Archive Remix Film Festival: Saturday, October 1st, 7:00 – 8:00 PM.
Blackstone Valley Tourism Center, 175 Main Street, Pawtucket, RI 02860
More information from Rhode Island Historical Society
Providence Community Library (Rochambeau)
Thursday, October 6th at 6pm
708 Hope Street
Providence, RI 02906
Warwick Center for the Arts
Thursday, October 13 at 6:30pm
3259 Post Road
Warwick, RI 02886
Image Gallery
Thursday, October 20th at 7pm
36 Market Street
Warren, RI 02885
James Baumgartner: Becca, what is the Archive Remix Film Festival?
Becca Bender: The archive remix Film Festival is a collaborative project between the Rhode Island Historical Society and Little Fire. My collaborator Raz Cunningham, and I started this project a year ago. And the idea is that we digitize a bunch of footage from the Rhode Island Historical Society film collections, and then put a call out to creators. They can be professionals, they can be amateurs, really anybody who wants to access that footage, and then remix it into their own short films. And the idea is really to get the material that’s in the archive out of the archive and into the hands of new creators so that they can tell new stories with it.
James Baumgartner: I understand you give the filmmakers about 300 minutes of footage, how do you pick that 300 minutes out of everything that’s in your archive?
Becca Bender: So that is the most fun part of my year, which is when Raz comes to the archive and we walk down the stacks and we look at the titles that are on the cans. And we pull things that interest us such as unhooking the hookworm, and we’re here to stay and early silent films, we really try to get a huge variety of the kind of stuff that’s within the archive. And that’s everything from these early narrative films from the teens. Through news footage through educational films, industrials, commercials and public service announcements, really kind of a cross section of what’s in the archive.
James Baumgartner: There are 15 short films in the festival this year. Rai Terry is one of the filmmakers
James Baumgartner: Rai, let’s talk about your film. You get access to 300 minutes of film material. How do you decide – how do you narrow that down into what you’re creating?
Rai Terry: I tend to just take a bunch of clips that I find interesting, I sort of whatever idea I think this year, I was like I kind of wanted to do something like creepy, little spooky. And so I just went through and found anything that I could possibly make seem creepy. I didn’t want it to be too scary, but I wanted it to kind of have like a sort of haunted kind of feel to it. [Music: Amapola]
James Baumgartner: Rai’s three and a half minute film is creepy in an atmospheric sort of way. For the soundtrack, they used a slowed-down version of a record from the archive. There are reversed and overlapping images including a building getting knocked down, people in old bunny costumes ice skating, ducks landing on a frozen pond, and more.
Rai Terry: I feel like with the Archive Remix Film Festival, gives me a sort of boost to the rest of the work that I’m going to make for the rest of the year. Because it’s like I can sort of see very raw, a sort of raw way of how I create. When I showed up last year to the festival, getting to see everyone else’s work, I think was really, really incredible. I mean, also just getting to see your own work screened. But then seeing everyone else’s work, I sort of had this moment of like, Oh, I thought I was gonna be the best one here. And, you know, it’s all these sort of really incredible pieces that people you know, who knows, these random people around the state are making out of this footage, it’s really unique to Rhode Island. So I think that it’s just a really cool festival in a really cool way to have people take ownership over what’s in the archive, and sort of get to recreate it, manipulate it, and then have shown, you know, to their peers and their community. So I think that’s definitely my favorite part.
James Baumgartner: That was Rai Terry, one of the filmmakers screening their films tonight at the Archive Remix Film Festival. We also heard from Becca Bender, the audio visual curator and archivist for the Rhode Island Historical Society, one of the organizers of the festival. You can see the films tonight at 7:00 at the Blackstone Valley Tourism Center in Pawtucket. For The Public’s Radio, I’m James Baumgartner.
