- [Announcer] Live from your public media studios, WVIA presents "Keystone Edition Arts", a public affairs program that goes beyond the headlines to address issues in Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania.

This is "Keystone Edition Arts".

And now, Erika Funke.

- Welcome to "Keystone Edition Arts" where past and present come together through paper in motion telling tales freshly and artfully.

Sarah Scinto opens to page one.

- [Sarah] Artists have always found innovative ways to draw inspiration from paper and their diverse approaches are included in the PBS series, "Craft in America".

From the intricate folds of origami to the vibrant layers of collage, the festive creations of pinatas and the delicate precision of paper cutting.

The series showcases the possibilities of this medium.

One Wayne County artist working with paper is Samuelle Green, whose large scale paper art has appeared in museums in China, Italy, France, and her hometown of Honesdale.

Green's talent earned her the 2024 F. Lammot Belin Arts Scholarship awarded by the board of trustees for the Waverly Community House.

The scholarship supports artists who demonstrate exceptional skill and promise in the fine arts.

Another recipient, Judith Levy, used her scholarship to create the artist book, "Shadow Traffic".

A copy of which is in the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art.

According to the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, artist books are unique works of art that embody an artist's creative vision and quote, "Exist at the intersections of printmaking, photography, poetry, experimental narrative, visual arts, graphic design, and publishing."

With their work, Green and Levy have found novel ways to turn an everyday object into something more.

For "Keystone Edition Arts", I'm Sarah Scinto, WVIA News.

- It's a simple bouquet of paper posies, but it brings past and present together and tells a story that connects generations of a family from Union County.

In 2018, students were invited to take part in a challenge involving recycled art that was put in place by the public TV series, "Working Class".

Regional producers, Penn College of Technology and WVIA Public Media selected this piece, Victory Garden, as a top entry.

Brooke Dorman, then in fifth grade made these flowers by cutting and quelling paper strips from recycled bank checks that belonged to her great-grandparents.

Brooke and her mother said their ancestors survived the Great Depression and World War II and the bouquet represents victory gardens that were popular during that era.

A story from the past, told in the present from recycled paper checks.

Making it real for us today.

Recycling, restoring, retelling, reviving, we're about to meet artists who are telling stories from the past using paper crafting from days of old.

Magid means storyteller.

And a group of musicians from region in Massachusetts with a storyteller and a visual artist have chosen as their name, The Magid Ensemble to capture the essence of what they do.

Temple Hesed in Scranton took part in a Yiddish arts and cultural initiative through the Yiddish Book Center.

And when Rabbi Daniel Swartz discovered the Magid Ensemble there, he knew he had to bring the group to Scranton where they were able to tell the story of "Shterna and the Lost Voice" through paper cuts in motion at the JCC.

(lively music) - This is a performance that is a combination of visual art, traditional oral storytelling, and original plasma music.

And each of them, I think really beautifully hold their own and also contribute to this piece of total theater.

- This is a paper cut what's called a cranky or a moving panorama.

It's an older storytelling device.

This particular one is made out of cut paper on top of tracing paper and then laminated with tape.

So, you turn the crank and it moves.

It's a scroll on two dowels, and as you turn it, it shifts it from one dowel to the other.

- Shterna began to suspect who it was she was dealing with.

For it is often said that Eliyyahu, Elijah the prophet travels the world in the guise of a sick man.

- This is all from Weaver's story.

It is an original story that I made up rooted in Ashkenazi folklore, specifically folk tales of Elijah the prophet, to make people feel curious to learn more about diasporic Jewish traditions.

- I was really inspired by obviously, Jewish paper cut art, because that's what this project is, But then also, Indonesian shadow puppetry, doing a lot of research on the Shtetl's history and like looking at architecture, looking at motifs in traditional paper cut art, but then also sort of interwoven with my own style in here too.

- Of course, it's not like fast and disposable.

Of course, it has to be experienced live and collectively.

(lively music) It means a lot that people of all ages feel that they can drop into that and connect just with sort of the old hobby of going to see a storyteller or a picture show.

- [Kiah] We have these puppets that appear in it and behind the screen, they look really cool.

When the kids come up after and they wanna see, they see it and it's just paper.

And I think that's really cool for them to realize that they can do that.

- They really like sit down and lock into it because of course it is a glowing screen, which they know how to sit down and lock and that's great.

