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Rare films come to life online
Once consigned to dusty film canisters and dark library shelves, some rare American films are seeing new life through a joint project between three University of North Carolina organizations and Folkstreams, Inc. The groups have collaborated to create folkstreams.net, a video streaming Web site built as a national preserve of documentary films about American folk and roots culture.
The hard-to-find films that are made available through folkstreams.net represent some of the most significant and artistic documentaries of the 20 th century, and they give voice to the arts and experiences of diverse American groups. They are accompanied on the Web site by background materials that give context to both the films and their subjects. The films are protected by copyright, but use of the site is free.
“Heretofore, much good independent film work was like the tree falling in the wilderness with no one to hear,” said Tom Davenport, Folkstreams project director and independent filmmaker. “With the Internet and video streaming, we will be able to make a ‘national park' from this wilderness where everyone can come and freely hear and see what we have labored on for so long and with such enjoyment.”
Viewers can now find films like Cowboy Poets, representing three aspects of the cowboy-poetry tradition; Give My Poor Heart Ease, a 1975 account of the blues experience through the recollections and performances of B.B. King, James "Son" Thomas, Shelby "Poppa Jazz" Brown, James "Blood" Shelby, Cleveland "Broom Man" Jones, and inmates from Parchman prison; and The Angel That Stands By Me: Minnie Evans' Paintings, a portrait of the African-American visionary artist Minnie Evans from Wilmington , N.C.
Although many of the films have won film festival awards and critical acclaim, they do not fit easily into mass-market outlets like movie theaters, video stores and broadcast and cable television. Notoriously hard to distribute, Folkstreams.net makes these films easy to find and view on the Internet.
Folkstreams.net currently streams 39 films by some of America 's best-known independent documentary filmmakers, including Les Blank, John Cohen, Tom Davenport, William Ferris, Paul Wagner, Michal Goldman and Susan Levitas. The site will host 52 films by the end of September in both RealPlayer and QuickTime formats.
“This really is just the beginning,” said Davenport . “We have already identified 138 films that we want to add to the collection, and our goal is that Folkstreams will continue to build and grow over time.”
UNC's School of Information and Library Science, ibiblio.org, and the Southern Folklife Collection partnered with Folkstreams, Inc. to create Folkstreams.net. ibiblio.org is a free public library of digital material that provides server space and digital streams for Folkstreams.net, and UNC's Southern Folklife Collection maintains the film and tape archives.
The project has been supported through a $95,000 National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences since October 2004. Folkstreams.net also receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.