The Moving Image

April 2000—my husband has returned home from a research trip to Northeast Historic Film in Bucksport, Maine. It is late at night when he walks through the door, but we stay awake so that he can recount his adventures at the regional moving image archive and describe the small town of Bucksport. As I have never been to Maine, I have a difficult time imagining what he is describing. Mark pulls out a videocassette of an archival amateur film, one of the films he had seen. I suggest that perhaps archival viewings might wait until the next day, but he insists and slips Northeast Historic Film's From Stump to Ship into the VCR.

Folksy music begins to play. A voice-over explains that the long lumber industry is a thing of the past and that the narrator has purchased a moving picture camera to make a complete record of the long lumber operations on the river. I see men sawing [End Page 1] down pine trees, teams of horses hauling logs, and men eating lunch at their camp. Most remarkable is the river drive. Men run over logs as though they are flying over them as the logs rush down the river. Eventually the logs make it to the mill, and finally a schooner sets sail taking the logs to market. As I watch the schooner depart, the narrator explains that this is the twilight of his career as a lumberman. When it ends, I tell my husband that From Stump to Ship is remarkable. Although I have yet to visit the state, I now have my own memory of Maine.

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Figure 1 Alfred Ames, the creator of From Stump to Ship (left) and two river drivers stand on logs.

Alfred Ames, the owner of the Machias Lumber Company, filmed From Stump to Ship in 1930. In part, the film was a tribute to his family's lumber company and a record of its last year before the company was sold. The film's rediscovery in the mid-1980s was integral to the formation of Northeast Historic Film (NHF), a regional moving image archive located in Bucksport, Maine. After cofounding NHF, Karan Sheldon and David Weiss produced Woodsmen and River Drivers, a 1989 compilation documentary that integrates interviews of retired woodsmen and river drivers, From Stump to Ship footage, and historic still photos. Ames's film and the contemporary documentary deal with the same topic: the vanishing of Maine's long lumber industry and the people who worked in it. While both moving image documents are edifying portraits of a way of life that has all but disappeared, they also are instructive for understanding the ways in which contemporary spectators make sense of the past when confronted with antiquated, archival moving images. [End Page 2]

Any number of archival films or contemporary documentaries that integrate archival footage might be used for such an interpretation, but I have selected From Stump to Ship and Woodsmen and River Drivers because they share footage (Woodsmen and River Drivers relies on From Stump to Ship clips to tell its contemporary story) yet were created in two different eras. Ames's film was made at the moment that the long lumber industry was vanishing. The documentary looks back more than fifty years at the industry and the life that accompanied it. In addition, both documents' narratives specifically confront the issue of looking back in time; Ames's film addresses a past that is disappearing before his camera lens, and the contemporary documentary speaks to a past that only exists in archival images and the woodsmen's memories. In other words, the narratives themselves reflect on what it means to confront the past, helping to direct the spectator to interpret the effects of the passing of time and the meaning of history.

While From Stump to Ship and Woodsmen and River Drivers both confront and contemplate the passing of an era, the spectator experiences the past constructed in the documents in distinctive ways. Like an old photograph, From Stump to Ship frames and freezes a vision of past lives and methods of work that appears to be entirely isolated from the present. Suggestive of the experience of time past, the spectator is left to interpret the relationship between the past and the present. Woodsmen and River Drivers, on the other hand, choreographs the relationship between the past and the present, creating a temporal continuum that dramatically reveals the effects of time's progression. It reflects the experience of time passing.

From Stump to Ship and Woodsmen and River Drivers frame the past differently, but spectators necessarily judge and experience the past within both documents through the lens of the present. Viewers juggle their conceptions of the present along with the past represented within the documents in order to make sense of the moving images. In other words, spectators undergo the experience of bifocality, a kind of temporal shifting between the past and the present. Anthropologists and other cultural scholars use the concept of bifocality to help explain the complexities that people face as they attempt to make sense of the conflict between their ethnic and national identities.¹ The term bifocality suggests that neither national nor ethnic identities are privileged; rather, ethnic groups manage multiple identities simultaneously. When confronted with disparate cultural traditions and multiple histories, Mexican Americans, for example, may draw upon the pluralities of their past and present to reshape their cultural memories. [End Page 3] This renegotiation, anthropologist Michael M. J. Fischer explains, is a dialectical or two-directional journey that examines the realities of both sides of cultural differences so that they may mutually question each other.² I have adapted the concept of bifocality to help explain the spectator's temporal dual-consciousness when confronting From Stump to Ship and Woodsmen and River Drivers. Rather than assimilating the past represented on the screen or privileging the self-consciousness of the present, the viewer maneuvers between and around them. The significance of this maneuvering is that the viewer, in varying degrees, re-visions the past, actively creating a more localized and personally meaningful understanding of the passage of time and history.