But for them to be able to come up afterwards and really see how it's made, that it's a technology that they can understand, it's not like a digital thing that, you know, the more integrated it becomes into our lives that actually, the less people really understand how it works.

- There's real beauty in making something like this that's like not economical, it's not going to earn us a lot of money.

It's so handmade.

There's like so many moments that I see where like, I made a mistake and then had to correct for.

But I think that that's kind of the beauty of analog stuff.

Something happens and then you have to find a way to fix it instead of pressing undo.

- [Weaver] It's quite simple and quite complicated and something that they also can create with their own imaginations.

(audience applauding) - Members of The Magid Ensemble performing at the JCC in Scranton in December, 2024, hosted by Rabbi Daniel Swartz.

And temple has said with the JCC, the Scranton Area Foundation and Jewish Federation of Northeast Pennsylvania, a feature produced by WVIA's Kris Hendrickson.

In the story they told, "Shterna and the Lost Voice," Shterna goes on a hero's journey to retrieve the lost voice of her friend.

The world will not be the same without the voice that is lost.

The quest to retrieve a lost voice can serve as a wonderful metaphor for the next story that we might call Bucknell and the Lost Films.

We have as the lead quester, Eric Faden, professor of film media studies at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, who with his team, has unlocked a treasure trove of voices from the past so that their stories can be told again.

Welcome, Eric.

- Thank you so much.

- It's so good to have you here.

And we're aware, aren't we?

Of the US preservation is so active at trying to preserve our film stock.

You all share them at the campus theater- - Of course.

- In Lewisburg often.

But tell us that story about how you backed into a project in Japan to save some films that were moldering and might've turned to dust if you hadn't paid attention.

- Absolutely.

So I was very, very fortunate in 2017 to go on a research fellowship to Japan.

I had a project lined up that I was gonna work on kind of 19th century glass slides that were projected.

And one of the first museums that I visited to do work on after moving my entire family 6,700 miles across the planet said, "This is a really interesting project, but most people already kind of worked on this material before."

And this was certainly, a bit disheartening to hear, but at the same time, they brought out a box and inside that box was a film unlike any I'd seen before.

It was on paper.

And they had dozens of these boxes.

and the head curator of the museum was like, "This is what you should really be working on because nobody's doing a lot of research and nobody knows a lot about these films."

And so of course, I was fascinated with them.

- They are... You have a roll right there?

- I do, yeah.

- And that's made of, that's a roll of film made of paper.

- It is.

So you could see that it's not transparent, but that it is opaque solid.

And so it required a very different type of projection system to use.

And this is when I got excited about the project because in speaking with the curator of the museum, I initially said, "Well, let's watch some of these movies.

These would be really interesting to see."

And he explained that it was impossible to see them because the paper is very delicate now, and the projectors from the 1930s are very rough on the films.

And he wondered aloud, kind of very optimistically, "If only there was someone that could figure out a way to scan these films and then project them anew."

And that's kind of when the Japanese Paper Film Project started.

- Wow.

We have to ask why did they make paper films?

Why did they go that way?

- That is a great question and a complex question, but the short version of the answer is it was pretty common in Japan at home and in neighborhoods to have 35-millimeter projectors.

So films that were done in theaters would be cut up and then sold in bits and pieces and watched at home or projected for like a neighborhood film screening.

But most of those films were nitrate films.

So they were very flammable and very combustible.

And so this company kind of came out and said, "Let's try making film on paper."

And of course, Japan has an incredibly long paper craft history and several other companies then followed suits.

And from roughly 1932 to 1938, paper films were manufactured and sold.

- [Erika] What then, we need to know how you have the ability to show us an image like that- - Sure.

- Certainly.

But before get there, what were the considerations?

Because we've talked before about the cultural and historical situations that may have brought this, you gave us to the 1938, something like that.

What happened that it the ground to a halt?

- So World War II happened.

So Japan, the Japanese government put out a decree that any kind of domestic product using metal, especially toys or kind of hobby equipment was banned because they needed metal for the war effort.

And so all of these companies that made paper films also sold projectors, which were made of metal.

And if you couldn't buy a projector, people were not gonna buy the films.

So all of the companies folded in 1938.

- Okay.

We want to ask about, of course, the content, but in order to get to the content, you had to come up with, "If only someone would be able to develop a way to scan them."

And that fell to you?

- It did.

And I should say I was kind of hopelessly optimistic that I would be able to figure out how this would would work.

