Moving image review (1988]-)

Collections: 'Great Spirit' Film Preservation Tour Pleased by a 1999 donation of film in a rare early color format, NHF was doubly delighted to receive more of the same print last winter — from a different donor. As Boston Globe film critic Jay Carr explains in the adjacent piece, Rob Lagueux's discovery of a piece of Land of the Great Spirit footage brought the young donor and his parents, Robert and Elaine, to the Alamo during the Film Preservation Tour gala in early December. The visit was a real eye-opener for these residents of Stoneham, Maine, especially Rob, a senior at the University of Southern Maine and a film fanatic. He remains amazed that these images were ever shown in his community. "It was bringing faraway lands and peoples to a teeny, tiny town," he says. "It must have been something quite extraordinary." Rob's passion for film led him to this fragment of rare Prizma Color footage in 1998. Told by his mother that the Knights of Pythias lodge in East Stoneham once held film screenings, Rob searched the lodge for traces. He and his father, a past grand chancellor there, discovered the lodge's wellconcealed projection booth, complete with films and 35mm projector. "It was almost as if, whenever the last movie was shown, everybody just shut the lights off and walked out and left it diere," Rob says. And the partial reel of film, one of the few that hadn't deteriorated seriously, followed him home. Last year, having decided to donate the Here, in monochrome, an image from a color fragment, possibly Land of the Great Spirit, 1919. James E. Morrison Collection. fragment to NHF, Rob was surprised to learn that 300 feet of the film had already turned up — donated by Jim Morrison, whom die Lagueuxs knew well. Also of Stoneham, Jim became a good friend to NHF through his visits to our display at the annual Fryeburg Fair. Like Robert Lagueux, Morrison was a past grand chancellor of the K of P, and he had cleaned out the boodi after the Lagueuxs' visit. In exchange for NHF videos, he gave the Prizma Color film to NHF along widi the Powers projector. We were deeply saddened to learn that Jim passed away in late January. NHF sent Jim's segment of the film to George Eastman House to be copied at the Haghefilm laboratory in Holland. The footage is of great historical importance as relatively few Prizma films survive, and this one documents indigenous peoples, says silent-film historian David Pierce. In the teens, "technical problems for effective color photography and projection were nearly insurmountable, and only Prizma and the better-known Technicolor managed to deliver a commercially acceptable result," Pierce notes. The Prizma system used emulsions on both sides of die film base, one toned red-orange, the odier blue-green. "The process was developed about the same time as Technicolor, with each company premiering their first films in 1917," Pierce says — but Prizma was out of business by 1923. In East Stoneham, Maine, the Hiawatha Knights of Pythias lodge showed movies regularly in the early 1920s, By Jay Carr During the Library of Congress Film Preservation Tour's visit to the Alamo, a gala on December 8 showcased work such as Evangeline and The Making of an American. Boston Globe film critic Jay Carr helped present the event and offers the following observations of the evening. Film is our amber, stopping time, at least for a while. It is life caught on the run. Who'd have dreamed there'd be such a treasure trove of it in Bucksport, a town hitherto associated widi lumber and paper? Northeast Historic Film turns out to be a hotbed of sophisticated and dedicated energies, kept humming by my kind of maniacs — lifers mad about film, snatching it back from the brink of oblivion, giving it a home and adding it to a rich and ineffably moving tapestry of what went before us. In a culture determined to plow itself under every few years, that's not only reassuring, but therapeutic, essential and pleasurable. SoHo, Tribeca, Bucksport The excitement of last December's film preservation gala was perceptible upon walking into the building, a vibe bouncing off the newly whitewashed walls of the Alamo Theatre — built in 1916, allowed to crumble a bit, but back on the upswing. The 125-seat theater is as modern and inviting as any screening room in SoHo or Tribeca. And with better projection equipment, capable of showing vintage film. For vintage film, largely homemade, is what the place is about. Although the program unfurled a handsome print of the 1929 Evangeline, with its roots in a doleful piece of the North American past, the expulsion of the Acadians, that's not what remains most strongly etched in the mind of one viewer. Cherryfieldis a 16mm film, shot in 1938, seemingly at random, which is one of the things that makes it so Continued on Page 11