An understanding of how viewers experience archival footage and documentaries that integrate it has become increasingly important as cultural critics, and to some extent the general public, have come to recognize the value of historic archival films. Because collection, restoration, preservation, and storage of these cultural artifacts is so time consuming and financially taxing, it is important to consider how contemporary audiences may respond to them. And while not all such films can, will, or even should find a substantive audience, some do. Many Maine citizens, for example, have discovered the cultural and historic importance of From Stump to Ship. In 2002, it was named to the National Film Registry, a mark of distinction that is infrequently bestowed on amateur films. As more moving images like From Stump to Ship become accessible to the public, we will want to have a clearer understanding of how such films help to shape the viewing experience and our relationship with eras that precede us.³

A Brief History of From Stump to Ship and Woodsmen and River Drivers

In 1930, Alfred Ames, the president of the Machias Lumber Company in Washington County, Maine, created a silent, 28-minute film of his long lumber business. Using a 16mm moving picture camera, Ames focused it upon the woodsmen and river drivers who worked for him, creating a social history of life in the woods during the early twentieth century. Ames and his nephew, Rufus Fuller, wrote a script to accompany the silent footage, providing viewers an account of the lumber business and details of the men who worked for him.⁴ Ames stated in the script that he made the film because he knew that "the long lumber industry in Maine was a thing of the past." [End Page 4]

As the title of the film suggests, Ames documented the entire process of his lumber business—from the cutting of trees to the milled lumber being shipped to market. He documented his employees sawing trees into sixteen-foot logs during the winter months and his horses toiling as they hauled great loads of lumber through snow-packed woods to the river. As winter turned to spring, Ames filmed the river drivers agilely running over logs in the rushing water, shaking them with their pick poles to keep them floating with the current. In the accompanying script, Ames takes care to name most of the men shown in the film, and he emphasizes their individual skills. As the camera rests upon the forty-eight-foot band saw at the mill, for example, Ames explains that it must be sharpened on a grinding machine. "Notice the sparks fly from the emery wheel on the filing machine. Jim Mealey is the filer. To file he simply points up the tooth with the file. These saws have to be rolled, hammered, and tensioned. It is some job to make one run perfect."

It is uncertain if Ames originally intended to make his film to show his workers. But he did project the film at the Machias Lumber Company farewell banquet in 1930. "Mr. Ames is an expert amateur photographer and the pictures were of high caliber and intensely interesting to these men," a newspaper article explained, "most of whom saw themselves on the screen at work."⁵ Ames recorded the final days of his family's lumber business and an important chapter in Maine's economic and social history. He showed the film more widely as part of his political campaign. In 1932, Ames, a Republican gubernatorial candidate, exhibited From Stump to Ship as he read the script at Maine granges, churches, and American Legion posts. An article in Machias Valley News suggested that this was a highly effective manner in which to run his campaign because Ames did not have to make any promises that he might later have difficulty keeping.⁶ Nevertheless, Ames did not win the election. Democratic candidate, Louis J. Brann, became Maine's new governor that year.

After the election, Ames lost interest in the film, and From Stump to Ship was not seen again until the mid-1940s, when Rufus Fuller borrowed the film and took it home to Providence, Rhode Island. There, Fuller showed the film at his children's schools and to the theater department at Brown University. But after a few showings, Fuller put the film away, storing it in a cracker tin at his home. The film remained on a bookshelf in the Fuller home until 1970, when Fuller's wife, Alice, donated the film to the University of Maine at Orono (UMO). At the university, the film made its way to David Smith, a historian of the Maine woods. For a few years, the film remained on the floor of Smith's office, buried under documents and papers. Upon rediscovery of the film, Smith moved it to the Public Information Office at UMO. While the film was finally accessible, it received no scholarly attention until 1984—fourteen years after the film was donated to the university. [End Page 5]

