8

RECLAIMING THE LOCAL FILM

Artifacts, Archives, and Audiences

IN HER STUDY OF FILM preservation in the digital era, Giovanna Fossati refers to the “archival life” of a film, which “indicates the life of film once it has entered the archive, from selection to preservation, from restoration to exhibition and digitization.”¹ This reframing of film as an object in flux—a catalogue entry one day, something in need of repair the next, an ephemeral experience on the screen for many evenings, and, finally, a computer file among many others—is generative even if it discounts the materiality of celluloid. In this chapter, I expand on Fossati’s notion of the “archival life” of film to include what I call its “second lives” outside the archive, which begin when moving images, particularly those that were orphaned, are rediscovered by community groups, scholars, and artists.

As I discuss later, it was not until the early 1980s that a few archivists had an inkling of the existence, let alone the value, of local films. Another decade passed before film historians and archivists realized that these films, and similar moving images produced outside mainstream commercial and independent spheres, constitute what Paula Amad has called a “counter-archive” in which moving images challenge the traditional archive’s “sacred myths of order, exhaustiveness, and objective neutrality” due to their fragmented and fragile status.² Given the neglect of local films for the entirety of the period in which they were produced in large numbers, it is surprising that any survived at all.

But even when these films began to circulate in the communities where they were made, their status was far from secured. Reels were found and then lost again. Community copies were created on video cassettes, with new soundtracks and texts identifying people and places on screen, but these videos were not preserved alongside the films they reproduced. In other cases, artists removed local movies from community and archival contexts and instead used them as found footage pieces that commented on their serial nature. In fact, the second lives of local films are just as fragmented, capricious, and multifaceted as the circumstances that allowed them to be produced in the first place.

Although I am primarily interested in how local movies have survived the vicissitudes of time in order to become treasured historical artifacts in the communities where they were made, such travails are also indicative of how the twinned fields of film preservation and film history have shifted to accommodate local motion pictures. The itinerants who kept the movies they made, including Shad Graham and H. Lee Waters, sold or donated some of their work to universities and film archives in the early 1970s but were met with middling interest, and the collections were subsequently neglected.³ It was not until the late 1990s that local films were considered “orphans,” unprotected by copyright and thus a priority for preservation efforts. Early academic studies of the cinema centered on the medium’s status as an art form, not historical record or cultural artifact. Only after a series of “turns” in the field of cinema studies—the theoretical turn, the historical turn, the cultural turn, and, finally, the archival turn—did local movies even show up on the research agendas of film specialists. To paraphrase Norma Desmond, local films were big; it was the field that was small.

YEARS ROLLED BACK: FINDING AND LOSING LOCAL FILMS

Although some local films were never really lost, narratives of loss and recovery are critical to how scholars and communities alike understand these movies, and, one could argue, much of cinema history. In her history of motion picture archives, Janna Jones suggests that in the early 1990s, archivists began rejecting earlier commitments that privileged feature-length commercial cinema in order to focus on “constructing the history of the twentieth century by way of their attention to maintenance, preservation, and restoration of archival film materials.”⁴ This shift in archival practices and priorities at a national level created both the infrastructure necessary for local films to be recovered in the first place and fostered a community of archivists and scholars who were invested in bringing such moving images into popular and critical discourses.⁵ In other words, local films were no longer seen as curios, the equivalent of a mass-produced manufactured good made by a factory that closed long ago, but instead as windows into the history of a community and, by extension, the United States.

By the late 1990s, archivists, funding sources, and scholars were in a position to identify and, more importantly, prioritize the preservation of local films. The National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF), a federally chartered corporation that selected and administered film preservation grants, began making awards in 1998. In its very first year it gave more than seven thousand dollars to the Nebraska State Historical Society for the preservation of Kearney and Its People in Motion Pictures (c. 1926).⁶ In the historical society’s application to the foundation, curator Paul J. Eisloeffel noted that the film was conceived as an “actuality piece,” not as one of the “local talent” motion pictures that were popular at the time. Eisloeffel further argued that the films were made in collaboration with Universal, and thus were “a rare collaboration between a major studio and a local community.” Because they had been left in the towns where they were filmed, they were orphaned by the film studio. Eisloeffel observed that such films were a “unique testament to the power of the moving image as a documentary medium,” and, moreover, valuable to the study of state and local history.⁷

Since 1998, the NFPF has proved to be a reliable funding source for the small archives, from public libraries to historical societies, that hold local films. For example, it has funded the preservation of thirty-five reels of H. Lee Waters’s Movies of Local People (1936–1942); Paragon Feature Film Company’s production of The Lumberjack (1914); a home movie depicting the making of Don Newland’s Americus’s Hero (1928); Park Motion Picture Production’s My Home Town in Mooresville, North Carolina (1946); and many other local films. While the presence of the NFPF alone has not caused the revival of interest in local films, its support for such pictures has smoothed the journey from discovery to preservation. Other funding sources, from privately raised money from the communities where the picture was made to a mixture of federal, state, and regional grants has given the holders of such movies a range of options when seeking funds for preservation, video and digital transfers, and, in some cases, reproduction for sale. In order to get a better sense of how such films are found, understood, and preserved as “local films,” the following case studies of three of the filmmakers or film companies discussed in this book—O. W. Lamb of the Paragon Feature Film Company, the female directors of the Amateur Theatre Guild, and H. Lee Waters—illustrate how historians and archivists alike have interpreted these films.

Paragon Feature Film Company

Although just three of the dozens of pictures made by the Paragon Feature Film Company are extant, the fact that the company was active in the 1910s, the decade in which the movie industry itself was organized, makes its work of considerable value, particularly because relatively few films from this period survive. Not surprisingly, these films were of interest to archives even before the turn to an interest in orphans, and, in fact, one of Paragon’s movies, Blissveldt Romance, was featured in a 1993 congressional report that led to the establishment of the NFPF. At the same time, these reels were, in two of three cases, held by archives that had neither significant film collections nor staff who specialized in audio-visual preservation. While these three pictures survived exceptional odds in order to make it to their hundred-year anniversaries, each of them demonstrates the difficulties of preserving local films after they are discovered.

BLISSVELDT ROMANCE

When the Paragon Feature Film Company shot the Blissveldt Romance in August 1915, the company was near its peak, making movies that challenged narrative and aesthetic conventions of the booster film. After the film was made, it was presumably given to the Grand Rapids Association of Commerce, which sponsored the film, though in this case it may have been left directly in the hands of Benjamin Hanchett, president of the local streetcar company and owner of two properties that were featured prominently in the picture—the Blissveldt farm and the Lakewood mansion. In any case, the film was found in the attic of Hanchett’s Lake Michigan cottage in the 1980s, when it was sold to another prominent Grand Rapids family. After a few years, the family donated the nitrate reels to the Grand Rapids Public Library, which decided to apply for an American Film Institute–National Endowment for the Arts (AFI-NEA) grant to pay for its preservation. In a written statement submitted for a congressionally mandated 1993 report on the state of film preservation in the United States, Grand Rapids city historian Gordon L. Olson noted that the $1,100 received from the federal government allowed them to attract matching local funds and produce a new 35mm negative and print, a 16mm reduction negative and print, and two video masters. In his statement, Olson argued that “it is important that films such as these are preserved, not only for the local images they contain, but also to document their role in the development of the movie industry,” tying them into a national narrative of the rise of Hollywood.⁸ At the same time, the publicity the Blissveldt project received resulted in the preservation of other films made in Grand Rapids, thus ensuring greater awareness of the community’s own moving image history.

