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Hunched over a light table, Gemma Perretta stares at frame after frame of what she believes is an 80-year-old home movie of two children in the family’s backyard. She winds slowly through the reel, making notes on its contents and condition. When a torn sprocket hole along one edge catches a thread in her cotton glove, she stops, cuts a length of special tape, and fits it over the damaged area. A few frames on, she pauses to examine a scene with a powerful magnifier. The date code, imprinted along the film’s edge, reveals that this piece of film was manufactured in 1929—two years later than the rest of the reel Perretta has examined so far. That explains why the children look taller than they had in previous scenes.
On it goes, frame by frame, until the 100-foot reel of film—which would run less than five minutes if projected—is repaired to the best of Perretta’s ability. After cleaning the film, she threads it onto a device made specially for transferring delicate film to other more modern media so that these images from the earliest days of amateur filmmaking are preserved for future generations to learn from and enjoy.
The process is at the heart of a conservation effort that goes on daily at Northeast Historic Film in Bucksport. Here, millions of feet of film and thousands of hours of videotape receive, if not a new lease on life, an extension of what might otherwise be an untimely end, and the job of preserving them is a mission that the people involved consider of more than passing importance.
For the cofounders of Northeast Historic Film, that job has been a labor of love for more than 20 years. It began when David Weiss and Karan Sheldon decided to reconfigure a 1930 film called From Stump to Ship that documented the way logging used to be. When the pair showed the film for the first time in Hauck Auditorium at the University of Maine, they hoped for a crowd of 200. Eleven hundred showed up. “We knew we had struck a deep chord,” Weiss says. “People came who used to work in the woods, or had parents who worked in the woods. It meant something to them.” The reworked documentary would later be added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. In the process, Weiss and Sheldon discovered that old treasures like From Stump to Ship had no official home. “There was a place for old newspapers or old photographs, but we found out that old films were scattered everywhere,” Weiss says. “So we said, to heck with being film producers—let’s collect it and let other people figure out ways to use it.”
Weiss and Sheldon’s mission at Northeast Historic Film quickly moved beyond preserving these films—which includes everything from home movies and amateur films to local TV archives—to giving these moving time capsules as much exposure as possible. “We want people to look at these images, not just have them sit on the shelves of our archives,” says Weiss, Northeast Historic Film’s executive director and overseer of day-to-day operations. From NHF’s study center in the Alamo Theatre building in downtown Bucksport, researchers, educators, and others interested in glimpsing the past can view more than 3,000 copies of works in the various collections and refer to over 2,000 publications about moving images. There are also periodic screenings of films from the archives’ various collections; many of those are also on sale.
The process of gathering and preserving all that film and videotape did not happen overnight. Soon after Northeast Historic Film was founded, Weiss and Sheldon began spreading the word that all moving images of regional interest were welcome. That message drew responses from filmmakers amateur and professional, many of whom donated their original film to the archives with the expectation that doing so would safeguard its future indefinitely. Initially, film donations were recognized by giving the donors VHS copies (once their films had been repaired and transferred to BETA tape, still the most stable medium for long-term preservation). Weiss soon realized that such generosity in a labor-intensive undertaking could not continue; NHF now charges an hourly rate for what are termed technical services.
The most significant development since Northeast Historic Film opened was the addition of a 5,000-square-foot conservation center in 2003, without which the organization would have failed to realize its main goal: keeping all those images viewable. Film survives best in relatively dry, cool conditions; the optimal environment in the conservation center will add hundreds of years to the life of the film it holds. Also referred to as “the cube,” the building was the first of its kind in the Northeast and one of only a handful nationwide. “It extended the life of our collections by a thousand percent,” Weiss says.
The uses for the archives Northeast Historic Film stores and collects are as diverse as their contents. “I think that the most interesting use of moving images is when an actor or novelist calls to view film footage to show how people lived during an earlier time,” says Jane Donnell, who has worked for NHF for 13 years. “They want to see how people moved, talked, and gestured—actual behavior and movement are only available through these historic documents. How do you know what a birthday party was like in 1930 in Downeast Maine unless you can see it in real time?”
