In this May 17 post, Bradley E. Reeves (Appalachian Media Archives) shared his new 23-minute video compilation, made to stand-in for the live presentation he would have given at the Orphans / Eye International Conference in Amsterdam. The Tennessee Valley Authority: Built for and Owned by The People (2020) will remain up for future viewings and research.
Finding he didn’t have time enough to include a recent archival cache in the first mix, Reeves cut another stand-alone video. For post-symposium posting. It began with a connection to the symposium’s water theme, but morphed into a biography of someone who left behind media artifacts of several types. Among these were remnants of a never-completed film from the exploitation genre that became a craze after the commercial success of Russ Meyer’s The Immoral Mr. Tease (1959).
Therefore, content advisory: nudity.
As Reeves describes:
Knoxville television pioneer Jack Weidemann passed away in 2018, leaving behind several trunks full of moldy 16mm motion picture newsfilm, various-format videotapes, scores of publicity photographs, and folders of paper documents. Discovered with the reels of film were screen tests, outtakes, raw footage, and demo reels for Wiedemann’s uncompleted 1960 nudie-cutie feature The Legend of Calinda, partially filmed in the coves and water holes surrounding Tennessee Valley Authority dams. The 20-minute piece documents the making of the unreleased film, now seeing the light of day six decades later.