And at first I kinda did it manually, photographing the films frame by frame.

So taking a picture, moving the film one frame, taking another picture.

So a film that was only a minute or two long would take four or five hours to photograph that way.

And then the results still were problematic because after the third hour, you get pretty tired and you get pretty sloppy.

So what I did was reached out to some colleagues at Bucknell in other disciplines, so mechanical engineering, computer software.

And we collaborated to build a scanning system that could relatively quickly scan the films in about eight or nine minutes and then develop software that could then process and stabilize those images and reanimate them.

- Well, that alone is a chapter in a book for sure.

- It is.

- I imagine.

That's wonderful.

And I love the collaborative nature of this project 'cause you tell us all along, that students were involved in that.

- Absolutely.

- And that's so wonderful.

But was it something like a revelation when suddenly, this works?

I know you had been snapping pictures before, but when suddenly, you could get a little train and you could see some of these images moving, was it like (gasps)?

- It was amazing actually.

Because a lot of different parts had to come together.

Obviously, we needed to create a kind of mechanical rig that could transport the film.

We needed a way of being able to record the film.

We recorded a very large frame size and a very high frame rate.

And then we needed a way to process all of that footage.

And the films themselves are enormous.

We usually travel with 20, 40 terabyte hard drives.

So it's a lot of processing power that's needed to put all the films together.

- [Erika] And who was dancing on the set?

What was that?

You know, were there Samurai?

And what did you see?

What did you find?

- So the films are really varied.

There are color films that are anime and all sorts of different anime mythological creatures are very popular.

So it's almost like seeing kind of Miyazaki films very early on.

There are lots of mythical kind of samurais and ninjas, but there's also live action movies.

So these have been copied from 35 millimeter film and then printed onto paper.

And those are also incredibly varied.

So we have like fictional films, we've seen Hollywood Westerns, we have a copy of "Tarzan," we have a number of Japanese films that we believe are lost films.

And the paper films are the only surviving kind of footage of those movies.

And of course, being the 1930s in Japan, there's tremendous number of films that are about the war efforts.

And so propaganda films, films sponsored by the government and various military films, lots of marches.

- I was tickled to see in some of the samples examples you sent so that we could include them in this show, Eric.

And one of them looked like it was, what the road runner would do.

Run off the cliff and then realize there's no more cliff and the chance of...

So there were cartoons like that in the sense of?

- Absolutely, yeah.

- Fritz the Cat, or Felix the cat type things?

- Yeah, so Japan already at this time had a kind of big tradition of manga, which is now very popular worldwide.

But many of the manga characters first became animated or anime characters in paper films.

And a lot of the companies that were making paper films were coming out of the printing industry and not necessarily out of the film industry.

So they already had some relationships with artists and people that were doing manga and anime.

- [Erika] Well, you just mentioned "Tarzan," for example, and Westerns.

What was the relationship in those days between the US film world and Japan?

- Sure.

Well, Hollywood is of course, a global film industry.

So the films were popular there.

And in Japan, there was actually a kind of process for integrating non-Japanese films.

And there was a person called a Benshi who was a narrator.

And the Benshi did a live narration of the movies as a way of kind of acclimating audiences to what's going on, especially in foreign films where they may not fully understand what's happening or what the context for something is.

And what's incredible about the paper films is we also have soundtracks for some of the films and on that are Benshi narrators telling the audience what's going on.

- Now you have a lovely chance to pull in an audio expert to help with the recreation of these soundtracks.

Tell us about how they were preserved and how you found them.

- Sure.

So the soundtracks are separate from the films.

They're on 78 RPM shellac records.

So if you thought the films were delicate, the records are even more delicate.

But we found a number of collectors in Japan who also had records.

And in some cases, there were people that collected films and some people that just collected records and we had to bring the two together.

But I've been very, very fortunate to work with Ryan Hollings, who's the audio supervisor for the Criterion Collection.

And he has done dozens and dozens of feature films, but he became really fascinated with this idea of trying to restore audio from the 1930s that went with paper films.

And so he has volunteered and donated his time to help us restore the audio for the films.

- Wow.

How did you proceed then?

You got the mechanism, it worked and you were able to do the transferring, the scanning that you needed to do, but you also wanted to share it, you wanted to share it- - Of course.

- With the folks back in Japan, you wanted to share it with us.

How did you roll it out for the world?