Since Northeast Historic Film came on the scene, many Maine families are seeing the value of their home movies in a new light. “One goal of mine was to drive up the price of home movie reels at yard sales,” David Weiss says.
One of Gemma Perretta’s current projects is transferring a lifetime of home footage, shot on 16 mm film, for a Maine family. Perretta, like many of the young film technicians who have worked at NHF over the years, is a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman House. She discovered her interest in historic preservation when she was doing an internship at the Harvard Film Archive. Though she must do a lot of juggling at NHF—the backload of donated film alone is daunting—“I greatly enjoy what I do,” she says. “The challenges are overshadowed by my pleasure at working with the film and the people accessing it.”
The costs of operating Northeast Historic Film—which, besides the technical services and administrative personnel, includes maintaining the climate-controlled conservation center, screening room/theater, distribution area, and study center—are met through diverse funding sources. The organization is member supported; some 450 individuals, families, and organizations make annual donations and receive discounts, invitations to special screenings, and twice-yearly newsletters about NHF. Grants have supported the care of film and videotape donated by all of Maine’s television stations and other significant collections. NHF rents space in its conservation center for storage of large collections, including works owned by the University of Maine, Colby, Bates, Harvard Film Archives, and Anthology Film Archives of New York City. Smaller collections also are housed in the center, including work prints of professional filmmakers and movies collected by local nonprofit groups, including the Belfast Historical Society and Museum.
In the late 1990s, the Belfast group accepted a donation of film from a local family and turned to NHF for advice and assistance. “We recognized the film had historical value, but we didn’t know what the heck to do with it,” says George Squibb, a museum volunteer who asked for and received technical advice on film handling from NHF staff. Squibb then did the required repair work on some 27,000 feet of 8 mm, Super 8, and 16 mm film, and NHF cleaned and transferred the images. “Northeast Historic Film was always there with answers to our questions,” Squibb says.
Several years ago, reels and reels of early WABI TV footage was about to be thrown away for lack of appropriate storage space; it was rescued at the last minute by Northeast Historic Film. “We all shudder now when we think of how close it came to being lost,” Donnell says. Now everything, from the local reaction to JFK’s assassination, to Eisenhower receiving the first salmon landed from the Penobscot River, to a segment from the local Bozo the Clown show, is in safekeeping for decades to come.
NHF’s holdings document a way of life gone by in ways that a book or newspaper article from that time never could. Some of the scenes stored in the cube include the bodies of the Brady gang being removed from downtown Bangor; the 1938 Fryeburg Fair; late ’30s footage of the making of a birch bark canoe; the 1955 Civil Defense evacuation of the city of Bangor; plus footage shot worldwide by traveling northeasterners, such as the earliest known color film of Gandhi.
Jane Donnell is in charge of NHF’s video and DVD sales, and still is fascinated by the content she is able to help preserve. She picks up Dynamite, Whiskey and Wood, a public television production that looks at the off-duty life of woods workers. “It shows the fights, the drinking, and the bars—all the recreation most of these men knew,” she says.
The majority of the moving images in Northeast Historic Film’s collection relates to northern New England. Other moving image material also reaches their door, including dramas, newsreels, animated shorts, and comedies. Northeast Historic Film doesn’t refuse any reel that comes in the door. “NHF’s primary goal is preservation,” Weiss says, “so we’ll work to find the appropriate home for material that may not be related to the region.” Weiss encourages people to think about the history-in-motion they might have in their attics or office closets, and consider bringing them to NHF. “There are a lot more pieces of the puzzles out there,” he says.
The mission of keeping moving images available long-term is not a simple one. Changes in technology, plus the unstable nature of some media, have challenged archivists worldwide. Older, nitrate-based films can literally self-destruct; the dye layers in some newer film stocks can fade at differing rates, causing serious color shifts; videotape can exhibit a variety of problems, including dropouts, emulsion “shedding,” and color shift. Thus, the key is to clean, repair, and transfer materials that come in the door as soon as possible.
“The pace we can work at comes down to money,” Weiss admits. Gifts like a $2,500 grant from the Bangor Savings Bank Foundation to purchase two new devices for transferring 8 mm and Super 8 film to other media go a long way.
