AMIA Spring 2021

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.