The Yale Film Archive is a film archive located in Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, and is part of the Yale University Library. The film collection consists of more than 7,000 35mm, 16mm, 8mm, and Super 8mm prints and the video collection includes more than 50,000 items on DVD, Blu-ray, LaserDisc, and VHS. The Film Archive engages in the conservation, preservation, presentation, and circulation of moving image materials. The Yale Film Archive is a Member of the International Federation of Film Archives [1] .
Founded in 1982 as the Yale Film Study Center, the Yale Film Archive traces its roots to film collections at Yale dating back to the 1960s, including the historic archives of a number of prominent film collectors. The Film Archive is currently involved in efforts to preserve film on film and to share its collection through public screenings, to ensure that films can continue to be presented as they were originally seen by audiences.
The film collection of the Yale Film Archive is made up of a wide range of holdings, from Hollywood features to experimental shorts, from home movies to Bollywood musicals. The collection spans more than 120 years of cinema history, and includes films from around the globe as well as a number of films made by Yale alumni and about Yale and New Haven.
Researchers can view films on site [2] in the Yale Film Archive's screening room, capable of showing 16mm film, DCP, and multiple consumer video formats including 3-D Blu-ray. The Film Archive also has two flatbed film viewing stations and ten private video viewing booths for individual use. The Yale Film Archive regularly screens its 35mm prints for the public in the Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium, the last 35mm-equipped public venue in New Haven County.
Yale Film Archive staff regularly consult on special film projects around the University, including the preservation of film material in the Benny Goodman Collection in the Irving Gilmore Music Library of the Yale University Library. [3]
In 1968, Yale began collecting 16mm film with the purchase of several hundred prints known as the John Griggs Collection of Classic Films. [4] The Griggs films came to Yale largely through the efforts of experimental filmmaker Standish Lawder, then Assistant Professor in Yale’s History of Art Department, and Yale alumnus Spencer Berger, a film collector and historian of the Barrymore family. The purchase was funded by three alumni: Fred W. Beinecke, Richard E. Fuller, and Chester J. LaRoche Jr., all graduates of the University. Although modest, this acquisition encouraged other collectors to donate their films, which then became part a vital part of film curricula.
Over the next 15 years, film as an academic discipline grew immensely, leading to the formation of both the Film Studies Program and the Yale Film Study Center in 1982. During the 1980s, the 16mm archive burgeoned with film donations by Yale alumni Spencer Berger, Ralph Hirshorn, and others, while Yale’s 35mm archive was born with hundreds of rare prints of television programs produced by Herbert Brodkin, and collections such as those of the pioneering experimental director Mary Ellen Bute, a 1926 alumna of the Yale School of Drama.
In 2014, the monthly screening series "Treasures from the Yale Film Archive," showcasing 35mm prints from the archive's collection, began. The screenings feature introductions by Film Archive staff as well as Yale faculty, and have also included guest filmmakers such as Lee Isaac Chung, Tamar Simon Hoffs, Warrington Hudlin, James Ivory, Frank and Caroline Mouris, Michael Roemer, Willie Ruff, [5] Ira Sachs, and Norman Weissman, as well as musical accompaniment for silent films by Donald Sosin.
In July, 2017, the Yale Film Archive formally became part of the Yale University Library. In January, 2021, the Film Archive moved to a newly renovated 3,200 square foot headquarters, designed by Apicella + Bunton Architects, in Sterling Memorial Library. [6]
Films preserved by the Yale Film Archive include Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (directed by Mary Ellen Bute) and The Boy Who Saw Through (produced by Bute and directed by George C. Stoney); [7] Our Union, directed by Carl Marzani; To Be a Man, [8] directed by Murray Lerner; and four films by animator Frank Mouris: Quick Dream, You're Not Real Pretty But You're Mine..., Chemical Architecture, and Coney Island Eats. In 2018, the Film Archive completed preservation of director Nicholas Doob's 1979 film "Street Music," which features performances by 19 street musicians including "Oliver "Pork Chop" Anderson," Brother Blue, Bongo Joe Coleman, Jimmy Davis, Guy Mosley, Gene Palma, and "The Automatic Human Jukebox."
The Yale Film Archive also preserved 2-inch videotapes containing a 1972 broadcast by WTIC of "What's Happening," a local news program that covered the visit to Yale by Duke Ellington and other jazz musicians including Eubie Blake, Dizzy Gillespie, Jo Jones, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, and Mary Lou Williams. [9] In 2021, the archive completed preservation work on Sedat Pakay's 1973 short film James Baldwin: From Another Place, which captures James Baldwin during his time living in Istanbul, Turkey in 1970. [10]
In 2022, thanks to a grant from The Film Foundation, the Yale Film Archive restored Losing Ground in 4K using the original 16mm negative to create a new 35mm negative, 35mm prints, and DCPs. [11]
The Yale Film Archive holds a number of individual collections of the films of various filmmakers and film collectors, some of which are listed below.
