A View from the Booth: Archival Screening Night

Archival Screening Night (ASN) takes place on the Friday night of the annual Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) conference. In the months approaching the conference, AMIA members are invited to submit a treasure from their collections to be included in the program lineup. Submissions might include news clips, home movies, travelogues, commercials, restored classics, and experimental films. A wide array of archival gems are then put together into a program that warms the room with shared laughter, delight, and sometimes somber reality. It is almost impossible to encapsulate ASN without bringing my personal insight into this amazing gathering of archivists, scholars, students, and technicians. I look forward to the AMIA conference every year, and I specifically recall the moment I knew I wanted to be involved in what many refer to as a highlight of their conference experience.

Los Angeles, November 2000: I was a student in the L. Jeffrey Selznick school of Film Preservation at the George Eastman House and attending my first AMIA conference. Many of us recall the grandeur of the Samuel Goldwyn Theater on Wilshire Boulevard, where the ASN was held that year: the more-than-life-sized Oscars bookending the red-curtained stage and the excitement of what would enfold before our eyes. I had been to many film festival screenings before, but there was something different about the energy of the room. Of course, I was a starry-eyed student of film preservation and had never been to the Academy before. It was during the intermission, when I was standing in line for refreshments, that I recognized the evening’s organizer, Ruta Abolins, who had at that point been commandeering the screening night for many conferences past. In my young, naive way, I immediately introduced myself and offered my services for screening nights to follow. I explained to her my love for and involvement in film projection and that I had worked at a few film festivals as both projectionist and programmer. I could “help tighten the show” perhaps. I even had “a few ideas that would smooth presentation.” Oh, how bold and inexperienced I was! Ruta listened patiently and then calmly said, “Here’s the baton. It’s yours.” What did I just do? Could I follow in such esteemed footsteps? Lo and behold, the next year, AMIA was in Portland, Oregon, and I took that baton. Ten years later, I am still organizing and now co-organizing what will remain a very special evening of our annual conference.

ASN evolved from a previous incarnation. Before AMIA was AMIA, it was the Film and Television Archives Advisory Committees. They, too, held screenings. Current AMIA president Wendy Shay (Archives Center, National Museum of American History) recalls an early gathering from 1985 in Wisconsin at which attendees viewed video footage from the Austrian Film Archives, during which they took nitrate out and started burning it, an undoubtedly legendary screening in the event’s history. Those who started this organization, then, screened films at their annual gatherings from the very beginning. What was initially an informal screening of ten to fourteen films and videos became a more formalized annual screening event based on submissions of recent archival acquisitions, discoveries, and restorations. By 2000, the event was officially titled “Archival Screening Night.” As the membership grew, the need for bigger venues increased as well. Needless to say, the amount of material that members wanted to show and see similarly escalated.

Thankfully what is most remembered about ASN are the films that were screened and not the very few technical mistakes (and resulting delays) that may have occurred! We have seen clips of old news programs, restored classics, home movies, experimental and avant-garde treasures, travelogues, poignant interviews, industrial and educational classics, superb trailers, and musical wonders. Some memorable moments include the 2002 Boston conference, for which Margie Compton (archivist at the University of Georgia Media Archives) dressed in a green go-go outfit to go along with a clip from Now Explosion (1970), a popular TV show in Atlanta that featured music of the time. At that same conference, Francis Poole (University of Delaware Library...