Harvard Film Archive Collections

It’s a proud day over here at the Harvard Film Archive.

The electronic finding aid for one of our most regularly accessed collections of material, The Hollis Frampton Collection, 1963-2001, is now available online via Harvard’s OASIS catalog!

Hollis Frampton Collection, 1963-2001 : Guide

Researchers can now instantly view and search a list of contents in this vast collection, which consists of items ranging from posters, photographs, 16mm film, 1/2″ open reel video, and artworks – just to name a few – and gives rare insight into the career and personality of one of America’s most important avant-garde filmmakers.  In addition, users with a Harvard ID and pin can access and listen to digitized audio recordings directly from the finding aid.

To set up a research appointment, see the HFA’s access policies.

And if you’re in the Chicago area, check out this upcoming symposium and screening series on Frampton:

Critical Mass: Re-Viewing Hollis Frampton

The 7th annual Home Movie Day will be held at the HFA on Saturday October 17th.

Over the years we have seen a wide variety of films at Home Movie Day, from an amateur Tarzan re-enactment by kids in the 1930s to film taken on an oceanliner in the 1920s.  Last year a teenage spy film hit the screen to great acclaim.  Classic home movies of barbecues and family vacations are our bread and butter, and they never cease to surprise and delight the crowd.

Why home movies? Because these little films, yours, or your grandma’s, or the ones you found at the junkyard, are unique and personal, potentially interesting, funny, pretty, fascinating and strange, and certainly worth a watch. Be the star of the show!

We provide the screen, projectors, projectionists, film inspectors, music, and information about film preservation and home movies in general, you provide the films.

The films you bring can be new or old (but don’t bring films we’ve shown at Home Movie Days past), they can belong to you or someone else. They should be amateur (not mass-produced), but those are the only guidelines.

Home Movie Day

Check in with your films at 11am
Films will screen 1-4pm
In room B-04 in the lower level of the Carpenter Center
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge

Bring out your home movies on super 8, 8mm, 16mm, VHS, DVD, or other video format (bring a player or camera). Video is limited to 5 minutes. Local film archivists will be on hand to discuss home movie preservation.

Each film must be inspected for damage before being run on a projector, so please drop off your film as early as you can.  If possible, drop off your film at the HFA office the week prior to the event.

For more information about Home Movie Day and locations around the country, visit the Home Movie Day website, homemovieday.org.

(notalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971)

The HFA recently posted a number of preserved audio recordings from the Hollis Frampton Collection on Harvard’s online catalog, HOLLIS.

Filmmaker, photographer, and critic Hollis Frampton’s collection came to the HFA in 2003.   From original artworks to invaluable audio recordings, this collection gives rare insight into the career and personality of one of the most important American avant-garde filmmakers.  The recently digitized recordings document Frampton giving lectures, answering audience questions and engaging in lively debates after screenings of his own work  throughout the late 1960s and mid 1970s.

The collection is currently available for use on site at the HFA’s conservation center and at the Fine Arts Library’s reading room.   An online finding aid is in progress and will be posted to OASIS in the coming months.  In the meantime, the preserved audio recordings can be accessed online by members of the Harvard community, and the entire collection can be accessed on site by following our research inquiry steps outlined on the HFA website.

In this example , Frampton can be heard lecturing at the Carnegie Institute on January 21st, 1971 as part of the Independent Filmmaker Series.  Frampton’s films Surface Tension, Artificial Light, Zorns Lemma and (nostalgia) are discussed during the lecture and the question and answer period that follows.

The fifteen digitized and preserved recordings represent only a portion of the 1/4″ reel to reel tapes and cassette tapes in the Hollis Frampton Collection at the Harvard Film Archive.  The Frampton Collection also includes photographic and xerographic art works made by Frampton, videotapes of television interviews with and shows about the artist, writings on Frampton by various authors from numerous magazines and newspapers, photographic slides picturing Frampton, letters written to Frampton, and paper materials corresponding to exhibitions of the artist’s work and that of his friends.