- Sure.

So this has been several trips to Japan.

So one of the ideas with the scanner is that several museums and archives consider the films national treasures.

So they can't send them to us, we need to go to them.

So when we designed the scanner, we wanted to make sure it was very small and portable.

It could be packed and taken to Japan.

So over the last three summers, we've scanned about 200 films.

And last summer, we were even able to take Bucknell students with us and they did some of the work there.

And while we were there, we also worked with audio engineers who helped us record the audio.

That's been then, all of that footage was brought back to the United States, and we worked at Bucknell using both custom software to kinda stabilize the films as well as some kind of visual effects software.

And that's allowed us to make a exhibition that could be shown and projected.

And so we have slowly been rolling that out to audiences so that they could actually see these films from almost 100 years ago, - Standing room only in New York, right?

- We sold out New York, yes.

- Yes, it's wonderful, it's wonderful.

What about the sense, Eric, that it's an exciting project just because of the unusual nature of what it is that you're exploring.

- [Eric] Sure.

- But what are the implications for the film world at large in discovering this material and then making it available?

Who's excited and what does it mean for film in general?

- Right.

Well, I should say, to be perfectly kind of transparent, I was really excited and I think the director of the museum that I was working with was excited.

And I thought that pretty much might be the worldwide audience for these films.

But I've been amazed at the kind of reaction to them.

The films themselves are very charming because you could still see that they're paper, but of course, they're movies as well.

And so I think they're really unique for a lot of people.

But the other thing that's really important, and this is why I think preservation and archival work is so important, is you don't necessarily know what you have or what you're gonna get.

And so in some cases, as I mentioned, we have preserved films that no longer exist in any other format.

So these would've been lost to time forever.

And we're still kind of making our way through the 200 plus films that we've scanned.

And every week is a little bit of an adventure of, you know, what are we gonna get this week?

Or what is this particular movie about?

- Do you have any sense, and you sort of suggested it, Eric, the idea that there are contemporary filmmakers in Japan.

Is there any sense that there are echoes through the decades?

- Absolutely.

So I think many animators and contemporary animators, especially in Japan, are deeply kind of in touch and embedded with the history and the culture of what came before them.

And so this is kind of one more example of something that could finally be seen that saves and preserves a style of animation and a particular look of animation that could potentially be brought back into the 21st century.

One collector in Japan is a professional animator.

And so for him, it's been, you know, really interesting and revelatory to see the films come alive.

Because it's very hard to watch a film just looking at a film strip and trying to figure out what's going on.

- Do you have a sense that there are hiding in archives that you haven't touched 100 more films?

- Yeah.

So for better or worse, I like the person that gets the email of, "We think we found 40 more films here," or, "We found 20 films here."

So we will be returning to Japan this summer to work with another collection of about 40 films.

- You must have noticed some echoes in that piece on The Magid Ensemble.

With the turning of like- - Absolutely.

- And the paper scrolls.

Before we closed, what reverber, what echoes?

'Cause that's cross-cultural.

- Absolutely, it is.

So there's several, I look at paper films and I've always kind of positioned this project as what I call eccentric Japanese cinema, which are cinematic practices that aren't what we kind of consider normal commercial movies.

And aside from paper films, there's also a really amazing practice called (speaking in foreign language) which are these kind of proscenium arch theaters that went around on bicycle.

And you had storytellers who pulled the cards that revealed each kind of card underneath.

And there's a lot of continuity between paper films and (speaking in foreign language).

So it was wonderful seeing that.

- Now we're going to thank everyone, thank you, and everything, but we're gonna end with Duo YUMENO.

And that's a wonderful esteemed group that played music for you while you screened in New York.

- Yes.

So I've been very, very fortunate to collaborate with them.

And they've been wonderful.

- Wow, this has been wonderful.

And we thank you so much Dr. Faden, for your time and all that you're bringing to the world for us.

And we'd like to thank you and The Magid Ensemble and you for watching.

And this in every episode of "Keystone Edition" is available on demand on our YouTube channel and now as a special audio podcast, so you'll never miss an episode.

Visit wvia.org/keystoneeditionarts to stream episodes or subscribe to the podcast.

For "Keystone Edition," I'm Erika Funke.

Thank you for watching.

We'll close with Duo YUMENO bringing together sounds from the tradition and they are inflecting it with contemporary expression.

(playful music) (playful music continues)