To Hold in the Heart & Live from the Archives!
By: Kate Pourshariati
A filmmaker documents her mother’s flight from Laos, archival film from Museum collections help to tell the story.
Mr. Kintner meets TedX
By: Kate Pourshariati
Recently the Archives department had a request for footage of Morocco, which turned out to be for a film about current day and historic use of water in Rabat. Once again Watson Kintner’s beautiful Kodachrome footage (1951, etc.) has had another outing in the world, this time returned to Rabat where the filmmaker has presented […]
Navajo Film Themselves/Through Navajo Eyes at Penn Museum
By: Kate Pourshariati
This summer (2012) an intern from Kenyon College, Melanie Shelton, spent over 320 hours doing research in the Sol Worth papers at University of Pennsylvania. During this time, she constructed a website based on manuscripts from the Navajo Film Themselves/Through Navajo Eyes project. The original project took place in 1966 in Pine Springs, Arizona and […]
Films Shared Back
By: Kate Pourshariati
Back in the 1980s when video cameras became ubiquitous they slowly made their way around the world, and we started to get videos from indigenous communities in Brazil, such as the Videos in the Villages collective, and productions from native Alaskan people such as KYUK tv. It is an eye opener for audiences to see […]
Retro Mashup International
By: Kate Pourshariati
Live from the Archives! Film series is announced, with its inaugural screening on March 15th, 2012.
A true translation: Updates on Matto Grosso (1931), and The Hoax (1932)
By: Kate Pourshariati
Regular readers of the Penn Museum blog may recall a post about an exciting film re-identification and discovery, in which we realized that the film that we thought was The Kid was really called The Hoax (1932) and that a copy was in the collections of the Smithsonian. By way of University of Pennsylvania’s Dr. […]
Native Life in the Philippines (1913), or, Another missing film found in the Archives.
By: Kate Pourshariati
Thanks to our digitized and streamed film collections on the Internet Archive, Dr. Mark Rice, a researcher who teaches at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York, found a rare 1913 film of which the Museum likely has the last remaining elements (i.e. portions). To quote Dr. Rice: “… Titled, Native Life in the […]
Afghanistan in Peacetime: “Painted Trucks”(1972), presented by the filmmakers, Judith and Stanley Hallet
By: Kate Pourshariati
Looking through a collection of 16mm films housed in the Museum Library, our film archivist came across a 1972 film which gives a rare glimpse of peace in a country often torn apart by war. We got in touch with the filmmakers, Judith and Stanley Hallet, who let us know that this film is a […]
Archival travelogue films: China!
By: Kate Pourshariati
In preparation for the Chinese New Year celebrations we have pulled some archival travelogue footage from two collections; Kate and Arthur Tode, and Mrs. J. Shipley Dixon. As you will see, the films are remarkable for their view of pre-revolutionary period China, both 1930 “Canton” (Guangzhou) and 1945(?) “Peking” (Beijing). The filmmakers in both cases […]