Streaming now: an HD recording of the second session. 87 min.
In choosing to devote the symposium to Water, Climate, and Migration, we sought presentations addressing the current moment of climate crisis as well as historical media that allow us to think about how the planet got to this point. And about how archives and media makers face the need to be greener and cleaner. This panel does these things.
Click to enlarge or go to vimeo.com/429875386.
Linda Tadic, “The Environmental Impact of Digital Archives.”
In 2017, she founded Digital Bedrock, a provider of digital preservation services, of which she is CEO. She also teaches digital asset management and media access in the UCLA Department of Information Studies (and did similar teaching for NYU MIAP until 2011 when she moved to Los Angeles). While director of the University of Georgia Media Archives and president of AMIA, she spoke about archiving local television at the first Orphan Film Symposium in 1999.
Jennifer L. Peterson, “National Park Roads in US Government Films from the 1920s.” Peterson served on the program committee for Orphans 2020. “Understanding the sources of global warming requires a historical awareness that film history can help us with,” she writes. This presentation discusses two films produced for the National Park Service in 1927: Wheels of Progress and Roads in Our National Park, both preserved by the National Archives. “I illustrate how nature was defined in that era as a resource for human use. Looking at these films today, we can see the government cooperating with the forces of fossil capitalism to articulate what we might call a state ideology of nature.” Professor and chair of the Department of Communication at Woodbury University in Los Angeles, her keynote talk at the 2018 Orphan Film Symposium — “Love, Loss, and Climate Change: Watching the Historical Nature Film Today” — can be heard here.
Alexander Markov (Ukulele Films, St. Petersburg, Russia) Constructing Hydroelectric Power Stations in the USSR and Egypt. Currently producing a documentary entitled Hydroelectric Joy (2020), he screens a teaser for that film as well as archived documentary rushes and recently acquired amateur films shot in the 1950s and 60s.
NB. The archival films screened by Peterson and Markov during the May 26 live stream have been cut down version of the session recording.