Keeping up with the workload, though, is only part of the challenge. At the same time, administrators at NHF continue to chip away at the many capital improvements needed to their building, which dates back to 1916. A recent capital campaign in which donors “bought a brick” for $100 helped restore the Alamo Theatre building’s front façade. Their next major renovation, Weiss hopes, will bring more people inside that Bucksport landmark.
Over the years, Northeast Historic Film has been given a wealth of vintage projection equipment, movie posters, and other film-related items—enough to open a museum. So work is ongoing to create a museum that will give these gems a proper home and to capitalize on the thousands of new visitors expected to visit the Penobscot Narrows Bridge Observatory, which was completed last year.
“Northeast Historic Film can be an economic engine for the town,” says David Milan, Bucksport’s economic development director. David Weiss agrees, but his motivation has never been attached to dollars.
“When you watch a broadcast on the history channel, you see the great events that shaped civilization,” Weiss says. “What we do is the antithesis of that—we’re saving images of the way your mother kept house, or how your father worked, or the elm trees on your street before they died. We’re holding on to something very close to all of us.”One One Friday night in late December, the latest James Bond thriller arrived just in time for the weeklong run at the Alamo Theatre. But when projectionist and facilities manager Phil Yates removed the film from its shipping cans and spliced it together, he discovered a problem: The last 90 seconds of the film were missing.
Having no time to order another copy, Yates did what had to be done: He stood in the lobby as the somewhat confused viewers departed and described the final moments. He even uttered the trademark line, “Bond—James Bond.”
“It made for an interesting week,” Yates says. The unusual conclusion was taken in stride by most of the Alamo’s regulars; they’re just glad to have their theater back.
Built in 1916, the Alamo Theatre is a local landmark and haven for movie-lovers. But until the early 1990s, it had changed its identity several times, being used as an A&P store, health center, and the Alamo Bar and Grill.
When the building was bought at auction in 1992, David Weiss, Karan Sheldon, and crew weren’t planning on going into the movie theater business, but the public wouldn’t have it any other way. Today the Alamo Theatre is once again a hub of cultural activity, hosting new feature films, screenings of NHF collections, as well as group meetings, symposiums, musical events, and a silent film festival held each summer.
Northeast Historic Film, however, manages to plug its mission, even when the likes of Casino Royale is playing: NHF creates and plays a history minute made of gems from its moving images collections as a preview to every showing.n
On it goes, frame by frame, until the 100-foot reel of film—which would run less than five minutes if projected—is repaired to the best of Perretta’s ability. After cleaning the film, she threads it onto a device made specially for transferring delicate film to other more modern media so that these images from the earliest days of amateur filmmaking are preserved for future generations to learn from and enjoy.
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The process is at the heart of a conservation effort that goes on daily at Northeast Historic Film in Bucksport. Here, millions of feet of film and thousands of hours of videotape receive, if not a new lease on life, an extension of what might otherwise be an untimely end, and the job of preserving them is a mission that the people involved consider of more than passing importance.
For the cofounders of Northeast Historic Film, that job has been a labor of love for more than 20 years. It began when David Weiss and Karan Sheldon decided to reconfigure a 1930 film called From Stump to Ship that documented the way logging used to be. When the pair showed the film for the first time in Hauck Auditorium at the University of Maine, they hoped for a crowd of 200. Eleven hundred showed up. “We knew we had struck a deep chord,” Weiss says. “People came who used to work in the woods, or had parents who worked in the woods. It meant something to them.” The reworked documentary would later be added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. In the process, Weiss and Sheldon discovered that old treasures like From Stump to Ship had no official home. “There was a place for old newspapers or old photographs, but we found out that old films were scattered everywhere,” Weiss says. “So we said, to heck with being film producers—let’s collect it and let other people figure out ways to use it.”
Weiss and Sheldon’s mission at Northeast Historic Film quickly moved beyond preserving these films—which includes everything from home movies and amateur films to local TV archives—to giving these moving time capsules as much exposure as possible. “We want people to look at these images, not just have them sit on the shelves of our archives,” says Weiss, Northeast Historic Film’s executive director and overseer of day-to-day operations. From NHF’s study center in the Alamo Theatre building in downtown Bucksport, researchers, educators, and others interested in glimpsing the past can view more than 3,000 copies of works in the various collections and refer to over 2,000 publications about moving images. There are also periodic screenings of films from the archives’ various collections; many of those are also on sale.