Film historians Annette Melville and Scott Simmon, the authors of the 1993 report that was commissioned by the Library of Congress, came to a somewhat different conclusion than Olson. After noting that motion pictures of “historic or cultural interest” were being held by “government offices, historical societies, museums, universities, libraries, and nonprofit associations” that were ill-equipped to handle film, Melville and Simmon observed that the Grand Rapids Public Library successfully took advantage of an AFI-NEA grant to preserve and transfer the film to video so it could be shown in the community. But, as they go on to note, “the point here is that most small public organizations with historically valuable films are not equipped to preserve them without expert technical advice and support.”⁹ Although these comments appear to be unnecessarily critical, they proved prescient, as the 35mm elements of Blissveldt Romance were left at John E. Allen, Inc., the laboratory that preserved the film and produced the transfers, and the 16mm elements went missing sometime before they were requested for a screening at the 2012 Orphans Film Symposium.¹⁰ Even though the film continues to be screened in Grand Rapids, local audiences now see a DVD copy of a video transfer, which is far from the quality of the original print.

PRESENT AND PAST IN THE CRADLE OF DIXIE

While Blissveldt Romance’s preservation was made possible thanks to a federal grant, another Paragon production, Present and Past in the Cradle of Dixie (1914), was preserved because it had been given in 1921 to the Alabama Department of Archives and History by the manager of the Empire Theater, part of a local theater chain.¹¹ But rather than keeping the nitrate film in their own collections, the archives department gave it to the state treasurer so it could be stored in that department’s safe, and by 1940 had forgotten about it when the archives moved to another building. The film was discovered in 1986 when the treasury department temporarily vacated their offices for a renovation to the state capitol building.¹²

Although Present and Past was lost for half a century, once it was rediscovered state archivists located a considerable amount of material about its production, including a copy of the script, a program, and even a list of proposed titles (including “The Court of Love Unites the Blue and the Grey”). As the archivist Tanya L. Zanish notes in a 1993 article, the film “is a romanticized view of both the early twentieth-century South and Montgomery’s role in the formation of the Confederacy,” which made its preservation problematic, particularly given the city’s uneasy relationship to both the Confederacy and the long civil rights struggle of African Americans following the end of the Civil War.¹³ Nevertheless, the film was screened again publicly, and a local television produced a sympathetic documentary about its discovery, which included interviews with the children of some of the film’s stars.¹⁴

THE LUMBERJACK

Of the three extant Paragon productions, The Lumberjack, shot in Wausau, Wisconsin, is unique in that the film was never lost. Even so, it took almost a century for the film to enter an archive. According to a 1983 documentary on the film’s production, the 35mm print, made for the film’s star, Hans Hagge, was kept in the vault at the Wausau Theatre until the theater’s manager died in 1945, when it was moved to the Employers Mutual Liability Insurance Company of Wisconsin, based in Wausau.¹⁵ Later, the film was moved again, this time to city hall, where it was kept in a basement vault, and screened on occasion. In his 1983 documentary, When You Wore a Tulip and I Wore a Bright Red Rose, Stephen Schaller accounts for the film’s production history and the memories of those who remember seeing the film when it was exhibited. He even interviews one person who appeared in the film, who refers to herself as the “last leaf on the tree,” the one surviving cast member.

While Schaller’s film is remarkably aware of The Lumberjack’s historical significance as an example of a broader phenomenon, there are no direct references to other extant works from this period, in part because neither Blissveldt Romance nor Present and Past had yet been found. In this way, When You Wore a Tulip offers a window into an alternate history in which these films were found and identified when archivists and historians were first looking more closely at cinema history, which could have placed such pictures at the center of these inquiries, rather than the margins. In other words, rather than describing such movies as orphan films, we might have instead referred to them as hometown movies and seen them as the leading edges of an account of the cinema in which there were many sites of production—from family homes to industrial production companies to Hollywood—all worthy of study and preservation. Instead, both The Lumberjack and When You Wore a Tulip languished for a time after the latter was produced, and it was not until 2011 that the Wisconsin Historical Society received a NFPF grant to preserve the Paragon film.

Movie Queen

In her study of film preservation, Caroline Frick emphasizes the role regional film archives play in the United Kingdom in finding and caring for materials that would be passed over by national film archives. In the United States, state archives sometimes have taken on this function, but collecting policies and budgets mean that they could be unprepared for the task of collecting their state’s moving image history. Since 2000, several independent state and regional film archives have been created, including the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, which Frick started in 2002; Chicago Film Archives (2003); and the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound (2005).¹⁶ Although these archives differ in important ways, they all took their cue from an independent regional film archive, Northeast Historic Film (NHF), which was founded in Maine in 1986 by Karan Sheldon and David Weiss, and now holds 10 million feet of film and more than 8,000 hours of video.¹⁷

In just the third year of the organization’s history, NHF received a donation of the 16mm film print Movie Queen, Lubec (1936), which spurred an ongoing research project on the films that, as Sheldon notes, layers “firsthand production and reception testimonies, documentary research, physical preservation, public presentations, and discussions of accreted meanings” in order to turn them into “significant cultural records.”¹⁸ The archive has now collected ten Movie Queen prints, all made in New England, although the company produced films throughout the United States.¹⁹ Like many itinerants active in the 1930s, the directors of the Movie Queen films tended to leave the 16mm reels with the production’s sponsor, which increased the likelihood of their survival. At the same time, relatively few Movie Queen productions used intertitles or other identifying markers, which meant that many titles were unidentified until an archivist from NHF inspected them.²⁰

Due to NHF’s regional focus, and the large numbers of Movie Queens made in New England, the archive has been able to approach the films collectively as a long-term research and preservation project. Starting with an early preservation project, funded by an AFI-NEA grant, to preserve two Movie Queen films in 1989, the archive has made the film series a priority. Over time, archivists have located new films, identified the people and places depicted in them, and researched the elusive directors and their employer, the Amateur Theatre Guild, who made them.²¹ While the three extant films made by Paragon were each discovered and preserved as independent works, the Movie Queen films were from the beginning seen as the products of an itinerant practice.

