as one of the main MHDL developers for the past 4+ years. During that time, I have seen first-hand the various interconnected systems and tools—as well as continual “behind the scenes” work—that keeps things running smoothly. This work is not always visible or apparent to users, so what I’d like to do with this blog post is share what some of this work has involved.
July 31, 2024- Older Posts