MIAP Thesis Presentations 2015

Students in the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program will present their M.A. thesis projects, covering a wide range of topics such as African American home movie collections, VHS batch codes, and film preservation in Stalinist Russia. All sessions will be held in the NYU Cinema Studies department at 721 Broadway, 6th Floor and will be open to the public. See below for a complete schedule and presentation descriptions.

Monday, March 30th

10:00 AM - 11:00 AM (Room 648)
Blake McDowell - Jules V. D. and Miriam Bucher

Tracking down the history of the invisible, yet omnipresent wife and husband filmmaker dynamic duo of Jules V. D. Bucher and Miriam Bucher

Tuesday, March 31st

5:00 PM - 6:00 PM (Room 648)
Genevieve Havemeyer-King - Organized Love: An Archival Workflow for MLF Productions & the Newport Folk Festival Collection

MLF Productions houses the works and production materials of Academy Award winning filmmaker, Murray Lerner, including more than 80 hours of historic footage captured at the Newport Folk Festival between 1963 and 1966. Initially used to create the 1967 film Festival!, the collection contains recordings of legendary performances and interviews with many of the country’s greatest artists, including Joan Baez; Bob Dylan; Mississippi John Hurt; and Johnny Cash. Following the digitization of the Newport film and audio materials, the collection has become a rich source for researchers and new filmmakers, creating an urgent need for detailed cataloging and collection management. This thesis presentation will demonstrate how Genevieve worked with MLF staff to create a database and develop a sustainable archival workflow suitable for a small-scale production environment.

6:15 PM - 7:15 PM (Room 648)
Michael Grant - VHS Stocks in Their Dotage: How are the Old Articles Holding Up?

An exploration of the uses of VHS in institutions over the years.  We will look at the ways different tape brands and stocks were used, how they age over time, and ways of dating and branding stocks based on external characteristics such as textures, batch codes, and colors.

Wednesday, April 1st

10:00 AM - 11:00 AM (Room 648)
Allie Whalen - I Will Counterrevolution / I Will Stop All the Motion: Archiving Exile, Samizdat, and Underground Audio from the Eastern Bloc

I Will Counterrevolution / I Will Stop All The Motion: Archiving Exile, Samizdat, and Underground Audio from the Eastern Bloc is centered on mapping the physical history of unofficial Eastern European audio from the point of creation up to acquisition into an archive. Illegal audio materials from the Eastern Bloc have landed in archives and private collections around the world and include rare recordings composed and disseminated in secret, such as punk, rock, noise, and experimental concerts and performances as well as lectures, readings, and meetings. Based on case studies conducted in archives in Hungary and the Czech Republic, this research examines how audio recordings were created, distributed, hidden, censored, and confiscated under state control and how materials were retrieved and processed by archives after the fall of Communism.

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM (Room 670)
Ethan Gates - An Archive for the Millions: Belye Stolby and the Role of Film Preservation Under Stalin

In 1935, in a directive signed personally by Stalin, the Soviet government approved the construction of a state feature film archive in the Moscow suburb of Belye Stolby. Later to be known as Gosfilmofond, the Belye Stolby archive was born in a society where cinema was primarily valued for its immediate ideological impact, rather than its lasting artistic legacy. The complex web of political, cultural and economic circumstances that turned the Stalinist state's attention toward preservation stands in stark contrast to the contemporary formation of institutional film collections in the West, with implications for archival function and theory that remain visible in Russia today.

3:15 PM - 4:15 PM (Room 670)
Carmel Curtis - Unlocking Access: Audiovisual Materials for Incarcerated Communities

This thesis examines historical and contemporary policies, procedures, and practices enabling and preventing access to audiovisual materials for people who are incarcerated in the United States. Based off of this historical and historiographical research as well as analysis of a 2015 survey, recommendations are made that aim to improve/support access to and care of audiovisual materials in prisons.

5:00 PM - 6:00 PM (Room 648)
David Neary - Quit Crowdin' Me Joe: Preserving Joe Dante's The Movie Orgy, an Archival Anomaly

Begun in 1968, budding filmmaker Joe Dante envisioned The Movie Orgy as an expression of riotous, rebellious, cinematic fun, and a study of the camp curios of 1950s American culture. Assembled from more than a hundred feature films, television shows, commercials, and educational films, the gargantuan project swelled to a 7-hour found footage epic, touring university campuses across America. Buried in its cans for decades, it was unearthed by Dante in the early 2000s, digitized, and once more delights audiences at rare screenings at festivals across the U.S. and abroad. This presentation will recount the unique history of The Movie Orgy, and the footage within it, while drawing attention to issues of copyright, projector-based live performance, digitization, and the problems surrounding the archiving, preservation and screening of such a complex work.

6:15 PM - 7:15 PM (Room 648)
Lorena Ramirez-Lopez - An Accidental Archive: Case Study of IndieCollect

I am investigating the unique situation that occurred between IndieCollect and DuArt where IndieCollect took initiative actions to save the films after DuArt, a well-known film processing lab shut down its services. During this investigation I am analyzing IndieCollect's practical process and approach and comparing it to an ideal archival perspective and standards and highlighting what can be done for the films and their mission.

Friday, April 3rd

11:15 AM - 12:15 PM (Room 648)
Jasmyn Castro - Unearthing African American History & Culture Through Home Movies

The portrayal of African Americans on film has been much debated since the advent of the moving image. There is no better demonstration of this than what is depicted in the numerous home movies shot by African Americans during the rise of amateur filmmaking in the United States. Results of African American home movie collections will be represented in an online database in order to streamline access to the intimately diverse depiction they can provide of African American history and culture.

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM (Room 648)
Karl McCool - Out from Underground: Advertising and the Emergence of the Gay Porn Theater

In June 1969, several days before the Stonewall rebellion, the first ads for gay porn screenings began appearing in the Village Voice and The New York Times. Among the first to appear in the Village Voice and the very first to appear in The New York Times are ads for a "gayla movie program" of "all male charmers," presented by Warhol superstar Gerard Malanga. Months earlier, in January 1969, a far less brazen ad, seeking members for a "homophile film club" called Cinema 7 appeared in the Village Voice. This name calls to mind Cinema 16, just as the later ad carries associations with Andy Warhol, whose films, increasingly in conversation with sexploitation cinema, are advertised on the same pages. As these early ads suggest, underground and sexploitation cinemas overlapped in this period, both gaining a wider public in the pages, first of the underground press and later in the paper of record itself.