2023
On April 11, 2023, 7pm, Deserted Films returned to the Palm Springs Cultural Center for another screening of fun educational/sponsored shorts and home movies. Come on out for “From the Archives: Art, Design, and the Look of Optimism”! All proceeds we earn from these shows go to digitizing films.
On February 25, 2023, we collaborated again with Modernism Week and the Palm Springs Public Library for Home Movie Day, a grassroots, worldwide effort to educate the public about home movies that invites the public to bring their films where we inspect, repair, and screen them.
On February 22, 2023, Melissa and Devin, as Deserted Films, gave a talk at the Palm Springs Public Library called “Thanks for the Memories-The Importance of Home Movies.”
2022
On December 20, 2022 at the Palm Springs Cultural Center, we hosted a “Holiday Oddities” program of ephemeral films from our collection and films we borrowed from archivist friends.
During the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ annual conference (December 6-9, 2022 in Pittsburgh) one of our home movies was included in the Archival Screening Night show!
This (Fall 2022) term, Master of Library and Information Science students at UCLA (Janet Ceja’s “IS289-3 “Special Issues in Information Studies: Motion Picture Film Preservation” course) learned all about film preservation using home movies from our collection we had yet to view. Here’s a bit about their efforts. In teams, the students digitized ten of our films using a 4K Kinetta scanner in the university’s Media Preservation Lab. Their contributions can be found on the “A Longer Drive,” “A Flight Away,” and “Holidays, Special Events, Parties, & Weird Stuff” pages. Notes for each film are in part derived from the descriptions they provided as part of their class projects. We wish to thank Felicity Flesher, Jeremy Hendrickson, Michaela Telfer, Christina Scholze, Daniella D’acquisto, Kylie Marie Harris, Marisa Rae Pimentel, Eunice Hong, Karl Theopold, Emily Gudmundson, Grace Lauren, Sidney Garcia, Tatiana Hernandez, Dr. Janet Ceja, Dr. Shawn VanCour, and Chloe Reyes in the Lab for their hard work and coordination. You can also watch team “Splice Girls’” final project video here (we have their permission to link out to it.)
2021
We also participated in our first international screening as Deserted Films in an event called “Christmas Home Movie Day” in 2021 which was organized by Italian archive, Superottimisti. Superottimisti screened our home movies among others on Christmas Day at the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino and near the Venaria Reale Palace in Torino, Italy, as well as online.
We received our first film donation back in summer 2021! Some of the films we lent the UCLA students (see above) to study and digitize came from donor Beth Campbell, daughter of the filmmaker. She mentioned in an email to us, passed along to the students: “My dad’s name was Donald Ramsay Lawson, but was always known as Ramsay. He attended Redlands University and then Stanford for his MBA. His big joke was that he never would have gotten into Stanford if it wasn’t for the war (WWII), because his grades weren’t great. He was rejected from serving because he was a diabetic. So a professor at Redlands recommended he apply to Stanford and was accepted because they needed men! He was a CPA in Pasadena, with a firm that his father started, Lawson and Co, which later became Guill, Blankenbaker and Lawson. I think it closed in the 1980’s. He was an amateur photographer, a hobbyist.” To watch Lawson’s films, see # 343 and #344 on “A Longer Drive.”