One of the more unusual outcomes of this research was the 2000 production of a new Movie Queen in Bucksport, Maine, the home of NHF. Written and directed by archivists Andrea McCarty and Don Radovich, the opening credits note that it was inspired by the Movie Queen films made by Margaret Cram, who for a time was thought to be the sole producer of these movies. The black-and-white 16mm production includes images of the community that take after the tropes of the 1930s films, including shots of road signs welcoming the queen, intertitles, and her arrival by boat. At the same time, McCarty and Radovich play with the conventions of silent-era melodrama, with a flashback scene introduced by the title “Insert flashback here.” In this way, the Bucksport Movie Queen belongs to the neo-silent cinema of directors such as Guy Maddin, Veit Helmer, and Charles Lane. Although the film follows the loose narrative structure of the earlier Movie Queens, no one appears in period dress, and an additional love story is added to the plot. In this way, the Bucksport Movie Queen suggests a desire for movies with a stronger narrative structure, one closer to Hollywood than the decisively amateur aesthetics of the guild’s versions. At the same time, the townspeople in the Bucksport film appear to have enjoyed the experience of making the movie just as much as those who were in the original movies, even if the Bucksport film winks at its source material, having fun with a film that never took itself seriously. Although NHF has also engaged in more conventional preservation work, the creation of the “new” version of Movie Queen suggests that they are invested in creating a vibrant culture around these films. Even though the original films were left with individual communities, NHF has gathered them together again, making what might have appeared to be a one-off local effort into a regional film practice shared by many New England communities.

H. Lee Waters

In other cases, local films survived because the filmmaker kept them and continued to exhibit them locally. Although an untold number of movie theater owners and hobbyists kept their movies close, H. Lee Waters’s care of his films suggests how local pictures fell from popular awareness even as they circulated within the communities where they were made.

H. Lee Waters’s brief career as an itinerant filmmaker ended in 1942, when wartime restrictions on gasoline, the birth of a third child, and a revived portrait studio business brought him back to stay in Lexington. But Waters retained an interest in itinerant exhibition. He continued to revisit the communities where he made Movies of Local People to show them his films from the 1930s and 1940s. He undertook a twenty-year anniversary tour during which he visited a number of towns, including Fort Mill, South Carolina, where he called his movies Way Back in 1940. In a flyer, Waters promised that the audience will “enjoy seeing the year’s [sic] rolled back for you” and assured them that the movies will “bring back fond memories of people and places that are gone . . . But Not Forgotten!” Elsewhere in the same flyer, however, Waters suggested that the films revealed a certain continuity in the community, asking audiences to “see yourselves and your friends as you looked 20 years ago” and suggesting that “you won’t believe what you see . . . but the camera doesn’t lie!”²² While Waters’s films may have not initially been received as historical works, with the twenty-year tour such an association was his primary calling card.

Figure 8.1. H. Lee Waters later in life. Courtesy of Davidson County Historical Museum, Lexington, N.C.

In making these return visits, Waters also prompted exhibitors to recall the decline of moviegoing, which had dropped considerably in the postwar period. In a 1960 letter, O. T. Kirby, manager of the Dolly Madison Theater in Roxboro, thanked Waters for bringing his former patrons back to the theater:

We played your MOVIES OF LOCAL PEOPLE, taken in Roxboro during the years of 1938 and 1939 over May 12–13–14, 1960 to very good results at the box office. It would be quite a job to dig back into our records this far to determine how this recent engagement stood up against the original ones, but off hand, I would say there was an increase in business this time. In fact, I think there was considerably more enthusiasm among our townspeople who remember these twenty-year-old films.

Figure 8.2. Flyer for H. Lee Waters’s Movies of Local People in 1940, Fort Mill, South Carolina. H. Lee Waters Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

It is our intention to return another series of these old pictures some time in the very near future. Needless for me to say, this attraction brought in so very many of our friends whom I have not seen since the advent of television.²³

While Waters’s original Movies of Local People was one of many things used by theater managers to get people to come to the movies, his twenty-year anniversary tour took place after the cinema had already lost a substantial part of its audience, thus making his films one of the few things that could get people to turn off their television sets and go to their local theater. Kirby, like many movie theater owners in small towns, got out of the business in the 1970s, and the movie theaters in Roxboro have since been converted to other uses.²⁴

In 1976, the Winston-Salem Journal ran an article about Waters with the headline, “Old Movies Appeal to Nostalgia.” Identifying Waters as a “vintage Lexington photographer,” the article notes that he was back on the road selling his films, but this time he was “phasing himself out as he goes—first showing and then selling the old movies to any willing buyer in the various towns and villages.” Making the point that he was showing his films at civic club gatherings, not movie theaters, the article stated that it was “nostalgia,” not seeing oneself on the screen, that drove the interest in these films.²⁵ Along with Milo Holt, a film distributor from Siler City, North Carolina, Waters sold as many of the films as he could during the 1970s. Waters’s decision to sell his movies meant the end of his film practice, transferring the responsibility of storing and screening of the films to those institutions—in most cases, libraries, schools, or civic organizations—that purchased them.²⁶

In 1985, Tom Whiteside, a filmmaker who was teaching at Isothermal Community College in Spindale, North Carolina, came across Waters’s films of Cliffside, which had been purchased by Philip White, a local historian and principal of the Cliffside School.²⁷ Soon after, Whiteside went to Lexington to meet Waters and began a long relationship that resulted in the establishment, in 1988, of the H. Lee Waters Collection at Duke University. The collection received an early dose of publicity in 1989, including an NBC News segment on Waters and articles in several major newspapers in the region. With Waters’s financial records as a guide, Whiteside began contacting libraries and other community groups who might have purchased the films to convince them to donate the originals to Duke with the understanding that they would receive several viewing copies of the film in return so they could continue to show their movies as they wished. Duke University received a number of NFPF grants, beginning in 2002, to preserve these films. In 2004, Waters’s films of Kannapolis, North Carolina, were nominated to the National Film Registry, the first local movies to be so honored, which made the collection an even greater priority for Duke Special Collections and the NFPF. In 2015, ninety-five films from the collection, along with Waters’s financial records, were placed online.²⁸

Although these three narratives of discovery appear to be unlikely and singular events, the history of film preservation is full of such stories, such as the 1978 excavation of more than five hundred silent films found in the permafrost in Dawson City, Canada.²⁹ While some films were genuinely discovered, in many cases this narrative of finding a “lost treasure” was foisted on these pictures; in fact many such films were well known in the communities where they were made. For example, residents of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, had long been aware that Don Newland had shot a movie in their community in the 1930s as it was screened in the local theater in 1966 during the town’s bicentennial festivities, but the film appeared to have disappeared shortly after. The film resurfaced in 2001, when the theater’s longtime manager finally revealed that he had kept it.³⁰ Many other local movies remain lost, but memories of their production have been sustained by local history columns in town newspapers, photographs, oral histories, and, in the case of the Bucksport Movie Queen, recreations.

So far, I have focused on discovery narratives in which an archive swoops in to collect, preserve, and, most importantly, identify the importance of local motion pictures to the history of the cinema. But many local films are not in archives or, at the very least, are not part of an archive’s priorities in terms of preservation and access. Instead, they are held by residents of the community where they were produced, who have sought to make them legible to contemporary audiences by adding music, commentary, and other media, such as photographs. By reclaiming local films for their own purposes, communities have remade them for the video and digital eras.

