TOP AUTHORITY ON FILM PRESERVATION TO SPEAK

One of the nation's leading authorities on film preservation will speak at Bryn Mawr on Thursday, April 7, at 4:30 p.m. in Thomas 224. The lecture by Scott Simmon, Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, is sponsored by the College's Center for Visual Culture.

Simmon's lecture, "Inventing American Film History: Archives, Access and the Curious Creation of the Canon in Cinema Studies," will reflect upon his experience as a film scholar, film programmer and film preservationist. The protection and preservation of films other than mainstream feature films — documentaries, educational and experimental cinema and amateur films — is a growing concern among film scholars. Increasingly, scholars are rethinking what film history does and what it is, and why certain films are treated as art while other films are not. Simmon will discuss how access to film archives has shaped the discipline of film studies, and how new technologies may very well transform its future.

Simmon is an authority on American silent cinema and has written books on D.W. Griffith and King Vidor. He was a film programmer at the Library of Congress and supervised the restoration of two historic films by early pioneers: Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates (1919), a response to D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915), and Lois Weber's message film Where Are My Children? (1916).

More recently, Simmon produced two important DVD anthologies collecting more than 100 films preserved by U.S. public archives. These two sets, Treasures from American Film Archives and More Treasures from American Film Archives, have already had a transformative impact upon film-studies curricula across the country.

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