What may be the earliest film footage from the Civil War era has been discovered in the motion picture vaults at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, where preservation officers plan to immediately begin restoration.

The three-minute reel, which archivists estimate was filmed in 1861 or 1862, reveals an active battlefield as well as behind-the-scenes footage of Union soldiers in encampments and marching in formation.

After finding the unmarked reel and after determining its authenticity, Eastman House contacted filmmaker Ken Burns. He plans to visit the museum immediately to begin research.

“This moving footage would have significantly enhanced my Civil War documentary,” said filmmaker Ken Burns, who earned an Emmy® Award for his nine-part documentary The Civil War (1990), which featured thousands of still photographs. “We are seriously considering opening up the film to include this priceless new material.”

Eastman House preservation staff has painstakingly created digital scans of the rare and fragile footage, allowing for the creation of online video.

Click on the video link below to be among the first to witness history – the first motion pictures ever captured of the Civil War!

I first taught how to make carbon tissues and transfer pigment prints printing back when I was at George School in 1996. Imagine high school students making carbon prints! When these kids went to college and said they made carbon prints, their teachers didn’t believe them. A lot of these old processes are made out to be much more difficult than they are. In reality, it’s usually the negatives that give people the most trouble. It’s amazing to me how many experienced photographers can’t tell the difference between an over exposed and an over developed negative. Well, that’s the sort of thing I still teach when it comes to learning a printing process.

Thomas Annan, Close No. 28 Saltmarket, 1868 -1877, Carbon Print

We have a few spaces left for our upcoming carbon printing workshop  April 11-14^th  and if the response from our last workshop [collodion chloride printing out emulsion] is any indication…we’re still giving the public something they can’t get anywhere else. I chose vintage carbon prints for the workshop from the photography archives last week and the work is breathtaking. Selections include original early carbon prints by Thomas Annan and the work of pictorialists Paul Lewis Anderson and Edward Steichen.

With four full days, the workshop will proceed at a leisurely pace. I am really looking forward to getting to know the interesting mix of art photographers, teachers, photo historians and the visually curious our workshops always attract.

Elizabeth Taylor’s death closes another chapter in the history of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Rising from child star to ingénue roles and finally to leading lady, Taylor’s acting gifts were often overshadowed by her impeccable beauty and tumultuous personal life. An early indication of how her startling beauty could mesmerize viewers came when a cameraman shooting one of her scenes in Jane Eyre asked the eleven-year-old if she was wearing fake eyelashes (She wasn’t.)

The camera loved Elizabeth Taylor and she became a skilled and inspired craftswoman in front of its lens. We are fortunate that George Eastman House conserves many core titles of her film legacy as well as superb still photographs of the star. Film prints of Lassie Come Home, National Velvet, Father of the Bride, Raintree County, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, Cleopatra and Butterfield 8 are conserved in the motion picture vaults. Nickolas Muray’s stunning 1948 photograph taken of the 16-year-old Taylor just as she was embarking on the adult phase of her career is one of the gems of the Eastman House photograph collection.

Elizabeth Taylor was recognized in her lifetime for her work as an actress and an activist, twice honored with Academy Awards for Best Actress, she was also the recipient of the Academy’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and was a Kennedy Center Honoree. She should also be remembered as a strong, forceful young woman who took charge of her career, became a producer, and was daring in her choice of roles. When asked by an interviewer to name the most difficult actors he had worked with, director Joseph L. Mankiewicz answered by naming two stars who were the exact opposite: Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando. Mankiewicz had nothing but praise for Taylor’s artistry, commitment and professionalism on both Suddenly, Last Summer and the troubled Cleopatra. The latter film nearly sank the Twentieth Century Fox studio, was fraught with problems and huge cost overruns. But Mankiewicz maintained that he never lost a day because of his star – she was always on time, prepared and dynamite in front of the camera.

Elizabeth Taylor’s vibrant beauty, her earthiness and good humor and her sheer joy in life made her a force of nature. Her film legacy remains the most eloquent testimonial to this remarkable woman who brought intelligence, grace and beauty to our world.

From folding cameras to Brownies, antique cameras have been displayed for my viewing since my birth. My grandfather’s house introduced me to the history of the camera as well as early photographs of my family’s American heritage.

My grandfather along with his father, like many other Rochesterian men, worked for the Eastman Kodak Company. Throughout my grandfather’s time working at Kodak and exploring his photographic hobby, he collected an array of classic cameras. Each room in his house has several cameras resting on dressers, antique china cabinets, wooden tripods, and any other flat surface providing a home for a piece of his vintage collection. Antiquated photographs as well as stereographs can be seen accompanying the cameras that took them.

