Well it happened more quickly than we thought it could.  Last year South Side Projections and the South Side Community Arts Center presented a program that included CFA’s THE CORNER (1963, Robert Ford) and a VHS copy of LORD THING, a documentary on the Conservative Vice Lords shot from 1954 to 1969 made by Dewitt Beall.  Over the years, the film materials to the LORD THING had disappeared.  Mike Phillips of South Side Projections gave us some preliminary leads to trace the film elements and prints, but all became dead ends.  That is when CFA contacted Buckey Grimm who said, “If it’s out there, I will find it.”  And BAM, he did!

CFA has received the extensive film materials used to create this extraordinary documentary that over the span of 15 years examines the evolution of the Chicago street gang called the Vice Lords. It “begins in the ghetto streets of the mid-Fifties— a virtual combat zone for dozens of small neighborhood gangs from different parts of the city [that in time unite] forces in a common cause.” The film unfolds within a period that begins when the Supreme Court struck down the practice of segregation to when the civil rights movement was at its height (1954-1969). In 1970, it won the Silver Medal in the Venice Film Festival, but never got into distribution.

A huge debt of gratitude goes to film researcher extraordinaire Buckey Grimm who located the film materials with Elina Katsioula-Beall in California.  She has cared for her husband’s films since his passing and is donating the Beall Collection to Chicago Film Archives. CFA will be submitting a proposal to the National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve this film that documents a typically inaccessible part of Chicago’s past.

If you would like to be a preservation partner of our newest acquisition, the DeWitt Beall collection, give us a call at 312-243-1808 or email info@chicagofilmarchives.org.

- Nancy

We here at CFA are so thankful of our supporters, as donations are hugely important to our work in processing and giving access to our varied and unique collections. Here’s a list of our more recent supporters:

JoAnn Elam Collection:
CFA has begun processing the films of Chicago filmmaker JoAnn Elam (1949-2009), a central figure in the in the history of Chicago’s experimental film community. Due to the superbly generous donation of $5,000 by her sister Susan, we have been able to begin to stabilize this large and complex collection of film materials. Included in this collection are film elements from a work-in-progress (1979-1990) called EVERYDAY PEOPLE, a film that chronicles her experiences as a postal carrier and the people she met along the way. Susan Elam has become a Preservation Patron of the JoAnn Elam Collection.

EVERYDAY PEOPLE (rough cut), JoAnn Elam, 1979-1990

Marquis Ritchey Cring Collection:
And this year, Susan Hayes became a Preservation Sponsor of her father’s home movie collection – The Marquis Ritchey Cring Collection. Marquis Cring (born in Belle Center, Ohio) moved to St. Louis to take a job as head of advertising and public relations at the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad. There he met Irene Ellerbeck, another M-K-T employee, and they married and had there first and only child, Susan. Like many other railroad employees who were amateur filmmakers, he often took his camera (and family) when traveling with the railroad to such places as Mexico, the Ozarks, and Galveston, Tx. These films span the mid 1920s through the mid 1950s. One reel even contains footage of Charles Lindbergh at a 1927 Mexico City bullfight that was held in his honor.

Syliva & Russ Davis Collection:
Also, thanks to Colleen Roberts who is a Preservation Sponsor of the Russ and Sylvia Davis Collection. This might be CFA’s most popular collection consisting of almost 200 pro wrestling matches fought in 1950s Chicago. Each match is announced by radio personality Russ Davis who produced these films for Chicago’s first commercial television station WBKB.

Edouard Carpentier vs Lou Thesz (Jack Dempsey referee), Chicago International Amphitheater, Circa 1957

You, yourself can adopt any CFA collection and be responsible for it’s preservation and archival care. Just go here!

Anne and Nancy are headed down to Austin, Texas this week for the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) annual conference, and can do this only because of the support from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. THANK YOU!

The annual AMIA  conference provides an opportunity for colleagues and those interested in the field of audiovisual preservation to meet, share information, attend screenings and work together.

FAIRY PRINCESS (1956)

Margaret Conneely’s film FAIRY PRINCESS will also be making an appearance in Austin at the Saturday afternoon screening of AMATEUR NIGHT: HOME MOVIES FROM AMERICAN ARCHIVES. AMATEUR NIGHT, which was produced by the Center for Home Movies in 2010, spotlights a selection of amazing amateur films from across the country – including our very own, FAIRY PRINCESS from 1956 (to learn more about FAIRY PRINCESS and the preservation work behind it, visit our preservation page) .

CFA is also bringing one of our new favorite films along with us to compete in the second annual “Reels of Steel” Competition at Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse. For some suspense, we’ll leave the film a surprise a now . . . .

Welcome to CFA’s new website. We hope to expose you to more moving images within our collections while bringing stories and context to the historical Midwest documentation that CFA preserves. Currently we are in the process of building an online, open source collections management system that will allow us to publish our collections’ intellectual and media content online. Be on the look-out for this searchable component on our EXPLORE COLLECTIONS page and our STOCK FOOTAGE LIBRARY page. MIDWEST STORIES, also, will become a more interactive, curated page to explore historical and cultural topics that spring from CFA collections.

Thanks to Real Hard Work for the design and Whirl-i-gig for your continued build-out of our collections system. And, by-the-way, a huge thank you to Amanda Robillard for her out-sized grasp of metadata and its peculiar function in the archival world.

Nancy and Anne

LOVE SONG (1947)

“Ruth Page (1899-1999) embraced a life of artistic restlessness, in which a quest for the new, with a refusal to conform to any one style of dance, became her legacy.  Emanating from Chicago, the visionary work of Ruth Page influenced the growth of theater design, opera ballet, and dance.  She achieved worldwide recognition as a true pioneer of dance in America.”

- Lon Gordon, Professor of Fine Arts at Illinois State University

Stunning in size and scope, this moving image collection documents and preserves the dance legacy and artistic circle of choreographer, Ruth Page, named by the Dance Heritage Coalition as one of America’s 100 Irreplaceable Dance Treasures.  The largest collection of moving image materials related to Ruth Page, it is a worthy complement to the vast manuscript collection that resides at the Jerome Robins Dance Division of the New York Public Library and the Newberry Library in Chicago.

This collection contains rehearsals and performances that date back to 1922 including footage of Rudolph Nureyev soon after his defection from the Soviet Union, Balinese dances filmed during Page’s 1928 Asian Tour, and performances of The Merry Widow on the Ed Sullivan Show.  It also contains numerous interviews with dance critics such as Clive Barnes and John Martin, dancers such as Larry Long, Delores Lipinski, Anne Kisselgoff and Maria Tallchief, and a comprehensive series of interviews and oral histories with Page herself that date from 1957 through 1987.  Among the dozens of Ruth Page ballets that are contained in this collection is a 35mm print of Bolero danced in 1928 at Ravinia in Highland Park, IL.  To our knowledge, this is the only existing moving image representation of that performance.