In which Penn Museum’s Film Archives announces a new occasional series: Live from the Archives!
One great pleasure of archival work is to see what creativity researchers bring to interpreting the materials in our Museums’ collections. Once, their output consisted mostly of print publications using these primary source materials, more recently, artists and filmmakers are discovering digital visual materials in the re-use of our film and other collections. Most excitingly, often these filmmakers come from the cultures of the people in the films.
To celebrate this we have begun a series of screenings that highlight documentaries that make use of our collections, in addition to screening films that the Museum originally produced. We call this occasional series Live from the Archives! The premier screening will be Thursday March 15th at 6pm, (free admission, open to all)
Elephant in the Dark: Refractions of Muslim Identity, featuring one film by young Persian-American filmmaker, Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz, which makes use of Watson Kintner’s 1963 footage of Iran, in her first person essay film Inheritence. The second film, Ghetto girl by Ambarien Alqadar, makes extensive use of her family’s archival super-8 footage, and takes place in the largest Muslim neighborhood of Delhi.
Keep your eyes open for the following screenings:
- Jeanette Kong has made a film called The Chiney Shop, which makes extensive use of a reel of Arthur and Kate Tode’s footage of the West Indies (Jamaica) in the 1930’s, to tell the tale of the Chinese community in Jamaica and how they became utterly Jamaican while retaining their Chinese identity. We hope to screen this film in September 2012, the filmmaker will be present, and a panel talk on the Chinese diaspora and its presence in Jamaica is being organized by Dr. John Jackson and Dr. Deborah A. Thomas.
- Maren Elwood’s film, Stone and People is about the tension between land rights of current day Inca people and archaeological field work and antiquities preservation. The particular Kate and Arthur Tode collection film reel from Peru that Maren culled from was preserved in a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation in 2007, the first of four that we have received for our film collections. It is gratifying to learn that we selected to preserve a film that turns out to have relevance to a large audience in Peru, and will be reborn in a new context some eighty years later. (Imagine Kate and Arthur’s spirits in surprise to see that they are heavily featured in a new film!) We expect to present this film in late 2012.
- The latest collaboration with a filmmaker involves a Fulbright project in India about Victorian colonial period female travelers, which she will contrast with current day internet consumption (virtual travel) by South Asian teen girls. The filmmaker, Courtney Stephens, currently researching in Kolkata(formerly Calcutta), will be working with the Dixon and Tode collections for this film. which is titled Venus Peregrine. No date has been yet set for this screening, since it is still in production, but likely it will be in Spring 2013.
Stay tuned for more details!