QUICK SEARCH:
 
Symposium 2006
The Working Life

• Symposiums and Essays •

Northeast Historic Film Summer Symposium

The Working Life

July 20-22, 2006
 

The 2006 Symposium explored the working life as a subject of amateur and non-commercial film, paying special attention to moving images that offered a new historical, cultural, and critical understanding of work since the late 19th century. By examining moving images of the working life made by amateurs and for noncommercial purposes, this Symposium examined the details, diversity, and perspectives on work that often escape recognition in mainstream media representations.
Read the 2006 Symposium program (PDF, 670KB)
 
For more information about the 2006 Symposium and its presenters, contact Northeast Historic Film.
 

MOVING PICTURES:

Where You’ve Been That You Might Not Have Seen

A Collage Poem for The Working Life 2006 Summer Symposium
by
Patricia Smith Ranzoni
 

(Clip 1: Transgressions)


I know I
am not supposed
to be writing our women
digging their greens, tres-
passing in another class,
but this ground is composed
of my people


and I am on my knees          and this is a knife.


(Clip 2: All in Good Time)


     A woman in her handsewn dress
relays canners of washwater heating on the range since
it's turning out to be a good drying day.  Piles
of handmade and couldn't be made clothes for seven sorted
around their new lordlike wringer from Ivan Braun's.


               Milkpail, scrubbed and scalded...
The frothy hay-seeded strainercloth clean again on the pulley line.
Yeastdough rising in a three gallon pot.  Cookingdishes soaking
awaiting free hands and next boiling teakettle rinse.


               Four rhubarb pies men will vie for
at some benefit bakedbean supper crowning towels
on the linoleumtacked sideboard she's been up since five.
Only so much time before the youngest get home on the bus
their father out at four.  The car's at the mill


               where would she go she never shops.
No clubs.  Chauffeurs the kids after extra trips to keep it,
and him when he's had too much.  Work and more work
she hollers when she's had it they hardly ever hear her laugh


               but sometimes she plays Amapola
on the piano and The Beer Barrel Polka she doesn't even
need notes and she sees to it any who want have lessons long
as they want in town with Faye MacLeod.


 (Clip 3: Piano Lessons)

There’s always an old piano to be found.


Small hands that weed, haul, pitch, pick and stack
                         need a piano as much as a piano needs them.


A child’s thinking she no longer wants lessons
                         can coincide with a father’s first traction 
                                  and leave from the mill and news
                                   there’s no more money
                                        or rides.


(Clip 4:  Making Maybaskets)


chasing     kissing     chasing     kissing


Your mother trades her eggmoney for pleats of tissue
and crinkled crepe paper at the 5 & 10 the colors of arbutus trailing/ on the ledges...
off the Waldo-Hancock Bridge where... [writers] will someday come to work and run
come to breathe in  what people imagine you girls imagine about those sailors
off those tankers and barges come to load and unload.  Don’t go down town
there’s a boat in...lest you pick all Bucksport’s rare wild rose yarrow on the way to the wharf,
encounter rainforest you don’t know about emotions, become women right there on the dock
emerging with foreign flowers between your souvenir breasts for the rest of your life.


 (Clip 5: Incendiary)

She takes them to be consultants
when they sit beside her
on the Bangor to Boston flight
discussing “the lesson from Bucksport.”
You know, “dialoguing the situation,”
one actually says.


“So what!”
“It was only five thousand and
it was extra anyway.”
“Only a perceived loss,”
You know, “values” they say.


She strains under her seatbelt
against their sickening tone.  Them.
She is a child in the frigid dark carrying
finger biting pails from the well
to the cows, trip after slippery
mitten soaking trip;  because
a barge is in and has to be loaded and
it is her father’s “value” to work
all the overtime he can get
to make ends meet and
the ends don’t.  Meet.


“I hesitate to call it sabotage,”
“but we expected morale
to be improved by now.”
“Problem is,”“they’re reminded
of the cut every week on payday.”
“The solution to that is to pay them
once a month,” one says.
One smiles and says.


