Kattelle, Alan Collection

SummaryCollection contains features, shorts, newsreels, and home movies. Collection includes "The Making of an American," a 1920s film by The State of Connecticut Department of Americanization, about the importance of learning English, "Tommy’s Troubles," by the Dept. of Health and New York Tuberculosis and Health Association, and "Operations of the Columbia Salvage Corporation at Charleston, South Carolina." Features include the silent biblical epic, "Jeremias" (1922), directed by Eugen Illés. Jan-Christopher Horak identified the film, a safety 35 mm. copy distributed by the Wholesome Film Service, Boston, as "The Fall of Jerusalem." See Horak's article, "The Strange Case of The Fall of Jerusalem," The Moving Image, Fall 2005. WorldCat The collection also contains one reel of the lost Laurel and Hardy film, "The Rogue Song." Shorts and newsreels include Paramount-Bray Pictographs: The Magazine of the Screen, Pathé News, Castle Films, and "Bobby Bumps" animated films.

Biographical/Historical NotesAlan D. Kattelle (1919-2010) was a engineer and business executive who collected, wrote, and lectured about amateur motion picture equipment for over twenty-five years. His articles appeared in numerous collectors' society journals and periodicals. He is the author of the book Home Movies: A History of the American Industry, 1897-1979 WorldCat. He is co-founder and past president of the Movie Machine Society and served on the advisory board of Northeast Historic Film. The Making of an American was made in 1920 to be used as an educational tool in the Americanization effort—governmental initiatives to assimilate immigrants into mainstream culture, especially by encouraging them to learn English. The film was shown to more than 112,500 people the year it was made, and then copies were sold to other states. The film was targeted to industrial workers and contains location filming at the Hartford Rubber Works Company. It was named to the National Film Registry by the Librarian of Congress in 2005. The print survived on 28 mm. stock and was preserved with assistance from William S. O'Farrell, National Archives of Canada.

Conditions Governing Reproduction and UseAuthorization to reuse and/or reproduce must be obtained from Northeast Historic Film. See http://oldfilm.org/content/stock-footage-licensing for more information.