While walking through George Eastman House’s new exhibition, Between the States: Photographs of the American Civil War, nostalgia overcame me. Hanging a right after entering the exhibit doors and coming around the first wall brings you “front and center” with two authentic cameras used to shoot American Civil War photography. Just as in my grandfather’s house, I was brought face to face with pieces of photographic history.

The 1864 stereo camera owned by the M.B. Brady Studio, now in the collections of George Eastman House and now on exhibit.

One of the cameras in the exhibit, along with another on loan to the Newseum in Washington, D.C., were used by the studio of Mathew Brady, the prolific Civil War photographer. They are the only two known Brady cameras in existence today. These, along with the Lewis wet-plate camera also on view in the Eastman House exhibition, are held exclusively in George Eastman House archives.

Brady’s stereo camera was acquired by George Eastman House from Graflex Inc. and was found in Auburn, N.Y., amidst a collection of Brady’s glass plates. This camera was used to produce a pair of 4½ x 4½-inch images. The images would be separated, cropped and mounted together side by side. Looking at the two images through a stereographic viewer would produce a seemingly three-dimensional image.

Grandpa also has a couple of stereographs lying around his house. I remember my amazement looking through a pair of stereograph glasses resembling 19th-century bifocals and viewing the two images combined to make one with depth and length. You can sense this awe two feet away from the two cameras as George Eastman House has provided a Brady stereotype and a beautiful viewer constructed by a student of the graduate program.

Also gracing the glass case in the Between the States exhibition is a Lewis wet-plate camera. The Polaroid Corporation gifted this aged artifact to Eastman House. The camera, manufactured by Henry James Lewis, was conventional of Civil War photographic equipment. It also produced two images, although these were 3¼ x 4½-inch. This wet-plate camera closely resembles the daguerreotype camera, which Lewis’s father and brother had previously produced. This camera provides a perfect representation of the size and style of camera that had to be lugged around on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War.

This exhibition is important to Rochester and the history of American photography. I was fortunate to have my grandfather introduce me to historic cameras at an early age. We, as citizens of Rochester, are innately enriched with photographic history. We hold here, in our own backyard, images of a war that has shaped our nation to this very day. This is evident in the accompanying exhibit Still Here: Contemporary Artists and the Civil War.

The opportunity to view the apparatus by which these images were captured is exclusive to Rochester and George Eastman House, where you can experience the amazement and power these cameras display.

One of the great pleasures in working for George Eastman House, and in my particular case the Motion Picture Department, is the opportunity for rediscovery. In the cold storage vaults here we house tens of thousands of films. The classics are many – Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz are  just two that are often noted.

But by and large the collection is made up of thousands of films that film history has forgotten or ignored in the years and decades since their release. Now I’ll be honest some of these films have been forgotten for very good reasons. Sh! The Octopus, anyone?

Still others have been forgotten and neglected for reasons not of their making. Wonderful films that in some cases were trampled when American audiences were captured by the birth of the blockbuster. In 1977 filmmaker Mark Rappaport released Local Color.

"Local Color," 1977

Film Critic Roger Ebert called this funny, and melodramatic tale of the interconnected lives of New Yorkers “a strange and wonderful movie.” Shot in black-and-white, Local Color has the look and feel of another NYC-based film that would appear two years later, Woody Allen’s Manhattan. But like many films released in 1977, Local Color would never have a chance to find its wider audience as another little film steamrolled across American movie theaters. That film was Star Wars.

 The role that George Eastman House plays in Local Color happens 30 years later when Mr. Rappaport decided to entrust the original negatives of Local Color to the Motion Picture Department. Received in 2008, Local Color was almost immediately on our preservation radar.

By now Mr. Rappaport was a well-known and respected independent filmmaker of the 1980s and 1990s. Many of his films had garnered a following, but prints in screenable condition were quite rare. Initial inspection of the material also revealed something very troubling. The original picture negative was exhibiting signs of “vinegar syndrome.” Long-term exposure to above average temperatures and humidity cause film made on acetate film stock to give off an acetic acid, vinegar-like smell. This is usually just a sign of deeper problems. Film naturally shrinks over time and vinegar syndrome can expedite this process. The film can become warped. The photo emulsion can become soft causing the image to loss definition.

 Luckily for us and the film, preservation funding was obtained through the Avant-Garde Masters program funded by The Film Foundation and administered by the National Film Preservation Foundation. We worked with the Los Angeles-based laboratory Film Technology to preserve Local Color.

 Along with the original elements, brand new negatives now sit in our cold storage vault. New projection prints have been struck and are just beginning to make their way to screening venues. It is appropriate that our new preservation of Local Color was screened recently at Anthology Film Archive in New York City. Hopefully those audiences were able to rediscover the charms of Local Color.