When Smith and Henry Nevison, the radio and television producer for UMO's Public Information Office, finally viewed From Stump to Ship in 1984, they came to the conclusion that the film was an important historic artifact because it portrayed a fundamental aspect of Maine's cultural and economic heritage that had long disappeared from the realities of everyday life in the state. In order for the film to be restored, reconstructed,and made accessible to the public, a team of scholars from UMO (which included Smith and Nevison) collaborated with Karan Sheldon and David Weiss, independent film and video producers who had recently moved to Maine from Boston. With funding from the Maine Humanities Council and Champion International, a paper products company, Sheldon and Weiss were able to create a reversal work print and have the film restored and then reconstructed in 1985.⁷

The decisions that were made during reconstruction of the film changed the nature of the original artifact. Some of the film's collaborators, for example, were as committed to Ames's script as they were to his images. They decided the film would be more cohesive and more accessible for contemporary viewers if a voice-over (narrated by Tim Sample, a Maine celebrity and humorist) of Ames's script could be added to the film. To show the film with sound on 16mm projectors, the original speed of 16 frames per second was changed to 24 frames per second. In addition, some elements of Ames's script were also changed. Words that did not correlate with the images in the film were cut, and in some places two sentences were condensed into one. The film was altered by the 180 edits that were made to the film, reducing its original running time by approximately one minute. Most of the cuts simply tightened the film; for example, some cuts removed footage in which Ames had forgotten to turn off his camera before he rested it on the ground. Some original shots appeared out of sequence, and they were reordered for a more logical progression. Finally, the producers added a fiddle-and-harmonica musical score of early twentieth-century jigs and waltzes common to the north woods.

Clearly, the reconstructed From Stump to Ship is not the same as the original film. The addition of a voice-over and the musical score added an audible dimension; the frame rate changed the look of the film; and while the alteration to both the film and the script was not monumental, both have been changed. While most of the original film and Ames's words remain in the reconstruction, it is important to note that the version of From Stump to Ship that has been viewed widely by contemporary audiences and was named to the National Film Registry is not Ames's original film. It was reconstructed in a manner that might be more appealing to audiences who are familiar with existing sound and film technology. [End Page 6]

Once production of From Stump to Ship was finished, the film was exhibited at UMO in September 1985. Expecting a few hundred people to attend the screening, Weiss and Sheldon were pleasantly surprised when eleven hundred people came to see the film. As part of the agreement with the Humanities Council, the project participants took the film on the road, and from October 1985 to March 1986 nearly eight thousand people across the state viewed the film. From Stump to Ship resonated with the people of Maine, in part because both the film and the public manner in which it was exhibited commemorated the widely forgotten history of woods life in the early twentieth century. Following the film screenings, audience members were invited to offer their reactions to the film. Many spoke of parents or other relatives who had worked in the woods, and retired woodsmen and river drivers shared their own memories. In more private and casual conversations often following the public screenings, Sheldon and Weiss spoke with many of the retired lumbermen, some of whom had worked at the Machias Lumber Company for Alfred Ames.

From Stump to Ship is a document that has helped to restore and maintain the memory of the woods life; nevertheless, it is from the point of view of Alfred Ames, a prosperous business owner. Through their meetings with the many retired woodsmen at the film's screenings, Sheldon and Weiss envisioned a documentary that was from the point of view of the retired workers—providing them with the opportunity to respond to the film that Ames had left behind. Sheldon and Weiss believed it was imperative to document their testimonies before it was too late, for most of the men were already at least eighty or ninety years of age. Fully familiar with the genre of the compilation documentary (a fact-based piece using personal testimony and other material), Sheldon and Weiss envisioned a production that combined a chorus of woodsmen voices in their own environment along with From Stump to Ship cutaways, historic still photos, and music germane to the region and period. The Maine Humanities Council funded the Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral [End Page 7] History (at UMO) to do a series of twenty-five oral histories with retired lumbermen whose experiences were associated with From Stump to Ship. The most dynamic and intriguing interviews were then videotaped to be included in the half-hour documentary Woodsmen and River Drivers. The Maine Humanities Council and Champion International Corporation provided a small budget to produce the documentary that was released in 1989. Over a three-year period, with supervision from UMO's Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History, producers Sheldon and Weiss and director and videographer Michel Chalufour wrote, videotaped, and produced the thirty-minute documentary. Like From Stump to Ship, the structure of Woodsmen and River Drivers corresponds with the seasonal rhythm of the long lumber industry: there are woodsmen's recollections of woodcutting in the winter, river drivers' memories of spring drives, and finally reflections of millwork and schooners full of cargo headed to market during the summer months. The documentary has received critical acclaim, winning a gold medal at the 1990 International Film and Television Festival. It has been distributed through public screenings and home videocassette sales, and in the early 1990s was shown on PBS stations across the country as well as on the Learning Channel.

