Claire Fox, Spring 2019

Claire Fox, IndieCollect, Spring 2019, HFPA

Laboratory for Icon & Idiom, Inc. is a New York-based nonprofit organization whose mission is to preserve American independent cinema through film restoration initiatives and to provide filmmakers with the means to preserve their own works. Laboratory for Icon & Idiom, Inc.'s IndieCollect campaign was started by president Sandra Schulberg in 2008. The organization received a breakthrough grant from the Ford Foundation in 2014, as Schulberg organized archivists from the Academy Film Archive, the UCLA Film and Television Archive, MoMA, Eastman House, Anthology Film Archives, and the Library of Congress to rescue film negatives housed at DuArt after its wet lab closed. In order to create bibliographic and element records for these titles, CTO Israel Ehrisman built and designed a database, which is now known as the IndieCollect Index. The Index has since expanded to include additional archival initiatives, including my focus, the Queer Cinema Index (QCI). The QCI was launched in October 2017, with support from a generous donation from film collector and curator Gerald Herman and other donors. The QCI aims to “create a comprehensive online compendium of LGBTQ films, television series, and webisodes made in the U.S. and around the world.” My primary task was to create an initial draft of a controlled vocabulary to describe LGBTQ+ moving image works. I worked toward this goal in collaboration with QCI Project Director and LGBTQ+ film historian Robert Hawk, and sought additional research assistance and collaboration from NYU Cinema Studies student Shayna Maci Warner. The three of us brought unique skills and perspectives to this project, and we were able to create a vocabulary draft and submit it to our archive partners for review and feedback. Beyond the controlled vocabulary, I provided guidance for Robert Hawk to approach his paper archive, and created an initial informational spreadsheet of titles being considered for a traveling LGBTQ+ film series, Pioneers of Queer Cinema, which was the recipient of a Warhol Foundation grant during the course of my internship. Films to be included on the tour which were being scanned and restored during my internship included Jan Oxenberg’s A Comedy in Six Unnatural Acts (1975) and Home Movie (1973).