NO LONGER IN USE: RECLAIMING THE LOCAL FILM

In her 1986 defense of the work and craft of local historians, Carol Kammen argues that, counter to the assumptions of academic historians, local history is a “broad field of inquiry” that encompasses a range of approaches, from cultural history to environmental history, and methods, including oral history, statistical analysis, and literary studies.³¹ As she observes, many of the research methodologies that were commonplace in local history are now being adopted by academic historians, a migration that has only accelerated in recent years, and film history is no exception.

Most often, the discovery of local films prompt community groups to identify the people and places in the film and then inscribe their work into the film text, usually through the addition of an audio track, with narration and musical sequences, to what was a silent film. More recently, these movies have been radically transformed by being placed online, with some communities taking frame grabs of the film and presenting them as a series of digitized stills, while others simply upload their movies, with or without annotation, to commercial video sharing sites.

In The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History, Jaimie Baron defines what she calls the “appropriation film,” which contains moving images the film viewer experiences as “‘archival’—that is, as coming from another time or from another context of use or intended use.” Challenging longstanding distinctions between archival footage, which carries with it the authority of its holding facility, and found footage, which is assumed to lack this authority because of its uncertain provenance, Baron suggests that “foundness” is a quality of all historical moving images, which become “archival” as they are integrated into documentaries, experimental film, and other appropriation films. She suggests that the “archive effect” occurs in appropriation films when the gap between the present of the film and the past of the image is acknowledged within the film itself. As she argues, the archive effect “is a function of the relationship between different elements of the same text.”³² Even minor alterations to the image, such as layering on a textual description or adding a narration, is enough to produce this effect, thus transforming how the text can be read and, presumably, experienced by the viewer.

In reclaimed local films, found moving images are incorporated into new works that subtly but pointedly change how they are understood by residents of the community that was filmed. The term “reclaim” has historically been used to indicate the recovery of something that was lost, often with moralistic undertones. In recent decades, however, the idea of reclamation has been deployed in environmental contexts, in which something that is defiled or wasted—soil, water, and wood are just a few examples—is saved, recovered, and put to use. My use of the term indicates both the assumed status of local films when they are found and the hopes historical societies, public libraries, and community groups have for these images once their reclamation work is complete. In contrast to restoration, which in a film context means to bring the work back to a form that is as close as possible to its original state, reclamation acknowledges the desire to bring something back while also holding to its status as something that was once lost or devalued. Many reclaimed local films are videos, a medium that, as Michael Z. Newman has argued, has a long history of fostering utopian thinking.³³

In this context, these movies are not valued for their “historical, cultural, or aesthetic significance,” the qualities that would make them candidates for inclusion on the National Film Registry, or for their evidentiary status as historical artifacts. Rather, they are of interest because they facilitate the matching of previously unknown moving images of the past with other media, from audio commentaries by local historians and longtime residents of the community that was filmed to textual descriptions of the people and places who are identified. While archives often privilege preservation over access, and seek out grants in order to ensure the original artifact will survive in perpetuity, community groups prioritize access and are less likely to consider the film itself as something worth preserving. For this reason, it is as access copies, and copies of access copies, that these movies thrive.

THE ARTIFACT AND THE ACCESS COPY: RECLAIMING THE MOVIES OF AMATEUR SERVICE PRODUCTIONS

The films of the often anonymous directors of Amateur Service Productions (ASP) are, in many ways, the most ordinary of local pictures. In almost all cases, they were made at the behest of a civic or service organization with relatively little fuss. While the films were screened at movie theaters, there is no evidence of the pomp other itinerants called up, such as parades, fictional scenarios, or trick camerawork. Rather, these movies were merely records of everyday life, filmed following what seemed like a shooting list—a shot of the entrance to town; its main street; and, dutifully, key businesses, schools, and social organizations. Even their titles were ordinary: See Yourself and Your Town in Movies was commonly used.

Although the company was active for just a few years, from 1935 to 1941, company representatives claimed that they produced as many as four thousand films during this period. The movies they left behind have become footage for local historical videos, which transforms these works into ruminations on a period that has long been associated with economic hardship and social solidarity. From the outset, it is clear that these videos are not invested in the films themselves as artifacts. For example, in a 1991 video of ASP’s 1938 film in Reedsburg, Wisconsin, the scrolling introductory text informs the viewer that “music, sound effects and subtitles have been added to enhance your viewing pleasure and to help identify some scenes,” and “various sequences in this film have been rearranged to provide better continuity.”³⁴ The Reedsburg video uses band music and advertising jingles in the soundtrack, and sound effects—children playing, cars driving, creaky doors opening—are deployed in a manner similar to that used in the “sound” versions of silent films that were made in the 1930s. Instead of a narrator identifying scenes, white text, which the introduction identifies as “subtitles,” notes the names of local businesses and places, leaving people unidentified. The closing credits note that the original film was donated to the Wisconsin Historical Society, further severing the connection between the artifact and the access copy.³⁵

If the Reedsburg video adds relatively little detail to the film, other local historical videos attempt to place the movies within the context of the time in which it was made. For example, when community historians in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, acquired the 1937 film See Yourself and Your Town in the Movies in the 1990s, they created a videotape copy, which they retitled Aliquippa in 1937 (1997), adding both music and commentary.³⁶ The video was sponsored by a local historical society, the Center for Industrial Heritage of Beaver County, and was narrated by five people with different relationships to and interests in the people and places presented in the film. For example, the video opens with scrolling text that discusses a 1937 Supreme Court decision that is relevant only because it happened to involve a labor dispute between Aliquippa workers and Jones and Laughlin Steel, the town’s major employer. The scrolling text continues by introducing the production of the film as the other significant event that year. This tension between the national and the local runs through the piece, and many like it, in part because such movies only become legible when read either as very specific images of people and places or as a general window to life as it was once experienced by people living in a particular place.

We see this tension express itself in the soundtrack, which alternates unidentified big band music presumably from the period in which the film was made and the voices of the narrators, whose identifications resonate with familiarity and often intimacy. Because the Aliquippa film, like most others, features hundreds of people, identifying individuals is a time-consuming task, particularly considering that the video was made sixty years after the original film. And yet, what stands about the video is not the surfeit of information about the people and places depicted but rather the narrator’s musings on the past’s relationship to the present. For example, when one of the town’s future celebrities, the composer Henry Mancini, who was fourteen at the time, appears in the marching band sequence, the narrator briefly identifies him and then moves on to the next name. But when shots of the dedication of a pavilion in St. Joseph Park in the neighboring town of Center Township appear, the narrator muses on the gap between the present of when the narration is recorded and the past of the images. (See Moving Image 8.1.)

