Screenings at AMIA 2015

AMIA 2015 will offer a number of screenings in the hotel and at the Whitsell Auditorium.  Anyone registered may use their badge for entry.

Thursday . November 19
7:45pm . Whitsell Auditorium

AMIA Archival Screeening Night
Archival Screening Night is a showcase for AMIA members’ recent acquisitions, discoveries, and preservation efforts. The program represents the magnificent spectrum of media formats, works, and collections protected and preserved by the AMIA community.”

Friday . November 20
7:30pm – 8:30pm . Hilton Hotel

Report: Chicago’s First Home Video Day
Home Video Day is a new spin on Home Movie Day, an international annual event held since 2002 that focuses on celluloid home movies–8mm, 16mm, and Super-8. Yet families and communities everywhere have also been videotaping public and private life for about three decades now, and few people realize just how endangered these documents of people’s history really are. Home Video Day is an engaging and fun way for the archival community to raise awareness about the importance of personal archiving, and it provides a communal experience that is hilarious, touching and uncomfortable in a way that only home video can be! The organizers of the first Chicago Home Video Day will discuss the success of their 2015 event and provide attendees with a blueprint to launch HVDs across the country. We will also screen some of the funny, heartwarming, and just plain baffling home videos that turned up at our Chicago event.

Friday . November 20
8:35pm – 9:35pm . Hilton Hotel

Reframing Portland (LIVE)
This special screening event features live projections of expanded moving image works by local filmmakers and video artists using archival footage culled from the collections of Portland area archives and private collections with live scores performed by local musicians. Archival sources include color footage documenting the Vanport, Oregon Flood of 1948. Vanport was home to many of the workers that came to Portland during WWII to aid the war effort, and was the center of the African American community in Portland from WWII until the time of the flood. Other films include glimpses behind the scenes at the Oregon Health & Science University Hospital in the early 1940s and vibrant Kodachrome footage of the Victory Loan Company’s late 1930s talent show.

Friday . November 20
7:45pm  . Whitsell Auditorium

The Remastered Paris is Burning
Released over 25 years ago, Paris is Burning has proved itself as withstanding the test of time within the LGBT community. At a time before Madonna released “Vogue”, this film put the concept of vogue-ing on the map. Following a handful of drag queens who compete in balls in New York City, this ethnographic piece opens the window to what it was like being openly gay in New York City back in the 1980s. With the help of technological advances and a dedicated team, Paris is Burning is being presented like never before, remastered from the original camera negative and, for the first time, being screened in its original aspect ratio so you can see the film as it was intended through the eyes of director.

Saturday . November 21 | Please wear your badge for admission
11:00am . Whitsell Auditorium

The Thanhouser Studio and the Birth of American Cinema
The documentary recounts the untold story of the rise and fall of this remarkable pioneering motion picture studio during the first decade of the twentieth century. Utilizing film clips from AMIA member archives, it is an excellent case study how the work of member organizations can be used for documenting early film history. The documentary traces the evolution of one family’s career as it transitioned from producing live theater to establishing one of the most successful independent silent motion picture studios in early cinema. Set against a backdrop of Thomas A. Edison and his Motion Picture Patents Trust companies dominating the industry, the story plays out in New York, Florida and California. It is a compelling story of fame and fortune, twisted by the vagaries of fate and ending on a bittersweet note

Saturday . November 21  | Please wear your badge for admission
1:00pm  . Whitsell Auditorium

This is Cinerama: Remastered
“This is Cinerama” plunges you into a startling new world of entertainment. That advertising herald is as accurate today as it was in 1952, when first night viewers found themselves suddenly riding a rollercoaster. Cinerama was an immersive cinematic process different in format and presentation from any other type of filmed entertainment. Captured in a triptych of 35mm images, with the image on each panel taller, clearer, and with 7 tracks of discrete sound, the picture was then projected on a gigantic, deeply curved screen, in a theater with surround sound speaker placement. The result was larger than life, three-dimensional and awe-inspiring. “This is Cinerama” is all at once, a demonstration film, a travelogue, an opera, an Aquacade, with soaring majesty and thrilling spectacle. Presented in Smilebox(TM) Curved Screen Simulation.  Prior to the screening, the film’s digital restoration team of David Strohmaier and Randy Gitsch will present a before-and-after demonstration and discuss their work.

Saturday . November 21 | | Please wear your badge for admission
7:00pm – 8:30pm . Whitsell Auditorium

UKSUUM CAUYAI: THE DRUMS OF WINTER
Shot in 1977, this award-winning ethnographic documentary explores the traditional dance, music, and spiritual world of the Yup’ik Eskimo people of Emmonak, a remote village at the mouth of the Yukon River on the Bering Sea coast. Dance was once at the heart of Yup’ik spiritual and social life; the bridge between the ancient and the new, the living and the dead, a person’s own power and the greater powers of the unseen world. In THE DRUMS OF WINTER, the people of Emmonak express through performances and interviews how their history, social values and spiritual beliefs are woven around the songs and dances that have been handed down to them through the generations. Throughout the film, archival photographs and film footage accompany the words of early missionaries who brought with them both Christianity and cultural repression. Added to the National Film Registry in 2006, the film has been recently restored to its original cinematic quality with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation and the Rasmuson Foundation. (90 mins.)

Saturday . November 21
7:30pm – 8:305pm . Hilton Hotel

Big_Sleep™//a codec tutorial

By Evan Meaney, Amy Szczepansi, Big Sleep™ is part software demo, part documentary. It explores problems in our archival urges. Via a single-channel desktop screencast, informatic elements ebb and flow—creating and relating interface absences. These gaps suggest that no amount of hard drive space can defy mortality. The only way to fully prepare our media for the future is to prepare ourselves for a future apart.  The piece presents material from the late William Birch, one of the most important Fox Movietone cinematographers.  Examining his now-decaying body of work—we find an argument for access in the present. Digital migrations of these early films are often met with limited, temporary success. Looking into the future, one might see a canon of obsolesce. Looking further, one might not see anything at all.

Saturday . November 21
8:30pm – 9:30pm . Hilton Hotel

It Happened in 16mm: A Night of Regional Film, Part Deux
The Small Gauge Amateur Film Committee (SGAFC) and the Regional Audiovisual Archives Committee (RAVA) are co-sponsoring the second annual small gauge regional film screening event to take place during the Portland conference (a continuation of the event that began in Savannah). The program will occur in the evening in the conference hotel or a local microcinema and will be curated from the collections of RAVA’s institutional members and local regional archives. It will feature 16mm film from regional archives highlighting content of the Portland/Pacific NW region.