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curated by Karianne Fiorini and Dwight Swanson
In the last twenty years, more or less, numerous film collectors, families, and film archives devoted to the home movie heritage of the last century have put their home movie collections (or at least part of them) online, providing them with the images and information needed to give us an idea of which kind of materials the virtual spectators are going to have access to. Curated by home movies specialists Karianne Fiorini (Italy) and Dwight Swanson (the United States), “Private Films in Public Spaces” is a program of home movies and amateur films found online, a virtual voyage around Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world, with a spotlight on two of the main characteristics of the home movie heritage’s most enlightening subjects: private lives and public events.
Talking about home movies on the Internet means diving into a mare magnum of websites, catalogs, databases, repositories, and other online resources in which you can completely lose yourself in the huge amount of film materials available online in terms of beauty, customs and traditions, social richness, geographic spaces, and the cultural peculiarities which have brought the viewers through time and space. This program is an attempt to outline some possible personal paths by surfing through different routes: film archives, countries, cultures, people, historical eras, and events.
All these journeys all around the world through the eyes of the “amateurs” and their small gauge cameras will offer to the public a glimpse into what we can find online and on what home movies are (or can be) without any attempt to be exhaustive. After following the whole path, each home movie reveals itself to be different from the others, so at least from now on we hopefully will no longer hear the usual comments about these films, “they are all the same,” or “if you watch one of them you have seen them all!”.
George Jefferies - George Jefferies Film (1963, 2', 8mm, silent) [Excerpt]
United States
Sixth Floor Museum
Scenes from the day of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Ira Gershwin - Prize Fight (1937, 1', 16mm, silent)
United States
Library of Congress
A boxing match filmed from the crowd by songwriter Ira Gershwin.
Homer Henselt Howard - Movie Film Showing How the Kingsley Machine is Manufactured at Our Factory (1930s, 3', 16mm, silent)
United States
Chicago Film Archives
An amateur industrial film of machines and workers on a factory floor.
Jim Hubbard - 1988 ACT UP Kiss-in (1988, 3', 16mm, silent)
Unites States
Jim Hubbard
Hand-processed 16mm film of an anti-AIDS, anti-homophobia demonstration in New York City.
Karl Berolzheimer - Maxwell Street Market (1978, 4', 16mm, silent)
United States
Chicago Film Archives
A glimpse of Chicago’s lively Maxwell Street Market shot in the late 1970s.
Don McIlvaine - Mural: Paint West Wall (1969, 4', Super 8, silent)
United States
Chicago Film Archives
Artist Don McIllvaine painting “Black Man’s Dilemma,” a large mural on a Chicago building.
Cassandra Bromfield - Ditmas Jr. High School playlist (1970s, 9', Super 8, sound)
United States
Cassandra Bromfield
8 short films of student life in a Brooklyn, New York junior high school.
Tara Nelson – Marathon (2010, 3', Super 8, silent)
United States
Tara Nelson
The Boston Marathon as seen through the eyes of a non-runner.
Jon Maloy - Inside a Projection Booth (1965, 1', 8mm?, silent)
United States
Texas Archive of the Moving Image
A movie theater projection booth in Austin, Texas.
Jacob Glick - Portrait Posing (1944, 2', 16mm, silent)
United States
Chicago Film Archives
Portrait-style home movie of family members posing while sitting on chair.
Anonymous - New Year’s Eve 1961 (1961, 3', 8mm, silent with added score)
United States
Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound
Couples dance at a 1961/1962 New Year’s Eve party in East Tennessee.
Fred McLeod - All Personal Sound Movies (1962, 5', 16mm, sound) [Excerpt]
United States
Orgone Archive
Sound-on-film home movies of filmmaker Fred McLeod at his mother’s house in Oakmont, Pennsylvania.
Walther Barth – Fee (1929, 8', 16mm, silent with added score) [Excerpt]
Germany
Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound
A young couple’s film of themselves set amongst wildflowers and smokestacks.
George Moreau - Mariage Georges Moreau (1923, 8', 9.5mm, silent) [Excerpt]
France
Cinéam
Georges Moreau and Odette Merlaud’s wedding on 24 January 1923 in Charenton-le-Pont.
Augusto Gandini - La vendemmia a Incisa in Val d’Arno (1929, 4', 9.5mm, silent)
Italy
Archivio Cinescatti di Lab 80 film
Grape harvest in Incisa in Val d’Arno.
Father Delany - Gloucester Street (1931-31, 7', 16mm, silent) [Excerpt]
Ireland
Irish Film Institute
Life in a heavily-populated, inner-city Dublin neighbourhood.
Fausto Moroni - A Shanghai I (1933, 2', 8mm, silent)
Italy
Archivio Superottimisti
Glimpses of Shanghai in the early Thirties.
Francesco Vodret - La “Marcia dei Martiri” (1934, 4', 9.5mm, silent)
Italy
Società Umanitaria - Cineteca Sarda
Fascist commemoration in Florence.
Edouard Franciscus Millecam - Rotterdam 1939 (1939, 8', 9.5mm, silent) [Excerpt]
The Netherlands
Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid
City symphony in Rotterdam.
