Real Reels Start Rolling

Molly Wheeler (Lucy Gellman photo)

October 16, 2015 - Molly Wheeler first heard of Home Movie Day in 2004 while attending a conference for the Association of Moving Image Archivists. “It just cracked my mind open,” said Wheeler, reflecting on the annual celebration of amateur films and filmmakers in a recent interview on WNHH’s “Deep Focus.” “I thought it was one of the coolest events I had ever heard of.”

Watching other people’s home movies may at first glance seem like a strange candidate for the coolest way to spend an afternoon. But for Wheeler, an archivist at the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library who specializes in audiovisual material, Home Movie Day represented a perfect intersection of three pursuits she cares deeply about: film preservation, social history, and community engagement.

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Treasures Unearthed

Brian Meacham (Thomas Breen photo)

September 28, 2015 - Gone are the days when every movie theater in the country was equipped to project film. With the rise of digital cinema, movies are now cheaper and easier to produce, distribute, and exhibit than ever before.

But what about those theaters that can’t afford to purchase digital projectors? What about those filmmakers who cherish the physical dimension of film and its inimitable impact on the visual quality of a movie? And what about the potential loss of the medium so central to the history of cinema: the very material on which movies were produced and projected for the first century of the form’s existence?

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History, In 16 MM

Bennett Lovett-Graff (Thomas Breen photo)

April 24, 2015 - “My father was a very typical Jewish shirt salesman in the New York garment district who became a 16mm film collector,” said Bennett Lovett-Graff, editor at Scarecrow Press and publisher of the New Haven Review.

But that word typical seems a bit of a misnomer. There was nothing ordinary about the zeal with which Herb Graff collected films, nor the generosity with which he shared them. “Shirt-salesman by day, passionate film maven by night,” as Lovett-Graff said, Herb Graff collected films for over 30 years and took every opportunity to present them to the public, through screenings, lectures, and leases so that they could be reused by educational programs or documentary filmmakers.

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