Remembering 1999
Welcome back to our weekly #AMIAat30 post!
Last week, after seeing our post on the 1998 conference in Miami, member Brian Graney reminded us of interesting happenings around the November 1999 conference in Montréal.
Highlights: The conference included a screening called “The Richness of the Regions: Projecting a Global Picture of the Twentieth Century.” This eclectic set of short works from around the world was curated by the Regional Audiovisual Archives (RAVA) committee’s founding chair, the late Maryann Gomes (1954-2002) of the North West Film Archive in Manchester.
Gomes also helped to start RAVA (then an Interest Group, now a Committee of the Membership) at the 1998 conference in Miami, as part of an effort to advocate for more awareness about regional collections. In 1999, the committee was co-chaired back in 1999 by Karan Sheldon and Dwight Swanson. See an image of Gomes below (courtesy of The Journal of Film Preservation).
Graney also remembered, and co-director Randy Gitsch confirmed, that a few interviews for the documentary on film archivists, KEEPERS OF THE FRAME (1999) were shot in the conference hotel at the 1996 conference hotel and screened at the 1999 conference to much fanfare.
Those KEEPERS interviews at the conference in 1996 included: author and academic Dr. Raymond Fielding, the late William “Bill” O’Farrell (National Archives of Canada), David Francis (formerly of Library of Congress), and Pam Wintle (Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History). According to Gitsch, they also shot non-interview footage of “silent film showman” Dr. George Hall projecting before an AMIA audience. See screenshots from the film below.
Also included are an announcement of the conference in the Montréal Gazette from Nov. 1, 1999 and a couple of snapshots from that year’s The Reel Thing.
RAVA’s (now chaired by Laura Treat) current activities here.
A complete list of people current and past members featured in the film.
And you can stream KEEPERS OF THE FRAME (at least in the U.S.).