Mr. Lines goes to Washington (for 24 hours)

Last Monday Michael and I met at 8:30am inside the National Archives in Washington, DC (well, technically the Motion Pictures Archives are just beyond DC in College Park). I had taken BoltBus from Brooklyn on Sunday and Michael had flown late that night from Atlanta.

We had done our research and Michael knew exactly what we’d be dealing with. The National Archives have a strict policy of what you can and cannot take into the archive rooms. No ink pens, no sweaters with zippers, no hats, no hand-held scanners (though flatbed scaners are permitted). The security guards kept asking about his REDONE camera body, “What is this?!”

Everything that’s not allowed in the research rooms is kept in lockers underground. Here’s what we took in (thankfully they had carts), plus a laptop, a pencil, and a sense of humor…

Once we registered every piece of our gear and went through an orientation to get ID cards, we buried ourselves in research to pull, review and shoot film reels with the REDONE. There are set times throughout the day when staff will pull film reels: 10, 11, 1:30, and 2:30. We used every one of the deadlines - actually missed the very first one by a minute (this is the government, we learned), but Michael became fast friends with *almost* everyone on staff and they came through for us.

While I was initially skeptical about the quality of footage we were about to shoot from the film viewing stations, Michael dialed in and captured absolutely gorgeous results. And in between the running around for reels and blocking light with black fabric, I became rather obsessed with the 35mm and 16mm film and recorded this audio of it rewinding.

(using the iSlate app on the iPhone)

Make no mistake, this was some extreme documentary research. The room manager, who had worked there for decades, was dumbfounded to hear that we’d come to town for only one research day, intending to go through 50+ films and leave by 4pm. But we did it. We worked from the minute we arrived to 4:30 when we rushed from the locker rooms to our taxi driver who’d been waiting for 20 minutes. I then rode with Michael through the gnarly beltway traffic, around and across town to the airport where we finally had some lunch. He took a flight back to ATL and I took the metro to catch my bus back to Brooklyn. I think it took a week for both of us to recover.

Our first trip to the DC archives was intense, but equally fun and rewarding. We’ll go back for more, withouth a doubt, although not for a few weeks I should hope. -Hudson

(pictures from Flickr)