When the pilot announces
changed landing plans,
(out of his hands, he says)
they jostle him through their
textbook talk.  Wouldn’t want him
working for them, they say.
“Must be a union man,” they say.


“Asses!” she wants to answer,
her smoldering anger threatening
to take them down.
And don’t they think it possible
that union people ever travel
twenty miles upriver, or fly anywhere,
or don’t they care how disgusting
their “dialogue” is in a laboring state
or don’t they care
or don’t they care or don’t they care?

(Clip 6:  Another Long)


               Comes back a dark
before the 4 o’clock
shift lets out.  Comes back
the deep freeze
safe to slaughter in, safe
to hook the summer’s beef
critter from a north porch
rafter in, to hang lean
suspended months
in crystal state for children
to whittle chips from
to fry after county basketball
games in town while friends
sip Coke at Pop Hill’s.
For a wife’s hands chapped
from outside work
or work inside in a house
cold in as out
for a wife’s chapped hands
to carve stars from
ragged slices of the-sky’s-
the-limit  to fry in that rugged
castiron pan that is his entire
universe raised on salt pork
and biscuits the tenathem
swearin’ his family’ll never
go to bed hungry, for a wife’s
chapped hands to have on the table
by the time P.D. comes through that door
from unloading hundredpound
bags of tapioca for test-coating paper
from that day’s #2-machine’s run.
Rigger.  Before his pie.


These are the days of men dying in blizzards walking home from work at the mill.
These are the days of accidents in the woods.
These are the days of nothing but working to keep warm.
These are the days of children and old people going up in awful sorrowful smoke.
These are the days of tomorrow’s flaming lips


(Last Clip: Hush with me...)


before we punch out. I know you’re tired from your work
and so am I, and we should be out raking in the fields. But we will most likely
never crew again, so here’s where the heart comes in.
I’m telling you, you could hear it in their sighs if they could realize
what you do, and that you are here amongst them right now hashing it over,
how to show the truth for the visible--and invisible--workers of the world,
for which, there is no end.
With the exception of the third and last clips, these poems and fragments of poems can be found in their entirety and contexts in Ranzoni’s collections from Puckerbrush Press, CLAIMING (1995) and SETTLING (2000), available through any bookstore. Signed copies may be ordered directly from her at pranzoni@aol.com.
 
Patricia Smith Ranzoni was born in 1940 upriver in Lincoln, Maine, to a young Canadian-American wood-cutter and farm girl. For work at the papermill when her father returned from W.W.II, her family located to Bucksport where she grew up and where she now writes from one of the subsistence farms of her youth which her husband and children helped keep in the family. She worked her way through graduate degrees at U. M. in education but has had no instruction in poetry, being deeply folk-schooled in the traditions of her people. Her poetry has been published across the country and abroad; has been used in Colby College’s “Many Maines” course;  drawn from by U. M. departments of English and history; and is being acquired by (U.M.) Fogler Library’s Special Collections and other archives of Maine history, class and women’s studies.
 

2006 SYMPOSIUM PRESENTERS

Ruta Abolins is the Director of the Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection with a collection rich in broadcast history, newsfilm, and home movies. She has a BFA in Filmmaking from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, an MA in Popular Culture from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and an MA in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin. All of this education — just by chance — seems to make up the perfect mix of information and skill necessary for her work.
 

Robbins Barstow is an 86-year-old retired educator, living with his wife of 63 years, Margaret, in Wethersfield, Connecticut, where their three children were raised and had their lives uniquely documented in home movie family chronicles.  A graduate of Dartmouth College (1941) with a Ph.D. in education from the University of Connecticut (1967), Robbins worked as a public school educator in Connecticut until his retirement in 1984. A long-time social and political activist, he continues to be involved in church-related peace and justice efforts, and the global whale conservation movement. Robbins has been a life-long movie buff, and an amateur filmmaker for over 70 years. He has produced more than 100 family, travel, and documentary films and videos, many of which have been broadcast over local public access television. A dozen of his 20th century family home movie productions have recently been accepted for preservation by the Library of Congress.
 

