ArchiveWeb.page, a brand-new high-fidelity web archiving system available as a Chrome extension from the Chrome Web Store. This new tool is similar to a webrecorder’s desktop version for web archiving, but as an extension, it allows for personal web archiving directly in the browser for Chromium-based browsers. Website: https://archiveweb.page/ GitHub Repo: https://github.com/webrecorder/archiveweb.page
Lorena Ramírez-López is an alum from the National Digital Stewardship Residency of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a graduate from the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program at New York University, and member of XFR Collective. She currently works as a consultant... Read More →
I'm a Data Engineer, Time Based Media Technician and Artist. I'm fascinated by outdated technology and the process of translation and obsolescence in technical languages. I currently work at Artsy as a Data Engineer and Webrecorder as a General Developer.
Browsertrix Crawler is a simplified browser-based high-fidelity crawling system, designed to run a single crawl in a single Docker container. It allows for personal web archiving via your terminal. GitHub Repo: https://github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler
Lorena Ramírez-López is an alum from the National Digital Stewardship Residency of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a graduate from the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program at New York University, and member of XFR Collective. She currently works as a consultant... Read More →
I'm a Data Engineer, Time Based Media Technician and Artist. I'm fascinated by outdated technology and the process of translation and obsolescence in technical languages. I currently work at Artsy as a Data Engineer and Webrecorder as a General Developer.
Share a virtual drink with current students, prospective students, and recent grads and chat about the conference, classes, the job market, and any other questions you have!
Now in its 32nd year, Milestone works with archives and labs to restore films that have been "lost" to history -- films by women, African Americans, the LGBTQ community, Native Americans, etc. We like to "mess" with the canon.
Wednesday April 14, 2021 9:00am - 9:05am PDT
Stage A
Moderated by AMIA board members Juana Suárez and Andrea Leigh, this opening plenary will be a frank exchange between colleagues about the present state of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in our field, while visioning solutions to unroot the systemic inequities in our institutions in the near and not so distant future. In 2016 AMIA hosted its first plenary on diversity, inclusion, and equity. The panelists challenged our membership to put DEI at the center of all aspects of our work as moving image archivists - from curation, to collection development, to hiring practices and beyond. In the five years since, much has been accomplished but more needs to be done to support the needs of groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in our field. So, in 2021 the work continues. We have learned that conversations about diversity are not always easy, but we ALL should share the responsibility to overcome our discomfort and engage in open and honest discussions if we’re going to affect meaningful, sustainable, and lasting change.
Head, Metadata Mgmt Digital Content, Library of Congress NAVCC
Andrea Leigh is the Metadata Management and Digital Content Unit Supervisor at the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center where she is responsible for implementing and developing workflows, policies and procedures for the description, processing, and ingest... Read More →
MIAP Director / Associate Professor of Arts, New York University
Juana Suárez: Director of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program at New York University. She is a Latin American Cinema scholar and a media preservation specialist. Author of Cinembargo Colombia: Critical Essays on Colombian Cinema (Spanish 2009, English translation... Read More →
Pamela is a media archivist from Chile with international experience in film, video, audio and digital preservation. Pamela currently works as a Consultant for the firm AVP, where she focuses on digital preservation, technology selection and implementation, and management of software... Read More →
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Michael Pazmino received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley in Film and Media Studies where he discovered his passion for audiovisual archiving through an internship at the Pacific Film Archive. He went on to attend UCLA’s Moving Image... Read More →
Wednesday April 14, 2021 9:05am - 9:45am PDT
Stage A
The Mexican Coordination of Historical and Cultural Memory (CMHCM, by its initials in Spanish) was created in November 2018 by the current president of Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Within CMHCM attributes and responsibilities is to create a digital repository that brings together digital objects and collections regarding Mexico´s bio-cultural, historical and artistic legacy from across GLAMUR institutions. In order to meet this aim, in February 2020 -with the name of Memórica-, an initial version of the digital repository was launched. This paper will describe the efforts and decision making processes behind the project. We will argue how Memórica seeks to provide a robust platform and a conceptual framework that will enable the collection, management, aggregation and retrieval of digital collections in a useful and reusable way. We will introduce the technological infrastructure of Memórica thus describing how it is built upon existing technologies which have been already tested within projects of similar scale and potential. In addition to this, we will outline how the repository attempts to facilitate sustainable innovation through APIs, interoperability, efficient scalability, containers, among others. Finally, we will highlight how the use of free and open source tools, libraries and codes, as well as controlled vocabularies and ontologies, will provide Memórica with the capacity to harvest and collect data from digital platforms, memory organisations and individuals in Mexico and worldwide.
Jo Ana holds a degree in Cultural Heritage Restoration from the National School of Conservation (ENCRyM) in Mexico City. In 2008 she obtained her Master’s degree in Curating from Sunderland University in U.K. She is currently doing her PhD at Bristol University in U.K. Her research... Read More →
This forum/open discussion asks - is now the right time for AMIA to go international? As of today, there are twelve student chapters, spread over two continents, four countries and too many different time zones. And yet, most of these programs are located in North America, and all but one are English-taught. 2020-21 has been a challenging time for everyone, including the educational community; but these challenges came with opportunities too, including a rapidly expanding cross-pollination of ideas and practices online. While we gradually come to terms with the idea of unplugging from Zoom, a growing number of newcomers are wondering how accessible AMIA will become to them in a post-pandemic world. This session, sponsored by the Education Committee, will open a conversation on how student chapters could increase mutual understanding and cooperation with their peers abroad. Join us in completing a map of education programs across the globe that are, soon will be, or once were part of the audiovisual heritage landscape, so we can collectively decide where to boldly go next!
A/V Memory Worker, Footage Research & Translation, AMIA Continuing Education Advisory Task Force (CEA)
Guillaume Boure is a time-based media preservation professional, independent footage researcher and translator for moving image and oral history projects. Since 2020, he is working with the Oral History Projects department at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The... Read More →
AMIA Student Chapter at INA sup, ex-Cannes Classics Festival
Louise Gerbelle graduated in 2019 from INA sup – the French National Audiovisual Institute School, with a Master's in Audiovisual Heritage Management. She also holds a BA in Film and History of Arts from Sorbonne University in Paris. She has previously interned with several organizations... Read More →
Micah Gottlieb is a time-based media archivist and film programmer based in Los Angeles. He is currently an MLIS candidate at UCLA and is the co-chair of the AMIA UCLA Student Chapter. From 2016 to 2019, he was the assistant programmer of the Quad Cinema in New York, which screened... Read More →
Wednesday April 14, 2021 10:00am - 10:50am PDT
Stage D
A variety of lightning talk perspectives from those working with media collections in different ways and in different types of organizations. What do archives look like in 2031? What does a day in the life of a media archivist look like? What does media preservation mean? What new technologies are in play? Any (or all) of these questions are open for discussion. This is the first in a continuing series of talks by thought leaders looking at the future of our profession. A short discussion of what has been presented will close the session.
Karen Chan is the Executive Director of the Asian Film Archive (AFA) based in Singapore. She has been with the AFA since 2006 where she started work as an archivist. Under her tenure as Director, she has developed the AFA from a two-person team to becoming a subsidiary of the National... Read More →
May Hong HaDuong is the director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Prior to her appointment to UCLA this year, May served for 13 years at the Academy Film Archive. An active AMIA member of over 15 years, she has expertise on the complexities surrounding access to moving images... Read More →
Linda Tadic is Founder/CEO of Digital Bedrock, a managed digital preservation service provider that helps libraries, archives, museums, producers, studios, artists, and individuals preserve their digital content. Her over 35 years’ experience includes positions at HBO, ARTstor... Read More →
Senior Director Media Library and Archives, WGBH Educational Foundation
I am passionate about making media archives accessible on-line. This goes hand in hand with digital preservation, metadata processes, and systems to manage both. I seek to use technology as much as possible to help archivists and librarians with their work.
