AMIA 2026 | Lunchtime Screenings
12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Screening Session: From the Cellar to the Cinema: Pittsburgh Sound + Image’s Origins
- Steven Haines, Pittsburgh Sound + Image
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 feature a narrated tour of highlights from the archives of Pittsburgh Sound + Image, screening 16mm treasures from the collection, and using those as a jumping off point for stories of the people behind the reels.
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12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Screening Session: Mid-Century Amateur Film/Photo Culture in the Ira Current Collection
- Jamie Marie Wagner, University of Colorado Boulder
- JoAnna Ramsey, University of Colorado Boulder Libraries
Within the extensive home movie collection of Ira Current—longtime chemist at the Agfa-Ansco film company in Binghamton, NY—one can catch fascinating glimpses into many aspects of amateur film and photography culture in mid-century America: footage from inside Ansco; candid test footage shot to demonstrate newly-developed Anscochrome color film shock; meetings of the Binghamton Camera Club; short narrative melodramas featuring members of the Binghamton Civic Theater; and footage of Current’s home workshop projects, including a sound-on-film camera he built and tested with his young children in 1950/1951.
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12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Screening Session: Progression By Destruction: Community Displacement in Los Angeles
- Jessica Sanchez, Hollywood Heritage
With cities all over the world currently grappling with rising populations and housing crises, let’s look back to Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s to see approaches taken by the City Housing Authority and Community Redevelopment Agencies. These films show how the post war population boom was used to justify the demolition of homes people lived in, ultimately leading to the demise of 2 once thriving communities: Chavez Ravine and Old Bunker Hill.
12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Screening Session: A Litany for Survival: the Life and Work of Audre Lorde
- JT Takagi, Third World Newsreel
- Ada Gay Griffin, Independent filmmaker
- Draye Wilson, Third World Newsreel, Electronic Arts Intermix
Recently restored, A Litany for Survival: the Life and Work of Audre Lorde is a documentary about the iconic Black poet, lesbian, mother, educator and activist. Screening at Sundance in 1995, it was restored in 2025. The film explores a life and body of work that embodies connections between the Civil Rights movement, Women’s movement, and the struggle for LGBTQ rights. We will screen 40 minutes of the film, followed by director Ada Gay Griffin and TWN director JT Takagi and Archival Coordinator Draye Wilson talking about the production and preservation. Preservation becomes resistance when forgetting is policy. Preservation is a necessity for People of color and LGBTQIA+ communities facing escalating state-violence. As thousands of books have been banned and hundreds of DEI programs dismantled, what we protect now determines how future generations will know what happened, who we were, and how we survived.
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12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Screening Session: Access to Oral Histories: A Case Study
- Jenni Matz, Television Academy Foundation
- Zack Ellis, TheirStory
The Television Academy Foundation Interviews is approaching its 30th anniversary in 2027. In looking for ways to tell the story of our stories, the collection stewards went back to the founders and original staff for the collection to establish the institutional history of the archive. To save on expenses and time, staff utilized TheirStory to capture remote interviews, transcribe them, and create a robust index of topics and clips. A public-facing access tool was put together, with the ability to quickly and easily add more stories as they are collected over the next year. This screening session will detail the tools and infrastructure used to both capture visual histories and provide access to search and explore them with a demo of the site created for this in-the-works project.
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12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Screening Session: Beyond PowerPoint: Documenting 1970s and 1980s Corporate Multi-Image Slideshows
- Zachary Vanes, University of Iowa
- Steve Michelsen, Independent Archivist
This screening session will feature new video documentation of restored multi-image slideshows that were created for corporate meetings during the 1970s and 1980s. Often using over fifteen carousel 35mm slide projectors and a high-definition soundtrack synchronized through a computerized device, multi-image presentations were World’s-Fair-style spectacles intended to entertain clients, motivate workers, and introduce products. Multi-image shows often took the form of panoramic mosaics punctuated by optical effects achieved through laborious animation stand work. The screening program will showcase the variety of tasks that multi-image performed at late-20th century meetings and conventions: dispensing new age wisdom, announcing coffee breaks, honoring top-performing employees, and addressing concerns about precarious economic conditions. In the contemporary moment, when nearly every public speech is accompanied by some form of slideshow software, these multi-image presentations reveal a time when meetings assumed a far more dynamic mode of address.
12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Beyond Digitization: Latinx Home Movies, Community Memory, and the Future We Are Preserving
- Mayra Isabel Garza, California Revealed
- Kate Dollenmayer
Home movies preserve dimensions of memory, identity, and community life that are often absent from institutional archives. Through curated selections from newly digitized Latinx home movies, this screening session explores how moving images expand historical narratives that have frequently reduced communities of color to stories of migration, labor, hardship, or political struggle. Families gathered in backyards, celebrations shared across generations, and moments of everyday joy offer a fuller understanding of the people, relationships, and communities that shaped these histories. Using orphan films as a starting point, the session examines what responsibilities emerge once these materials have been preserved. Through film clips and discussion, attendees will explore questions of description, access, community engagement, and stewardship while considering how archives can move beyond preservation as an endpoint toward more meaningful relationships with the communities whose histories they hold.
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12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Discover Pittsburgh’s Jazz Legacy – We Knew What We Had – Documentary
- Mark Jackovic, MCG Jazz
- Marty Ashby, MCG Jazz
- Roger Humphries, Pittsburgh Jazz Legend
- Dwayne Dolphin, Pittsburgh Jazz Legend
We Knew What We Had: The Greatest Jazz Story Never Told is a documentary film that explores the social conditions and historical events that coalesced to make Pittsburgh one of the leading contributors to the legacy of jazz music in the world. The film is packed with compelling interviews, historical photographs, and over 20 live performance clips including George Benson, Ahmad Jamal, Stanley Turrentine, Billy Eckstine, Kenny Clarke, Art Blakey, Billy Strayhorn, Mary Lou Williams, and more – all Pittsburghers. The film was produced for a general audience, capturing the spirit of a distinctly American art form, the character of a regional locale, and the soul of a determined people. It was awarded a Gold Telly Award in the Use of Music for Television and a Bronze Telly Award for the Cultural in Television. Executive producer Marty Ashby and musicians Dwayne Dolphin and Roger Humphries will answer questions after the screening.
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12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Preserving the Films and Videos of Susan Kleckner
- Jeremy Smith, University of Massachusetts Amherst
- William Kaizen, UMass Amherst
This session will screen several rarely seen film and video works by pioneering feminist/activist filmmaker, Susan Kleckner, whose archive is held by the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center (SCUA) at UMass Amherst. SCUA digitized dozens of Kleckner’s works in preparation for a career spanning exhibit held at Haverford College in the fall of 2025. Kleckner’s work represents over 40 years of creative experimentation and political engagement. This session will offer a long-overdue exploration of Kleckner’s multifaceted film/video career and illuminate her enduring influence on feminist, queer, and activist art practices in the U.S. and beyond. Works to be screened include: Three Lives, Another Look at the 1972 Democratic Convention, Bag Lady, Greenham Common, Windowpeace, and others.