Week 5

This week we started work on the rest of the film collection located in a stairwell at Filmmakers. As we continue to find more and more films faded and fading, struggling with vinegar syndrome, and a myriad of other problems, I wonder who is going to want to bring these films into their collection. One of our fellow classmates is doing her paper in this collection and I am interested in finding out if she finds an institution willing to bring in films that they know are in such disrepair.

Personally I am graoing interested in these films for their content. Educational films are a great way to look back on how our schools have used media to inform children about different things in our world. There have been tons of history focused and safety focused films. I think back to some of the movies I watched in elementary and high school; I think about what they taught me and how they helped to shape my opinions on the world I live in. I also think about the films my friends saw in school and how they helped to shape their opinions.

This is an interesting subject. I doubted that I would enjoy looking at the degrading films but I have been proven wrong. Through this exercise many interesting questions have been raised and I am interested in seeing what will happen to these films when we are done. Will they continue to haunt this mysterious staircase of almost lost films or will they be resurrected to teach us once again, not of the present but of the past; where we came from?