Preserving Rare Interviews with African American Filmmakers

Recently, the Black Film Center/Archive (BFC/A) partnered with Indiana University’s Archives of Traditional Music (ATM) to create high-resolution digital preservation master files and standard access-format files of a number of rare interviews with notable black filmmakers. Originally recorded on audiocassettes, they included interviews with filmmakers such as Camille Billops, Marlon Riggs, and Michelle Parkerson. As technology changes, transferring vulnerable analog audio materials to digital formats will ensure that the material will remain accessible for future researchers.

The BFC/A has been conducting interviews with African American filmmakers and actors since it was founded in 1981. Phyllis Klotman, the founder and first director of the BFC/A, did many of the interviews in the collection; all of the interviews preserved by the ATM, with two exceptions, were done by Klotman. The interviews that were preserved were selected in part because of the age of the audiocassette and the person interviewed. Unless someone is a film scholar or serious fan of independent black filmmaking, the names of those interviewed would not be readily recognized with the exception, perhaps, of Jim Brown, the NFL Hall of Fame running back turned actor who starred in films such as The Dirty Dozen (1967), 100 Rifles (1969), and Slaughter (1972). Two of the people interviewed, Kathleen Collins and Marlon Riggs, unfortunately died much too early—Collins died of cancer at the age of forty-eight in 1988 and Riggs died of AIDS in 1994 at the age of thirty-seven. In each case, the people interviewed have made significant contributions to black cinema and have been overlooked by many film critics and scholars. The interviews, whether from early in their careers or toward the end of their careers, are important documentation of African American independent filmmaking.

Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) has a long history of using audiovisual materials for teaching and research, as far back as the early twentieth century. The campus currently holds more than 500,000 films and audio and video recordings, of which nearly 250,000 are unique or rare. The William and Gayle Cook Music Library has almost 200,000 recordings, serving the Jacobs School of Music, where jazz and classical music are taught along with opera and ballet. As one would expect at a Big Ten school, the Athletics Department has unique media holdings, especially in men’s basketball. The Lilly Library has rare books, manuscripts, and special collections: there are papers and film from Peter Bogdanovich and four collections of materials from Orson Welles, including open reel tapes and transcription discs of radio programs. A particularly well-known unit at IU is the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Among their holdings are some 8,000 films and 11,000 videos, as well as interviews and other sound recordings.¹

One of the largest repositories for audio materials on campus is the Archives of Traditional Music. Founded in the late 1940s by George Herzog, a Hungarian ethnomusicologist, anthropologist, and linguist, it is the largest ethnographic sound archives in the United States,² with more than 95,000 items,³ mainly music, folklore, and oral history from around the world. Among the more noteworthy collections are extensive recordings of Native American music and languages; recordings made by Lorenzo Dow Turner in the United States, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Brazil; some four hundred hours of Nepalese folk music recorded in the 1960s by Terence R. Bech; and recordings made by Harold Courlander in Haiti, Cuba, Ethiopia, and on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona. Since archives generally receive materials long after their creation, few born-digital recordings have been accepted at the Archives of Traditional Music, but every analog audio format can be found in the storage vault: audiocassettes, open reel tapes, vinyl LPs, wire recordings from shortly after WWII, lacquer and aluminum discs from the 1940s and earlier, all the way back to wax cylinder recordings of Chinese opera from 1902 and Franz Boas’s recordings of the Ntlakyapamuk Indians from 1897.

In 2005, the ATM partnered with Harvard University’s Archive of World...