Northeast Historic Film Summer Symposium: The Political/The Personal (review)

Northeast Historic Film (NHF), a leader in nontheatrical film preservation and a model for regional moving image archives, hosted its nineteenth annual Summer Symposium from July 19 to 21, 2018. As usual, the event benefited from the fact that it is held in NHF’s Alamo Theatre, a restored historic venue that has been expanded to include a film archives at the back of the building. As such, the presenters were able to show footage from nontheatrical film and video productions on a screen that provides a grander scale than these historic works received when originally exhibited, while the longer time slots of about forty minutes per talk allowed for more thorough analysis than would be possible at other conferences. Considering the timeliness of this year’s theme, “The Political/The Personal,” this ability to linger on topics and hold more in-depth discussions was quite valuable. Likewise, in a historic moment when personal agency feels restricted by the weight of political trends, the inclusion of numerous presentations focusing on impactful, community-centered projects felt quite uplifting.

The NHF Summer Symposium cannot be separated from the event’s location and atmosphere. The event’s older cousin, the Orphan Film Symposium (Orphans), has grown over the years in proportion to the nontheatrical film community it has helped foster, resulting in biennial registrations approaching two hundred to three hundred persons. Dan Streible and other Orphans organizers have made deliberate and largely successful efforts not to lose the sense of community that came with earlier editions. However, encouraging participants to talk to each other and remain engaged between presentations is far easier at NHF, which had just over a few dozen attendees in 2018. Bucksport has only a handful of restaurants where attendees can gather, virtually all of the crowd visits the same ice cream parlor down the street from the Alamo, and there is ample time for people to talk to each other about their work and research at the lobster dinner that closes out the conference. The symposium also overlaps the Bucksport Bay Fest each year, with the inconsistent timing of the accompanying parade resulting in a sudden intermission to allow it to pass in front of the theater; it would be impossible to concentrate over the parade’s noise, and unfortunate for attendees to miss it. Having a symposium in an ideal, small-town vacation spot in the middle of summer removes much of the stress and formalness of typical academic events, while promoting a sense of community.

However, NHF’s remote-but-scenic location has almost certainly limited the event’s annual audience size, and its placement apart from a university, academic, or professional organization has likely limited awareness of it. As much as the Summer Symposium’s smaller audience promotes conversation and a sense of community, it is not in a place where considerable growth would diminish this. This year’s organizers, Devin Orgeron and Melissa Dollman, were frank about this need for a larger audience and, during their closing remarks, discussed some ideas for pursuing this. Although the size of the NHF Summer Symposium did not diminish it, finding ways to maintain the status quo or, better yet, build a larger community should be a priority moving forward.

The opening night presentations were outside of the main conference theme, instead focusing on research from two recipients of the William O’Farrell Fellowship, which funds a brief residency for one researcher at NHF each year. The 2017 fellow, Artemis Willis of the University of Chicago, presented findings from her research on lantern slides in the greater New England area. Willis showcased materials from NHF and discussed other institutions throughout New England that have used such materials in the past or have worked to preserve and display them in the present. Meanwhile, the incoming O’Farrell fellow Martin Johnson, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, would present his research using NHF collections the next year, but for the recent conference’s...