In this footage, the narrator goes beyond merely identifying the scenes in order to call attention to both the historical circumstances that led to the pavilion’s dedication and, implicitly, the recognition that this “happy gathering” is firmly in the past. At one point, the narrator notes that the park is near a cemetery, which is not seen in the footage, only to further comment that it is no longer in use, underscoring the decline of the community. In fact, as Aliquippa in 1937 continues, it becomes clear that the narrators are interested in the film in part because it documents a moment when the town was near its peak in terms of population, political power, and social solidarity, and thus underscores the tragedy of its subsequent decline.³⁷

This process of reclaiming privileges what Allison Landsberg has called the “affective mode of historical engagement.” Local historical productions are more than just videos; instead, as Landsberg suggests of historical film more broadly, they produce “visceral experiences—the oscillation between proximity and distance, alienation and intimacy,” that she suggests allow viewers to think historically.³⁸ Although she focuses on historical fiction films, her emphasis on affect, rather than representation, seems particularly important for local historical videos. The affect local films were intended to produce—the bodily experience of seeing yourself on screen—is replaced by something different, seeing one’s own community as a mediated and historicized moving image.

The presence of the narrator, whose intimate relationship to the people and places pictured gives him or her authority over these images, encourages viewers to see these films as storehouses of memories, narratives, and experiences, not just representations of the past. For example, in another local history video, made using Amateur Service Productions’ footage of Sauk City, Wisconsin, the narrator, W. J. “Shimmel” Coenen, notes the following over an image of a two men in front of what appears to be a house: “Now this is August Marquardt on the left and Oswald Homberger on the right. They started a real estate business after the banks went broke in nineteen hundred and whatever and it’s interesting to note that August Marquardt is blind but he’s a real estate dealer. I think that’s interesting.” In contrast to the Aliquippa film, dates are fairly unimportant to the narrator, who instead uses the images on screen to discuss what is imperceptible in the film itself—such as the fact that the man wearing dark glasses is blind—and thus binds these stories to the film. In The Ethics of Memory, the philosopher Avishai Margalit delineates common memory, an aggregate of “the memories of all those people who remember a certain episode which each of them experienced individually,” from shared memory, which “integrates and calibrates the different perspectives of those who remember the episode.” Unlike common memory, which is only held by those who experienced a particular event, Margalit argues that shared memory cuts across time, binding members of a “community of memory” to one another. Shared memory depends on these communities of memory, as Margalit defines it, “a network of people and organizations to carry out the division of mnemonic labor,” as well as the association of the remembered items, in order for it to function.³⁹ In effect, local historical videos serve to make the common memories of those who assembled the video a shared memory for the community.⁴⁰

Although I have focused here on videos that were produced using films shot by Amateur Service Productions, similar videos have incorporated a wide range of historical moving images, including other local films, home movies, and newsreels, as well as photographs, maps, newspapers, and other ephemera. These reclaimed copies are less likely to be in archives than local films, and, given the comparatively short shelf-life of video, are now more vulnerable to being lost than the films that they were intended to save. Meanwhile, many communities have turned to another new medium, the internet, in an effort to share their movies with a much larger audience, one very different from the geographically and spatially circumscribed communities they knew best.

REMEMBER CLIFFSIDE: LOCAL FILMS ON THE WEB

When H. Lee Waters sold his films in the 1970s, he found eager buyers among those who grew up in mill towns. Like the Aliquippa film, Waters’s movies depicted mill towns at their peak of productivity and population, and many former residents looked back at mill life with fondness, particularly those who were children in the 1930s. But if the Aliquippa film was seen in the context of the community’s decline, many mill town movies were among the only moving image records of these communities, which no longer existed as such. Beginning in the 1960s, mills shuttered operations, and in many cases companies dismantled worker housing, shops, and other buildings once they were no longer needed.

Cliffside, in the North Carolina Piedmont, was one of those communities. In 1901, Raleigh Rutherford Haynes, who had already developed several textile mill communities, chartered Cliffside Mills, which went into operation the following year. By 1922, the community had grown large enough to support its own public school building, and by the 1940s, its population reached 2,500, larger than many municipalities in the state, even though it remained a company-owned village. The homes were reserved for employees of the mill, which, over time, fell into disrepair. By the 1960s, all company housing was removed from Cliffside, against the wishes of some residents who would have preferred to purchase their homes from the new owner, Cone Mills. Soon after, the once-thriving village became a ghost town, even though the factory itself was active for another three decades.

In 2002, former Cliffside resident Reno Bailey, a software developer who had recently retired, created Remember Cliffside, a website that exhaustively documents the town. The hand-coded site contains primary and secondary source materials, including oral histories, photographs, images of a scale model an artist made of the town, and, in one section, more than three hundred stills that were taken from H. Lee Waters’s film of the community.⁴¹ Each still is labeled, and most of the individuals who appear in them are identified. While Lois Womack and Sue Crowe, the “twin reporters” for the Cliffside News, suspected in 1937 that Waters’s visit meant that “Hollywood doesn’t seem so far off now as it used to,” and that “movie contracts” would be on their way for Cliffside’s residents, these images had lost any association with the movie industry.⁴² Rather, it is their specificity to the community that gives them meaning. Visitors to the site can now see the film either as a series of stills or as moving images. Waters’s films, then, are not only a media artifact, left unconnected to the rest of the material, but rather incorporated into the community’s history.⁴³

In fact, it is their placement on a local history website that reveals how local films on the web are different from the community history videos discussed earlier. While the need to match sound with image forces narrators and editors to make decisions about what to emphasize in their reclaiming of local films, when these films are placed on the web, there are no similar restrictions on how they are used. For example, on the Cliffside site it is possible to document those left out of the films, most notably the community’s African American residents, by including photographs, maps, and other documents pertaining to the African American community in Cliffside. Instead of representing a film as the account of a place and a time, Remember Cliffside permits a more expansive notion of what it means to document and revisit the past, with Waters’s films serving to reveal just how many stories might be told about the community.

Unlike many local history websites, Remember Cliffside is a remarkably robust and well-tended site, one that is itself in need of preservation, as the design and infrastructure has not changed since it was first created.⁴⁴ But, many local films are not handled with such care, even though digital tools now make it easy to work with moving images. Instead, they are commonly found on video sites, including YouTube and the Internet Archive, where they are left open for interpretation and reuse by those who come across them.

THE INDETERMINACY OF NOW

In his 2004 book The Remembered Film, Victor Burgin observes that one of the consequences of the ubiquity of digital media in our contemporary moment is its capability to change our expectations for how the past is represented in visual media.⁴⁵ In a world that sees itself, and often its past, as a motion picture, local films compensate for the absence of moving images from many histories. And on video sharing sites, movies themselves become the medium of history writing, as people create video essays out of photographs, texts, maps, and other media. While certain visual and aural artifacts, including VHS hiss, projector noise, and audio buzz, hint at how the films were transferred and remediated for online streaming, this work is rarely commented on in the descriptions. In fact, local films are uploaded online with just the barest of details, leaving commenters to speculate on the date of the footage, its initial purpose, and the people and places pictured. On occasion, even the identity of the person or organization who has uploaded the video is obscured, making it difficult to discern the origins of these films.