Bob Brodksy has been an amateur filmmaker since age eleven. Bob kept his interest mostly avocational until he saw clearly that his films and photography suited him better than his other work, especially when he turned his camera on ordinary people and asked them to talk about their jobs. Super 8 filmmaking enabled him to work without sponsorship.

Three events coincided during the 1970’s to cause the making of A Day at the Factory:

1. Bob Brodsky, then in his mid-thirties, decided to work full time at photography and

    filmmaking.

2. Super 8 single-system magnetic sound-on-film recording became a reality.

3. Bob was given ten days notice to make a presentation before high school teachers on

    job opportunities for high school graduates in a shoe factory.
 

Cara Caddoo is a filmmaker and educator based in New York City. She holds an MA in African American Studies from Columbia University and is currently completing an MFA in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College, where she also teaches in the Film and Media Studies Department. Her research focuses on issues related to the intersections of race, gender, and class in media, with a particular focus upon images of African Americans and Asians in early film.
 

Ardis Cameron is Professor of American and New England Studies. She is the author of Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1880-1912, (University of Illinois Press, 1994) and Looking For America: The Visual Production of People and Nation (Blackwell, 2005). She is currently working on two book projects, The Road Out: Girl Travel and Trouble in Northern New England, and Tales of Peyton Place: The Biography of a Big Book. She is the recent recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a Senior Research Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  

 

Melissa Dollman has very recently finished UCLA’s Moving Image Archive Studies graduate program where she explored various aspects of the field, but narrowed her focus primarily on the many facets of public access to moving image materials. Prepping 16mm 1980s news footage and summarizing its content for UCLA’s catalogue; researching hours of news coverage about the career of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor for a study guide; and creating shot lists to flesh out bibliographic records of director Henry Koster’s home movies taken behind the scenes of his films are a few of the stages in facilitating access that she has worked on. Additionally, during her term as this year’s Women in Film Foundation fellow she assisted in the depositing their archive with UCLA and a study guide to their general collection which features oral history interviews with women working in the film industry. 

Leo Enticknap is a senior lecturer in media studies and curator of the Northern Region Film and Television Archive, both based at the University of Teesside, UK. He has an MA in Film Archiving from the University of East Anglia and a PhD from the University of Exeter, with a thesis on British non-fiction film during the post-war reconstruction period. His research interests are the history of media technologies, ethical issues surrounding the practice of archival restoration and preservation and the relationship between politics and the non-fiction film in Britain. His first book, Moving Image Technology: From Zoetrope to Digital, was published by Wallflower Press last year. He is currently researching the international distribution of De Forest Phonofilms, and hopes to shortly start work on a monograph charting the relationship between the Conservative Party and the British film industry. A former projectionist, Enticknap is also a co-chair of AMIA's Projection and Presentation Group.
 

Sian Evans is a film/video producer working on national and international projects since the late 1970s. For the last fifteen years she has worked primarily in the corporate market, making videos for internal corporate audiences and for national foundations. Her supervising producer credits include documentaries and television shows such as the PBS outdoor adventure series Anyplace Wild; a PBS special on WWII military medical experiences Wounded In Action, and A&E's Bearing Witness, Barbara Kopple's look at women war journalists working in Iraq. Sian is the director/producer of an experimental documentary on the nature of “home” called Home Is Where the Heart Is. She is currently producing for Discovery HD Theatre’s Sunrise Earth series, and consulting producing on a documentary about an originator of the Outward Bound and NOLS programs in the United States, Tap Tapley. She has a great love of documentary in all its forms and therefore of any home movie.
 

Michael H. Frisch is Professor of History & American Studies/ Senior Research Scholar at the University at Buffalo, SUNY.  He has been involved for many years in oral and public history projects such as  Portraits in Steel (1993), a collaboration with photographer Milton Rogovin that documented in oral history and photographic portraiture the lives of Buffalo area steelworkers before and after the plant closings of the 1980s; it received the Oral History Association’s Best Book prize for 1993-1995.   Frisch is the author as well of A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (1990), and was President of the American Studies Association (2000-2001). His work in oral history applications of new media technology is being developed through his consulting office, The Randforce Associates, LLC, based in the University at Buffalo’s Technology Incubator.