Brad Collar is the Senior Vice President of Technical Operations at WarnerMedia. In his current role Brad oversees both operations and strategy for the company’s global archives, the associated content preservation activities, content metadata, content security, DVD/Blu-ray production... Read More →
Librarian and Archivist at the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, Flores oversees all library, archives, and museum services, including community outreach, instruction, grant projects, and donor relations. Flores has worked in libraries since 2004 and holds a BA in Film Studies... Read More →
Filmmaker, archivist and activist for popular film preservation. Her first film Perdida, had its international premiere at the official selection of Telluride Film Festival and received several awards during its journey through festivals. She is the founder of the Permanencia Voluntaria... Read More →
Hillary is an entertainment archivist with an extensive background managing all the aspects of studio and production company collections. While getting her Master’s degree in Moving Image Archive Studies from UCLA, Hillary interned for the Women in Film Foundation and the Academy... Read More →
Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center
Heather Linville is the supervisor of the Motion Picture Laboratory at the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center where she is responsible for managing 2K/4K digital and 35mm B/W photochemical film preservation workflows. Previously, she was a Film Preservationist... Read More →
Digital Preservation Analyst, Archives New Zealand
Joshua Ng is the Digital Preservation Analyst at Archives New Zealand. Usually he is responsible for ensuring processes are in place to maintain the integrity of the Government Digital Archive. Recently he has been heavily involved in Utaina!, a cross-agency joint AV Preservation... Read More →
Director, Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive, Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive
Rachael Stoeltje established the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive and has served as its Director since the founding. She has served on the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) Executive Committee since 2013 and is currently the Chair of the Coordinating... Read More →
Joe has been playing drums in the Los Angeles area for over twenty seven years. A Berklee College Of Music graduate, Joe moved to LA in 1992 and by March 1993 he had landed the gig with Dweezil & Ahmet Zappa's group "Z". Since then Joe has gone on to play for many acts over the years... Read More →
Wednesday April 14, 2021 10:00am - 10:50am PDT
Stage B
Beginning as an innovative rehabilitation group in Southern California in the 1950s, the Synanon Foundation steadily grew into a major alternative lifestyle community with locations nationwide and membership in the thousands. After declaring themselves a religion in the 1970s, the organization eventually closed following a series of incidents, including the founder pleading no contest to conspiracy to commit murder. “Synanon on Film” will cover research into Synanon’s history and internal filmmaking practice as part of processing and inspecting the film collection at UCLA Library Special Collections. The collection includes many unassembled outtake rolls that present a challenge to match with finished films for preservation and management. By discussing the Synanon films as a case study, this presentation will demonstrate an approach to preserving a complex and controversial film collection, including organization, repair, digitization, and respecting donors’ privacy policies.
I'm an archivist currently working on audiovisual preservation for the USC Libraries Digital Repository. I hold an MLIS from UCLA and have recently worked with film & media for UCLA Library, Al Larvick Conservation Fund, and Home Movie Day. Previously I was Collections Manager and... Read More →
Wednesday April 14, 2021 10:25am - 10:50am PDT
Stage A
The Flying Farmers films are a time capsule. In 1944, the Oklahoma Flying Farmers organization was envisioned and born in Stillwater, OK. The Flying Farmers had a direct impact on agricultural communities, where farmers and ranchers across the United States envisioned how airplanes could be of great practical value to them. Ultimately, the organization became international in scope and is known today as the International Flying Farmers. With support of the National Film Preservation Foundation, the Oklahoma State University (OSU) Archives was able to preserve these unique nitrate films and make them available online. This presentation will give a snapshot of how OSU successfully completed the grant project in order to showcase the story of the life of farmers and their families using airplanes as part of their farming operations in the 1940s.
Director, Digital Curation, Oklahoma State University
Patrice-Andre "Max" Prud’homme, PhD, is the Director of Digital Curation at the Oklahoma State University Library. He provides leadership and management in the areas of digital curation, preservation, and discovery of digital resources.
Wednesday April 14, 2021 11:15am - 12:05pm PDT
Stage C
A summary of local and international actions that have taken place in response to the crisis of the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo, a crisis further aggravated by similar political attacks, budget cuts, and laying off personnel at the CTav (Audiovisual Technical Center) in Rio de Janeiro. In both cases, the circumstances are aggravated by the dramatic impact of the Coronavirus in Brazil, and the erratic and repressive response of Jair Bolsonaro’s government. By presenting an analysis of some of the results and an update of recent events, I invite collective thinking for further action so that individuals, institutions, and associations keep lobbying in favor of these two important heritage institutions and our colleagues in Brazil
MIAP Director / Associate Professor of Arts, New York University
Juana Suárez: Director of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program at New York University. She is a Latin American Cinema scholar and a media preservation specialist. Author of Cinembargo Colombia: Critical Essays on Colombian Cinema (Spanish 2009, English translation... Read More →
Wednesday April 14, 2021 11:15am - 12:05pm PDT
Stage A
After the success of the ADIFP Cohort panel in November this is another opportunity to meet the inaugural ADIFP cohort and hear about their current projects!
Sr. Manager of Oral History Projects, AMIA Pathways / Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Teague Schneiter is Sr. Manager of the Academy Foundation's Oral History Projects dept, an initiative that records, collects and preserves interviews with filmmakers. She has an MA in Preservation &Presentation of the Moving Image Uni. of Amsterdam. Since 2017 she has served on the... Read More →
Lorena Escala Vignolo graduated with a BA in Audiovisual Communication from the University of Lima and holds a Master's Degree in Film Preservation from Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in San Sebastián, Spain. She has been working on an investigation on small gauge film in Peru, and... Read More →
Ari Green is a first year Ph.D. student in Public History at NC State University. She’s currently an Archival Processing Assistant at NCSU’s Special Collections. Most of her experience lies in historic preservation and digital preservation where she prioritizes maintaining and... Read More →
CK Ming works at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture as a Media Conservation and Digitization Specialist. Previously they were the Archivist and Project Manager at the South Side Home Movie Project. They are currently a director of the board for the... Read More →
Wednesday April 14, 2021 11:15am - 12:15pm PDT
Stage E
Join us for Lightning Talks, Visions of 2031, and Tech Talks from our exhibitors. The Pavilion has gone virtual - but it's still a great hub of information! In this session, you’ll see live lightning talks, a few of the Visions 2031 talks you may have missed, and Tech Talks from our exhibitors. Then during the day, take time to go to the Pavilion and visit some of the booths! If you see one of our partners and sponsors online - just click their name and say hi – they continue to support AMIA and the conference and make our programs possible.
Linda Tadic is Founder/CEO of Digital Bedrock, a managed digital preservation service provider that helps libraries, archives, museums, producers, studios, artists, and individuals preserve their digital content. Her over 35 years’ experience includes positions at HBO, ARTstor... Read More →
Partner, Managing Director - Software Development, AVP
Bertram leads AVP's development team to create innovative, flexible, and user-center software for AVP projects and clients. His background specializations include the acquisition, management, and preservation of documentary, research, and cultural heritage collections. Before joining... Read More →
Regina Efimchik is the Director of Professional Development Studies and is passionate about leveraging her background in corporate, academia, online education, teaching, coaching, and communication skills consulting to meet the needs of lifelong learners. Professional Development... Read More →
Wednesday April 14, 2021 12:15pm - 12:50pm PDT
Stage D
How can one describe a collection, if the content defies archival standards? Do these concepts allow the flexibility to accommodate the unusual, eccentric or under-represented? Furthermore, can creative improvisations be employed in the archival practices of arrangement and description to provide access? These questions must be asked when attempting to describe the irreverent ethos of the KEN KESEY COLLECTION OF MERRY PRANKSTERS HOME MOVIES AND OTHER MATERIALS collection’s subject matter. In addition to the content, the arrangement (or lack thereof), communal authorship, and conflicting legacy records, problematize the application of concepts such as respect des fonds, provenance, and original order. This presentation will discuss the collaboration, alternative approaches to descriptive standards and consolidation of 10 years of documentation from multiple preservation projects that were necessary to arrange and describe this collection. Challenges and potential recommendations for complex moving image collections will be discussed and never-before-seen footage will be screened.