The process of gathering and preserving all that film and videotape did not happen overnight. Soon after Northeast Historic Film was founded, Weiss and Sheldon began spreading the word that all moving images of regional interest were welcome. That message drew responses from filmmakers amateur and professional, many of whom donated their original film to the archives with the expectation that doing so would safeguard its future indefinitely. Initially, film donations were recognized by giving the donors VHS copies (once their films had been repaired and transferred to BETA tape, still the most stable medium for long-term preservation). Weiss soon realized that such generosity in a labor-intensive undertaking could not continue; NHF now charges an hourly rate for what are termed technical services.
The most significant development since Northeast Historic Film opened was the addition of a 5,000-square-foot conservation center in 2003, without which the organization would have failed to realize its main goal: keeping all those images viewable. Film survives best in relatively dry, cool conditions; the optimal environment in the conservation center will add hundreds of years to the life of the film it holds. Also referred to as “the cube,” the building was the first of its kind in the Northeast and one of only a handful nationwide. “It extended the life of our collections by a thousand percent,” Weiss says.
The uses for the archives Northeast Historic Film stores and collects are as diverse as their contents. “I think that the most interesting use of moving images is when an actor or novelist calls to view film footage to show how people lived during an earlier time,” says Jane Donnell, who has worked for NHF for 13 years. “They want to see how people moved, talked, and gestured—actual behavior and movement are only available through these historic documents. How do you know what a birthday party was like in 1930 in Downeast Maine unless you can see it in real time?”
Since Northeast Historic Film came on the scene, many Maine families are seeing the value of their home movies in a new light. “One goal of mine was to drive up the price of home movie reels at yard sales,” David Weiss says.
One of Gemma Perretta’s current projects is transferring a lifetime of home footage, shot on 16 mm film, for a Maine family. Perretta, like many of the young film technicians who have worked at NHF over the years, is a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman House. She discovered her interest in historic preservation when she was doing an internship at the Harvard Film Archive. Though she must do a lot of juggling at NHF—the backload of donated film alone is daunting—“I greatly enjoy what I do,” she says. “The challenges are overshadowed by my pleasure at working with the film and the people accessing it.”
The costs of operating Northeast Historic Film—which, besides the technical services and administrative personnel, includes maintaining the climate-controlled conservation center, screening room/theater, distribution area, and study center—are met through diverse funding sources. The organization is member supported; some 450 individuals, families, and organizations make annual donations and receive discounts, invitations to special screenings, and twice-yearly newsletters about NHF. Grants have supported the care of film and videotape donated by all of Maine’s television stations and other significant collections. NHF rents space in its conservation center for storage of large collections, including works owned by the University of Maine, Colby, Bates, Harvard Film Archives, and Anthology Film Archives of New York City. Smaller collections also are housed in the center, including work prints of professional filmmakers and movies collected by local nonprofit groups, including the Belfast Historical Society and Museum.
In the late 1990s, the Belfast group accepted a donation of film from a local family and turned to NHF for advice and assistance. “We recognized the film had historical value, but we didn’t know what the heck to do with it,” says George Squibb, a museum volunteer who asked for and received technical advice on film handling from NHF staff. Squibb then did the required repair work on some 27,000 feet of 8 mm, Super 8, and 16 mm film, and NHF cleaned and transferred the images. “Northeast Historic Film was always there with answers to our questions,” Squibb says.
Several years ago, reels and reels of early WABI TV footage was about to be thrown away for lack of appropriate storage space; it was rescued at the last minute by Northeast Historic Film. “We all shudder now when we think of how close it came to being lost,” Donnell says. Now everything, from the local reaction to JFK’s assassination, to Eisenhower receiving the first salmon landed from the Penobscot River, to a segment from the local Bozo the Clown show, is in safekeeping for decades to come.
