Category Archives: blog

Janie Whited, Artist, Clown, Trombonist (1956-2019)

  An unforgettable presence in Lesbian Home Movie Project video collections, Mary Jane “Janie” Whited died unexpectedly on March 7, 2019, in Everett, Washington, just 63, from complications from an automobile accident that occurred many years earlier in Florida.  She’s just about thirty years younger than that in the clips below, which date from before

Read More

Piecing Together the Jane Morrison Collection

by Emma Prichard Jane Morrison was an independent film maker and teacher, first at Cony High School in Augusta, Maine, at Columbia University School of Film, and abroad. Her body of work spans experimental films, documentaries, and a feature film. Her films show both a devotion to her home state, highlighting Maine locations and artists,

Read More

Dietrich Films Document Family Commitment to Activism

By Emma Prichard, Northeast Historic Film In terms of the number of reels of film, the Mary Lou Dietrich Collection is one of the largest I’ve worked with. 154 reels, but they only come to about 7000 feet of 8 mm film. Each reel translates to less than four minutes when viewed. The collection was

Read More

Christine Reid Turns the Spotlight on Woman Behind the Camera

by Emma Prichard, Northeast Historic Film The adventurous types get all the attention. In Christine Reid’s case, deservedly so. Christine L. Reid (1906 – 1990) was the oldest child of a wealthy Boston family. She grew up moving between the East Coast and trips to the family home at Lake Tahoe. Her father, William T.

Read More

Dating the Background Noise

by Emma Prichard, Northeast Historic Film The NHF portion of the ‘Woman Behind the Camera’ project, spans almost a hundred years of black and white, color, sound, and silent film. Some, like the Kodak films with their edge codes, give a clear idea of the time period. Though edge codes cannot establish when the images

Read More

Millie Goldsholl’s “Rebellion of the Flowers”

Millie Goldsholl’s Rebellion of the Flowers (1992) appears to be the last film she completed and one that she poured an incredible amount of creative passion and energy into. Completed three years before her husband’s death, the film is dedicated to “Morton Goldsholl and the Good People who resist the abuse of power in any

Read More

Archiving Separatism

While lesbians shot home movies and amateur films well before Stonewall, the idea that making sexual identity public was essential to winning civil rights changed filming friends and lovers into a radical act, altered the way participants behaved in front of a camera, and changed what the women behind the cameras shot. For lesbians the

Read More

Searching for Context with the Marguerite Larock Collection

By Emma Prichard, Northeast Historic Film Open the pages of the 1929 Mechanic Falls High School ‘Pilot’, the Maine school’s yearbook, and you’ll find the usual photographs of students with lists of their accomplishments and extracurricular activities. Turn to page 7, and you’ll find the photograph of one ‘Marguerite Frost’. She stands out. Her list

Read More

Categorizing JoAnn Elam’s films

The following is adapted from a short presentation given by Brian Belak, Collections Manager for Chicago Film Archives, at the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ Annual Conference in New Orleans, LA, on December 1, 2017. The panel “Woman Behind the Camera: Uncovering An Overlooked Perspective” also featured archivists from Northeast Historic Film, the Lesbian Home

Read More

The Archival Gets Personal

Even if Lesbian Home Movie Project’s first collection had been a talkie, there’d have only been one way to know for sure that at least some of the women in it were lesbian: to know the filmmaker or one of the women in the footage. As it happened, I did know one fairly well. Friends

Read More