Preservation Archivist, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Film Archive
Brianna works as a Preservation Archivist at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Film Archive on the Blackhawk Films Collection where she oversees a large-scale digitization project—the primary aim of which is to scan to protect rare and under-represented titles within... Read More →
UCLA Graduate Program in Library & Information Science
Caitlin Denny is an archivist and filmmaker. She earned a Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science from UCLA in 2017, and a BFA degree in Media Arts from California College of the Arts in 2009. She has exhibited her film and video work internationally and has curated exhibitions... Read More →
Senior Motion Picture Archivist, UCLA Film & Television Archive
Todd Wiener has worked at the UCLA Film & Television Archive for more than twenty-one years and has served as its Motion Picture Archivist since 2005. In addition to supporting all motion picture-related academic, programmatic, and preservation programs at the Archive, Todd serves... Read More →
Wednesday April 14, 2021 1:00pm - 1:50pm PDT
Stage B
Students, scholars, and archivists now spend a majority of their time working from home and have limited opportunities to acquire in-person hands-on knowledge and brush up on new skills due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, free online resources remain fundamental to archival scholarship and the furthering of film and celluloid-related knowledge and practices. This panel, presented by the AMIA Small Gauge and Amateur Film Committee, will (re)highlight the importance of three different small gauge and amateur film online resources: Film Forever: The Home Film Preservation Guide, the Amateur Movie Database, and the Horizontal Boundaries Film Stock Database. Panelists will discuss their resource’s formation and creation, recent work, and their contributions to celluloid scholarship and preservation.
Media Preservation Librarian, Michigan State University Libraries
Sarah Mainville (she/her/hers) is the Media Preservation Librarian at Michigan State University Libraries. In this role she heads the Media Preservation unit which leads and advocates for the stewardship of both analog and digital media within the Library as well as develop policy... Read More →
Web & Geospatial Software Engineer, A Synesthete's Atlas
Chicago born & raised, San Franciscan since 1989, open to new geographies. Talk to me about human perception, experimental film and music, cooking or eating.
Wednesday April 14, 2021 1:00pm - 1:50pm PDT
Stage A
Please join us for the Projection and Technical Presentation Committee meeting! The agenda is open for people to suggest topics. This committee promotes, encourages and facilitates the highest possible technical standards in the public presentation of archival moving images and related audio.
The nature of public access television is in its DIY spirit. Often produced by volunteer crews, this form of community media sought to demystify television, put the tools of production into the hands of community members, and use television as a creative medium. Produced with varying levels of expertise and aims, it also prompts interesting considerations for the video archivist: from reused (but not fully erased) tapes, and sometimes wild variation (on purpose and not) in color balance and exposure within a program or even just between cameras. How does one capture an accurate representation of these programs during the digitization process? Ongoing efforts to digitize The Video Access Project collection of ¾” U-matic tapes at the Oregon Historical Society will serve as a case study to explore these questions, featuring clips and images of the project’s unique, enduring, and topical content.
Mia Ferm is a recent graduate of the Preservation & Presentation of the Moving Image MA program at the University of Amsterdam. For about a decade she has been a curator for and co-director of Cinema Project in Portland, Oregon, a collective that presents public screenings of experimental... Read More →
Wednesday April 14, 2021 2:15pm - 2:40pm PDT
Stage A
Celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2020, The HistoryMakers, “The Nation’s Largest African American Video Oral History Collection”, is comprised of over 3,000 oral history interviews with additional interviews occurring annually. The Library of Congress partnered with The HistoryMakers to ensure long-term preservation of this important collection and to prepare descriptive records that will facilitate discovery and use. Speakers in this session will describe inclusive descriptive efforts, the potential of linked data compliant unique identifiers for each interview, and bulk ingest using a combination of manual, semi-automated, and automated techniques. This session illustrates the need for practitioners across library and archive disciplines to work cooperatively as the profession navigates between the analog and digital, incorporates linked data principles, and ensures the long-term sustainability of significant large-scale moving image collections.
Dave Gibson is a Library Technician in the Moving Image Section of the Library of Congress' National Audio Visual Conservation Center. A graduate of the inaugural class of UCLA's Moving Image Archive Studies program in 2002, Dave joined the staff of the LOC in 2006 and, since then... Read More →
Head, Metadata Mgmt Digital Content, Library of Congress NAVCC
Andrea Leigh is the Metadata Management and Digital Content Unit Supervisor at the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center where she is responsible for implementing and developing workflows, policies and procedures for the description, processing, and ingest... Read More →
Laura Drake Davis is a Digital Specialist at the Library of Congress in the Moving Image Section. In this role, Laura processes born-digital moving image content, develops new workflows for born-digital content and develops strategies for metadata capture and transformation. Laura... Read More →
Wednesday April 14, 2021 2:15pm - 3:15pm PDT
Stage B
Melanie is a creative entrepreneur who recently co-founded Archive Valley an online platform connecting filmmakers, producers and archive researchers with archives sources worldwide. Archive Valley offers archive sources the ability the expand their international visibility, and be... Read More →
Wednesday April 14, 2021 2:15pm - 3:15pm PDT
Stage E
Films from a long-shuttered Co-op end up in a closet. 37 years later the films are dragged out and shown as a curiosity. Some are quite good. But who is this female Polish immigrant underground filmmaker using the pseudonym HJ Roman? A beloved Super 8 Chicago filmmaker named Norm Bruns passed away from AIDS in 1990. Friends assume the films are lost and over the years calls to suspected relatives and partners are fruitless. Where are the films? Thankfully, some of these mysteries were cracked with the use of common public library resources like genealogical databases, reverse directories, microfilmed newspapers, and the patience and cooperation of fellow librarians.
Harold Washington Library Center of the Chicago Public Library
Josh B Mabe is a librarian, filmmaker, and programmer. His films have screened at the New York Film Festival, Images Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, and the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival. He has programmed work in Chicago at Gallery... Read More →
Wednesday April 14, 2021 2:40pm - 3:15pm PDT
Stage A
Based in Singapore, the Asian Film Archive (AFA) is a transnational archive that preserves the cinematic treasures of Asia, focusing especially on films that are not already saved. This tour gives an insight to the work of the AFA through its collection, programmes, and the collaborative nature of its partnerships. We will be available to take questions during the session.
Karen Chan is the Executive Director of the Asian Film Archive (AFA) based in Singapore. She has been with the AFA since 2006 where she started work as an archivist. Under her tenure as Director, she has developed the AFA from a two-person team to becoming a subsidiary of the National... Read More →
Wednesday April 14, 2021 3:15pm - 3:55pm PDT
Stage D
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.
Born and raised on the Navajo Nation, Manuelito Wheeler is currently the Director of the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, AZ. Since taking this position in 2008, he has worked with staff to see the completion of numerous exhibits which are 100% Native-built from concept, curation, and creation. Along with this, he has led his small team in creating innovative projects which influence and preserve Navajo culture. In the pursuit of native language preservation, the Navajo Nation Museum has partnered with major motion picture studios like Lucasfilm Ltd. (Navajo Star Wars), Walt Disney Pictures and Deluxe Studios (Finding Nemo) to dub popular movies into the Navajo language (Diné Bizaad). Under Wheeler’s direction, the Navajo Nation Museum has also worked with world renowned artist Ai Weiwei, partnering him with Navajo artist Bert Benally to create a site-specific installation piece in a remote canyon on the Navajo Nation. Wheeler attended Arizona State University where he earned his BA in Art History.
Navajo Star Wars will screen during the conference on Thursday evening. See the schedule for time and how to view.
The objective of this presentation is to establish the importance of the implementation of artificial intelligence tools for the preservation of the digital documents that house the archives of Latin America. It is true that in Latin America many archives have not started the digitization process of their collections, it seems that preservation has stagnated there. Many times this happens due to lack of technological resources and the little training that there is in the staff. This means that the progress in preserving collections is limited. However, despite these problems that plague the region, it is necessary to talk about the next step: artificial intelligence. What are the alternatives for the implementation of AI in the archives of Latin America? How viable is its application? How does it contribute to improving the processes that are carried out? All these questions will be discussed in the session.
