At Adler and the library, preserving film from around the world

A crisis like the 2008 flood reveals things we might not notice otherwise—the sense of purpose that can unite a big institution, the muscles that start to ache after a day of sandbagging, and the diverse, often irreplaceable collections housed in pockets of the University.

Take the global cinema archive amassed by the Institute for Cinema and Culture. Many of its film prints, DVDs, and tapes are gifts from visitors to campus, or finds by faculty traveling the world.

Corey Creekmur and colleagues had emptied their department’s basement storage in the Adler Journalism Building. But as the flood threat grew more dire, they decided to evacuate the institute’s first-floor holdings, too.

“By then we had no power and no elevators, yet there was this amazing willingness to pitch in,” says Creekmur, director of the institute and associate professor of cinema and comparative literature, crediting Jenny Ritchie, Lacey Plathe, Sarah and Donald Moeller, Rick Altman, Claudia Pummer, Ellen Sweeney, and Teresa Mangum for their heavy lifting.

Creekmur later helped move Special Collections and University Archives materials from the Main Library basement next door, and found that the library’s Media Services department had likewise rescued its film collection—thousands of reels.

“I knew we had a lot of films,” he says, “but seeing them in stack after stack, literally taking up all the space in Media Services, was astonishing.”