Overcoming Silence - 9 June 2010
Soviet Film Project: Preserving and Propagating the Soviet Experience into the Next Century
by Daniel Frontino Elash
Comrades in the San Francisco Bay Area recently reclaimed possession of a cache of about 300 films that had been the film library of the Berkeley, California branch of the Soviet-American Friendship Society (SAFS). These films have been moved to New York City under the auspices of the U.S. Friends of the Soviet People (USFSP), who will proceed to digitize and distribute them, online and on DVDs. These films were produced in the USSR, in Russian with English subtitles, and intended as a Soviet self-description of its own culture and history. Therefore, if the memory of the USSR fades in time, these films will become increasingly important historical and cultural documents.
About two-thirds of the material is stored in metal canisters, and seems to have held up well. About one third of the material is sitting in boxes in the open air, and has fared poorly. Exact titles are difficult to ascertain, because the canisters are hand-labeled. However, they have been cross-checked with a copy of the SAFS film catalog from 1986, on file at the Tamiment Library in New York City. Based on this, the collection seems to contain a good representative sampling of the kinds of films SAFS was distributing at the time, including: Soviet history; ethnography; science; culture; and Russian language instruction.
The immediate goal of the Soviet Film Project is to raise money in order to acquire digitization equipment: a telecine machine; a dedicated Macintosh running Final Cut Pro; several terabyte-sized hard drives. We are also seeking volunteers to run the machines, once they're acquired, and a suitable workspace conveniently located on the NYC subway system.
For more information, to volunteer, or to contribute, please contact:
USFSP, P.O. Box 140434, Staten Island NY, 10314-0434
Tel: 718-667-4740. Email: <usfsp@hotmail.com>