She studied a degree in Communication Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She has a master's degree from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in the area of Communication and Education. She did another master's degree in Educational Development from the National... Read More →
Researcher, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. PhD in Documentation from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She coordinates the Ibero-American Network of Digital Preservation of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (RIPDASA). She is Vice-President of the International... Read More →
Thursday April 15, 2021 10:00am - 10:25am PDT
Stage B
During his lifetime, Francisco Villa was filmed, photographed, and written about by international journalists, filmmakers, novelists, and political figures. Yet, it is in film that his most enduring image has transcended and had the greatest impact. This intervention examines how this image was crafted and re-fashioned through the decades as cinema evolved in both Mexico and the United States. In life, most national and foreign films represented the revolution as a spectacular folk-show, and Villa was at their central stage. But after his assassination in 1923, the image of Villa took on a new role that over time changed from a drunken bandit to a Robin Hood figure, redeemer of those that the old regime had exploited. In Mexico, the cinematic lens captured archetypes created over time that sought to create a society loyal to the revolution through the incorporation of prominent revolutionary figures who were unapologetic and operated in a carefully curated countryside that glorified a movement by highlighting the bravery of men and downplaying the harsh conditions of the battlefields. In the United States, the premiere of Viva Villa! in 1934 not only created a vision of Villa but projected an image of Mexico internationally that perpetuated stereotypes still prevalent today.
In 2019, AMIA launched its first survey of the audiovisual archiving field. This was followed by a revised study in 2020, the AMIA Annual Salary & Demographics Survey of the Field. The panelists will discuss how these studies were informed by similar surveys commissioned by the Society of American Archivists, American Alliance of Museums, and American Library Association. Like these other studies from our allied cultural heritage professions, the AMIA surveys demonstrate that diversity is lacking in our field and that we will need to make serious and deliberate efforts to fix this. The panelists will discuss some of the actions that AMIA has already taken in response to this. Additionally, the panelists will highlight salary trends for the media archives profession, discuss how salary transparency has been a positive development in other fields, and present data on how the COVID-19 has impacted media archivists’ working styles and career stability.
Brian Real, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Information and Library and Information Science at Southern Connecticut State University. He holds a PhD in Information Studies and an MLS from the University of Maryland. His research is split between analyses of the modern social impact... Read More →
Sr. Manager of Oral History Projects, AMIA Pathways / Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Teague Schneiter is Sr. Manager of the Academy Foundation's Oral History Projects dept, an initiative that records, collects and preserves interviews with filmmakers. She has an MA in Preservation &Presentation of the Moving Image Uni. of Amsterdam. Since 2017 she has served on the... Read More →
Curator of Moving Images and Recorded Sound, Amistad Research Center
Brenda Flora is the Curator of Moving Images and Recorded Sound at the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. She became the Center’s first audiovisual archivist in 2010, and has been responsible for creating and implementing AV policy and overseeing numerous grant-funded... Read More →
Thursday April 15, 2021 10:00am - 10:50am PDT
Stage C
The University of Maryland Libraries received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 2019 to digitize the Dance Exchange collection, a video collection of performances and rehearsals and their corresponding paper programs. This paper will discuss a brief history of the project and content, best practice technical standards implemented by the Libraries and expanded for this project, scaling up workflows built to handle a project of a few hundred items to a project of over 1,100 items, changing digitization workflows due to pandemic closures and the need to move the project work remotely, and a repository and digital preservation archive migration that occurred during the course of the project. The report will share how we overcame challenges and will implement the changes we made to future av digitization projects.
Manager, Digital Conversion and Media Reformatting, University of Maryland
Robin Pike is the Manager, Digital Conversion and Media Reformatting at the University of Maryland managing digitization operations across seven College Park Libraries. She has been Co-PI of an NEH National Digital Newspaper Program grant for three phases and other grants funded by... Read More →
Digital Projects Librarian, University of Maryland Libraries
Pamela A. McClanahan has been the Digital Projects Librarian at University of Maryland Libraries since 2019 and serves as Project Manager for the Historic Maryland Newspapers Project, as well as other grant-based digitization initiatives. Prior to that, Pamela was an Archival and... Read More →
Thursday April 15, 2021 10:25am - 10:50am PDT
Stage B
Medics and doctors have been in a privileged position historically: their profession is not only borderless, but is a passport to normally inaccessible places. In light of our understanding of colonial encounters, how problematic are these filmed meetings? To what degree do they represent historical fact or myth? The session looks at the surprising scope of medical film archives, focusing on several films shot in the Americas 1930-70s from Wellcome Collection, London. Henry Wellcome, an American by birth, founder of the museum and library now known as Wellcome Collection, travelled to South America as an agent to a pharmaceutical company in the 1870s in pursuit of cinchona, used in the production of quinine, a treatment for malaria. Through film depicting a series of journeys in the Americas, three film ‘encounters’ are viewed. The first, World Tour of 1935, when hundreds of members of the British Medical Association with their families embarked England and travelled across the Atlantic, through North-America/Canada, and then by sea to Melbourne, Australia, for an annual meeting. One of the itineraries took the travelling doctors fleetingly through a ‘remote’ Indian village at Isleta, New Mexico, Grand Canyon and beyond. Wellcome’s laboratories had obtained samples of curare derived from tree bark, used in arrow poison by indigenous hunters in South America. This was developed into a drug used as a muscle relaxant for surgery and ECT in the 1940s. South East Ecuador, where quinine had been discovered, visited by Wellcome on plant hunting expeditions in the 1870s, was also the location of Dr Wilburn Henry Ferguson’s anthropological medical research amongst the Jivaro people. Ferguson set out to find out the secret behind shrinking human heads with the view that this might help combat cancer. Needing further funding in the 1960s and 70s, he co-opted his indigenous hosts in re-creating their encounter. Both Wellcome and Ferguson laid claim to preserving indigenous rights, although the filmic record suggests mixed feelings from those First Nation Peoples.
During the summer months of 1947 Lewis and Betty Rasmussen, an American couple from Racine Wisconsin, completed a feature-length 16mm color documentary film entitled Arctic Holiday about the so-called “Caribou Eskimo.” Enthusiastic amateur film hobbyists, they were keen on translating their love of travel and filmmaking into a way to make a living and Artic Holiday proved to be their successful entry into the world of lecture filmmaking. From the mid-1940s through to the late-1950s, the Rasmussen’s would go on to complete almost a dozen feature-length lecture films about Canada and its northern and Arctic reaches including Arctic Journey, Canoe Country, James Bay Country, Newfoundland and Labrador, North of South, and The Great Mackenzie, amongst others. In addition to collecting images of the north, the Rasmussens also acquired Inuit and Indigenous items which they featured in their films and eventually donated to The Kenosha Public Museum (Kenosha Wisconsin) in the early 1970s.In this presentation I will look more closely at the Rasmussen’s Arctic Journey, a film they premiered in 1950 which depicts their travels around Hudson’s Bay. Of specific interest is a 4 ½ minute section entitled “Stone and Ivory Carvings” that shows detailed images of carvings that the Rasmussen’s acquired during their travels. The Rasmussens’ collection of Inuit carving coincides exactly with the period during which James Houston, a white southerner from Montreal, was making bulk purchases of Inuit carvings in the same region under the auspices of Canadian Handicrafts Guild. Famously, Houston’s subsequent show of Inuit carvings in Montreal sold out almost immediately and he is credited with the birth of modern Inuit sculpture. The Rasmussens, I will argue, are an interesting footnote in this crucial moment in the development of a southern art market for Inuit sculpture. As tourist-filmmakers travelling in the Arctic, the Rasmussens were precisely the kind of qallunaat (non-Inuit) that provided the litmus test for what kinds of objects the southern “white man” would find appealing.
Or… Publishing is Fun and Will Make you Rich: An Open Forum on the Journal, on Publishing, and on Why that Needn’t Terrify You. Sponsored by AMIA’s Publications Committee, this is an open forum about The Moving Image and publishing within our community more broadly. Learn about the journal and hear about where we are headed in 2021-2022. Some published authors and committee members as well as some of the journal’s editors and editorial board members will be present to answer questions and demystify the process. Get to know The Moving Image and have a say in the shape it takes in years to come! Let’s share our ideas about the journal’s future and our futures as writers.
