Recorded June 16, 2022. Here’s the opening segment of the Orphans 2022 program “Reanimating Histories,” which was built around filmmaker Kelly Gallagher receiving the Orphan Film Symposium’s biennial Helen Hill Award.
First, Bill Morrison was to introduce his recent film Buried News. Pairing his work with Helen Hill makes sense. She screened her first home movie footage rescued from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at the 2006 Orphan Film Symposium, in her hometown of Columbia, South Carolina. He was there to debut Who By Water. She presented him with her VHS copy of his film Decasia with the muck of Katrina still on it.
When circumstances prevented Bill from traveling, Paul Gordon (Library and Archives Canada) stepped in to introduce Buried News. The note in the printed program read: “Newsreels documenting U.S. racial divide (1917-1920); from the Dawson City Collection.” Running time: 12 minutes.
Click to enlarge or go to vimeo.com/734548266.
Bill Morrison sent this annotation on July 27, 2022.
On May 13, 2012, at 6:10am, a Canadian film programmer named Paul Gordon, wrote me to inquire about screening my film Decasia (2002) at the Lost Dominion Screening Collective in Ottawa. He went on to say:
“I also happen to be a Motion Picture Conservator for Library and Archives Canada. If you ever wanted to come up here and look for films or maybe even work at our facilities maybe we can make it happen.”
I wrote Paul back asking if they didn’t house the Dawson City material at Library and Archives Canada (LAC), and he responded that they did. I first visited Ottawa to screen my films in March 2013, and spent a couple days across the river in Gatineau, QC where Paul worked at the Preservation Centre.
The first day I began looking at the films, March 27, 2013, I requested to view a British Canadian Pathé News film from 1919 that was listed as containing footage of the 1919 World Series between the Chicago White Sox and Cincinnati Reds, a series that lives in sports infamy as one in which members of the White Sox accepted gamblers’ bribes to intentionally lose. Though the imagery had then been restored 35 years earlier, it had remained entombed in the archive, without having been re-examined in the wake of the 94-year-old scandal it portrayed. Once uploaded to the Library’s YouTube page, it quickly became a viral sensation among baseball historians.
And here is said news footage:
posted Apr 25, 2014 (416,071 views as of Jul 28, 2022)
“Excerpt from the British Canadian Pathé News showing various baseball games between the Chicago White Sox and Cincinnati Reds in the 1919 World Series. Material is from the Dawson City Museum and Historical Society Collection, as well as Library and Archives Canada. Language: This film is a heritage item from Library and Archives Canada and is only available in English. IDC: 22175.”