Thanks to film archivists around the country, all the stills in the previous post were positively identified within hours of posting them.

Nice work everyone!

Anyone well-versed in the world of Abbott and Costello is welcome to identify the still below.

email me with your answer

coffey (at) fas (dot) harvard (dot) edu

the sign in the window reads Shirts & Neckties. The number is 616-3, but it doesn't appear to match a Universal picture.

The HFA has a new display case in our office at the Carpenter Center.  This month’s exhibit is from my present favorite, the Howard E. Burr Collection.

These boxes once housed films sold to the home market, and they fall into a few categories.

First, the newsfilm, newsreel, sports, or other newsy documentary  film.  These are generally serial or magazine -type films.  The covers don’t have much variation from month to month.

Next up, the cartoon.  Most of these cartoons are not one-offs, so the same cover could be used for all Happy Hooligan cartoons, for instance, with only the name (printed on the side) changing for each box.

Soundies are another example of a somewhat generic cover that could be used again and again, the only variation being the color of the box and the description of the content.  Soundies were short musical films, a pre-cursor to the music video.

Several distributors, finding their content appealing and their name well recognized, chose to sell their films in a generic box almost all the time.

Of course, a generic box was also a cost cutter, as was re-using an image.

Many times, reduction prints of feature films had exciting covers showing scenes from the film.

To see these covers and more in person, drop by our office.

In the young days of cinema, one of the first methods for presenting a film with recorded sound was to employ a method of sound on disc.  In the mid-1920s, films were occasionally distributed with an accompanying record.  The projector for this type of presentation had a record player attached to the base, and the record and film would be synched up by the projectionist.  As one might imagine, the synch didn’t always work, sometimes the record would skip or perhaps the operator would put on the wrong record.  It wasn’t a perfect system.

In the later 1920s, sound on film, which was a system that had been simmering for a few years, broke through and changed popular cinema forever, effectively killing the silent feature film.  This technique of sound on film, still in use today, provides an optical soundtrack on the edge of the film, which means it never goes out of synch (unless there has been a mix-up in the production of the track) as well as avoiding other problems of sound on disc.

Sound on disc made a brief re-appearance in the 1990s with the introduction of the digital sound on CD format, DTS.  In this format, the 35mm print was released with an optical soundtrack as well as digital track on CD.  To use this system, there would be a time code reader on the projector that read an optical timecode on the film (see below), which kept the CD track in synch with the picture.  As with other theatrical digital formats, the analogue optical soundtrack is retained, and in case of failure of the digital sound, the projector can revert to the optical soundtrack.

This image, below, from Kill Bill (Tarentino, 2003), shows the 4 modern soundtracks.  The left side of the film shows two digital tracks, Sony’s blue SDDS on the outer edge of the perforations, Dolby’s black digital information between the perforations, and to the right of the perforations, the two white lines of analogue optical soundtrack (variable area), and the DTS optical timecode (white vertical dashes to the immediate left of the image), which is used to keep the CD in synch with the picture.

I discovered today, while working with the Burr Collection, that sound on disc found its way to the home movie market as late as 1966.  The 8mm film pictured below, perhaps not surprisingly, is a compilation film from the 1920s/1930s when cinema’s comedians were coming out of a career in vaudeville.

8mm sound on disc

The record provided with this film could be played on standard record player, but it is a flexi-disc, the cheapest of disc recordings.  This type of record could also be found in magazines as an advertisement or free song.

Last month the HFA’s Conservation Center staff attended the annual Summer Symposium at Northeast Historic Film in Bucksport, ME.  The theme of this year’s symposium was Ways of Watching.

Papers were delivered on topics as diverse as watching and interpreting the home movies of strangers, presenting films at a department store in the early days of cinema, and viewing films in classrooms.

This was a great opportunity for the HFA to present some films from the Howard E. Burr Collection.  We realized that, although the scholars and archivists at the symposium were very interested in watching films, some may not have ever seen a film projected, as many researchers access film through digital or video copies of the actual film.  Most had probably not watched films at the home of a collector, and many had probably not seen the films I chose to project for them.