The Experience of Watching the Past

As we move toward an interpretation of bifocality and its relationship with the viewing experience of From Stump to Ship and Woodsmen and River Drivers, we must first consider the ways in which spectators identify with what they see on the screen. Film scholar Vivian Sobchack explains that our engagement with a film depends on our knowledge and our familiarity with the objects that we see on the screen.⁸ The more familiar we are with what we see, the more likely we are to see beyond the screen object and back to our own lifeworlds. For instance, the filmic objects in our home movies become referents for other places and times that we have experienced. We are dependent on the images that we see only inasmuch as we use them (images of our parents, children, homes, friends, and pets) to evoke and recover memories. We view these kinds of moving image documents with one eye to the past and the other to the present, measuring the distance between them and the losses and changes that have necessarily incurred along the way. We may experience the documentary or a fictional film differently from the home movie because our knowledge of the images that we see is often incomplete—although not completely absent. While it may be that we are familiar with an image of the past that is constituted in a documentary or a fictional film, the images are not necessarily of our own past, so we must attend to the narrative more completely than when we watch our home movies or other films that portray pasts personally familiar to us.

We cannot necessarily predict how a spectator will experience an archival film or a documentary that integrates its footage because it depends, in part, on the viewer's relationship with the images on the screen. From Stump to Ship has a long history of viewers, ranging from Ames's workers to gubernatorial speech attendees, to academics, to thousands of contemporary Maine citizens. Clearly, not all viewers have responded to [End Page 8] or could respond to the film in the same manner. When Ames exhibited his film at Machias Lumber Company's farewell banquet in 1930, a newspaper reporter stated that the men viewed the film with fascination, as they were able to watch themselves working on the screen. Surely, seeing themselves on film must have been intriguing. However, the men may have also experienced a sense of loss as they watched what visibly remained of their working lives at the Machias Lumber Company.

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Figure 2 Dr. Howard Kane, left, and Alfred Ames. Kane shot the sequences inside the mill for Ames's From Stump to Ship.

Evocative of a time that was immediately past, the film suggests the workers could have looked through the images on the screen to reflect on their working lives. It is likely that only Ames and the workers at the Machias Lumber Company could so completely experience the film in this way—using it to channel their specific pasts and to reactivate important elements of the lives that they had recently left behind. The attendees who watched From Stump to Ship at granges, churches, and American Legion posts as they considered Ames as a potential governor of Maine would have likely used the images as a mimetic device as well—though not to the same extent as Ames or the men who had once worked for him. Two years after the closing of Machias Lumber Company (which marked the end of the long lumber industry that had sustained the state's economy [End Page 9] for generations), the film could have easily served as a catalyst, evoking memories of a way of life that was quickly disappearing from their state.

When From Stump to Ship reappeared in the mideighties, the number of people whose past was directly linked with the film had dwindled. But as Sheldon and Weiss toured the film around the state, it became clear that the film was still meaningful to thousands of Maine citizens, and it still evoked powerful memories for retired woodsmen and their families. Sheldon, who kept a journal of the 1985 From Stump to Ship exhibitions around the state, wrote the following about one of the viewings:

We showed Stump at the high school and about 400 people came, including four river drivers from Princeton and Grand Lake Stream. After the presentation many people stayed in the cafeteria for molasses cookies. The river drivers stayed and told stories endlessly. Vern was away in the woods and came home to find he had a new daughter. "Where'd you get that?" he asked his wife. He'd been gone six months or more.⁹

After another From Stump to Ship viewing Sheldon wrote, "One man told of cutting 84 cords a day with two other fellows. Someone up front said he had a single horse and cut selectively. He pointed out the lumber under the stage and said it was Fraser, Canadian wood. It was a lively group with the enthusiastic, 'I worked in the woods; this is a great film.'"¹⁰