At the same time, their obscurity generates a broader range of responses online. Video sharing sites encourage their users to engage with moving images by commenting on them, and in many cases individuals take on the task of supplementing these videos with their own reactions. These comments range from the identification of individuals and places to digressions about someone’s experience living in the place pictured. In some cases, such comments go in surprising directions, such as those for the 1940 production of Movie Queen in Bogota, New Jersey, in which one surprised commenter asks “son bogotanos gringos?”⁴⁶ Another goes on to note that Bogota was named after the Bogert family, who helped settle the area, and has no connection to the Colombian capital.

More often, however, users comment about where relatives appear, identifying specific sections of interest, or time stamps, in order to direct subsequent viewers to scenes of interest. In a comment on It Happened in Norristown, a user writes “Puts family life in late 30’s Norristown into perspective. I think I see my grandfather, Frank Wildman. Now I understand how people got into Philadelphia with relative ease.”⁴⁷ In other instances, users observe moments that are incongruous with contemporary decorum. In a comment on This Is Progressive Wilkes County (1948), one asks, “29:50 Did he say what I think he said?” leading the curious viewer to go to the section of the film and hear the narrator note, “One of the principal reasons for the county’s industrial stability is the capable industrious source of white American labor.”⁴⁸ While none of these responses are particularly surprising as YouTube comments, they do suggest the ways in which responses to local films online are different from those that occur in other contexts. While the comingling of the archival with the contemporary, and the local with the global, has its own pleasures, it often comes at the expense of identifying the local film as a cultural artifact, belonging to a particular place and time.

But the most surprising reuse of local films once they leave their community context occurs not online but in the black box theaters and white cube galleries where art is both produced and received. Filmmakers, musicians, and installation artists have reworked, repurposed, and interpreted local films. While this work is distinct from the kinds of local historical research discussed above, artists explore how these moving images may be reinterpreted for future audiences who will think about moving images in contexts far removed from the movie theater where the films were once screened.

ARTIST REUSES OF LOCAL FILMS

Unlike community groups, artists rarely have strong investments in identifying the people and places in specific motion pictures, and instead emphasize the films’ aesthetic qualities. At the same time, these images are received as something more than footage, as their production history is often either incorporated into the work itself or takes on an important role in how these new pieces are received by critics and audiences. While both community and artistic reuse of local film transforms the original, artists also radically shift how these films are valued and interpreted. As a result, the three examples discussed here—Vanessa Renwick’s 2003 film Britton, South Dakota; Jenny Scheinman and Finn Taylor’s 2015 multimedia work Kannapolis, A Moving Portrait; and Gareth Long’s 2014 installation Kidnappers Foil—suggest some of the ways these films might be read when their ties to specific people and places are no longer what is most interesting about them. In other words, these artists are exploring the attractions these films have for people who do not see themselves, or their collective histories, on screen.

Even though they were produced by itinerants, most local films were not intended to travel. Their primary audience, and in many cases their only audience, consisted of people who recognized the scenes before them. This intimacy between the films and their subjects began to separate soon after their first screenings; almost all of the local films that are extant were shown to many local people who were not present for the movie’s premiere over a period of decades. And yet, it was not until these films entered archives that they attracted an audience that consisted mostly of people who were not from the community depicted.

One of the primary places where such screenings occurred was the Orphan Film Symposium, which, from its very first meeting in 1999, sought to connect the “film scholars, archivists and preservation experts” who found these motion pictures in archives throughout the world with the “filmmakers and historians” who might use them.⁴⁹ Filmmakers such as Alan Berliner, Péter Forgács, and Bill Morrison were invited to share their work with archivists and scholars, who in turn took interest in how filmmakers were using materials that archivists and scholars had studied and preserved. By bringing together professional communities with interests in orphan films, Dan Streible, who founded and continues to run the symposium, raised awareness of local films produced in the United States.

This model of archivist-artist partnership is seen in Vanessa Renwick’s 2003 film Britton, South Dakota, which reuses local newsreels shot by Ivan Besse in 1938 and 1939. In 1991, the archivist Rick Prelinger acquired two and a half hours of Besse’s films from a collector in Texas. Soon after, he brought the films back to Britton, where Besse again narrated them in front of an audience of people who recognized themselves and their neighbors in footage shot a half-century earlier. In early 2003, Renwick contacted Prelinger in search of footage she could use for a screening and performance event in Portland, Oregon.⁵⁰ He sent her a large sampling of films from his archives, including a video copy of Besse’s films. Renwick was immediately struck by the faces of the children in the films and selected two sequences to be scored by Johnne Eschleman, a multimedia artist who performed music under the name the Distance Formula. Shortly after the live performance and screening, Renwick invited Eschleman to record his score in a studio and matched it to the footage.

The nine-minute video opens with a black screen or, more precisely, a blank screen, as if to suggest the presence of a projector. On the soundtrack, one hears the hiss of a sound recording, as well as a selection of eerie sounds that may be coming from birds and amphibians or possibly electronic instruments. When the images appear an organ is heard on the soundtrack, creating an atmosphere of melancholia. The film transfer is exceptionally sharp, and Besse’s aesthetic, which, like many films of the period, borrows conventions from portrait photography, gives the impression that the children on screen were filmed out of a documentary impulse. In a brief comment, the filmmaker James Benning observes the “structural” quality of Britton, South Dakota, suggesting that the iterative practices used by many itinerants to maximize profits, particularly capturing every person who might be persuaded to see themselves on screen, could also be read as an experiment with film form.⁵¹

If Renwick reinterprets the Britton films as structuralist Americana, the musician and composer Jenny Scheinman, along with the filmmaker Finn Taylor, turned H. Lee Waters’s Movies of Local People into a series of small town portraits for Kannapolis: A Moving Portrait.⁵² The project was prompted by a new initiative, titled From the Archives, in which Duke Performances, the university’s performing arts organization, asked artists to create work inspired by, and in dialogue with, materials held by Duke’s Special Collections. In 2010, Aaron Greenwald, director of Duke Performances, approached Scheinman about writing songs based on Waters’s movies. Although Scheinman conducted extensive research about Waters and the culture of the mid-Atlantic South, in a radio interview she emphasized that she not did see her project as a documentary.⁵³ Rather, she sought to inhabit the lives of the people pictured, creating pieces that captured their perspectives while simultaneously considering how contemporary viewers, immersed in social media, might see the people and places depicted in Waters’s films.

In the performance, which premiered at Duke University’s Reynolds Industries Theater in March 2015, Scheinman accommodates this dual perspective by constructing narratives out of Waters’s footage. Although the work takes its name from one of the many cities Waters visited, Taylor uses footage from several dozen films, which he treats as material to be reedited, slowed down, color-corrected, and otherwise manipulated to fit Scheinman’s songs. Other sounds, such as the steady hum of textile machinery and the noises of children playing, are added to the soundtrack, breathing an aural life into the silent images. One of the hokiest moments in Waters’s films, when two embarrassed school-aged children, always a boy and girl, hold a large cardboard heart inscribed with the words “Be My Valentine,” is here presented as the early signs of a courtship. Character-centered songs, along with the repetition of certain images, allows for a reading of Waters’s films as little narratives, much in the way stories were constructed out of the best known images of the 1930s, photographs taken on behalf of the Farm Security Administration.⁵⁴ In this way, what appears to be intimacy in the work—particularly those songs that explore the inner lives of these characters—is instead an artifact of Scheinman’s and Taylor’s distance from the footage, which allows them to create their stories without concern for the identities of the people in the films. The processes of identification and recognition that were an essential part of the local film’s appeal are traded for more generalized pleasures of immersion in a distant and unfamiliar past.

