Deaf Folklife Film Collection Project

This paper addresses the theme of collecting and preserving the “unwritten” historical record of deaf people by describing several critical aspects of preservation and dissemination of historical film materials made by deaf individuals. Such film records are valuable for scientific investigation of minority group lifestyles and for use in the genesis, development, and demonstration of ideas to promote more general interest and understanding of deaf folklife and literature. To make all this possible will require systematic efforts to locate and preserve film in suitable archives. In addition, cataloguing is needed to make appropriate films or film segments accessible to researchers and other users. To demonstrate the feasibility of such a program, I describe a model film library project, a collection of films made by Charles Krauel and Charles Yanzito of Chicago, who document how deaf people lived in the Midwest during the period 1925 to 1940. The method of locating specific film segments in these films is described as a film indexing system that incorporates relevant information on cultural and linguistic aspects of the deaf community to make the film index more useful to those interested in Deaf Studies.