Retired workers and their families thought From Stump to Ship was a "great film" because they or their family members had "worked in the woods." In other words, the specifics of Ames's film hardly seemed to matter to the retired workers. After the viewings, what they had explicitly seen on the screen was not discussed; instead, they saw through the images of From Stump to Ship and used them as a springboard for their own memories. Particularly in the town of Machias (where many of Ames's workers once lived), community members did not necessarily have to see the film to be affected by it. "The film was in the air," Sheldon told me during an interview. "It validated the town's experience and its identity, generating many positive memories for the community." If this was the case, it is but an extreme example of a moving image document's capacity for generating localized, specific memories; just an awareness of the film's existence might have helped to regenerate and reframe the past. [End Page 10]

Viewers who recover personal memories have directly experienced at least part of what they see in the film; they need not focus on the details of what they see on the screen. However, for most of us, the film is a less personal portrait of the past, providing contemporary viewers with both visual and descriptive details of the woodsmen's skills, the intensity of their labor, and a portrait of the woods lifestyle. As the camera films a river drive, for example, Ames states that the camp cook has "halloaed [sic] luncheon"—meaning that it is time for the men to come in from the river and have lunch. As the camera focuses on a man running over logs to get to shore so that he may eat lunch, Ames stated, "The fellow in the rear is Brown from East Machias, now a bellhop at the Falmouth Hotel, Portland. He said, 'Mr. Ames, I came pretty near falling in.' But he landed on shore all right." The next scene shows about a dozen men at their camp preparing for and eating lunch. Some wipe their faces with a large towel. Others are shown eating their lunch, sitting on logs. Ames explains that the men eat breakfast at four in the morning, two lunches—one at nine in the morning and the other at two in the afternoon, and dinner when they come in from camp in the evening. He takes care to provide exact details of what they eat. For example, Ames explains that their lunch at nine in the morning includes "canned beef, boiled ham, hard-boiled eggs, biscuit, doughnuts, cookies, tea."

After seeing From Stump to Ship at an elderhostel, Arthur Gates wrote, "Being from St. Louis, MO, this was totally different than anything we had ever seen but very enjoyable and quite understandable even though we had no background to understand it."¹¹ Like Gates, most of us must pay close attention to the images in order to fill in the gaps of our partial or nonexistent knowledge of the long lumber industry and the techniques and daily lives of the woodsmen. As I had never experienced a river drive or even seen one on film before I saw Ames's film, I watched the drives in From Stump to Ship with great attentiveness. Ames filmed the river drivers agilely running over logs in the rushing water, shaking them with their pick poles to keep them floating with the current. He stressed the potential danger of river driving, particularly when the logs were jammed. As the film portrays the men tending to a log jam six to eight feet deep—all the way down to the bottom of the river—Ames stated, "The men on these logs have to be careful because if their foot slips down between some logs they are liable to have a foot or a leg pinched off. You will notice the logs gathering momentum all the time." As Ames describes the process of pushing the logs with a pick pole to keep them from settling in a cove, he mentions that the sound of the river is so loud that the foreman must simply motion to the workers with his hands to communicate with them. I see the foreman gesturing with his hands to the other men, and because the film is my only experience with a river drive, I believe that the sound of the rushing river was overwhelming, and I am certain that river [End Page 11] driving was a dangerous occupation. I am present and mindful of what I see on the screen. I do not drift away to my own past experiences as I watch the workers push the logs out of the cove.

A relative of Alfred Ames, a historian of the woods, a longtime Maine resident, or someone who simply vacations in Machias may have their own memories that shape their viewing experience of the film, but for many people From Stump to Ship functions as a compelling and informative documentary. Like mine, their experience of the woods life is composed by way of Ames's images, and the sense of a past that has been lost and then resurrected by viewing the film is not necessarily personal. In other words, the nostalgia that we may feel as we watch Ames's film is one that he created by combining his images with the statements that he made in his script.

It is important to remember that Ames was aware that the way of life depicted in the film was soon to disappear. "Knowing that the long lumber industry in Maine was a thing of the past," Ames explained in the beginning of the script, "in 1930 I purchased a moving picture camera to make a record of the long lumber operations on the river, and show by our method of forestry the size of the logs we were able to produce." It is in this context that we begin to watch the film; we are aware that this is one man's account of a life that was being lost to him. During the film, Ames does not elaborate on the sense of loss that he was presumably feeling; however, he does remind us of it as the film ends. A schooner under its own sail, taking a cargo of lumber to Boothbay Harbor, the final step in the long lumber process, provides Ames the opportunity to reflect on the final days of his career in the lumber industry. "This is the Bertha V," Ames says of the schooner, "sailing out into the night in a southeasterly rain. This is what I call the twilight of my career." As the schooner departs, a sense of finality is emphasized, for Ames ends the film by quoting the final stanza of Longfellow's poem "The Day Is Done":

And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares, that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.

