This spring, I received an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences grant for work in film preservation at Anthology Film Archives in New York. The work for this grant focused specifically on New York Underground Film Festival collection, a well-known festival that had disbanded in 2008 after fifteen years of noteworthy documentary and experimental programming. Donated by the festival’s director Ed Halter in 2009, the collection consists of a myriad of audiovisual materials ranging from raw, unedited footage to edited master files to screening/exhibition duplicates, as well as a generous amount of paper materials and festival ephemera. Under the tutelage of head archivist Andrew Lampert and assistant archivist John Passmore (MIAP alumnus and preservationist on the work of Paul Sharits), I was able to perform a variety of archival tasks, including the creation of a database, identification and labeling system, all unique to the collection itself so that it may be used in future time by scholars and researchers interested in this once overlooked essential cinema.
