On Wednesday, Oct. 16, the Colgate’s department of art led a lecture about a breakthrough in a fifteen-year, five-person study of abandoned film canisters: the group was able to use a device called a Kinograph to digitize and conserve the film. The project united five very different people who have come together under one shared interest.
Matthew Epler, an independent designer and technologist, came across a number of 16 mm and 35 mm film canisters from the Soviet Union in a room in Amman, Jordan when he was a graduate student in 2009. At the time, he was unsure what to do with these canisters, not knowing how much they were worth or what he could learn from them.
The rest of the group — including Brynn Hatton, Kindler Family assistant professor in global contemporary art at Colgate University, Kay Dickinson, a film historian at the University of Glasgow, Masha Salazkina, professor of film studies at Concordia University and Ala Younis, an independent artist and curator who attended the lecture via Zoom — all felt drawn to this project for a variety of reasons. The members met for the first time in person in 2023 at a biannual archival film festival in Berlin, despite years of working on the film canister project together.
Hatton led the lecture by introducing the other members of the group as well as the project as a whole. She explained that this may be a slightly different conversation than the audience may expect. While these are films that they are studying, they have never actually watched any of them through a projector in the conventional way of film viewership. In fact, they were less concerned with the films themselves and more about what they stood for.
“The films were in pretty bad shape, rusting and covered in dust,” Hatton said. “They seemed to have historical significance, but they were on their way to the dumpster.”
Epler worked with locals to help preserve and gain as much information as possible out of these canisters. The rest of the group fell into place in hopes of doing the same. In doing so, they started making the Kinograph. Kinograph is an open-source and portable film scanner that they have been using to digitize these film reels onsite. Typically, digitization is very expensive.
“Kinograph was initially conceived as a cost-effective solution for digitizing films like the ones in this collection,” Hatton said. “We saw the need to create an affordable film scanner that allows individuals, archives and institutions to convert old film footage into digital formats, preserving historical content that would otherwise degrade over time.”
Many years after their creation, it’s hard to imagine the scale of the film canisters’ dispersion. Some are in this group’s archive, some have perished or been sold and others kept. Salazkina is treating these collections like a treasure trove of rare, lost or unknown events and a larger history of non-commercial film. However, these networks serve as a record of cinemas that allow the group a glimpse into places where national film archives do not exist.
Dickinson came into this project because of her interest in Arab cinema. She sees this as an archive of a movement. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union found most Arab states too wayward to be close allies. However, they had important trading and military connections, demonstrated in the movement of films — specifically, the increase in Arabic titles and translations — between the two regions. Younis also felt drawn to this based on her previous research on Jordanian cinema. Younis’ presentation was especially interesting because of the artistic nature of her work. She wanted to digitize and watch some of the films by using 16 mm projectors. As Hatton explained towards the end, this project is bringing to light the material history about more than what the films actually capture about the Cold War period — their movement and labels say something about the regions and their struggles at the time.
Epler ended the conversation by talking about the Kinograph itself. After he found the canisters and started looking into them, he saw online that many people were building Kinographs across the world and teaching others through forums.
Students in the audience were very interested in the dynamic that was created within the group. This lecture drew a large crowd of people interested in very different aspects of the project, like junior Addisyn Donfris, who has an interest in visual arts and media.
“I really enjoyed the way that this group formed and how a group of different scholars interested in different aspects of film and media and art from all around the world were able to find a common interest and be brought together by this medium,” Donfris said.
Harper Hollander, a senior studying film and media along with English, was also impressed by the intersection of ideas and the way that Colgate is involved in the project.
“It is so rewarding to be studying at a university that cares to get involved in projects such as this one that allow professors and students to be a part of something that can uncover so much about history and media,” Hollander said. “This project is something that will allow people with so many different interests to be able to use these devices in their work.”
Groups of filmmakers, artists, curators, engineers, non-profits, academics and more care about these projects and what they reveal. Epler’s final message to the audience was to get involved and share the mutual abundance that comes along with this.
