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Alan Katelle Oral History Project

Alan Katelle Oral History Project
The Alan Katelle Oral History Project was born of a unique opportunity afforded to attendees of the 2002 AMIA Conference to visit Alan Katelle's home in Hudson, MA., where the noted amateur film historian and author of Home Movies: A History of the Amateur Home Movie Industry in the United States (2000) housed his extensive collection of historic small-gauge equipment. (Alan is pictured here with archivist Liz Coffey in his display room in Hudson.) The proposal to undertake and record an extensive interview with Alan emerged naturally from the wealth of knowledge this elder member of our community shared spontaneously with his guests during that open-house event.

Members of the Small Gauge / Amateur Film Interest Group submitted a proposal to AMIA, which generously funded the project in 2003. Chad Hunter acted as Project Coordinator, and Andrea McCarty conducted the actual interviews, which were recorded onto standard audiocassette as well as onto miniDV cassettes. Copies of the audio and videorecordings reside at Northeast Historic Film in Bucksport, Maine (now also the home of the Alan and Natalie Katelle Collection of small gauge materials), at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY and at the offices of AMIA in Los Angeles, California. The project was completed in 2005, in which year Alan was honored with the Silver Light Award at the AMIA Conference in Austin Texas.

Transcriptions of the interviews are available here, in a series of .pdf files:

Introduction
Table of Contents
Tape 1
Tape 2
Tape 3
Tape 4
Tape 5
Tape 6
Tape 7
Tape 8
Tape 9
Tape 10
Tape 11
Index

The Small Gauge and Amateur Film Interest Group as well as the wider audience of film historians are grateful to AMIA for funding this project, to Chad Hunter and Andrea McCarty for devoting their considerable efforts to carry out the project, to Northeast Historic Film and George Eastman House for archiving the recordings, and of course to Alan Kattelle himself for his generosity in sharing his remakable store of knowledge with us all.

© 2008 The Association of Moving Image Archivists