After last year's success, the Moving Image Society is hosting its second "Save the Archives" benefit festival! In line with our ongoing programming efforts, we want to provoke discussion about the place of analog media and its preservation in a digital world. We invite submissions of works made on or using "obsolete media" (analog video, small-gauge celluloid film like 8mm and 16mm), found footage works made with any media, and any films that are about or related to archives, preservation, restoration, or provenance.
Our festival will be hosted in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Fine Arts Cinema and Union Cinema, which have remained committed to programming classic, experimental, and independent cinema on celluloid since their founding. The screening will benefit the UWM Film Studies Moving Image Archive, a collection of classic, experimental, educational, and orphan 16mm films.
The UWM Film Studies Moving Image Archive includes the Patricia Mellencamp 16mm Print Founding Collection, which holds over 90 cinema classics, the Marquette Collection, which holds a mix of over 60 educational and narrative films, and the Albert Krahn Orphan Film Collection, which includes over 100 reels of educational and industrial films. The majority of the films are currently stored in cardboard boxes or in rusty metal cans, and the process of rehousing these films to appropriate archival storage has just begun. Your submission fee will help us in our efforts, and ensure the continued life of our collections.
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Patricia Mellencamp is Professor Emerita in Art History and author of "Indiscretions: Avant-Garde Film, Video, and Feminism" (1990), and was instrumental in founding the university's film program in the early 1970s. She taught film history courses for thirty years until her retirement in 2002. The 16mm Print Founding Collection, which was recently rediscovered in a storage room and subsequently rehoused to the Center for 21st Century Studies, consists of prints she used in her courses until the advent of VHS and digital media.
The Moving Image Society was founded with its mission to care for the collection and preserve Mellencamp's legacy, and offers UWM students pursuing careers in film archiving and programming practical and vocational experience, professional development opportunities, and support in realizing their creative projects.
