This virtual-only webinar program, which takes place on Thursday, July 18 from 12:00-1:00 pm ET, explores the life and work of the film and theater director Rouben Mamoulian, with discussion of the new book “Peerless” by Kurt Jensen.

The Library has a collection of Mamoulian's papers, though it has not yet been digitized and made available to the public. Learn a bit more by reading the blog post linked to below.

• Of Note: Lessons from a Director's Chair Unfolding History

Here's an entertaining story (gift link) from the New York Times that ends with a wonderful connection to the Library of Congress! Down the Rabbit Hole in Search of a Few Frames of Irish American History offers a hint of what's to come in the subtitle, too: "The silent film 'The Callahans and the Murphys' was pulled after an uproar over stereotyping. What happened next tantalized one fan of old movies."

Read it to find out answers to the following questions:

• Who was Marie Dressler and why had everyone heard of her by the late 1920s?
• What did cartoonist Thomas Nast have to do with perpetuating stereotypes of Irish immigrants?
• Did the 1927 MGM film, The Callahans and the Murphys, depict Irish life as one long, intoxicated slugfest or was the film simply "good-natured fun?" 
• What did the Ku Klux Klan have to do with Irish Catholics at this time?
• After cutting several negative depictions from the film (slugfests, excessive drinking, fleas, domestic violence, mocking the Catholic sign of the cross), why did MGM finally pull the film from circulation?
• How did The Callahans and the Murphys foreshadow the Hollywood Production Code?
• How did the National Audio-Visual Preservation Center of the Library of Congress come to the rescue of the article's author?
• What happened to any copies of The Callahans and the Murphys?

Be sure to watch the two surviving film clips from the article! The Irish Film Institute also has a 5-minute Excerpt from 'The Callahans and the Murphys' on its website. The lost excerpt was discovered under the name, The Irish Picnic by another film buff. What fun! 

A screenshot from the film at The Irish Film Institute:

  Art/Music    Social Studies/History    3 - 5    6 - 8    9 - 12    Irish Immigrants    Film History    Silent Films  

I came across Oscar Micheaux in some articles and it continues to surprise me how much is right in front of me once a I am introduced to a subject.  The Library of Congress is rich with his resources and one of his earliest preserved films, Within Our Gates, is available to view in its entirety on the Library's site.  It is also one of the Watch Films on the Library's National Film Registry.

CBS News, in celebration of African American History Month, ran a piece, How Oscar Micheaux paved the way for generations of Black Filmmakers.  The opening visuals are from (and credited to) the Library of Congress.

An excellent Micheaux biography appears on the NAACP site as does an examination of the filmmaker the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Film Studies professor Wheeler Winston Dixon who examines the artist's work.

One can listen to Micheaux's books, The Homesteader, and The conquest: the story of a negro pioneer on the Library's archives.

The movie, Body and Soul, with Paul Robeson, can be viewed in its entirety online.

Micheaux figures prominently in the Library's archives, and a search within Chronicling America will yield additional treasures.

  6 - 8    9 - 12    13+    Art/Music    English/Language Arts    Social Studies/History    Oscar Micheaux    African American filmmaker    The Homesteader    Within Our Gates    Body and Soul  

As this Edutopia article, Using Storyboards in the Classroom, points out, 

The Teaching with the Library Primary Sources & Ideas for Educators blog post Archival Footage for Student Documentaries by Suzanne Schulz, a 2023 Library of Congress Junior Fellow, provides a wonderful lesson idea for student documentary creation weaving in footage from the Library’s free archival collections.

I watched with interested a linked film from that blog "Let's See Chicago” a Kodachrome tour of the city in 1940/41 which was a promotional film by the Santa Fe Railway.

The film covers much of Chicago but seems to leave out Chicago’s South side Black population.  A challenge to students would be to re-do the film, in its style but add a more accurate view of “seeing Chicago” in 1940 by including a wider swath of its citizens.  Viewing historic promotional films are another way for students to understand how people can be left out of history through media.

There are many Farm Security Act photographs taken of the South Side of Chicago in the Library of Congress and students can use still images merged into video to tell a compelling story. I went searching for examples from around 1940 for a starter list of images that might be explored.

• https://www.loc.gov/search/?fa=partof:lot+1084
• https://www.loc.gov/search/?fa=partof:lot+49
• https://www.loc.gov/photos/?q=Black+belt+chicago
• https://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=%22black+belt%22+chicago&co=fsa&st=gallery&loclr=blogpic
• https://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=%22black%20belt%22%20chicago%20rosskam&st=gallery&loclr=blogpic

What else might students find in the Library to re-mix the film?

  Chicago    Film    Re-mix