Local Films, National Preservation: Selections from the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound’s Grant Funded Films

Presented by the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound
Where: 
East Tennessee History Center
When: 
Thursday, March 7, 2019 - 2:00pm to 3:30pm

The Knox County Public Library is thrilled to announce their Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound is a recipient of a 2018 National Film Preservation Foundation federal grant, for the preservation of reels from the Harry Caldwell Film Collection. Mr. Caldwell was a Methodist missionary from Athens, Tennessee, who lived and worked in the Fujian province of China from 1900 to 1944. While there, he shot an amazing body of film documenting religious parades and ceremonies, glimpses of life in Buddhist monasteries, military drills, a missionary school, natural disasters, urban street scenes, and agricultural practices in the region. The decaying, damaged film was in dire need of preservation, and the Library of Congress's National Film Preservation Board awarded TAMIS a grant which would save a third of the reels. The Jane L. Pettway Foundation then generously stepped in with a grant to more than double the amount of the NFPF grant, so that the entire collection will receive new High Definition transfers, as well as brand new film prints!

KCPL and TAMIS are recipients of ten previous NFPF grants, and to celebrate this latest, we are hosting a screening of selections from these preserved films.

Included will be two extremely rare 1918 newsreels which captured some of the earliest moving images of the Smoky Mountains; a 1946 film looking at UT's postwar enrollment boom; Knoxville News-Sentinel-produced reel of Chilhowee Park’s playground opening day in 1948; a newsreel on the 1949 Knoxville Policemen’s Hollywood Movie Ball; a film of Bristol, Tennessee’s 1955 Newsboy Soapbox Derby; a 1957 documentary about Knoxville schools made by news reporter and filmmaker Vic Weals; and more! We’ll also feature a presentation on the Harry Caldwell Collection, and screen some of the film elements as they look prior to preservation.

Join us as we celebrate TAMIS’s past preservation efforts, and look to the future with one of our most ambitious projects yet. This FREE program will be in the auditorium of the East Tennessee History Center (601 S. Gay St.), Thursday evening, March 7 at 7:00 p.m.