We decided to set up a screening night that would roughly represent a typical screening night in the home of a film collector.  We didn’t want the screening to take place at the same venue as the symposium, which was held in NHF’s movie theatre, because the nature of the event demanded a more intimate atmosphere.  A local participant in the symposium generously volunteered to host the screening at her home, which was perfect.

Not all collectors present their screenings in the same way, but there tends to be a common  wish to “put on a show,” frequently aping the habits of the cinema during Hollywood’s Golden Age.   Rare is the screening of only one title.  “Doc” Burr’s daughter described screening nights at his home, which represent the habits of many others: “He was big on showing newsreels, a travelogue, previews of coming attractions, or cartoons (sometimes one of each!) preceding the feature.”  For the NHF screening night we attempted a similar program (although far shorter).

We presented film on 3 small gauge formats common to the US home cinema market: 16mm, 8mm, and super 8. First, an 8mm reduction print of a silent Mack Sennett comedy, The Campus Carmen (1928).  Next up, New England Holiday!, a 16mm short, silent travelogue from the 1940s about vacationing in New England.  In keeping with tradition, we moved to a cartoon, Farmer Gray in English Channel Swim (1925), shown in 16mm.  The “feature” finale was a super 8 condensed reduction print of Taxi Driver (1976), with mag sound.

It was not unusual for studios to release condensed versions of features for the home market.  Most common are the 8mm or super 8 silent versions that take a feature film and reduce it to its best 5 minutes, using inter-titles to explain the story.

This version of Taxi Driver was a little different.  The tale was cut down to the story of Travis, the pimp, and Iris (the teenage prostitute).  A narrator is employed to describe some gaps in the story.  “Travis Bickle has decided to take revenge against the pimp.”  The original sound from the film is retained.  “You lookin’ at me?”  Using only the scenes of sex and violence, the film is reduced to an exploitation version of itself.

The screening was a perfect coda to the symposium.  Everyone welcomed the opportunity to sit and watch films projected from a few feet behind them, the unfamiliar noise of the projector becoming part of the show.  People who were not familiar with these “home versions” of feature films were fascinated by them.  The woman who had not seen Taxi Driver had her fears confirmed, but has lived to tell the tale.

Upon returning home, we discovered quite a number of these super 8 sound condensed films, and hope to put a screening together for the public.  Keep an eye on our calender for details.

While item level cataloging of the HFA’s film collection in HOLLIS Classic is already underway (with over 1500 titles already available — limit your search to location:  Harvard Film Archive), another way to access information about the archive’s collections is via Harvard’s Online Archival Search Information System, OASIS.

Here, researchers can find collection level finding aids of HFA holdings.  This type of description is most useful for HFA collections that include outtakes, ephemera, or any type of material that is not easily described with a single title.  For example, the HFA’s first finding aid is the “Dick Fontaine Paper and Outtakes Collection,” which contains not only the feature films of the English documentary filmmaker Dick Fontaine, but also the outtakes, research material, video copies, and documentation that went into the production of each film.

Finding aids for a number of other HFA collections are in the works and will appear on OASIS in the coming year.

The finding aid for the Dick Fontaine collection can be found here:
http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/deepLink?_collection=oasis&uniqueId=hfa00004

And here’s more information about the Harvard Film Archive’s “Dick Fontaine Paper and Outtakes Collection”:

The Dick Fontaine collection at the Harvard Film Archive contains materials produced by English documentary filmmaker Dick Fontaine between the mid-1960s to the 1990s.  Currently professor of documentary production at the National Film and Television School in the UK, Fontaine is credited with introducing the techniques of Direct Cinema to British television and has produced, directed, and written more than forty films specializing in documentary, music, and original drama subjects. Included in the HFA’s collection are film prints and research copies of projects Fontaine produced with the Beatles, John Cage, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, and Johnny Rotten, as well as video, film, and audio elements resulting from the production of many of Fontaine’s documentaries.

