Streaming now: an HD recording of the live session of May 28, 2020, which began the day of programming dedicated to the theme of Migration. 108 minutes.
The session title Great Migrations of course alludes to the historians’ now-conventional name for the movement of millions of African Americans out of the American South throughout the early and mid-twentieth century. In film historiography, Jacqueline Najuma Stewart’s book Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (2005) maps the ways in which that transformation also shaped cinematic experiences. In film archiving and preservation, the term “media migration” takes in much of the work of archives, turning films into video, video into digital files, and managing these multiples. With both of these connotations in mind, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture has been conducting a multi-year Great Migration project, providing digitization to those who have unique media documentation of African American life, principally home movies. Candace Ming and Ina Archer have been instrumental in that work.
The other migrations of people discussed in this session are similarly great in scale. Klavier Wang show some of the early results of NYU Special Collections processing its large videotape collection of Chinatown Cable TV, an organization that produced news and other programming for Chinese immigrants to New York, seen on the city’s community access cable television channels. The Poland’s national film archive’s preservation of little known films about Polish diaspora, including migrants to Latin America, brings a new complexity to narratives of global migration.
Orphans Online
Migration Thursday, May 28, 2020
10am Great Migrations
Juana Suárez (NYU MIAP) moderator
Klavier J. Wang (NYU) Awakening Immigrant Voices: Chinese Cable Television in 1970s-1980s New York Chinatown
• Asia Cinevision CCTV excerpts, 1980-82.
+ a video added here, not played during Orphans Online:
Puppet Show (Chinatown Cable TV, 1980) 26 min.; part of NYU Special Collections Asian CineVision Records.
Iga Harasimowicz, Michał Pieńkowski, Grzegorz Rogowski (FINA: National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute of Poland)
& Grazia Ingravalle (Brunel U London)
• Polish Diaspora in Films of the 1930s: Osadnictwo polskie w puszczach Brazylii [Polish Settlements in Brazilian Wilderness] (1933)
Ina Archer & Candace Ming (National Museum of African American History and Culture)
The Great Migration Project:
The following film were shown during the live event but are not part of this video replay. However all can be viewed at NMAAHC’s Selections from the Great Migration Home Movie Project.
• Highland Beach [Maryland] home movies (early 1950s- 1960s)
• Trip (Zora Lathan, 1975)
• Ariel (Zora Lathan, 1975) 16mm, b/w, silent, 2:31. “one of several short experimental films shot and directed by Zora Lathan in 1975, when she was a student at University of Illinois-Chicago campus.”