Devin edits THE MOVING IMAGE and really thinks you should submit something. Seriously! We have special issues, but there’s always an open call! He returns emails, thinks of you as a colleague, and is probably as excited about this stuff as you are.
Brian Real, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Information and Library and Information Science at Southern Connecticut State University. He holds a PhD in Information Studies and an MLS from the University of Maryland. His research is split between analyses of the modern social impact... Read More →
Liza Palmer is managing editor for the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ The Moving Image; co-editor-in-chief of the magazine Film Matters; and contributing editor for Film International. She is a librarian at Brunswick Community College and lecturer in Film Studies at the... Read More →
SNOWDEN BECKER has been a leader in the field of media archives and preservation for nearly twenty years. She is a co-founder of the international Home Movie Day event and the non-profit Center for Home Movies, which was awarded the SAA Hamer Kegan Award for archival advocacy in 2017... Read More →
Thursday April 15, 2021 11:15am - 12:05pm PDT
Stage D
Home movies are among the most intimate of films and have traditionally been collected primarily by municipal or regional archives as examples of documentation of local life. In recent years, however, both in-person and online events and projects have allowed for broader considerations of the films, especially during the past year when archives have been regularly sharing their programs with audiences around the world. This panel, which is targeted at archives that hold amateur collections, is the first attempt to pull together organizations that manage home movie and amateur film networking projects on national and international levels. The panel will focus on the possibilities and needs of broader international coordination of home movie organizations and networks, and each panelist will present its networking activities and strategies, as well as the results of their most recent activities, in order to foster a discussion on shared goals.
Dwight Swanson has worked as an archivist for American film and video collections in Alaska, Maine, Kentucky, and Washington, DC. He has lectured and written extensively on home movies and amateur film history and has organized conferences on amateur, nontheatrical, and medical films... Read More →
Annamaria Motrescu-Mayes is a visual anthropologist with expertise in the study of the British Empire, amateur and new media, gender, migration, memory, and cultural studies. Based at the University of Cambridge, she is Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology, a... Read More →
Karianne Fiorini is an independent film archivist and curator. Since 2003, she has run different home movie projects and has been a frequent contributor to international meetings and symposia. She is among the founders of the first Italian Home Movie Archive, in Bologna, where she... Read More →
Lorena Escala Vignolo graduated with a BA in Audiovisual Communication from the University of Lima and holds a Master's Degree in Film Preservation from Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in San Sebastián, Spain. She has been working on an investigation on small gauge film in Peru, and... Read More →
Gianmarco Torri is an independent film curator. His focus are diary film and autobiographical cinema, found footage, amateur cinema and the creative re-use of home movies, essay film, low-budget/self-produced documentary. In 2003 he was among the founders of the first Italian home... Read More →
Thursday April 15, 2021 11:15am - 12:05pm PDT
Stage C
The first Argentine film dedicated to Antarctica was made by Eugenio Py in 1902, since then, countless explorers, travelers, scientists and filmmakers have been interested in filming the Antarctic continent. Among them José Manuel Moneta meteorologist, Antarctic explorer and diplomat, who participated in four annual campaigns during the twenties and made the remarkable documentary Among the ice of the Orkney Islands (1928), an invaluable document of Argentine scientific activities in the white continent. This film was the kick off of our project, two years then more than one hundred Antarctic films from different institutions and film collectors has been identified and many of them preserved, restored and screened for a broader audience.
Thursday April 15, 2021 11:40am - 12:05pm PDT
Stage A
Heather Walker is a graduate student in the Master of Information program at the University of Toronto, with a concentration in Archives and Records Management. She has a BA in Music Technology from the National University of Ireland. After working as a production coordinator in the... Read More →
Founded in 1968, Vanderbilt Television News Archive is located on the campus of Vanderbilt University, in vibrant Nashville, Tennessee. Join us for a virtual tour. We will provide an overview of how the archive evolved from a location in the Central Library to our current location, The Baker Building. The archive’s staff will also discuss the evolution of our operations from analog to digital, and how it shaped the archive today.
Curator of Television News Collections, Vanderbilt Television News Archive
Nathan Jones is the Curator of Television News Collections, Vanderbilt Television News Archive, where he is responsible for lending, outreach, and instruction. In his seven years at Vanderbilt, he has transitioned from medical librarian to archivist. Before coming to Vanderbilt, Nathan’s... Read More →
Jim Duran started with the Vanderbilt Television News Archive in 2018, coming from Boise State University where he spent 10 years in Special Collections and University Archives. He is the Director of the Archive and is also the Curator of Born-Digital collections. Duran has master’s... Read More →
Thursday April 15, 2021 12:15pm - 12:50pm PDT
Stage D
This presentation channels the spirit of the Library of Congress Mostly Lost film identification workshop. About 70% of American silent feature films no longer exist. While the loss of so many silent films is a tragedy, it has been especially devastating for the horror genre. For almost any horror character icon you can think of—Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, or even general creatures like mummies and werewolves—the very first appearance of that character on screen is lost. Lost along with them is the genre’s history. How different might werewolf movies be today if the very first werewolf film made had survived? The loss of 101 Bison’s 1913 film The Werewolf means few people are aware that film’s first wolfman was actually a wolfwoman. This talk by long-time Mostly Lost attendee Kelly Robinson will bring to light this and other lost film stories, changing the way we perceive horror history.
Rob created and co-directs the "Mostly Lost" film identification workshops along with Rachel Del Gaudio. Prior to the Library of Congress Rob worked at the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the USC-Warner Bros. Archive. In addition to his career long obsession with identifying the... Read More →
Kelly Robinson is a freelance writer and independent researcher with a particular interest in horror films, popular culture, and weird history. She is a two-time finalist for the Bram Stoker Award. Her essay, “Where the Wild Roses Grow: The Strange Allure of Murder Ballads” appears... Read More →
Focusing on a selection of animated shorts produced by the United States Information Agency (USIA), this session will trace the path of an unprocessed group of films, starting with their creation as a U.S. product under the guise of local production across the border in Mexico, continuing with processing, preservation, and digitization at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and ending with their potential use by researchers in the National Archives catalog. Using this example, we will investigate how the archives is a borderland serving as a site for the interplay between archivists’ resources and researcher expectations. With archival researchers increasingly expecting records to be available online or accessible in digital form, and archival institutions still working through decades of unprocessed collections, a mismatch occurs when research interest grows faster than staff are able to tackle the backlog. The films of the USIA are increasingly popular among scholars and are referenced in papers, panels, and articles. Archivists and preservation specialists at NARA have worked through processing and preservation on hundreds of titles, but many are still undescribed, and only a relatively small number have been digitized. Offering the USIA’s animated short films from Mexico as a case study, we hope to demystify and make visible the work of the National Archives and pave the way for a discussion on how to achieve the most from this valuable collection. The session will incorporate short clips from the films. Speakers will include co-chairs Heidi Holmstrom and Audrey Amidon, motion picture preservation specialists at NARA, to introduce the topic and describe the work of processing archivist Michael Taylor, who has spent the last seven years working through the backlog of USIA films. Also speaking will be motion picture preservation specialist Ivy Donnell, who preserved and digitized the Mexican cartoons, and Dr. Brian Real, an information and film studies scholar who uses USIA films in both sides of his research.