Although Scheinman’s songs, such as one plainly titled “Good Old Days,” question the temptation to look back at these films with fondness, subtle manipulations of the original footage emphasize nostalgic, rather than critical, readings of the films. For example, Taylor makes considerable use of one of Waters’s trademark camera tricks—the reversal of time, most often used to show young boys leaping up from the ground and back onto the top of a cliff. Waters achieved this effect in camera, which means that in the films themselves we only see the action once. But Taylor is able to deliver us this movement over and over, in effect creating a hierarchy of images in which we are encouraged to fix our eyes on certain figures and movements. The work’s title, Kannapolis: A Moving Portrait, signals what distinguishes Scheinman’s and Taylor’s approach from other interpretations of Waters’s films: we are expected to see them as portraits, pictures planned and produced with the expectation that they would be studied with care, rather than the fleeting glances of someone we might recognize. In this way, Scheinman and Taylor suggest one possible future for local films—repositories of stories that we must imagine, rather than research, and wells of visual records that we can draw on continuously.

While Jenny Scheinman reimagines local films as containers of short narratives created out of arresting images, the installation and conceptual artist Gareth Long sees the narrative, fiction films of the itinerant filmmaker Melton Barker as being “littered with questions of amateurism [and] amateur participation,” which have long been preoccupations of his artistic practice.⁵⁵ Long came across Barker’s films shortly after they were listed in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2012. Although the registry is typically thought of as a place to honor specific films, Barker’s entire oeuvre was added, even presumably those films that are not known to have survive or that still lie in dusty corners of small towns, waiting to be found. In an interview, Long emphasized his interest in exploring the “copying and iteration and seriality” that goes on in Barker’s work, seeing it not only as a prototype of later cultural forms, such as reality television, but also as a late version of early cinema, in which copying was a “distribution method,” a way to get around copyright by creating a work again rather than merely duplicating another’s chase sequence or waves crashing against the shore.⁵⁶

For the piece, which was exhibited at the Kunsthalle Wien, a contemporary art museum in Vienna, Austria, Long arranged eleven large screens in a dark cube, some translucent and hanging from the ceiling, others set against the wall. Barker’s films are shown simultaneously, even retaining the crinkle of the soundtrack, creating a cacophony of mismatched sounds when the films are playing. Although the films start at the same time, very quickly minor differences emerge. In an essay that accompanied the exhibit, Erika Balsom observes that the films’s seriality “might be understood as [a] violent imposition of sameness that liquidates historicity and authenticity.”⁵⁷ Instead of the locality of these works emerging as their core quality, we instead see their sameness, with difference read as imperfection rather than something that makes each version unique. Although Balsom nods to the film’s documentary value at the end of her essay, such characteristics are not relevant to Long’s presentation of the films, and there is no attempt to locate them within a particular geography, a social context, or even a cultural milieu.

Artistic renditions and reuse of local films are, unsurprisingly, provocative, and in fact might be seen as affronts to the kind of careful, local historical work community groups have done with these motion pictures. And yet, these examples demonstrate the very alien qualities of local films, the fact that they represent not only people and places that are distant from the contemporary moment but also a past that is not well-known and does not circulate in other contexts. At the same time, these creative works do not attempt to recast local films as something they were not—home movies, raw footage, or ethnographic work—and thus wrestle with notions of representation, community, and seriality, all of which are at the core of itinerant practices. In fact, by reusing the local film for other purposes, these works underscore what, exactly, makes it such a distinct mode of motion picture production in the first place.

LOCAL FILMS, THE ARCHIVE, AND THE ACADEMY

For film historians and archivists, there is the temptation to return to the original, to make the moving image legible in its moment of origin, and to recreate the conditions under which it was initially seen. But for those who work with local films, realizing this goal is impossible, as such movies assumed a temporal and spatial wholeness that was inherently unstable. In addition, the quest to preserve films has the unintended consequence of making the access copies that were produced in local communities secondary to the prints that are preserved in archives. In effect, the best practices for researching and preserving many kinds of films, particularly those feature-length commercial productions that, over time, have come to be received as movies of artistic and historical interest, are insufficient, and potentially harmful, to local films.

Instead, the experiences of discovery, reclaiming, and reuse outlined here suggest another approach to preservation, which would add contextual information to make cinema legible to a wider range of audiences. If the chasm between contemporary viewers and film artifacts is ever widening, the processes of recovery, reclamation, and reuse serve as a drawbridge between the two, allowing the viewer to connect with local movies without threatening the integrity of the original artifact. Although residents of a depopulated factory town; museum visitors in Vienna, Austria; and a thirty-year-old looking for movies of their hometown online all view these works in different ways, the fact that they are able to see these movies at all suggests the impact of the considerable effort that has been put into disseminating these films to a larger public.

If local films were intended to be an evening’s entertainment, shown one evening and then forgotten, their survival alone has confounded expectations. In the last few decades, though, their recovery by archives, reclamation by community groups, and reuse by artists has offered something even more challenging—a picture of what the world might look like if every movie was thought to be a local film, one of unknown thousands, copies of copies, forever moving in and out of focus.

NOTES

1. Fossati, From Grain to Pixel, 23

2. Amad, Counter-Archive, 4.

3. After his death in 1969, Graham’s widow, Ruth Esther Graham, established the Shad E. Graham Memorial Film Library, a collection of his Our Home Town films and other productions, at the University of Texas at Austin. The reels were held by the College of Communication until 1983, when they were transferred to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, also at the University of Texas. As for the Waters films, William H. Brown, archives registrar for the Division of Archives and Records, part of the State Archives of North Carolina, noted that a number of public libraries and historical societies donated Waters’s films to the state archives between 1974 and 1977 but these films were not available to the public for many years. Viewing copies of the films are now available, and some of the films have been digitized and put online.

4. Jones, The Past Is a Moving Picture, 17.

5. Thanks to Karan Sheldon for suggesting I should emphasize the role archivists at small institutions played in changing national preservation priorities.

6. Among the other state archives and historical societies that recognized the importance of their moving image collections were the Rhode Island Historical Society, Oregon Historical Society, Minnesota Historical Society, and Chicago History Museum.

7. NFPF Grant Application, courtesy of Paul Eisloeffel, Nebraska State Historical Society.

8. Gordon L. Olson, “Statement Regarding Library of Congress National Film Preservation Board Reauthorization,” in Film Preservation 1993: A Study of the Current State of American Film Preservation (Washington, DC: National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress, 1993), 4:159–160.