 

Nathan Godfried is Professor of History at the University of Maine. He teaches 20th-century American history and popular culture/mass media history. His research interests include, among other topics, the labor movement and the mass media. Selected publications:  WCFL: Chicago’s Voice of Labor, 1926-1978, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Fellow Traveler of the Air:  Rod Holmgren and Leftist Radio News Commentary in America¹s Cold War, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 24:2 (June 2004); and Identity, Power, and Local Television: African Americans, Organized Labor, and UHF-TV in Chicago, 1962-1968, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 22:2 (June 2002). The article, Struggling over Politics and Culture: Organized Labor and Radio Station WEVD during the 1930s, Labor History, 42:4 (November 2001) won the 2002 Cathy Covert Award for the best article in journalism history from the  History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
 

Robert Goff   I was born and raised in Liverpool, England. I have a BA in English from the University of Essex and a M.A. in American Culture from the University of London. I came to the United States to study for a Ph.D. in the American Culture program at Bowling Green State University and to teach in their Department of Popular Culture. I have since taught American Studies and popular culture courses at the University of Eastern Michigan in Ypsilanti and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I now live in Providence, Rhode Island, and I teach film courses at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and Providence College.
 

Erika Gottfried is Curator of Nonprint Collections at New York University’s Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, a special collection focusing on the history of the American left and New York City labor history. She is responsible for preservation and arrangement of large collections of 20th century still images and graphics, posters, political buttons, ephemera, and the Tamiment’s unique collection of moving images shot for labor unions and left political organizations. She also compiles inventories, creates databases, and writes comprehensive guides to make these materials accessible to researchers. Before coming to the Tamiment in 1989, she worked as a freelance photograph and film researcher for films and exhibits and as an associate producer for documentary films and television. She has a bachelor’s degree in history and a Master’s degree in Library Science, and has published articles on film, photographs and history, as well as book and exhibit reviews.

 

Julia Haslett  has worked at WGBH-Boston, the Discovery Channel, and as a Filmmaker-in-Residence at the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics. Her documentary shorts Hurt & Save (2001) and Flooded (2003) have screened at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Cinematexas, and Athens Intl Film Festival, among others. Julia is producer/director of the highly-acclaimed Worlds Apart (2001) series about cultural conflicts over medical treatment. Born in London, England, in 1968, she received her B.A. in English Literature from Swarthmore College and studied graduate film production at Boston University. Now a resident of New York City, Julia is currently in production on An Interview with Simone Weil (working title), an expressionistic documentary about the French philosopher and labor activist, Simone Weil (1909-1943). In 2005, she received a MacDowell Colony fellowship to support that work. Also a freelance writer, her articles have appeared in COLORS magazine and Release Print.

Patricia Raub  has a Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University in Ohio in American Culture, and has been teaching in the American Studies departments at Providence College and UMass-Boston since the 1980s. She published a book on women's best-sellers entitled Yesterday's Children:  Popular Women's Novels of the Twenties and Thirties, as well as articles on photography and vernacular architecture. Among the courses she offers are those on the history of work in the U.S., women's history and the history of U.S. documentary photography.
 

Ryan Shand is a Ph.D. candidate in the Theatre, Film and Television Studies department at the University of Glasgow. His thesis, entitled Amateur Cinema in Scotland, is a study of generic practices in amateur film production and the influence of competitions, manuals (mostly published by Focal Press) and amateur film journals (such as Home Movies and Home Talkies and Amateur Cine World) in the formation of these forms. Ryan has contributed to an Amateur Cinema option for undergraduate students, which ran for the first time last year at the University of Glasgow. He has also written on amateur film for the Scottish arts magazine The Drouth. Ryan completed his undergraduate degree in Film and Television Studies at Brunel University-West London and his MPhil in Screen Studies at the University of Glasgow. His masters dissertation was entitled Making Movies for Remembering: Amateur Non-Fiction Filmmaking in the Far North of Scotland 1931-1979.