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The University of Georgia’s Walter J. Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection has announced the discovery of home movie in their collections, shot on the extremely rare 28mm gauge in the late 1910s.
“We think it’s not just the earliest home movie shot in Georgia, but the earliest footage of Georgia,” said Ruta Abolins, head of the UGA Libraries’ Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection.
Now transferred to digital format, the short movie shows members of the Howard Melville Hanna family of Cleveland, Ohio, frolicking at Pebble Hill Plantation outside Thomasville. The footage primarily is of the Hanna children riding on horses and ponies.
Archivists Ruta Abolins and Margie Compton also said that they will be screening other films from the collection at the Home Movie Day event in Athens on October 20th.
Source: Online Athens
Jay Schwartz, film collector and impresario behind Philadelphia’s Secret Cinema will be screening a rare home movie from his collection in an outdoor screening at the Laurel Hill Cemetery. Jay discovered the film, which includes scenes of a court-ordered 1937 exhumation of the grave of heiress Henrietta Garrett, and will be showing it before Plan 9 From Outer Space. The Philadelphia Daily News has a story about Garrett and the film, including video of Schwartz talking about the film.
Update: The Philadelphia Inquirer has done an article, too.
Source: The Secret Cinema
Never-before-seen footage of the Royal family, including home movies of and by the Queen, are to be shown in a BBC documentary – in a tribute by the Prince of Wales to his mother.
In it, Prince Charles shares his family memories, providing insight into Queen Elizabeth’s public and private life. The Queen is celebrating her Diamond Jubilee, marking her 60 years on the throne. The documentary includes footage – filmed by the Queen – of nine-year-old Charles and his younger sister Princess Anne on a family beach holiday in Norfolk in 1957.
The two children are seen buried up to their necks in the sand with a corgi dog between them.
Throughout the film, the prince shares his memories of the Queen while adding his own commentary and insights.
Source: BBC
Los Alamos National Lab has posted some 1943 home movies of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project. Physicist Hugh Bradner shot movies “in a place that didn’t officially exist.”
The Wall Street Journal has an article about the World War II home movies of Edwin Fitchett of Poughkeepsie, New York.
Fitchett got his first movie camera at 15 and recorded family trips and holiday gatherings. He continued his hobby when he entered Cornell University in 1940, filming college and fraternity life on the Ivy League campus in Ithaca, N.Y. He enlisted in the Army in September 1942 but remained stateside until July 1945, when his artillery battalion was shipped to the Pacific. His unit was training for the pending invasion of Japan when the war ended just weeks after they arrived in the Philippines.
With U.S. military censorship restrictions lifted, Fitchett had his camera sent from home, along with any rolls of Kodak color film his parents could find. Soon he was taking the camera along on sightseeing trips to Manila and the Philippines countryside, often in the battalion’s flimsy two-seater planes used as aerial spotters.
The 71 minute DVD of Fitchett’s home movies is available for sale at www.fitchettfilm.com
From Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library…
A home movie (originally captured on 16mm film) taken by Julian Stein of Gertrude Stein’s oldest brother Michael Stein’s home, designed by Le Corbusier, in Garches, France followed by scenes of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at the Hotel Pernollet in Belley, France.
For more information, visit the Beinecke’s Digital Collections.
In 1936, the same year that he filmed Tarzan and the Rocky Gorge, a 16 year old Robbins Barstow joined his brother and five other boys on a journey of nearly 8,000 miles from Hartford, Connecticut to Montana and back. Led by a Hartford Seminary graduate student, the boys crossed 14 states and into Canada, camping along the way.
Before his death last year Robbins had the film, which he title The Adventure of the Galloping Geese, transferred to videotape, though sadly it is lacking his trademark narration.
Source: Archive.org
The Quincy (Michigan) Historical Society is searching for local home movies that are at least 25 years old. The films will be digitized and then screened as part of a “movie night” series.
Source: The Daily Reporter
The Ohio Genealogical Society hosted “Mansfield in Motion,” a screening of amateur and industrial films showing the history of the town.
A small group of people gathered at the Ohio Genealogical Society Library in Bellville on Saturday to get a glimpse of “Mansfield in Motion,” films of Mansfield from 1927 to 1968. Scott Schaut, curator of the Mansfield Memorial Museum, has been collecting the historical films, photos and audio recordings the past five years.
Some are commercial and industrial films, like recordings made by Tappan and Westinghouse, but most are old home movies.
“A lot of people might think of some of these things as home movies, but the events they capture and the things going on in the background provide much more than that,” Schaut said. “They help document our history.”
Source: MansfieldNewsJournal.com
home & amateur 