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Morrison-Shearer
film collection
CFA has
begun stabilizing and preserving the Morrison-Shearer film
collection. Residing in CFA’s vaults, these films by
Helen Balfour Morrison include the studio work of modern dancer
Sybil Shearer.
Sybil
Shearer was a leading pioneer of modern dance and arguably
one of the finest dancers of the 20th century. She began her
career at Bennington and in New York with the Humphrey-Weidman
Company and Agnes de Mille. After a critically acclaimed solo
debut at Carnegie Hall in 1941, Ms. Shearer moved to Chicago,
where she worked independently, close to nature, and in her
own unorthodox way. She met photographer, Helen Balfour Morrison,
who became her lighting director, photographer, filmographer,
and artistic collaborator for the next forty years.
Their
studio is located in Northbrook, Illinois and is maintained
by the Morrison Shearer Foundation in an effort to preserve
the documentary materials associated with these two artists.
http://www.morrisonshearer.org
A
Pictorial Story of Hiawatha
Film Restoration Project
In 2008,
Chicago Film Archives partnered with Valparaiso University
and Colorlab to preserve and research newly discovered nitrate
film footage in Valparaiso’s Special Collections. This
film was left to the university by one of its early graduates,
Katharine Ertz-Bowden. In 1897 she earned a Diploma in Public
Speaking with a BA in Science, and a few years later she married
fellow graduate Charles L. Bowden who had been an “expert
photographer with Eastman Kodak”.
During
the summers of 1902 and 1903, the Bowdens visited Desbarats,
Ontario, Canada, not far from where Charles had grown up amidst
the Ojibwe community living in that region. L.O. Armstrong,
a local agent for the Canadian Pacific Railway and an ardent
admirer of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, was by then presenting
dramatizations of Longfellow’s poem, The Song of Hiawatha.
Members of the nearby Garden River Ojibwe tribe performed
in the play. Katharine and Charles Bowden photographed and
filmed the presentations over two summers, and then assembled
their lantern slides and films to create A Pictorial Story
of Hiawatha. Over the next seven years, the Bowdens traveled
the Redpath Chautaugua Circuit, Katharine reciting the legendary
poem as Charles projected the images they had photographed
and filmed in Desbarats, Ontario.
These
films seem to be the earliest film representations of the
Hiawatha play that are in existence today. There is evidence
that Joseph Rosenthal filmed the live performance during the
same time for the Charles Urban Trading Company, but none
of that footage has been found. Nevertheless, Katharine Ertz-Bowden
claims that she and her husband were the first to film the
Ojibwe dramatization on the northern banks of Lake Huron.
After
retiring from "entertainment” in 1910, Ertz-Bowden
returned to Valparaiso University, working there as a librarian,
associate professor and archivist. She passed away in 1965,
leaving behind at the university a collection of lantern slides,
pamphlets, newspaper articles, and other documentation that
begin to bring context to the 710’ of 35mm nitrate film
that sat there as well.
There
are a number of layers to this history. At the foundation
lie the Ojibwe men and women seen in these films, and their
alliance with the white man’s portrayal of their native
culture. This alliance was in part instigated by tourism and
sought to tell the romantic story of Longfellow’s Song
of Hiawatha through a live dramatization. With new technology
in hand (the motion picture camera), the Bowdens were able
to further disseminate and perpetuate this “story”
of the native as they lectured across North America with the
Redpath Chautaugua Circuit. Katharine was breaking new ground,
being one of a handful of female lecturers in the Chautaugua
circuits. Additionally, the Bowdens were not far behind Burton
Holmes – Father of the Travelogue – in the use of
motion pictures to illustrate their travel presentations.
Holmes first used motion pictures this way in 1897.
The collaboration
between Valparaiso University, Chicago Film Archives and Colorlab
has resulted in the restoration and research that brings these
early films and their history back to life. Over the past
year and a half, Colorlab has labored to clean, repair, and
create new 35mm negatives and prints from deteriorating nitrate
films that originated on film stock not yet standardized.
The restored
footage from the Bowdens’ A Pictorial Story of Hiawatha
will be premiered at the Orphans 7 Symposium on April 10,
2010 in New York City.
