How Film (and Video) Found Its Way into “Our Nation’s Attic”: A Conversation about the Origins of Audiovisual Collecting and Archiving at the Smithsonian Institution

The Smithsonian Institution is one of the preeminent cultural organizations in the United States. Like its sister agencies, the National Archives and the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian is funded, in part, through the federal budget. However, it took the Smithsonian Institution much longer than the other national entities to recognize the historic and cultural value of collecting and preserving moving images. As a consequence, the history of moving image collecting at the Smithsonian began more recently and in a less systematic way.

In April 2012, Kimberly Tarr attempted to document the Smithsonian’s involvement with moving image archiving by asking a group of moving image archivists representing five different Smithsonian archival units to discuss the history of collecting and maintaining audiovisual collections within the institution. During a dynamic and wide-ranging conversation, the participants discussed the origin and development of moving image collections at the Smithsonian Institution, from separate and distinct beginnings to the more recent atmosphere of collaboration and coordination. Moderated by Tarr, the roundtable discussion brought together archivists from the Archives of American Art, the Human Studies Film Archives, the National Museum of American History Archives Center, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the Smithsonian Institution Archives to examine how the current environment grew from such fractured beginnings. The participants included Megan McShea, audiovisual archivist at the Archives of American Art; Michael Pahn, media archivist at the National Museum of the American Indian; Wendy Shay, deputy chair and audiovisual archivist at the Archives Center, National Museum of American History; Sarah Stauderman, collections care manager for the Smithsonian Institution Archives; and Pamela Wintle, senior film archivist at the Human Studies Film Archives.

What follows is a synthesis of the two-hour conversation. To the greatest degree possible, the stories are told in the words of the participants, with minimal editing.

Origin Stories

Human Studies Film Archives

Founded in 1975 by a “small but passionately committed group of anthropologists and film-makers,” the Human Studies Film Archives (HSFA) was the first of the moving image archives developed within the Smithsonian Institution.¹ Originally conceived of as the National Anthropological Film Center, the organization was created to collect films as well as to generate field-based films documenting third world cultural groups. The impetus for establishing the Film Center primarily grew out of “urgent anthropology”—the idea that cultures were changing rapidly and therefore needed to be documented. The Film Center’s founding director, E. Richard Sorenson, came from the National Institutes of Health, which had already been actively filming in the field as well as engaging in limited collecting. Specifically, they used film to study the disease kuru in Papua New Guinea; film is actually credited with helping to uncover the source of this viral disease.

From the very beginning, the Film Center collected films created by amateurs, anthropologists, and other filmmakers documenting traditional peoples around the world. “The framework for much of what the HSFA does today was established in those early years. Sorenson came from a science background, and there were already some ways of thinking about motion picture film that had not reached into mainstream moving image archiving,” noted Pamela Wintle. In 1981, the Smithsonian split the Film Center into two components: the filming unit and the archives. The archives were placed in the Department of Anthropology, which was fortunate, because about two years later, the Film Center was dissolved. It had fallen under the Museum of Man, a project based in the National Museum of Natural History that was ultimately discontinued. The Human Studies Film Archives remained and became responsible for the films created and collected by the Film Center.

Inspired by the establishment and success of the HSFA, many of the Smithsonian’s fifteen archival units began to address moving image materials that had been previously acquired on purpose or by default.

Smithsonian Institution Archives

The Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA) was established as a formal entity within the Smithsonian in the late 1960s. The collection is...