I suppose it’s the feeling you get when you look at a garden you have cared for. Nothing can compare to experiencing it with your own senses, to see firsthand the fruits of your labor … that what you have planted, fed, and watered has flourished.

That was the feeling in the air at George Eastman House on Saturday, July 16, as National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) Chairman Rocco Landesman and Congresswoman Louise Slaughter toured Eastman House.

NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman, left, and George Eastman House’s Tony Bannon discuss the three-strip Technicolor process in the camera gallery at Eastman House.

Hosted by Tony Bannon, the museum’s Ron and Donna Fielding Director, the guests were shown the Speed Graphic camera that shot the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima, displayed alongside the image, as well as a NASA Lunar Orbiter, Lumiere Cinematographe, and a three-strip Technicolor camera that had been used on studio lots for many celebrated MGM films.

And this was all before Landesman and Congresswoman Slaughter took their seats in the Dryden Theatre to experience films from the Eastman House motion picture archive, restored with the support from the NEA. The selected titles included the oldest film version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910), an early sound film from Theodore Case (1925), screen tests from Gone With the Wind (1939), and a documentary directed by Paul Morrissey (1965).

Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, co-chair of the Congressional Arts Caucus, tells why it’s important to support the arts in Rochester and nationally.

Slaughter, co-chair of the Congressional Arts Caucus, is a longtime supporter of the arts as well as Eastman House, continuing to connect Rochester to the leadership of the arts in Washington, D.C. It for this tireless work the museum honored her with the inaugural George Eastman Medal of Honor in 2006.

The threads of George Eastman House are intertwined with those of federal agencies that serve the public, such as the Library of Congress and the National Archives. In this vein the museum’s collections and preservation schools and workshops have national and global reach and impact. But this, of course, cannot be achieved without support.

Both Landesman and Slaughter told local TV press how important it is to experience the country’s leading cultural organizations firsthand, in person.

“Film is a great art form, our cultural heritage, and right here is where it is preserved,” Landesman said. “Tony Bannon is a legend throughout the country for the work he does and we want to support him and George Eastman House.”

A private viewing in the Dryden Theatre of films from the Eastman House archive restored via support from the NEA. On the screen here is the oldest film version of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” (1910)

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!

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!

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.

After decades of research by museums and archives, it has been determined by scientific study that the optimum storage conditions for rare artifacts are in outer space.

As a result, George Eastman House announced today it will be the first museum in the world to store a portion of its extensive archives — which totals 4 million artifacts related to photography and motion pictures — in outer space, via a module on the International Space Station.

To reflect the “out of this world” vision, the museum has officially changed its name to George Eastman House Intergalactic Museum of Photography and Film.

“Our global reach is being vastly extended,” said Dr. Anthony Bannon, the museum’s Ron and Donna Fielding Director, who has been training with the space program at Cape Canaveral for the last four months. Bannon will accompany the first collection launched into space.

The Right Stuff: Official space-program training portrait of Eastman House’s Dr. Anthony Bannon.

Jeff Hayzlett, Kodak’s chief marketing officer, is joining Bannon on the space journey. He also has begun training at Cape Canaveral, under the guidance of appointed astronauts Majors Tony Nelson and Roger Healy.

Kodak has been involved with space missions since the beginning of the space program.

“Kodak is happy to put our full might of our intellectual imaging science prowess behind this endeavor to ensure image permanence,” Hayzlett said.

Official space-program training portrait of Kodak’s Jeff Hayzlett.

Staff of the Intergalactic Museum have chosen several Oscar®-winning science fiction films to be among the first collections stored in space.

“George Eastman House, now the Intergalactic Museum, has long been at the forefront of photograph conservation and film preservation, and this museum and its expert staff continue to break new ground in all frontiers,” said Kaplan Jameskirk, chief operations officer of the Enterprise Museum Association.

The scientific studies, conducted over the past eight years at the Jabbahut Institute in conjunction with Eastman House, revealed that zero gravity aligned with the ideal climate conditions of outer space will preserve museum artifacts for thousands of years, possibly light years, beyond what archivists previously thought possible.

As the Intergalactic Museum prepares to go where no man has gone before, we wish you a Happy April Fool’s Day from George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film … where we will continue to proudly preserve the world’s treasures of photography and motion pictures, here on the ground.

But rest assured, if our research at Eastman House were to show space offers the optimum conditions for archival storage, we’d be at the forefront of such an initiative.

May the force be with you.