W. Werners-Sandbergen - 5 Mei 1945 (1945, 13', 8mm, silent) [Excerpt]
The Netherlands
Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid
The Liberation of Amsterdam 5 May 1945.
Jean Lepage - Fête de l'école à Montcavrel (1951, 4', 9.5mm, silent)
France
Archipop
The children of the Montcavrel school offer a show made up of traditional dances and gymnastic choreographies during the school festival.
Gaston Grabit - La Tribu des Zanko (1954, 13', 9.5mm, silent) [Excerpt]
France
Cinémathèque des Pays de Savoie et de l’Ain
The Zanko family, gypsy boilermakers from the Chalderash community, in Villeurbanne.
Girolamo Sotgiu - Congresso Nazionale del PCI (1956, 4'', 8mm, silent)
Italy
Società Umanitaria - Cineteca Sardai
The National Congress of the Italian Communist Party in Rome in 1956.
John Perrin - Perrin Family Home Movie: Our Baby and Baby's Day (1966-1971, 29', 8mm, silent) [Excerpt]
England
London’s Screen Archives
Home movie documenting family celebrations in East Dulwich and Brixton.
Jeannine Boitelle - Pêcheurs de Nazaré (1970s, 4', Super 8, silent)
France
Cinémémoire
The ancestral gestures of the fishermen of Nazaré.
Giovanni Torri - Gianmarco a Pesaro con la nonna Clara Palazzetti (1971, 2', 8mm, silent)
Italy
Private collection
A little child strolling around Pesaro with his grandmother in 1971.
Perspectives on curating online cinema
by Gianmarco Torri
This section was conceived as an attempt to develop a critical reflection on what we have gone through over the past year.
Almost all of us have been obliged to live and work exclusively online. We have been watching countless screenings, meetings, virtual conferences, and all of us have realized how many resources are available on the world wide web.
Such materials have appeared as a consequence of a ‘year of living remotely’ and as a virtual substitute for conventional theatrical screening programmes in several cases, but some of them had already been accessible for years on the websites and channels of many archives, associations, museums, festivals, cultural projects, and film-makers.
Our goal is to try and understand how this year’s experience can influence our work as well as to respond positively to this historical moment, learning some useful lesson for the future.
None of us believes any longer in the relevance and necessity of an actual theatrical viewing experience. Over the past few years, the Pesaro Film Festival has tried to prove this with a section dedicated to Super8 that explored and presented not only ‘images,’ but also the materiality of films, along with film-makers with their own personality and corporeality, and screenings with their performative, experiential, and collective dimension.
However, we cannot overlook that which happened, and how it affected our perspectives, culture, and society. We have possibly attained a better clarity of mind on what had already been going on for two decades now.
To meet this challenge over the long term, we have focused our reflection on those materials that are accessible online for free and permanently, which we think are those that can actually affect the traditional balance between access, curatorship, and film culture.
On a more utopian (not necessarily linked to pirating practices) level, these are materials that should effectively allow to overcome some hierarchic, geographic, economic, and cultural barriers as well as encourage to see the world wide web as something else than just another paying platform (something that has been little forgotten and scarcely practiced anyway).
Over the next few years, free-access streaming of images online is certainly not going to curb. On the contrary, expectations are that it continues to grow exponentially.
This immense territory actually offers those who operate in film culture an amount of assets that has never been so close at hand, and to a certain extent even snatched from the market logic and commercial operators. It deserves to be studied and upgraded in our consideration, instead of just deplored because it is supposed to belittle the movie-going experience, as though most of us – also based on the narrow cultural scope of conventional movie-theatre programming – had not already been discovering new works and shaping their own idea of film by way of the ‘small screens.’
We have not explored this wealth of materials with an encyclopaedic approach – mapping and listing websites or online resources may well be useful but does not produce a reflection on this opportunity – but we asked some curators/programmers for their critical point of view, putting themselves to the test and sharing their experience.
We asked them – each in their own field – to disclose the instruments that they use to orient their efforts, their points of reference, their knowledge, and the conceptual connections with which they construct an online programme, including how they avail themselves of this ‘virtual’ film dimension in their work. Another goal was for them to highlight the opportunities and the critical points, putting the resources in a historical and critical dimension, enabling us to find new paths and master new instruments of our own.
This is doubtlessly an ongoing process, but we believe it should be surveyed as we are convinced that in the years to come it will bring about deep change both in terms of access to the world film heritage and in terms of curatorship and programming as far as education and dissemination of film culture are concerned.
We would like the Pesaro Film Festival to become a site of critical exploration of a territory familiar to everyone but scarcely known. Sharing and juxtaposing perspectives could gradually contribute to a mapping of the future and a working hypothesis.
This section is accompanied by an e-book published by the Pesaro Film Festival available for free on the website of the Festival and the major platforms of distribution. The reflection that starts at the Festival is expanded through critical essays and more proposals of online programmes offered by the section curators and other illustrious contributors such as Oliver Hanley, Maurizio Marras, and Rick Prelinger.
OPEN ACCESS CINEMA
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