It’s festival week here at Eastman House, as the 360 | 365 George Eastman House Film Festival takes to the Dryden Theatre and other Rochester screens April 27 through May 2, showcasing 105 films from 21 countries.

Buddy Squires on location

Among those being honored are Oscar®-nominated and Emmy®-winning cinematographer Buddy Squires, who has been called “the visual poet.” He will receive the inaugural Golden Lens Award for Cinematography presented by Kodak and the festival, at 6:45 p.m. Thursday, April 28. Our evening with Buddy Squires will feature clips of his work and a talk with the audience

Of the amazing festival schedule the high point for me – truly a highest point – is a chance to be with Buddy Squires. He is a leading filmmaker and it will be a rare honor for us to be with him here.

Yes, he is best known for photographing the films of Ken Burns and is a founding member of Florentine Films. Buddy’s films with Ken Burns are preserved at George Eastman House, which houses the Florentine Films archive. Burns and his writing partner Geoffrey Ward were at Eastman House last August and when we honored them each with the George Eastman Medal of Honor.

Buddy has earned several Oscar® nominations and Emmy® awards for cinematography, as well as for producing and directing, plus several additional leading cinematography honors, including two previous awards from Kodak. A Kodak colleague, Lauren Lung, calls Buddy “a master of cinematic art” and his work “iconic and timeless.”

The festival’s film roster includes a screening of Strangers No More (2010), the current Oscar® winner for Best Short Documentary, for which Buddy served as cinematographer.

The 360 | 365 George Eastman House Film, which celebrates its 10^th anniversary in 2011, is the only contemporary film festival in the United States aligned with a major motion picture archive.

"Jazzmania" (1923), restored by Eastman House.

The festival lineup features three screenings from the Eastman House archives, including a recent restoration, Jazzmania (1923), accompanied by live jazz band The Djangoners, a rare nitrate screening of Gone to Earth (1950), and A Matter of Life & Death (aka Stairway to Heaven, 1946), which was photographed by Jack Cardiff, and will follow a screening of a new documentary titled Cameraman about the famed cinematographer.

We screen premieres as well as restored films daily in our Dryden Theatre, and the 360 | 365 George Eastman House Film Festival provides an additional platform to present archival films and our work as a world leader in film preservation

This festival is a rich blend of our film history with the newest film releases, selected by an exceptional programming team, comprised of an award-winning filmmaker, a nationally celebrated film critic, and Eastman’s House’s experienced film programmer.

A full schedule can be found at www.film360365.com.

See you at the movies!

I had a small group last week for the carbon photography workshop, which made it easier for me and unusually spacious in the darkroom for the participants. Though no matter how few people you have making carbon prints though there never seems to be enough hot water, so calls of “more hot water” were regularly heard in the darkroom for three days.

We made the first batch of carbon tissues using casting frames, coating rods and our fingers so that everyone had the experience of trying different ways to make the tissues. After everyone made their initial exposure tests and first prints we made two new color batches of pigmented gelatin and prepped other support material; watercolor paper and glass.

David Developing Carbon

Drying Tissues

‘John Deere tractor’ Green Orotone

My demo in action

One of the colors that came from this freedom of extra time was a sort of John Deere tractor green. We also made a lovely cool blue tissue. One of the participants wanted to make a carbon transparency on glass and at the time thought he had chosen the blue tissue. He was really surprised when we turned on the white lights during the development and saw that his beautifully made transfer was actually green. When the plate was dry I held a sheet of bronze coated paper behind the image so the group could see how it would look as an orotone. The green wasn’t so bad.

On April 12, 1861, at 4:30 am, Confederate forces attacked the US military installation at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. At the time, Fort Sumter was under construction and the Union troops inside were short of provisions. While this date is used as the beginning of the war, the events had already been set in motion by the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States in November 1860 and by the secession of seven states from the United States to the Confederate States of America.

Unidentified Photographer
FORT SUMTER SHOWING THE EFFECTS OF THE BOMBARDMENT BY THE ARTILLERY OF THE ARMY
& NAVY OF THE UNITED STATES WHILE OCCUPIED BY THE REBELS FROM APRIL 1861 TO FEBRUARY 1865, ca. 1865, Albumen print
 

Unidentified Photographer

FORT SUMTER SHOWING THE EFFECTS OF THE BOMBARDMENT BY THE ARTILLERY OF THE ARMY & NAVY OF THE UNITED STATES WHILE OCCUPIED BY THE REBELS FROM APRIL 1861 TO FEBRUARY 1865, ca. 1865,  Albumen print

The tale of the American Civil War has been told thousands of times. Historians,
both academic and amateur, have delved into the past to understand just how
the Confederate States of America decided to secede from the Union to form an
independent country, and how, in response, the Union eventually quashed their
attempts. Our current exhibition considers photography and its relationship to the War Between the States.
The George Eastman House collection holds over 1,100 photographs related to
the civil war, a modest number in relation to national standards. The strengths of this collection are some unique items, including a series of photographs found in a United States Postal Service dead letter office, several portraits of Confederate officers aboard the C.S.S. Alabama, and an album assembled to commemorate the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. In addition, items such as Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War provide extensive holdings of war-related scenes and landscapes.
It is estimated that over 620,000 soldiers died during the American Civil War
along with countless civilians. This remains the highest number of deaths for
American soldiers in any war. Photography played an important role in bringing this sobering reality to the public as, for the first time in history, photographers
showed the dead that remained on battlefields, and publishers had the ability to
reproduce these images in quantity. In addition, images showing the destruction
of cities, new American heroes, and arsenals of troops filled the pages of popular
journals such as Harper’s Weekly and Humphrey’s Journal.
Photography was still in the early stages of its invention. Therefore, many photographers were new to their craft and as the war raged on, photographic supplies were sometimes expensive and hard to come by. In addition, the existing processes could not capture the chaos of battle, with the cannons flaring and men fighting in combat.
Now at the sesquicentennial of these events, the stillness of what remains in these photographed scenes resonates in American minds. Destruction, struggle, and loneliness are evoked by the haunting, empty scenes, but we may also perceive an impression of valor in a young face, a sense of patriotism for a chosen side, a feeling of dignity in the face of death.