Film rolls from A Pictorial Story of Hiawatha before restoration
Katharine Ertz-Bowden in Desbarats, Ontario
Scans from roll 4 of the Bowden Collection - A Pictorial Story
of Hiawatha
The
National Film Preservation Foundation has awarded CFA funding
to preserve Susan Stechnij’s film
Mi Raza: Portrait of a family.
Mi
Raza: Portrait of a Family is a documentary film about
a working class Mexican-American family dealing with the stresses
of maintaining their cultural heritage in the face of the
dominant Anglo society. Made by Susan Stechnij in 1973 as
part of her thesis for a Master’s Degree in Anthropology
from the University of Illinois, the film follows the daily
activities of the multi-generational Navarro family living
in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. Each member of the
family responds differently to the pressures of assimilation,
revealing a complex family portrait that encapsulates broader
issues of immigration faced nation-wide. Yet the personal
details of their family life and culture place the film squarely
inside the notion of Chicago as a city of multiple ethnic
neighborhoods. Mi Raza is invaluable as an example
of a new style of ethnographic film making, an intimate portrait
of working class domestic life, and a historical record of
a community in a state of flux due to immigration and political
upheaval.
The film focuses on the family unit as the
site where issues of immigration and acculturation are contested.
The three generations of the Navarro family respond differently
to these pressures: from the Grandmother Chepa who has little
interaction with Anglo culture and still believes in the folktales
of her youth, to her son-in-law Clemente Sr. a factory worker
whose main contact is work, to the grandchildren who face
constant pressure from the educational system to assimilate
and forego their heritage. The film does not, however, describe
a simple path to acculturation over time. Instead it records
the family’s attempt to strike a balance between their
Mexican cultural heritage and their life in America. This
balance is portrayed as an outgrowth of the then emerging
Chicano political awareness. The Chicano attitude is exemplified
in shots of art classes at a community center where children
build Aztec pyramids, protests over labor concerns at a grocery
store, and a raucous school board meeting where activists
(including mother Lola) attempt to force a recalcitrant school
board to rectify the poor status of schools in Latino neighborhoods.
Along with the charged relations with the
outside world, the film captures the personal details of the
Navarro family life. From the opening scenes of Chepa cooking
breakfast for her husband to the simple, sweet celebration
of Rosemary’s 15th birthday (quincenera) the film adopts
the interior view of family life common to home movies made
for private viewing. That the film can provide such intimacy
is a testament to the openness of the Navarro family and the
delicacy with which Stechnij approached the project. However,
even in these private moments this ethnographic film records
the transmission of cultural knowledge, as in the scene where
Clemente Sr. teaches his son to make a special goat soup.
Susan Stechnij previously worked as an applied
anthropologist in the largely Mexican-American neighborhoods
of Pilsen and Little Village. She often used an early portable
video camera to record visual data in the community for her
research and as a historical document for the Mexican-American
community it depicts. This dual concern of creating work to
be utilized both by scholars and the people studied informed
the creation of Mi Raza. In the study guide that accompanies
the film, Stechnij expresses the hope that [ethnographic]
films made in the future will take into account the desires
of community people, and the filmmaker whenever possible will
make films that are not only about people, but also for them.
Mi Raza exhibits this with its bi-lingual subtitles,
translating the Spanish for the benefit of Anglo viewers,
and the English into Spanish for those, like Grandmother Navarro,
who only speak their native tongue.
Mi Raza: Portrait of a Family is
a fascinating hybrid of styles blending the ethnographic,
the home movie, and the direct cinema documentary. It continues
Chicago Film Archives’ mission of using film to tell
the history of Chicago’s varied inhabitants and neighborhoods.
It also furthers the CFA’s commitment to the study and
preservation of Chicago’s documentary movement. More
broadly, the film is relevant to telling the story of immigration
in Chicago and therefore America. While the film deals with
issues specific to its time – the Bracero Worker Program,
the Chicano political movement – the film remains highly
relevant to the current hot button issue of Mexican immigration.
The only remaining print of the film suffers
from a technical problem in which the sound and image are
out of sync. The grant
provided will allow for the creation of a new print and video
copy restoring the film and making this piece of living history
available again to the Pilsen community and researchers for
the first time in over 30 years.
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