In Longfellow's poem, the speaker explains that a feeling of sadness and longing has come over him as darkness replaces the day. He wishes to be read a poem that will ease his restless feelings. And once the poem has been read, the speaker explains, then the night will be filled with music and his cares will disappear. It is impossible to know exactly why Ames chose the last stanza of this poem to conclude his film; however, it may be that the film itself (like the poem that the speaker wishes to have read to him) is the remedy [End Page 12] to the sadness and longing that Ames feels as his "day" as a lumberman ends. For most contemporary viewers, the sense of nostalgia that they may feel as the film ends is given a voice through Ames's expressed regret.

The Experience of Lost Time

Like From Stump to Ship, Woodsmen and River Drivers recovers a personal past for a small number of contemporary audiences, for it is a fascinating record of a kind of life that is no longer lived, one that has receded into the archive. While our own pasts may notbe summoned by either Ames's film or Woodsmen and River Drivers, a study of how humans reckon with the past are summoned in both. From Stump to Ship is primarily the filmmaker's personal account, filmed at the moment when the life Ames had known was disappearing. Woodsmen and River Drivers, on the other hand, constitutes the woodsmen's collective memory, documented more than a half century after their lifestyle disappeared.

Woodsmen and River Drivers integrates still photos, oral interviews, and archival film cutaways: conventions that signal to contemporary viewers to pay close attention to the images because something can be learned by watching them.¹² Typical of the compilation documentary format, Woodsmen and River Drivers frequently depicts an interviewee who speaks of his memories, followed by archival footage that substantiates the interviewee's recollections. Four retired woodsmen, for example, re-create a bean-hole meal (a meal of beans cooked in a large pot over coals in a hole in the ground). Sitting at a picnic table on a bright summer day, the retired men reminisce about their working lives. As the camera cuts away to From Stump to Ship footage of river drives, one of the men sings a song about the dangers of the drives. "These words were scarcely uttered when the jam did break and go," Oly Watson sings, "and carried off the six brave youths, including young Monroe." Recounting the day that his brother-in-law drowned when he slipped off two logs, Earl Bonness remembers that Ames came to the site and stopped the drive for five days. "That was a kind gesture," he explains as he looks down. "Because everyone felt dreadful. And that was a pretty sad story to take back to his wife. But that could easily happen on a log drive. I had a few narrow escapes myself. Another day, another era."

"Frequently [as] the men talk about an activity, the actual event is shown, so that the emotional and physical aspects are both captured," writes a Geography and History reviewer of Woodsmen and River Drivers. "It is impossible not to experience the [End Page 13] danger and excitement as you witness men traversing a river of logs by jumping almost carelessly from log to log, or riding atop a log as it rushes downstream."¹³ It is true that From Stump to Ship footage enables us to see the events that the men describe, helping us to better understand the woodsmen lifestyle. However, the interviews in Woodsmen and River Drivers juxtaposed with the images filmed by Ames also capture a profound sense of the significance of the passing of time. For example, at one point the narrator explains that specially studded boots were just as important to the men as axes and peaveys. We then see archival footage of a handsome young man proudly holding a new pair of river driving boots, and we hear the voice-over of retired river driver Lowell Vose state, "Well, they were a brand new pair of caulk boots. Thought I had to have a pair of caulk boots." We then see the aged Vose speaking as he sits in a chair, holding a battered pair of boots. "Or I wouldn't be a river driver. So, I had a brand new pair of boots. They were beautiful. That was right at the start of my river driving experience." The juxtaposition of the young man with the new boots shown in the archival footage and the old man with the worn boots is startling. The viewer cannot escape the image or the message: time has taken its toll, weathering both the man and his boots.

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Figure 3 David Weiss, left, and Michael Chalufour recording in 1986 for Woodsmen and River Drivers. Photo by Karan Sheldon.

