Pardesi (Khwaja Ahmad Abbas and Vasili Pronin, India/USSR 1957), 35mm
Erica Jones and Lydia Creech at the Eastman Museum's film vault and workroom at Kodak 350, where the South Asian cinema collection is housed.
Over the past two years, Project Film Specialists Erica Jones and Lydia Creech have processed, archived, and cataloged the majority of the South Asian Cinema Collection at the George Eastman Museum, including 532 out of 775 Indian film titles. With most of the films inspected and the end of the grant-funded project rapidly approaching, the museum faces broader questions about the future life of these important cultural objects.
Erica and Lydia will discuss their accomplishments and provide perspectives about the importance of this collection and its preservation. This program will also include interviews with other archivists, scholars of Indian cinema, and members of the diasporic community about the future potential uses of the collections, their memories and connections to South Asian cinema, and what the presence of this unique collection as part of the George Eastman Museum archive means to them.
This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services: Grant #MA-245614-OMS-20.
IN FOCUS—Beyond Bollywood: Perspectives on the South Asian Cinema Collection
Recorded In Focus talk from 08/05/22. In this virtual presentation, Lily Jones, Boyer Cataloguer in the Department of Photography, will discuss her selections for the upcoming iteration in the Collections Gallery, which highlights how the history of photography has intersected with the evolution of tourism in the United States and abroad.