David Weiss Interview

Archived Interviews

Interview with David Weiss of Northeast Historic Film

This interview with the executive director and cofounder of Northeast Historic Film (NHF), in Bucksport, Maine was conducted by IPI/AMIA intern Justin Bonfiglio. NHF is dedicated to collecting, preserving, and making available to the public film and videotape of interest to the people of northern New England.

IPI: How did you get your start? What was your initial motivation?

Weiss: In 1985 Karan Sheldon and I worked on preservation and outreach for a 1930 16mm film about life in the Maine logging woods. The restored film, From Stump to Ship, named to the National Film Registry in 2002, was popular in the region. Thinking about a follow-up, we innocently wondered who had all the rest of the old film. Looking around, we realized many institutions and individuals held moving image collections, but no one had equipment, staff, or funding to process, preserve, or make them available. It was pretty clear that if we wanted to see it done we had to have a hand in starting a responsible organization.

IPI: What are the most important lessons you’ve learned since you started NHF? What are your biggest challenges?

Weiss: The first big lesson we learned was that you can’t tell the story of a region using moving images without depending on amateur film, and that the forms of amateur film were very diverse, including records of work life and how people interacted with the landscape—like ice harvesting and agricultural practices. At that time collecting “home movies” was very challenging. The resource was (and still is) widely dispersed in mostly individual hands, and each accession involved navigating a variety of family concerns. Cataloging systems were not geared for amateur material and virtually every piece of film was unique, uncopied material. Additionally, any given piece of film might be of interest to a relatively small group of people but often revealed something that struck very close to home and was deeply significant.

As an independent operation NHF is free to move quickly and pursue whatever we feel is important. (We are also free to starve, as we have no parent organization to pay the utilities and salaries.)

IPI: What effect has changing technology had on the archive?

Weiss: New technology (microcomputers and videotape) in 1986 enabled us to create an independent regional moving image archives. Changes in technology are providing us with new opportunities to reach audiences through the Internet. Adapting to new formats requires ongoing planning and investment in our technology platform. Recently we had to retire our old telecine technology, and the decision to acquire new 8mm and Super 8mm telecines was a significant decision and expenditure. It was critical to maintain that technology, as it is still a key service we provide to clients, donors, and researchers.

IPI: Could you tell us about a few of your collections? What additions have been most exciting to you in the past few years?

Weiss: Alan Kattelle donated his 800-piece amateur camera and projector technology collection to NHF, and he also gave us about 170 reels of film. One of the most interesting is The Making of an American (1920), a short drama intended to promote English-language classes to immigrants. It is a wonderful example of a state-government sponsored film that speaks directly to today’s students in English classes for speakers of other languages and is a rich text for studying the anxieties of business and government in the period.

Q. David Bowers has donated a collection of over 6,000 postcards of early cinemas. We are still considering the best way to display them. The cards are well organized, in beautiful shape, and a national resource. We’ve long had an interest in the history of moviegoing. Who knew there have been more than 600 places to see movies in Maine?

IPI: What do you consider the essential components of a successful film archives?

Weiss: Proper storage. Build it or find it; otherwise you are playing a long-term game of triage, where you will eventually lose the majority of your collections.

And outreach. Initiate outreach programs of all kinds—screenings, symposia, educators’ roundtables, a loan program, touring. Preservation is great, but what is it worth without access?

IPI: Education is important to NHF. What would you say to students and researchers who might be interested in the moving images at NHF?

Weiss: Our collections date from 1901 to the present day. We have seven million feet of film in 8mm, Super 8mm, 9.5mm, 16mm, 28mm, and 35mm, and 8,000 analog and digital video recordings—primarily film and video from Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Vermont. While we are dedicated to preservation of original materials relating to the northeastern United States, the collections encompass a much broader geography. Moving image creators from the region traveled widely; the earliest known color film of Gandhi is found in one collection, and we’re working on an online educational proposal around China film from the early 1930s. Our Online Collections Guide represents only a tiny portion of the 28,000 item-level records in our ProCite database. We are open to the public and truly enjoy having researchers spend time with us in Bucksport.

IPI: Could you tell us about your cold storage facility? How did you succeed in generating support for the project?

Weiss: We recently completed a three-story Conservation Center that houses two floors of 45°F/25% RH storage and one floor of 25°F/30% RH storage. All floors have compact shelving, giving us a capacity of about 12,000 cubic feet.

To generate support for the project we made the case that our collections, and the programs based on them, could not survive without an investment in a cold storage facility. It was expensive, but it is extremely short-sighted to fund only transitory programs, which ultimately rob the future of the resource. We also cited the National Film Preservation Plan and its conclusion that one of the key components to ensure the survival of the “National Film Collection” was a network of regional storage facilities.

Our cold storage space is designed to protect more than our own collections, and we were able to enlist a group of nonprofit consortium partners, including the Maine State Archives, the Harvard Film Archives, and the National Center for Jewish Film at Brandeis, among others, who had a need for such a facility. We still have room to spare and are interested in talking with anyone who may have material that could benefit from cold or frozen storage. For more information, see www.oldfilm.org/nhfWeb/services/services.htm.

IPI: What kind of role has preservation research played in your decision-making at NHF?

Weiss: Preservation research has played a key role in helping us target our resources effectively. While planning our facility we were able to get plenty of advice and examine a wide variety of facilities. A careful review of the research enabled us to sidestep some expensive but nonessential elements. Having access to the results of preservation research has enabled us to answer our clients’ questions with specifics. Our knowledge and ongoing relation to preservation research helps us and our clients have confidence in the structure and the system we created. The next step after building the cold vault was to make sure it was running properly. We use the IPI data logger system and have been able to standardize and adapt our vault monitoring activities as the vault space has expanded.

IPI: What kind of research would you like to see in the future? What would be most helpful to your daily work?

Weiss: As magnetic media formats continue to age, it becomes increasingly important that we get more information on long-term storage effects, predicting failure rates and timeframes, conditioning requirements for removal from cold storage. We are interested in wise use of energy resources, especially in cost control and ecological practices so as to be an efficient, affordable, and planet-friendly organization.

Like most audiovisual archives we have focused most of our attention on analog materials. It is clear that born-digital records pose a new set of challenges. Format obsolescence has always been problematic in television and video, but we will clearly need to address digital storage retrieval and access in the coming years.

IPI has been central in guiding the archival community in preservation and storage issues and we hope that IPI will continue to fill that leadership role the new digital age.