Woodsmen and River Drivers documents the changes in the once-thriving lumber town as well. As the documentary nears its conclusion, longtime Machias resident [End Page 14] Norman Nelson looks down at the site where the mill once stood. As the camera records a few stones left from the mill's foundation and the still riverbank, Nelson recalls that when the mill was in operation stacks of lumber would fill both sides of the riverbank and twelve to fourteen vessels would be lined up to carry the lumber away to market. The narrator explains that Alfred Ames understood that economic changes, the effects of the

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Figure 4 Lowell Vose talks about the caulk boots that he wore when he was a river driver for the documentary Woodsmen and River Drivers. Photo by Karan Sheldon.

Great Depression, and the loss of traditional markets spelled the end of the long lumber industry and a particular way of life. The wood camps, the sawmills, and the schooners have all disappeared, the narrator explains, and the only traces of the woods life are in the memories of the people who worked in the woods. "Today few know of their great skill and endurance," the narrator states. "Still, the woodsmen and the river drivers look back on their years along the Machias with pride."

Woodsmen and River Drivers helps most viewers comprehend a way of life that has vanished. But the format—the historic cutaways and men remembering their pasts—enables us to see the men in their youth and then observe and listen to them as they attempt to reunite with the lives they have long left behind. In other words, we are able to comprehend the experience of the woodsmen, but we also are given the opportunity to understand the experiential impact of time passing. One of the woodsmen, Newell Beam, reflects on his past as the documentary concludes. "I am proud. I'm a woodsman. Yes, I know what to do in the woods and this and everything about it. I like it; I still like it, if I could go in. But I can't go in," he explains. "I can't do it anymore. I've been there too many times." If the viewer feels a sense of longing or sadness as the documentary ends, it is no wonder, for only the memories of the woods life remain vital. Witnessing the woodsmen's youth (as seen in the From Stump to Ship footage), their attempts to reconnect with their pasts, and their own profound awareness of the passing of time, the documentary offers the viewer an existential canvas for contemplating how the passage of time shapes and alters the self.

We are aware that when Ames looked through the moving picture camera lens to make his film he was looking ahead to the time when his life as a lumberman would be over. He was, in a sense, creating a format for his future nostalgia. His awareness of what he was about to lose remains forever in the present, preserved in his images and his words. On the other hand, in Woodsmen and River Drivers, many years separate the woodsmen from the life they once knew. The men are at the end of their lives; the faces that look into the camera are worn, and their bodies, which once regularly performed strenuous physical feats in the woods and on the river, move about gingerly. Their memories of a time long past and archival footage of their young faces and strong bodies are all that remain of their lives in the woods.

While Ames's film preserves a story of a man who knew a significant moment in time was about to disappear, Woodsmen and River Drivers documents a story of men who both narrate and embody the effects of the passing of time. [End Page 16]

The Contemporary Viewer and History Making

Autobiographical and existential contemplations are but two ways in which viewers confront themselves in the present as they reckon with the past. Viewers may also evaluate and measure the social, economic, political, and cultural forces of the past against the more familiar face of the present. In other words, viewers do the interpretive work of history making. While it is true that the histories that viewers construct are not traditional, evidence-based narratives created by historians, they do share a similarity, for both kinds of history elicit some "truth" about the past by inquiry in the present, and both attempt to reckon with the past by making sense of the cultural shifts and social changes that occur over time.

Most contemporary viewers perceive a dramatic distance, both experientially and temporally, between themselves and the past represented in the documents. Viewers of From Stump to Ship make sense of the divide in a more active way than the documentary viewer, for the documentary purposefully reaches across the divide in order to interpret the past for the viewer, creating a nostalgic, but nonetheless authoritative, history of the woodsmen era. Ames's self-conscious preservation of the end of an era offers the viewer an interpretation of his own past and present, but not ours. When viewers see the schooner Bertha V leaving the harbor at the end of Ames's film, we are aware, as was he, that he was crystallizing the end of the long lumber industry, his life as the owner of the Machias Lumber Company, and the lifestyle of the Maine woodsmen. The meaning of the past in his film is left to be animated by contemporary viewers. Their burden and delight rests in making sense of the gap that stretches between the end of the film and the present moment.

Ames and the men who watched his film at the Machias Lumber Company farewell banquet were not burdened by making sense of a long stretch of history; measuring the dramatic economic, social, industrial, and political changes that have reshaped the landscape and a way of life during the twentieth century. But we are. The absence of the present in From Stump to Ship does not diminish it; rather the invisibility of its filmic images only serves to heighten its presence. The contemporary viewer wanders between an awareness of the present and the documented, imaged past. With little connective tissue binding the "then" and "now" within the film, From Stump to Ship viewers are ultimately drawn into an interpretive act of history making by linking their experience of the present with their understanding of the past as it is constructed in Ames's film.

