YPHSTB Curator: Film is a labor of love

How did you choose your specific theme for the screening?

As I was a digitization process operator with Memnon Archiving Services during the film portion of the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, I inspected and watched countless films from IU's archives, but my job was purely technical and I had almost no context for what I was seeing. I thought back over what I could best remember from all the collections that I handled and landed on animations as the films I wanted to dive into more deeply because of the level of creativity, planning, and sheer hours labor that creators must put into them (especially using traditional methods).

What excites you about You (probably) Haven't Seen This Before?

YPHSTB provides an outlet for the content that really makes the gargantuan effort of media preservation worth it. The whole reason we maintain archives is to let their contents be seen; their creation in the past was a labor of love just as their conservation is in the present. This film screening series is a way to directly put eyes on forgotten objects that people may find interesting for any reason, be it academic or pure entertainment.

What is special to you about the medium of film?

Film is special for its ability to simultaneously engage the senses of sight, sound, and timing. They are the next best thing to physically teleporting the audience into a specific time and place, which is all the more interesting when a filmmaker has engineered every moment of the experience by hand in the way that animation allows for.