Two nitrate film reels will be shipped out this month for preservation as part of two fellowships awarded to Selznick School graduates Sabrina Negri (Italy) and Elisabeth Rennie (Canada).

Both students have been given the opportunity to work for one month in a film lab, preparing, printing, and preserving the films from the George Eastman House Collection as an extension to their studies in the field of film archiving.

Sabrina will be heading to Haghefilm laboratory in Amsterdam, Netherlands this August, where she will begin preservation on “Kodachrome Two-Color Test Shots No. III,” (1922) an early color test made by Kodak in their quest to find a marketable method of creating color motion picture film.  Once the project is complete, she will present her work at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy this October.

Elizabeth will be spending her time at Technicolor Lab in Los Angeles, California where she will be inspecting, printing and preserving “His Baby Doll” (1917), an early slapstick comedy short starring Malcolm St. Clair.  The story concerns a young man who is ready to be married.  Finding himself in charge of a small baby during his bachelor party, he is caught in hilarious circumstances of confusion and mayhem with his fiancée and his future father-in-law.

The Motion Picture Department staff is looking forward to both of these preservation projects and wishes both Sabrina and Elisabeth their warmest wishes in their future careers in film archiving.

James Hall Nasmyth (1808-1890), a Scottish inventor and engineer, is best known for his development of the steam hammer. After his success in engineering and industry, Nasmyth retired and spent his later life pursuing the hobby of amateur astronomy. He moved to Kent and built a 20 inch reflecting telescope, made detailed observations of the Moon, and eventually in 1874, he published a book titled  The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite. This wonderful volume is illustrated with photographs (woodburytypes) and a copy is housed in the rare book collection in The Richard and Ronay Menschel Library at George Eastman House. The book was published to demonstrate the origin of certain mountain ranges on the Moon  through erosion and age. Nasmyth and co-author  James Carpenter  believed that Lunar mountains were the result of volcanic activity, a theory that was later disproved. Continue Reading »

Today marks the 1 year anniversary of the day we posted our first set of photographs on the Flickr Commons.  It is has been a great experience; sharing photographs and engaging Flickr users is so much fun it doesn’t even seem like work.  Here are a few stats that Ryan (Manager of Info Systems) pulled out of Flickr for this post:  12 sets, 655 notes, 813 photographs, 3,961 comments, 9,885 tags, 26,008 favorites and 1,971,520 views!  We are almost at 2 million views, which is a heady number for a medium sized museum in Rochester, NY!  We would love to reach 5 million by this time next year and we are excited to see what will come of all these people looking at and thinking about the photographs we care for at Eastman House.   So thanks to all the Flickr users who make the Commons a real community.  I’ve posted some screen shots to show off our photostream, but if you haven’t seen the Commons you take a look.

 

 

Eastman House's 12 sets on the Flickr Commons

Our tag cloud!

How many of us have a Fire Extinguisher under our kitchen sink, in the trunk of our car, or walk by one each day at work? How many of us have actually had the opportunity to pull the pin and fire off the contents?

Archivist Joe Struble practices his new Fire Fighting skills.

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Looking through our vault list late one Friday afternoon, I found many films with titles that refer to married life.   It makes sense since Hollywood has a lot to say about the subject!  

Still from the film "Women Men Marry"

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