The images and narrative cannot in themselves create a history of the Maine woods because history construction requires interpretation, but as David MacDougall [End Page 17] argues, films of memory are historically valuable because of the ways in which their images confront the viewer with the "primary stimuli of physical experience." MacDougall explains:

A residue of clearly physical nature remains in film images which is not available in verbal narratives, and its importance should not be underestimated. Film images may be reinterpreted in a variety of new contexts, but the unalterable record of appearance and place contained in them ultimately prove to have a [more] profound effect upon our "memory" of history than the interpretations we attach to them.¹⁴

From Stump to Ship viewers do not necessarily have authoritative, evidence-based accounts of the past to help form their understanding of the history of the Maine woods, but they are able to construct histories that are personally meaningful and relevant to the era in which they live by integrating the film's "raw" images of the past and their own personal understandings of the present.

It is necessary to remember that in its reconstruction, an orchestrated present has invaded Ames's film; it has been edited, and a voice-over of Ames's script and music germane to the period has been added as well. While the images remain more or less the same as the original film, the additions of the voice-over and the music add a performative texture to the film that likely shapes the viewer's response to the film and the way that the past is understood. The music, for example, adds historical authority, possibly altering the viewer's interpretation of the era represented in the film. Nonetheless, present-day moving images and narratives do not interrupt and shape the viewing experience as they do in the contemporary documentary.

In Woodsmen and River Drivers, the viewer encounters both past and present-day moving images and narrative. The contrast between them highlights the dramatic economic, social, industrial, and political changes that have taken place in and around Machias. Both the retired woodsmen and the documentary's narrator explicitly tell us that the woods life and all of its adventure and rusticity is long gone. The documentarians construct a linear history by portraying an antiquated way of life and the present-day effects of its disappearance. The documentary does the interpretive work of accounting for the past and reckoning with the present, creating a gentle but nonetheless authoritative history for the viewer. Viewers of From Stump to Ship are likely to wander through temporal zones, creating their own link between the past and their present experience. [End Page 18] The documentary viewer's temporal traveling is likely to be influenced by the fact that history has been choreographed and interpreted for them.

Conclusion

From Stump to Ship and Woodsmen and River Drivers are both moving image records that document a particular way of life that has been lost. The experience of them is unique to each viewer, for the experiential impact is determined in part by the viewer's lived experiences in relation to what is seen on the screen. However familiar we are with what we see on the screen, it is clear that the past is navigated through the filter of our present-day consciousness. In both the contemporary documentary and the archival film, the past and the present combine in varying degrees, creating the condition of bifocality—a kind of temporal double-consciousness that helps to shape the viewing experience and our understanding of the passage of time.

From Stump to Ship and Woodsmen and River Drivers both document a past that have been lost to us, yet they create viewing experiences distinct from one another. While Ames does mourn the passing of an era in From Stump to Ship, the film's images form a crystallized portrait of Ames and the woodsmen. They remain, in a way, forever in the woods, as vibrant and alive as when Ames filmed them. Rather than the stasis of time past presented in the archival film, the documentary invokes the concept of time passing. Woodsmen and River Drivers visually and descriptively juxtaposes the past with the present, reminding the viewer of time's inevitable march. We see archival footage of hearty young men and then confront the retired woodsmen looking into the camera and mulling over their youth. For most viewers it is possible to remain at an existential distance from time's effects when watching From Stump to Ship, but Woodsmen and River Drivers poignantly and dramatically reveals the relationship between time's progression and the human condition.

The viewer responds to archival films and documentaries that integrate archival footage in personally meaningful ways that we cannot necessarily predict. It is impossible to know exactly how viewers will situate archival films within a historical context because temporal shifting or bifocality helps to create a space in which viewers actively interpret the images of the past in accordance with their personal understanding [End Page 19] of the present. Of course, many people, at least at present, primarily encounter archival footage through documentaries that help to interpret history. However, as the public's response to From Stump to Ship suggests, if an archival film becomes widely accessible, its historical meaning and its implications for the present are likely to change. This is not to say that the public will resist or erase the histories that archivists and historianshave constructed for and around an archival film. Rather, authoritative histories and those shaped by the public can mutually inform one another, thereby enriching society's relationship with the past and enhancing our understanding of the present.