The award from the Academy supported me financially during my spring semester internship at Anthology Film Archives. My time at Anthology allowed me to study unique production elements from the 1940s, chart the changing approaches to film preservation over the decades, observe and participate in the workflow at a busy and productive film preservation department, and write a successful grant to fund the preservation of 3 films.
The main focus of my work was a preservation project on five short films by the filmmaker Sydney Peterson. Peterson was an independent filmmaker who made a number of collaborative experimental films – with other filmmakers such as Hy Hirsh and James Broughton and with classes he taught – in the late 40s and early 50s. Three of the films I worked on are well known in the history of avant-garde independent filmmaking, but two were very rarely screened when originally made and have therefore made less of an impact. Peterson donated the original elements of the films to Anthology in the early 1970s. They were shot on black and white reversal and edited together with cement splices at every shot change. A ten-minute film has as many of 300 cement splices making these 60-year-old films rather delicate one-of-a-kind objects that directly reflect the hands-on artistic approach of the filmmakers.
