Following last week’s HMD Boston event, tireless home movie champion Liz Coffey took the show on the road yesterday for a second event in Providence, Rhode Island. The Providence Journal joined her at the Rhode Island Historical Society to cover the state’s first ever Home Movie Day.
“These films can tell us so much that’s important about the people and daily life of our state,” Bernard P. Fishman, the historical society’s executive director, said before the screening in the group’s Aldrich House headquarters, on Benevolent Street.Two dozen people sat under a chandelier inside a high-ceilinged room in the Federal-style house to watch silent films on everything from U.S. fighter planes flying in formation during World War II to a group of Rhode Island Red chickens pecking around on a farm in North Attleboro. In the background during part of the screening, a Peggy Lee LP played on a gramophone.
The oldest film was from 1927 and captured a family visiting the Lincoln Park Zoo, in Chicago, and ice-skating on a frozen pond nearby. The most recent was shot last year by Liz Coffey, the society’s film archivist, during her vacation in Spain.
Read the complete article here.