Re: Maya's Haiti footage (was: Frameworker in the news)

From: Chuck Kleinhans (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Feb 24 2010 - 09:11:41 PST


It strikes me that given the recent events in Haiti, this is exactly
the wrong moment to be shouting that restoring a 60 year old set of
unedited footage should be deserving of special restoration funding.

Perhaps this can be a "teachable moment" about the realities of the
economics of film preservation, and not so incidentally, art world
attitudes to actual human disasters.

Chuck Kleinhans

On Feb 24, 2010, at 8:16 AM, David Baker wrote:

> Mark,
>
> Thank you for responding.
> As you can tell it was not your blog per se that enticed me to ask
> the question.
> (I am certainly one of the legion of anonymous audience members who
> have gotten
> the utmost pleasure from scrutinizing every inch of your website
> however.)
>
> Your title 'Academy Film Archive Preservationist" is what enticed
> me to send a query your way.
>
> Anthology is definitely the sole steward of the unedited Haitian
> footage.
> I have spoken with Andrew Lampert at Anthology. The impression I
> have is that while this is a project
> "in development" ,it has been so every year,year after year since
> it left Maya's hands.
>
> How to break the stasis this wildly consequential film has achieved,
> and get it seen by the public?
>
> Do you know of any precedent for restoration of material of this
> consequence being shared by two archival institutions?
>
> (If Maya could pick up and throw a refrigerator from one side of a
> room to the other,
> see: Stan Brakhage in Martina Kudlacek's In "The Mirrror Of Maya
> Deren" then somebody
> ought to be able make visible the woefully unseen unedited Deren
> Haitian footage.)
>
> Next stop Jonas,
>
> David
>

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