9. Annette Melville and Scott Simmon, Film Preservation 1993, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress, 1993), https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-film-preservation-board/preservation-research/film-preservation-study/current-state-of-american-film-preservation-study/

10. It is still unclear where the elements for the Blissveldt Romance preservation are located, though correspondence with Jim Winslow, a local historian in Grand Rapids, suggests that all elements remain at the Allen labs.

11. Zanish, “Present and Past in the Cradle of Dixie,” 28. The film premiered at the Grand Theater, which was part of the same theater chain.

12. Ibid., 25.

13. Ibid., 28. For more on Alabama’s approach to its multiple, and conflicting, heritage sites, see Eskew, “From Civil War to Civil Rights.”

14. The film was produced by Bill Schaum and written and narrated by Bob Ingram, a longtime reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser. It aired on WSFA, a Montgomery television station, in 1987.

15. When You Wore a Tulip and I Wore a Bright Red Rose, directed by Stephen Schaller, 1983.

16. University and state archives have also taken an interest in collecting regional film. For an extensive list of such archives, see Karan Sheldon and Karen Glynn, “Regional Moving Image Archives, United States” (2006), http://www.oldfilm.org/files/file/RegionalArchives.pdf.

17. “About Us,” Northeast Historic Film, 2010, http://oldfilm.org/content/about-us.

18. Sheldon, “Meeting the Movie Queen,” 80.

19. Two other Movie Queen films, from Bogata, New Jersey, and East Palestine, Ohio, circulate online.

20. For example, members of the Van Buren Rotary Club held on to their Movie Queen production but over time forgot what was on the 16mm reel. See “Collections: Movie Queen Mania,” Moving Image Review, Winter 2003, 7. Likewise, the Ellsworth, Maine, Movie Queen was discovered in 2015 in a collection that had been held by NHF since 1999.

21. Many of these archivists, including Andrea McCarty, Don Radovich, and Dwight Swanson, were trained at the L. Jeffrey Selznick School for Film Preservation in Rochester, New York, which started in 1996.

22. Flyer, H. Lee Waters Collection, David M. Rubenstein Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

23. Letter, personal collection of the author.

24. According to Kirby’s grandson Bob Morgan, now a pharmacist in Roxboro, Kirby left the business because he found it increasingly difficult to compete with multiplex theaters in Durham, North Carolina, thirty miles to the south, and was dissatisfied with the quality of films, whose content meant that the theater could not keep to its mission of showing “family entertainment.”

25. “Old Movies Appeal to Nostalgia,” Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal, January 12, 1976, 17.

26. As noted above, many of these films were soon after transferred to the State Archives of North Carolina.

27. Tom Whiteside, “Up for Adoption? The Adaptability of H. Lee Waters’ Movies of Local People,” http://www.sc.edu/orphanfilm/orphanage/symposia/orphans1/whiteside.html.

28. Duke University Libraries, H. Lee Waters Film Collection, http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hleewaters/.

29. Kula, “Up from the Permafrost.”

30. Wagoner, “The Huntingdon’s Hero Story.”

31. Kammen, On Doing Local History, 5.

32. Baron, The Archive Effect, 9, 22.

33. Michael Z. Newman, Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 105.

34. Reedsburg 1938 film, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmvNNgeF618.

35. In fact, when I viewed the copy at the Wisconsin Historical Society, I was unaware of the reclamation of the film, which was later uploaded to YouTube.

36. Counter to what the narrator of the film implies, the movie had been found several decades earlier by Robert Casoli, a visual education instructor at Hopewell High School in Aliquippa, who screened it from time to time at community events. See “In One Ear,” (Aliquippa, Penn.) Beaver Valley Times, November 26, 1959, 1. Don Inman acquired the film in 1990, when it was sent to the Boston-based Blackside, Inc., for use as footage for a WGBH documentary series about the Great Depression. Although the footage was not included in the documentary, the video transfer enabled the production of Aliquippa in 1937.

37. This rather unhappy story is emphasized in other local histories. For example, Rade Vukmir’s 1999 history of the Jones and Laughlin steel mill in Aliquippa notes in the introduction that “the greed of the 1980’s driven by Wall Street and the desire for shareholder and corporate profits had shut the mill down and ended a way of life forever,” and goes on to document, with photographs, oral histories, and production data, exactly what was lost. See Vukmir, The Mill, 15.

38. Landsberg, Engaging the Past, 29.

39. Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, 51, 58–59, 79.

40. Maurice Halbwachs’s work on collective memory is also useful here because he identifies the tension between efforts to establish and cultivate a national memory and the very localized, and often familial, nature of our own memories. See Halbwachs, On Collective Memory.

41. “Remember Cliffside,” remembercliffside.com.

42. “Cliffside News,” Forest City (N.C.) Courier, August 9, 1937, 9.

43. More recently, Duke University has created a companion website for the Waters collection, effectively a moving image equivalent of Roy Stryker’s Farm Security Administration photography unit in which the films themselves become secondary to a visualization of small-town culture in the Depression-era South.

44. In fact, in 2015, a fundraising campaign was launched to pay for the site’s preservation. See “Preserve 13 Years of Historical Research,” https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/preserve-13-years-of-historical-research#/.

45. Burgin, The Remembered Film.

46. Tommy Carlock, “Movie Queen - 1940’s Bogota NJ Part 1,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nC-msW5gm8&list=PLChMSN94D1H1_2jbiM1eCm5O13LYNqcn0&index=3.

47. Carl Christensen, “Norristown Pennsylvania - 1937 promotional film by the Chamber of Commerce,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sELHCpBkLs0&index=77&list=PLChMSN94D1H1_2jbiM1eCm5O13LYNqcn0.

48. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfUz13Lg22o&index=42&list=PLChMSN94D1H1_2jbiM1eCm5O13LYNqcn0.

49. “Call for Participants: Preservation of Film Conference,” Columbia, S.C. (September 23–25, 1999),” http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-announce&month=9906&week=d&msg=Z0KRZsEI49dkeSOc5u4xGQ&user=&pw=.

50. Vanessa Renwick, personal conversation with the author, November 7, 2015.

51. “Britton, South Dakota,” http://www.odoka.org/the_work/britton_south_dakota/.

52. Film editor Rick Lecompte and sound designer Trevor Jolly also contributed to the piece’s production. See “World Premiere Presentation: Duke Performances Commissions Acclaimed Musician Jenny Scheinman to Create New Work Inspired by North Carolina Films of H. Lee Waters,” December 9, 2014, https://dukeperformances.duke.edu/sites/default/files/u75/Press%20Release%20Duke%20Performances%20Jenny%20Scheinman%20%2B%20H.%20Lee%20Waters%20’Kannapolis’%2012-09-14.pdf.

53. Jenny Scheinman, interview, WUNC, March 20, 2015, http://wunc.org/post/kannapolis-moving-portrait.

54. For more on the Farm Security Administration, see Smith, Making the Modern, chapter 8.

55. Gareth Long, interview with the author, November 9, 2015.

56. Ibid.

57. Balsom, “Repeat Performance.”