During the Fall 2021 semester, the RML project supported two interns from the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. Each intern was hosted by an organization located on Long Island, which includes Suffolk, Nassau, Queens, and Kings counties. The following post is from Kirk Mudle, who interned at Queens Museum.
For my final internship in the MIAP program, I had the privilege of working with Queens Museum to help preserve and research the 16mm and 8mm motion picture film in their World’s Fair Collection.
Founded in 1972 in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, the Queens Museum is a non-profit institution that presents art exhibitions, public programs, and educational experiences for people in the New York Metropolitan area, and particularly the residents of Queens. The Queens Museum frequently collaborates with local artists and community partners to host public events and performances that address topics such as gender-justice, mental health, environmental justice, youth enrichment, gun violence prevention, and LGBTQ+ activism. While Queens Museum is deeply concerned with the contemporary issues of its constituents, they are also dedicated to creating opportunities for researchers and artists to reexamine and interrogate the history of New York City through long-term exhibitions, including their New York World’s Fair Collection.
The Queens Museum’s history is inextricably linked with the 1939-40 and 1964-65 New York World’s Fairs. The Museum was once the New York City Building, which was built to house the New York City Pavilion for the 1939-40 World’s Fair. After temporarily serving as the headquarters for the United Nations General Assembly between 1946 and 1950, the building reprised its role as the City’s official pavilion during the 1964-65 World’s Fair. 51 million visitors attended the second Fair, which ran over the course of two six month summer seasons and hosted 140 pavilions representing 80 nations, 24 US states, and over 45 corporations in a grand celebration of commercialism and capitalism couched in the utopian theme of “Peace through Understanding.” This theme was symbolized by a 140 foot high, 900,000 lb. stainless-steel model of the Earth called the “Unisphere” that still stands directly adjacent to the Queens Museum. The Queens Museum preserves the history of these two exhibitions through its collection of 10,000 objects related to the 1939-40 and 1964-65 World’s Fairs.
Advancements in audiovisual technology played a major role at the World’s Fairs: National pavilions and pavilions sponsored by industry leaders including Ford, General Electric, Pepsi Cola, and Kodak produced multimedia installations that combined live performances, film, and animation, and the World’s Fair Corporation relied heavily on the moving image as a means to promote the event. The Queens Museum has acquired approximately 100 audiovisual items through donations from Fair attendees, private collectors, and figures directly related to the World’s Fairs. These items represent a wide variety of formats spanning the history of 20th-century recording technology, including 16mm and 8mm motion picture film, optical disks, U-Matic and VHS tapes, audio cassettes, phonograph records, and open-reel audio tapes. In terms of content, they range from home-movies, documentaries, newsreel footage, and promotional, industrial, and corporate-sponsored films—all of which provide unique insights into the events.
In 2017, the Queens Museum received a large donation from Pam Tonucci, the heir of Hugo A. Seiler, the Director of Radio and Television Operations for the 1964-65 World’s Fair. This donation consisted of Seiler’s personal archive of World’s Fair mementos and included a total of 37 16mm films, 14 photographic slides, 12 open reel audio tapes, and 3 boxes of assorted print materials. While the print items were accessioned and cataloged at the time of donation, the Museum did not have the resources or expertise to process the audiovisual materials. As such, most of the films sat dormant in their original rusting film canisters and degrading shipping containers for years (and in some cases decades), which only served to accelerate their decay and put them at even greater risk. This changed last Spring thanks to the incredible work of my colleagues in the Regional Media Legacies (RML) program. Between January and of August 2021, RML intern Ana Salas and Research Fellow Robert Anen conducted the first assessment of the AV items in the Museum’s collection and performed mold remediation on several of the most at-risk films.
Last Fall, I picked up where Robert and Ana left off to continue inventorying and rehousing the 16mm and 8mm films, and began researching their content, origins, and history (also referred to in the archival world as their “provenance”). I used the film rewind bench Ana built and the RML Film Inspection Kit to inspect each film, attach new leader, repair any severely damaged or deteriorating splices, wind them onto new cores, and placed each into polypropylene canisters—all preservation supplies and equipment the Museum purchased per Robert and Ana’s recommendations. During the rehousing process, I confirmed or updated the metadata in the existing inventory while taking pictures and notes on the content of each film. I paid particular attention to important narrative landmarks, such as the particular World’s Fair pavilions, attractions, and historical figures featured, and noted any information related to their production, provenance, and any potential intellectual property concerns. After gathering this information, I wrote summaries of the films for eventual implementation into the Museum’s Collection Management System, Collection Space, and added notes to the collection spreadsheet about the status of potential rights holders.
I would be remiss not to mention some of my challenges during this project. This was my first time working with film outside of the safety of the MIAP film lab or classroom, so I was initially very intimidated by the idea of handling films this old, fragile, and potentially rare. This was where the support from my supervisors Lynn Maliszewski (Archives and Collections Manager at Queens), and Marie Lascu (Project Manager for RML) proved vital. Both Lynn and Maire exercised seemingly limitless patience with my questions and concerns, and never hesitated to offer advice or connect me with the resources necessary to conduct the work.
Before this internship, I was also mostly unfamiliar with the World’s Fairs. Aside from several childhood visits to the recreations of “It’s a Small World” and the “Carousel of Progress” at Disneyland in Orlando Florida, and a grainy photograph of my mother and grandparents visiting the 1964-65 Fair during the summer of either 1964 or 1965, I had almost no knowledge of the significance of the World’s Fairs or the role they played in shaping the landscape and culture of New York City and the United States. This is once again where Lynn’s expertise and extensive knowledge about these events and relevant information sources became so important. On multiple occasions, she pointed me in the right direction to solve some of the more confounding mysteries about where these films came from, who created them, and their uniqueness. This led to several exciting discoveries, including an early industrial film from the late 1930s that describes the election of Queens Borough president George U. Harvey and the expansion of the borough’s infrastructure, as well as a film directed and written by Hugo A. Seiler himself about the nuclear threat to America posed by the USSR featuring interviews with Colonel Raymond S. Sleeper, nuclear physicist Dr. Edward Teller (known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb”), and United States Air Force general B.A. Schriever.
In the final weeks of my internship I received a crash course in grant writing. I shadowed Lynn and Raphael Miles, Institutional Giving Manager at Queens, while they put together an application for the Council on Library and Information Resources’ (CLIR) ninth Recordings at Risk grant program. Based on my research during the semester, I helped select specific films that best fit into CLIR’s criteria: those which were at most at-risk, had content that was the rarest and least accessible, or had minimal privacy and intellectual property concerns. I created an updated inventory specifically for the application that contained technical, condition, copyright, and content descriptions for selected films and corresponded with several vendors to receive estimates for digitizing the films.
Reflecting on my time at Queens Museum, I can say confidently that my work will contribute to the Museum’s ability to preserve and make these films accessible to researchers and artists interested in the lasting legacy and consequences of the New York World’s Fairs. The experience also allowed me to grow as an audiovisual archivist in several ways. Not only am I far more comfortable handling delicate film, but I also gained an even greater appreciation for the archivist’s role as a researcher. Preservation does not just involve having the technical knowledge to care for the physical embodiments of cultural artifacts. It also requires an understanding of the social and cultural contexts surrounding their creation, how they were experienced in the past, and how they could be experienced in future. This information is essential in order to both describe collections so that they may be discovered by users and to advocate for their significance as pieces of history.