Audrey Amidon is a specialist in the Motion Picture Preservation Lab at the National Archives and Records Administration, where she preserves and makes accessible the permanently valuable motion picture records of the U.S. government. She completed the film archive M.A. program at... Read More →
Heidi Holmstrom has been a Motion Picture Preservation Specialist at the National Archives and Records Administration since 2009. She earned an M.A. in History, with a concentration in Archives and Records Management, from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. She currently... Read More →
Motion Picture Preservation Specialist, National Archives and Records Administration
Ivy Donnell is a Preservation Specialist in the Motion Picture Preservation Lab at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, Maryland. She received a MLIS in Archives and Digital Curation from the University of Maryland and a BS in Electronic Media and... Read More →
Brian Real, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Information and Library and Information Science at Southern Connecticut State University. He holds a PhD in Information Studies and an MLS from the University of Maryland. His research is split between analyses of the modern social impact... Read More →
Thursday April 15, 2021 1:00pm - 1:50pm PDT
Stage A
Cinelimite Inc. is a new American non-profit company dedicated to expanding access to Brazilian cinema and audiovisual history in the United States. One of their missions is to highlight how amateur film and filmmakers have recorded moments of Brazil throughout the 20th century that reflect the diverse culture of that country, equal to any feature length or professionally produced work. Upon creating an open call for people in Brazil to send Cinelimite their home movies here in the United States, and some significant outreach efforts, the company was sent over eighty super-8mm home films. After significant efforts to repair and scan these works under a low budget, a majority of them can now be freely seen on their website. With this poster session, Cinelimite co-founders William Plotnick and Gustavo Menezes will talk about the importance of amateur film preservation and access in Latin American countries such as Brazil.
William Plotnick is the Executive Director of Cinelimite, a non-profit foundation dedicated to expanding access to the history of Brazilian Cinema in the United States. William is a current graduate student at New York University's MIAP program. He holds a Master's degree in Cinema... Read More →
Gustavo Menezes is the Associate Director of Cinelimite, a non-profit foundation dedicated to expanding access to the history of Brazilian Cinema in the United States. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Social Communication - Audiovisual from the University of Brasília.
Thursday April 15, 2021 2:15pm - 2:35pm PDT
Stage B
In spring term 2020, the Oregon Multicultural Archives at the Oregon State University Libraries and Press collaborated with the OSU course Ethnic Studies 416/516 Migrant Health on an oral history assignment involving the Erlinda Gonzales-Berry Papers Collection, 1943-2010. The students listened to the oral history interviews and wrote interviewee bios, summaries, and historical context essays in Spanish and English, as the majority of the interviews are in Spanish. Parting from the bilingual metadata created by the students, my work as a Library Diversity Scholar consisted of reviewing, correcting, and in some cases translating and creating metadata with the aim to enhancing the online finding aid and help make these oral histories more discoverable and accessible for research. By focusing on the metadata creation and revision workflow for this project, this poster offers an easy-to-implement model for improving oral history discoverability and access especially useful to academic libraries and archives.
While cultural heritage institutions rush to reformat rapidly degrading audiovisual collections, the high volume of throughput results in a whole slew of challenges - one being quality control of digitized assets. With digital proxies becoming the primary means of future access to these collections, organizations are caught between two competing realities: the importance of ensuring 100% accuracy of transfers and the lack of dedicated staffing for quality control. To help address this problem, Andrew Weaver (University of Washington Libraries) and Susie Cummings (NPR) have developed and implemented automated tools built around open-source software to help practitioners rapidly scan digitized assets and identify files for more focused quality control analysis. This poster will present their work on ‘audioqc’ a tool for quickly applying metrics to audio streams (from both audiovisual and pure audio sources) as well as experimentation in applying the methodology of audioqc to other sources such as DPX film scans.
Media Preservation Librarian, University of Washington Libraries
Andrew Weaver is the Media Preservation Librarian at the University of Washington Libraries. A graduate of the University of Washington (B.A., MLIS) he has also held positions at Washington State University.
“The Archive Project” is a new initiative launched by the SFSU School of Cinema in 2020 as a volunteer-led program to promote student engagement with the School of Cinema’s instructional film collection and the student film archives dating back to the 1970s. Due to ongoing budget cuts, the school has not prioritized cataloging or organizing the majority of these materials. As a short term solution, the undergraduate film exhibitions course CINE 601 was redesigned to explore the archive through student-curated film programs. Utilizing the rough, digital copies of the student film collection, the class researched and developed six curated film programs to share on the class website “Streaming State,” and secured screening permissions from alumni filmmakers. This poster examines these student-led curation projects and also details some of the opportunities of online learning through archives, such as community building through the alumni networks and broadening the audience through online screenings.
Courtney Fellion (she/her) is a lecturer at San Francisco State University. She also works as the Administrative Associate at the San Francisco Cinematheque and as a registrar for a fine art handling company in the Bay Area. She has held curatorial research positions at the San Francisco... Read More →
Thursday April 15, 2021 2:15pm - 2:35pm PDT
Stage B
Sponsored by AMIA's Copyright Committee, this program will feature a leading expert on fair use, American University Law School Professor Emeritus Peter Jaszi, in direct engagement with participants, using their issues to model fair use reasoning in order to teach how to problem-solve in the workplace.
Preservation Archivist, Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Film Archive
Brianna works as a Preservation Archivist at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Film Archive on the Blackhawk Films Collection where she oversees a large-scale digitization project—the primary aim of which is to scan to protect rare and under-represented titles within... Read More →
Louisa Trott graduated from UEA’s moving image archiving program in 2003. She has worked at moving image archives in the UK and US, including the Imperial War Museum and Screen Archive South East. She co-founded the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, Knoxville. She currently... Read More →
Luke Skywalker joins forces with a Jedi Knight, a cocky pilot, a Wookiee and two droids to save the galaxy from the Empire's world-destroying battle station, while also attempting to rescue Princess Leia from the mysterious Darth Vader. Shown in Navajo wih English subtitles.
RobertEbert.com reviewed the translation: The nicest surprise is how C-3PO, voiced this time by a woman, becomes a soulful and complex bundle of tensions and contradictions. 3PO respectfully gathers the bodies of slaughtered Jawa for burning in one scene (the first such solemn burial in the series), but later hisses, "I can't abide those Jawas. Disgusting creatures!" when encountering a living one. C-3PO's anger, self-pity and self-loathing come through as tragicomedy in this vocal performance. He (she?) transfers the Jim Crow discrimination he routinely faces (most famously at the Mos Eisley Cantina) to his fellow droids and to anyone at or beneath his station. Miraculously, we still love him because, underneath all of his cowardice and political maneuvering, he is a mindful and lonely soul: His fretting over wounded R2D2 at the end of the movie, wherein he offers to donate any of his own parts necessary to restore his companion, is heartbreaking in plaintive, feminine Navajo.
“Born of a revolutionary bloodline to activist filmmaker, Melvin Van Peebles, you could say that Mario Van Peebles was born to make films that nudge our social consciousness and encourage us to answer questions we hadn’t thought to ask. “ – Allison Kugel, The Spectrum
Mario Van Peebles’ made his film debut playing a younger version of his father Melvin’s character in the senior Van Peebles’ 1971’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Throughout his career, he’s brought challenging, compelling material to the screen, making his feature directorial debut with the 1991 hit New Jack City, followed by Posse (1993), and Panther (1995). He has earned critical acclaim in films such as Michael Mann’s Oscar-nominated Ali for his role as real-life minister and human rights activist Malcolm X; the multi-award-winning Cotton Club (1984) written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola; Clint Eastwood’s Heartbreak Ridge (1986); and several projects with director Ava DuVernay. His films include the hip-hop coming-of-age film We the Party (2012), which he wrote, directed and produced; his documentary short Bring Your ‘A’ Game (2009); and Baadasssss! (2003), his odyssey about the making of his father’s groundbreaking film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), this time playing his father. He recently directed the Salt-N-Pepa story, is currently directing The Wu-Tang Clan Saga for Hulu, and is working on the revival of Melvin Van Peebles’ seminal 1971 musical “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” for Broadway.
Mario Van Peebles will be in conversation with Michael B. Gillespie, author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Duke University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Black One Shot, an art criticism series on ASAP/J. He is an associate professor of film at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center, CUNY.
Sweet Sweetback's Badassss Song will screen Friday, April 16 at 5:00 pm.
