Current Preservation Projects

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.



 

Archived Preservation Projects