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  • Archival News

Outfest UCLA Legacy Project

In partnership with the UCLA Film and Television Archive, 13th Generation Productions, and First Run Features, Outfest UCLA Legacy Project will be celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman with a restored 2K HD rerelease of the 1996 film. The Watermelon Woman, which tells the story of a Black lesbian video-clerk who becomes intrigued with an obscure 1930s Black performer whose interracial relationship mirrors her own, will be made available to a new audience thanks to a film to DCP transfer.

The film, restored in collaboration with the UCLA Film and Television Archive and Dunye, will have its digital premiere at the 2016 Berlinale and in conjunction with the 30th annual Teddy Awards. This rerelease of The Watermelon Woman will serve as a well-deserved homecoming, as the film both premiered at the 1996 Berlinale and was awarded the Teddy for Best Feature Film that same year. The release will be accompanied by adjacently programmed art galleries, featuring art from queer artists and queer artists of color inspired by, and in response to, the film. A collective of ten curators has been gathered to synergize the screening with the exhibits, as part of a larger traveling programming mission. The film and its accompanying gallery show will have its restored US rerelease at the 2016 Outfest Fusion LGBT People of Color Film Festival.

Home Movie Registry

The Home Movie Registry has recently opened a new digital exhibit curated by Jasmyn Castro, titled “Home Movies and the African American Community.” Castro, Media Preservation and Digitization Assistant at the Smithsonian Institute National Museum of African American History and Culture, has long been a proponent of the preservation and study of African American home movies, as illustrated by her recent AMIA presentation, “Unearthing African American History and Culture through Home Movies,” and through her founding of the African American Home Movie Archive.

Hosted on HomeMovieRegistry.org, the digital exhibit explores how home movies have served as a form of self-expression for those both in front [End Page 250] of and behind the camera. Focusing heavily on film from the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, but also including films from the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Prelinger Archives, the exhibit highlights particularly representative films, all within the wider context of African American involvement in the world of home movie production and collections.

National Museum of African American History and Culture

The Smithsonian Institute National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) premiered two new 16mm restorations at Orphans at MoMA: Animation and Activism on November 24, 2015. The films, Count Us In (1948) and documentary footage of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Youth in Action community workshop (1965), represent collaborative research and programming efforts from the newest Smithsonian museum.

Count Us In was presented by film historian Charles Musser and NMAAHC media archivist Walter Forsberg. The film produced Union Films, a leftist collective founded by Carl Marzani, is a Progessive Party presidential campaign promotional. The presentation involved resources from both NYU, where the Marzani Papers are housed, and from the NMAAHC, which had Count on Us in its Pearl Bowser Collection. The second film featured amateur footage from the community workshop, and was presented by Rhea L. Combs, NMAAHC curator of film and photography.

Black Film Center/Archive, Indiana University

Grants

The BFC/A was awarded a grant by the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF), a nonprofit founded by the US Congress to help save America’s film heritage. The grant will be used to fund the preservation of Jessie Maple’s 1989 film Twice as Nice. Twice as Nice chronicles the paths of twin sisters Caren and Camilla Parker (played by basketball legends Pamela and Paula McGee), as they struggle with their work/life balance as successful college basketball players. In a case of art mirroring life, the McGee sisters went on to lead the University of Southern California’s women’s basketball team to back-to-back NCAA championships in 1983–1984. In 2005 the Jessie Maple collection was deposited in the BFC/A, including assorted outtakes and other incomplete elements of Twice as Nice, but...

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