City College of New York and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Michael B. Gillespie is author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Duke University Press, 2016) and co-editor of Black One Shot, an art criticism series on ASAP/J. He is an associate professor of film at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center... Read More →
Join us for Lightning Talks, Visions of 2031, and Tech Talks from our exhibitors. The Pavilion is a great hub of information! In this session, you’ll see live lightning talks, a few of the Visions 2031 talks you may have missed, and Tech Talks from our exhibitors. Then during the day, take time to go to the Pavilion and visit some of the booths! If you see one of our partners and sponsors online - just click their name and say hi – they continue to support AMIA and the conference and make our programs possible.
Linda Tadic is Founder/CEO of Digital Bedrock, a managed digital preservation service provider that helps libraries, archives, museums, producers, studios, artists, and individuals preserve their digital content. Her over 35 years’ experience includes positions at HBO, ARTstor... Read More →
My poster presentation highlights my undergraduate student experience processing and describing an archival film collection, and my summer 2020 digital internship in which I encoded a EAD finding aid on the same small film project. I completed this task without the University having a Library School program, an Audiovisual Archivist, or an ongoing budget for the project. This experience has allowed me to find common ground while studying Public History, Museum Studies, Cinema Studies, and Anthropology. I have learned skills and the practical application of best standards and archival theory. After my experience with the film collection, I want to pursue a career in Audiovisual Archiving.
Katie Higley is a sophomore at Central Michigan University (CMU) studying Public History, Museum Studies, Anthropology, and Cinema Studies. At CMU, she is a McNair Scholar currently studying how Michigan Museums are utilizing their film collections. She is interested in film preservation... Read More →
Friday April 16, 2021 10:00am - 10:50am PDT
Stage B
The poster presentation will focus on a project derived from the master’s degree thesis I started at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (San Sebastian) centered on the reflection on home movies and amateur films from my country, Perú. The encounter with some Super-8 mm films from an amateur filmmaker from the Amazon and the task of digitizing them, along with another 42 orphan film reels bought in Lima by the director of MUTA International Found-Footage Film Festival, and the proliferation of online exhibitions due to the pandemic, got me the idea of creating a portal for sharing some of these moving images. As there is no public entity, at a national or local range, that digitizes and promotes the caring for home movies, private initiatives are crucial. With the support of my school's teachers and my mentor from the AMIA DIFP, www.cineamateurperuano.org was born. It suddenly came to my mind to turn it into a way to link existing related projects on the field. So far, it is just a platform to share home movies, plan Home Movie Days and search for new material. Some people interested or who is already working on digitization has contacted me though the site. On one hand, the poster will point out to the problems I have found so far, but also the possibilities to make this idea grow to formalize a digital archive with a proper catalogue and easy access for the general public. I think the issues of the proliferation of people getting digital copies of their home movies by themselves and throwing the originals, the acquisition of orphan films by privates who are not thinking of these artifacts as heritage, the lack of proper equipment and the disaggregation of projects about small gauge films are common, specially, in Latin America. This will be a good opportunity to discuss on those things and, at the same time, to put peruvian amateur and home movies production on a wider scope, which is something almost unknown.
Lorena Escala Vignolo graduated with a BA in Audiovisual Communication from the University of Lima and holds a Master's Degree in Film Preservation from Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in San Sebastián, Spain. She has been working on an investigation on small gauge film in Peru, and... Read More →
Friday April 16, 2021 10:00am - 10:50am PDT
Stage B
This presentation is about the discovery of two Argentinian films considered long lost. In 1902 Eugenio Cardini bought a Cinématographe Lumière in France, with which he shot some of the first films ever made in South America. None of these films were preserved in their original format, and one of them was considered, until now, completely lost. In 2020 two of these films, in the original Lumiere format, were discovered in Lodz, Poland. After some research we managed to reconstruct these reels’ odyssey: from Buenos Aires to London, then to Paris, to Germany and finally to Poland. A digitization and restoration project will make these films available for the public.
Lorena Bordigoni (she/her) holds a BA in Art History From Universidad de Buenos Aires and a MA in Audiovisual Preservation Management from INA (French National Audiovisual Institute). She has worked as a digital restorer of motion picture film and collaborated in many different projects... Read More →
Friday April 16, 2021 10:00am - 10:50am PDT
Stage B
The struggle and process of debugging is often where we learn the most. This panel focuses on adventures in debugging throughout the components of the NEH-funded DVRescue project which addresses the preservation of DV tape. The panelists shall review learned lessons from experiences in designing DV tape transfer stations, developing software to analyze and reconstruct obsolete media, and debugging a format that can behave unpredictably due to inconsistent implementation and tape damage.
Media Preservation Librarian, University of Washington Libraries
Andrew Weaver is the Media Preservation Librarian at the University of Washington Libraries. A graduate of the University of Washington (B.A., MLIS) he has also held positions at Washington State University.
Friday April 16, 2021 10:00am - 10:50am PDT
Stage C
John J. Valadez is a Peabody Award–winning filmmaker who has written and directed a dozen nationally broadcast documentary films for PBS over the past 18 years. Valadez’s films have tackled such diverse subjects as the unlawful imprisonment of a Black Panther Party leader; Latino gangs in Chicago; segregation in America’s schools; the history and impact of Latino civil rights on American society; and the genocide of Native Americans in the Southwest. They have garnered top prizes at film festivals from San Francisco to Mumbai; have been broadcast across the United States and Europe; and have been featured at major museums and cultural institutions—places like The Museum of Modern Art and the Lincoln Center in New York City or the National Gallery of Art and the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. Valadez’s major films include: The Head of Joaquin Murrieta (2016), Prejudice and Pride (2013 Latino Americans/PBS), War and Peace (2013 Latino Americans/PBS), The Longoria Affair (2010 PBS/Independent Lens), The Chicano Wave (2009 Latin Music USA/PBS), The Last Conquistador (2008 PBS/POV), Arise (2006), High Stakes Testing (2005 CNN), Beyond Brown (2004 PBS), Visiones: Latino Arts and Culture (2004 PBS), The Divide (2003 Matters of Race/PBS), Soul Survivors (1997 Making Peace/PBS) and Passin’ It On (1994 PBS/POV). A Rockefeller Fellow, PBS/CPB Producers Academy Fellow and twice a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, Valadez is a founding member of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers.
Annette M. Rodríguez is an assistant professor in the department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on public rituals of violence. She teaches courses on the intersection of literary analysis and U.S. histories.
Mediate is a web-based platform that allows users to upload audiovisual media; produce real-time notes; collaboratively generate automated and manual annotations on the basis of customized schema; preserve the annotations as data that can be queried; and export the data in CSV and JSON formats. Unlike many current platforms for analyzing audiovisual content, Mediate includes a user-friendly annotation interface that mimics non-linear editing programs, ease of use for content management, and controlled access for media and data. Platform demonstration and use cases will address: 1. Generating crowd-sourced temporal metadata that can be easily exported. 2. Labeling moving image training sets for machine learning projects. 3. Previewing files and sharing notes on collaborative restoration projects. 4. Enabling controlled access to collection materials for research, scholarly presentations, and instructional aids for film education. 5. Promoting cross-institutional research on collections through the use of controlled vocabularies to produce shared data.
Digital Humanities Programmer, University of Rochester
Josh Romphf is currently a software developer in the Digital Scholarship Department at the University of Rochester's River Campus Libraries. He is a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, where he also teaches classes on FFmpeg and video encoding.
Clara Auclair is a PhD candidate in visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester, in joint partnership with Université de Paris. She is the 2020-2022 George Eastman Museum fellow. Clara works on the history and memory of the French film industry settled in Fort Lee... Read More →
Director of Digital Scholarship and Studio X, University of Rochester
Emily Sherwood is Director of Digital Scholarship and Studio X at University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries. She is an alum of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and the EDUCAUSE/CLIR Leading Change Institute. Emily holds... Read More →
Friday April 16, 2021 11:15am - 12:05pm PDT
Stage B
In Mexico, a historical tradition of experiences appealing to “the community” exists, in both indigenous peoples and in mestizo groups, as a political experience against the official discourse of the nation and outside networks of governmental support. This panel proposes a discussion on the conceptual differences of “the community” in Mexican audiovisual archiving projects and practices. Through case studies of three recent and ongoing projects, this panel will reflect on community video archive experiences as local strategies that serve not only as accounts of the past, but as contemporary dialogues about national heritage that create visualizations of how ideas of community are understood. It will investigate the coincidence of definitions around “the community,” highlighting: maneuvers of discovery and concealment of notions about heritage, imaginary and real territorial boundaries, and zones of identity where tenets of classical archival science can both operate successfully and fail abysmally. This panel will discuss its topic with a broad spectrum of perspectives--from a deputy director of a national collecting institution volunteering her time, to a for-profit video producer operating a community center, to an illegal immigrant building digitization capacities. The case studies are unique and will not be duplicated in other panels. This panel will involve some translation for non-Spanish speakers. Participants are intermediate-to-advanced in their public speaking skill levels and experience.