Sterling Memorial Library (SML) is the main library building of the Yale University Library system in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Opened in 1931, the library was designed by James Gamble Rogers as the centerpiece of Yale's Gothic Revival campus. The library's tower has sixteen levels of bookstacks containing over 4 million volumes. Several special collections—including the university's Manuscripts & Archives—are also housed in the building. It connects via tunnel to the underground Bass Library, which holds an additional 150,000 volumes.
The Moving Image Archive is a collection of Scottish film and video recordings at the National Library of Scotland, held at Kelvin Hall in Glasgow, Scotland. There are over 46,000 items within the collection, and over 2,600 of these are publicly available online at the library's Moving Image Catalogue.
Associated Artists Productions, Inc. (a.a.p.) later known as United Artists Associated was an American distributor of theatrical feature films and short subjects for television. Associated Artists Productions was the copyright owner of the Popeye the Sailor shorts by Paramount Pictures, and the pre-1950 Warner Bros. Pictures film library, notably the pre-August 1948 color Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of animated shorts, and the black-and-white Merrie Melodies shorts from Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, excluding Lady, Play Your Mandolin!.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is a visual arts organization focused on the preservation, study and appreciation of film and television, based at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
The Battle of the Century is a 1927 silent short film starring comedy double act Laurel and Hardy, who appeared in 107 films between 1921 and 1951. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2023.
Robert Beavers is an American experimental filmmaker. Born and raised in Massachusetts, he attended Deerfield Academy which he left before graduating to move to New York in 1965 to pursue filmmaking. He lived in New York until 1967 when he and his partner, Gregory Markopoulos, left the United States for Europe, where they continued to live and make films until Markopoulos's death in 1992.
The Harvard Film Archive (HFA) is a film archive and cinema located in the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dedicated to the collection, preservation and exhibition of film, the HFA houses a collection of over 25,000 films in addition to videos, photos, posters and other film ephemera from around the world and from almost every period in film history. The HFA cinematheque screens films weekly in its 188-seat theater. It also maintains a film conservation center near Central Square, Cambridge. Harvard Film Archive won the 2020 Webby Award for Cultural Institution in the category Web.
Suzan Pitt Kraning, known professionally as Suzan Pitt, was an American film director, animator, painter, and fashion designer best known for her surrealist animated shorts, including Asparagus (1979).
Blackhawk Films, from the 1950s through the early 1980s, marketed motion pictures on 16mm, 8mm and Super 8 film. Most were vintage one- or two-reel short subjects, usually comedies starring Laurel and Hardy, Our Gang, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and other famous comedy series of the past. Blackhawk also offered newsreels, documentaries, and silent feature films. With the rise of the video market in the early 1980s, Blackhawk began producing video versions of many of their titles in 1981 and within a few years no longer manufactured film copies. The company was later purchased by Republic Pictures in 1985, and the film elements still later by archivist David Shepard.
The DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst is the only research center and archive outside of Germany devoted to a broad spectrum of filmmaking from and related to the former German Democratic Republic. Researchers are welcome to the archive by pre-arranging their visit.
Storm de Hirsch (1912–2000) was an American poet and filmmaker. She was a key figure in the New York avant-garde film scene of the 1960s, and one of the founding members of the Film-Makers' Cooperative. Although often overlooked by historians, in recent years she has been recognized as a pioneer of underground cinema.
Richard Roger Reeves is a Canadian animated filmmaker. He is known for his whimsical abstract animated films created using a drawn on film technique.
Jennifer West is an American artist. She is known for her digitized films that are made by hand manipulating film celluloid. She serves as faculty at the University of Southern California (USC) at the Roski School of Art and Design. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
The Cinematheque, founded in 1972, is a Canadian charity and non-profit film institute, media education centre, and film exhibitor based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
American artist Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) is justifiably best known for his boxes which constitute a singular contribution to the Surrealist canon and to the art of assemblage. However, he also pursued experimental film-making as an amateur beginning in the 1930s. Cornell was the principal pioneer of collage films in a purely artistic sense and, although the introduction of his films into the public forum was relatively late compared to when they were made, his work as a filmmaker has been widely influential.
Folkstreams is a non-profit organization that aims to collect and make available online documentary films about folk art and culture.
Leandro Katz is an Argentine-born writer, visual artist and filmmaker known primarily for his films and photographic installations. His works include long-term, multi-media projects that delve into Latin American history through a combination of scholarly research, anthropology, photography, moving images and printed texts.
Francis Peter "Frank" Mouris is an American animator. He is best known for his film Frank Film (1973), for which he won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.
The Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive (IULMIA) is a major repository for nontheatrical film, video, and related archival materials located in Bloomington, Indiana.
Cecile Starr was an American filmmaker, educator and author who taught and wrote about moving pictures.