NHF’s holdings document a way of life gone by in ways that a book or newspaper article from that time never could. Some of the scenes stored in the cube include the bodies of the Brady gang being removed from downtown Bangor; the 1938 Fryeburg Fair; late ’30s footage of the making of a birch bark canoe; the 1955 Civil Defense evacuation of the city of Bangor; plus footage shot worldwide by traveling northeasterners, such as the earliest known color film of Gandhi.
Jane Donnell is in charge of NHF’s video and DVD sales, and still is fascinated by the content she is able to help preserve. She picks up Dynamite, Whiskey and Wood, a public television production that looks at the off-duty life of woods workers. “It shows the fights, the drinking, and the bars—all the recreation most of these men knew,” she says.
The majority of the moving images in Northeast Historic Film’s collection relates to northern New England. Other moving image material also reaches their door, including dramas, newsreels, animated shorts, and comedies. Northeast Historic Film doesn’t refuse any reel that comes in the door. “NHF’s primary goal is preservation,” Weiss says, “so we’ll work to find the appropriate home for material that may not be related to the region.” Weiss encourages people to think about the history-in-motion they might have in their attics or office closets, and consider bringing them to NHF. “There are a lot more pieces of the puzzles out there,” he says.
The mission of keeping moving images available long-term is not a simple one. Changes in technology, plus the unstable nature of some media, have challenged archivists worldwide. Older, nitrate-based films can literally self-destruct; the dye layers in some newer film stocks can fade at differing rates, causing serious color shifts; videotape can exhibit a variety of problems, including dropouts, emulsion “shedding,” and color shift. Thus, the key is to clean, repair, and transfer materials that come in the door as soon as possible.
“The pace we can work at comes down to money,” Weiss admits. Gifts like a $2,500 grant from the Bangor Savings Bank Foundation to purchase two new devices for transferring 8 mm and Super 8 film to other media go a long way.
Keeping up with the workload, though, is only part of the challenge. At the same time, administrators at NHF continue to chip away at the many capital improvements needed to their building, which dates back to 1916. A recent capital campaign in which donors “bought a brick” for $100 helped restore the Alamo Theatre building’s front façade. Their next major renovation, Weiss hopes, will bring more people inside that Bucksport landmark.
Over the years, Northeast Historic Film has been given a wealth of vintage projection equipment, movie posters, and other film-related items—enough to open a museum. So work is ongoing to create a museum that will give these gems a proper home and to capitalize on the thousands of new visitors expected to visit the Penobscot Narrows Bridge Observatory, which was completed last year.
“Northeast Historic Film can be an economic engine for the town,” says David Milan, Bucksport’s economic development director. David Weiss agrees, but his motivation has never been attached to dollars.
“When you watch a broadcast on the history channel, you see the great events that shaped civilization,” Weiss says. “What we do is the antithesis of that—we’re saving images of the way your mother kept house, or how your father worked, or the elm trees on your street before they died. We’re holding on to something very close to all of us.”One One Friday night in late December, the latest James Bond thriller arrived just in time for the weeklong run at the Alamo Theatre. But when projectionist and facilities manager Phil Yates removed the film from its shipping cans and spliced it together, he discovered a problem: The last 90 seconds of the film were missing.
Having no time to order another copy, Yates did what had to be done: He stood in the lobby as the somewhat confused viewers departed and described the final moments. He even uttered the trademark line, “Bond—James Bond.”
“It made for an interesting week,” Yates says. The unusual conclusion was taken in stride by most of the Alamo’s regulars; they’re just glad to have their theater back.
Built in 1916, the Alamo Theatre is a local landmark and haven for movie-lovers. But until the early 1990s, it had changed its identity several times, being used as an A&P store, health center, and the Alamo Bar and Grill.
When the building was bought at auction in 1992, David Weiss, Karan Sheldon, and crew weren’t planning on going into the movie theater business, but the public wouldn’t have it any other way. Today the Alamo Theatre is once again a hub of cultural activity, hosting new feature films, screenings of NHF collections, as well as group meetings, symposiums, musical events, and a silent film festival held each summer.
Northeast Historic Film, however, manages to plug its mission, even when the likes of Casino Royale is playing: NHF creates and plays a history minute made of gems from its moving images collections as a preview to every showing.n