Media Conservator, Laboratorio Experimental de Cine, Mexico
Walter Forsberg works as a filmmaker and media conservator based in Mexico City. His films have screened widely, including at the Sundance, Rotterdam, and Toronto film festivals, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. A graduate of NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and... Read More →
Through case studies and surrounding discussions, this round table aims to shed light on forms of film cataloguing that have emerged outside institutionalised archiving in India. These archival practices that have been nurtured by communities of cinephiles, collectors, music and dance lovers have proven to be crucial resources for film archives, historians and academics. Contradicting the finiteness of certain standard cataloguing models, we encounter metadata mining characterised by open-ended rigour, imagination and zeal. By citing specific examples of the resurrection of filmographies by online communities; institutional “disobedience”; and hopeful collaborations between different forms of archives, the roundtable seeks to further open the discussion with all.
The American Genre Film Archive in Austin, Texas is dedicated to the preservation and restoration of films in areas traditionally overlooked by cultural institutions - including horror, exploitation and action. This tour and presentation will take you through the physical archive and go in-depth as to how AGFA expands its nonprofit mission with theatrical distribution, home video releases and in-house scanning and restoration.
Sebastian del Castillo is the Head of Film Restoration for the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA) in Austin, Texas. Sebastian has a BS degree from The University of Texas at Austin in Radio, Television, and Film specializing in film production. Sebastian got his start working as a... Read More →
Ivan Peycheff is the Head of Film Archive for the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA) in Austin, TX, and an avid film collector. Ivan studied traditional animation at the Art Institute of Seattle and the James L. Coffin School of Animation. In 2000 he got his start in the world of... Read More →
Alicia Coombs is Executive Director for the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA) in Austin, TX. She received a BA in Film Studies from Hampshire College where she focused on the topic of gender in horror and exploitation cinema, and her advisors failed at dissuading her from having... Read More →
Friday April 16, 2021 12:15pm - 12:50pm PDT
Stage D
Join the Nitrate Committee meeting to learn about new initiatives, ongoing projects or to suggest projects with the group. If you or your institution stores, ships or handles nitrate film then you will find this annual meeting beneficial. If you have any questions or topics you would like added to the agenda, email Rachel at rapa@loc.gov by noon on Thursday April 15th.
Since 2012, Rachel Del Gaudio has been organizing "Mostly Lost" workshops at the Library of Congress. Her dedication to identifying unknown films extends to her role as chair of AMIA’s Nitrate Committee and the Flickr page that she runs. As chair, she continues to work to make... Read More →
This panel will present a comprehensive update of The Media Ecology Project (MEP), including details on the progress made in relation to two advanced NEH grants that focus on very different subject matter: very early cinema ("Understanding Visual Culture Through Silent Film Collections") and 1950s-1970s television civil rights newsfilm (“The Accessible Civil Rights Heritage [ACRH] Project”). The panel will focus on the development of The Semantic Annotation Tool (SAT), which enables new capacities to create time-based annotations that enhance search and discovery across participating archives. We will report on innovations in gathering and organizing archival materials and metadata across multiple archives; innovations in the development and coordination of machine reading and machine vision tools; the development of new research to enable access of moving image culture for blind and low-vision users; and the development of capacities for output from The Semantic Annotation Tool into the Scalar digital publishing platform.
In South Texas, the Rio Grande Valley is not a valley at all but a delta floodplain whose identity hinges on its melding of two countries: the United States and Mexico. Many Valley residents split their time between both sides of the Rio Grande River, crossing back and forth for work, school, doctor's appointments, or cuando tienen ganas para unos taquitos. This session is about the importance of archiving home movies from the region. Díaz uses clips sourced from the RGV home movie collection at the Texas Archive of the Moving Image to lead up to her own personal Super 8mm archival project, The Pete Diaz Jr. Collection (her paternal grandfather). Pete Diaz Jr. was an entrepreneur and visionary from Rio Grande City, TX who had a passion for photography. He documented and archived his life through photography and home movies--perhaps he knew that the archiving of daily life, events both big and small, would be important for the future representation of his community. Díaz will present a case study detailing her process of acquiring, cleaning, scanning, color and audio remastering, and archiving this collection and the importance of preserving these personal histories for generations to come.
There will be awards for Best Solution to the Issue, Crowd Favorite, and Best Embodiment of the Hackday Ethos! For more info: https://wiki.diglib.org/AMIA-DLF_Hack_Day_2021.
Annie Schweikert (she/her/hers) is a digital archivist at Stanford Libraries, where she processes, preserves, and makes accessible born-digital archival collections. She is a graduate of the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program at New York University. Annie is also... Read More →
Morgan is a video and electronics geek through and through. As BAVC's Preservation Director he works to digitize and preserve stories and images created by artists, activists and filmmakers, especially those from under-represented communities and identities. His current preservation-based... Read More →
Filmmaker Dolissa Medina presents a program of archival material gleaned while conducting research for her current film project, Small Town, Turn Away. The film is a feature-length personal documentary portrait of the director’s Mexican-American border hometown of Brownsville, Texas 30 years after she left as a queer teenager, following in the footsteps of an older cousin who died from AIDS. Over the past five years, the filmmaker has collected material from sources including the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, the Catholic Diocese of Brownsville, The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, local news stations, and previous generations of documentary filmmakers. The archives have helped her piece together news events she either witnessed or participated in as a teenager coming of age in South Texas during the 1980s. Featured footage includes the original Sanctuary Movement for Central American refugees, Reagan’s re-election campaign visit in 1984, the 1988 “Tienda Amigo” building collapse tragedy, and the ritual murders of 1989, in which a cult of drug smugglers sacrificed victims to magically protect their operation. Also featured will be Super-8 home movies of Brownsville’s Charro Days fiesta, a celebration of friendship with the town’s sister city of Matamoros, Mexico, held each February since 1937. The program is a portrait of Brownsville and the Rio Grande Valley that is rarely seen. The film program will end with some samples of Medina’s previous and current work showcasing her use of archival material. Angela Reginato, co-producer and editor of Small Town, Turn Away, will join Medina for a Q&A.
Released 50 years ago, Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song opened the door not only for black filmmaking but for independent movies in general. Included in MoMA’s permanent collection and considered to be among the most significant features ever by an African-American filmmaker, Sweet Sweetback is a brutal and shocking story of survival and is credited as one of the first blaxploitation films.
Director/writer/producer/editor/composer Melvin Van Peebles stars as a black orphan raised in a brothel and groomed to be a sex show performer. Set up by his boss and two corrupt cops for a murder he didn’t commit, Sweetback escapes custody and is thrust into an increasingly hallucinogenic world of violence and bigotry where no one can be trusted, and the possibility of death lurks at every corner. Featuring a rousing score from a nascent Earth, Wind, & Fire, as well as surrealist visuals from stalwart genre cinematographer Robert Maxwell (THE CANDY SNATCHERS), Van Peebles creates an unforgettable study of perseverance in the face of racism.
In 2020, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song was named to the National Film Registry.
The Conference Committee is responsible for oversight of curated programming and program development of non-curated programming, including peer review. It liaisons with other committees and groups on conference activities and/or events, provides resources for speakers and chairs, promotes the conference.Through its work with attendees and speakers it makes recommendations on policies, programs, and structure to the board and steering group. Attendees are welcome to join us for more information about our work and provide feedback about the annual conference and affiliated events.