A highlight among the materials in this collection are elements related to the research and production of the film I Heard it Through the Grapevine (1982), directed by Fontaine and Pat Hartley and produced by their independent production company, Grapevine Pictures.  The documentary follows writer James Baldwin as he revisits the settings of civil rights struggles of the 1960s in the Deep South and reexamines the movement’s ideals twenty years later. Film elements for Grapevine consist of release prints and pre-production materials, including a complete set of picture and magnetic sound outtakes. The paper material includes notes, newspaper clippings, reports, and correspondence on the topics of civil rights, community organizing in the south, and the life of writer James Baldwin that were collected by Fontaine while preparing and researching the topic of the film.  Scripts, interview transcripts, shot lists, correspondence, contracts, clearances relating to the production, as well as materials regarding the screening and reception of the film are included in the paper materials as well.

The paper and film portions of the collection arrived at the HFA in 2006. Materials in this collection will be particularly useful for researchers not only interested in Fontaine’s career but also the history of documentary film, UK television, music and film, the civil rights movement in the United States, and writer James Baldwin.

The Polaroid corporation, whose former headquarters are located conspicuously close to the Conservation Center of the Harvard Film Archive between Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, made a grab for the home movie market in the late 1970s with the release of Polavision.

1978 Polaroid Polavision Instant Movies Commercial

Polavision camera and cartridge

Known as a favorite endeavor of Polaroid’s founder Edwin Land, the Polavision project, which included a camera, viewer, and instant super 8 film cartridges, went into development in the 1950s and was released to the public in 1978.

photo courtesy polapix

The project’s technical premise was based on additive color, a process inherently slower than the subtractive color process used in one-step print color photography that Polaroid pioneered in the 1950s and 1960s and also unlike other motion picture film stock of the time. (though it did have some similarities to the Dufaycolor process used in the 1930s and 1940s by filmmakers such as Len Lye).

Essentially the film consists of a black and white base and a three color filter layer where colors are formed by blocking light with dyes of magenta, yellow, and cyan. If you take a look at some processed Polavision film under a microscope, you’ll find that its surface is made up of strips of alternating red, green, and blue filters (appearing in some ways like the phosphor stripes of the CRT of a color TV).  These filters act both during exposure and during viewing to reproduce color.*

Polavision film scan

The nature of the additive process resulted in a very dense look, as the filtering cut down on the amount of light that could be transmitted through the film. This is the reason for the standalone table-top viewer, which aimed to correct this problem, but also made the system very proprietary in nature, unlike most other super 8 films which could be viewed with any brand’s super 8 projector.

While the instantaneous nature of the process was undoubtedly innovative, Polavision was a monumental failure for the Polaroid corporation with disappointing sales and languishing inventory. More than anything, the timing of the new process was just off – instant movies were quickly becoming available to home consumers with video cameras. The Polavision system as a whole, aside from the difference between the recording format of film or video, resembles early camcorder systems: the portable VCR consisted of the cassette player/recorder unit, and a television tuner unit, much like Polavision’s camera, cassettes, and separate viewer.

Polavision proved to be a costly mistake for Polaroid, and by 1979, only a year after widespread public introduction, production ceased and the Board of Directors wrote down the huge inventory of Polavision products, rumored to result in a $15 million loss for the company. In spite of its short life span, Polavision cartridges exist in many archives and collections today, including those of the Harvard Film Archive. Artists and filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, Robert Gardner, Stan Brakhage and Charles and Ray Eames utilized the format for their works, as well as countless numbers of equally important amateur home movie makers.

*Technical information courtesy The Land List, http://www.rwhirled.com/landlist/landdcam-pvis.htm

Welcome to our blog. We’ll be writing about the Harvard Film Archive’s Collection, which has over 15,000 items, mostly 16mm and 35mm film.

The image above is a frame enlargement from the film Child of the Big City, by Yevgenii Bauer.