FilmLandscape

Amateur film discussion with Karan Sheldon, Justin Wolff, Libby Bischof, Michael Komanecky.  Considering aesthetic intent, audience interest, and interpretive strategies.

Alexander Forbes, 28 mm b&w, Sheep on Naushon Island, 1915. http://oldfilm.org/collection/index.php/Detail/Collection/Show/collection_id/426


Alexander Forbes (1882-1965) born and died in Milton, MA. Great-grandfather, John Murray Forbes, a diplomat and businessman in China, was responsible for establishing the Forbes family on Naushon Island. Harvard Medical School MD in 1910; specialized in neurophysiology.

F.B. Richards, 28 mm b&w, Snow White[Blue Hill Country Club] 1916. http://oldfilm.org/collection/index.php/Detail/Collection/Show/collection_id/105

Colonel F.B. Richards (1862-1940) a summer resident of Blue Hill, Maine. Graduated from MIT in 1884, industrialist from Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Lieutenant Colonel in World War I.

Charles B. Hinds, 16 mm b&w, A.S. Hinds factory, Portland, 1925.   http://oldfilm.org/collection/index.php/Detail/Collection/Show/collection_id/368

Charles B. Hinds (1881-1958) A.S. Hinds Laboratory was built in 1920 at 331-337 Forest Avenue. Lehn & Fink (manufacturers of Lysol) bought the company in 1907, although it continued independently and was in business through the 1940s.

Hiram Maxim, 16 mm b&w, Scarf Dance, 1925. http://oldfilm.org/collection/index.php/Detail/Collection/Show/collection_id/251


Hiram Percy Maxim (1869-1936) was an engineer and inventor. His father, Hiram S. Maxim, from Sangerville, Maine, invented the Maxim automatic gun. Hiram P. Maxim was founder and first president of the Amateur Cinema League, 1926-.

Snowden Family Collection, 8mm color, outside a house in Stonington, circa 1960 (Reel 20)


Jason G. Snowden and Edith Pickering Snowden married in 1937,  filmed their six children and life in Deer Isle and Stonington, Maine. We do not know who is depicted here.

E.B. White, 16mm b&w  E.B. White, Joel White, Raffles the dog, circa 1940.   http://oldfilm.org/collection/index.php/Detail/Collection/Show/collection_id/102

E.B. White (1899-1985) was an essayist, humorist and fiction writer, born in New York and moved with his wife Katharine to Maine in the 1930s. Wrote for New Yorker and books such as Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little.

Albert Conley, 16 mm b&w, Automobile trips in Maine, 1928-1934. http://oldfilm.org/collection/index.php/Detail/Collection/Show/collection_id/13


Dr. Albert D. Conley (1887-1974) was a resident of Freeport, ME. He was a research chemist, married Mary F. Johnson Conley and lived on Pleasant Street, Freeport. His second wife was Madelyn Edith Dyer Conley.

Jameson Collection, 16 mmb&w,Brown Hill Farm, Bow NH 1926 and Enid OK 1927 (Reel 11) from Beta SP

John Butler Jameson (1873-1960) born in Bennington, NH, resident of Bow, NH. Insurance executive. 


Charles Norman Shay, 8 mm Kodachrome, Indian Island, Reel 1, and Tourism in the American West, Reel 9.

Charles Norman Shay, a Penobscot Tribal Elder, was born in Bristol, CT, in 1924, moving to Indian Island, ME in 1930, attending school in Old Town, ME.  He is the grandson of Joseph Nicolar, tribal representative to the Maine Legislature and author of The Life and Traditions of the Red Man (1893).

Arthur Libby Race, 16 mm b&w, Heron Island, Maine, 1939.

Arthur Libby Race, (1879-1960) was born and brought up in Boothbay, ME. He worked as managing director of the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston and lived at the hotel as resident manager in the 1920s-1940s.  Race was national chairman of the American Hotel Association Committee on Prohibition.

For who was there, see http://filmlandscape.tumblr.com/team

The visual and literary imagery of old New England became a national commodity, successfully marketed by a powerful publishing industry, a cultural elite of critics and editors closely allied with their artists and writers, both inside and outside the region, for a hundred years and more.

—Picturing Old New  England: Image and Memory, Page 16

Interwar amateur film has never been a commodity in this way. Each unique reel was made for personal use, not shown, critiqued, exposed to public view or assessment since.

Nontheatrical films from the first part of the twentieth century harbor intense yet largely ignored representations of how people lived in and understood their enfolding landscape. 

These moving image documents ask questions about perceptions of our environment and shift understandings of visual culture.