Home Movie Collection Day for Jewish Homegrown History Show your home movies at this community celebration of amateur cinema. Selected works will be considered for inclusion in Jewish Homegrown History, an exhibition opening at the Skirball Cultural Center in September 2010. July 19, 2009 DATE: Sunday, July 19, 2009 TIME: 11:00AM - 5:00PM (drop in any time) LOCATION: USC School of Cinematic Arts, SCA110

Gertrude Cohen and Harry Janofsky at Venice Beach, 1931 FIVE GREAT REASONS TO PARTICIPATE IN HOME MOVIE COLLECTION DAY 1. Actually SEE your old films.

In case you don’t have a working projector for your 8mm/Super8/16mm films, we’ve got you covered. If you’ve been curious to see what’s on those old reels but never knew how, this is your chance! 2. Rediscover memories of your favorite people and places. -Want to remind your husband how stunning you looked in your wedding dress? -Want to go back to the house you grew up in? -Want to honor the memory of a relative no longer with us? Come share your significant moments with an audience of family and friends. Show us the things you care about.

Barbara Youngerman, Daughter of Joe Youngerman, Executive of the Directors Guild of America 3. Be part of history! Participate in a nationally recognized historical research project! Your home movies could become part of our traveling museum installation, Jewish Homegrown History, which is scheduled for the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, the New Americans Museum in San Diego, and the Judah Magnes Museum in Berkeley. 4. Get big savings on a high quality digital transfer. Transfer your home movies to HD digital video with Pro8mm and get a significant discount on their professional quality services. Representatives from Pro8mm will be on hand to examine your films and give free advice on how best to care for the original reels.

Phil and Rhonda V. of Pro8mm The Millennium 2 HD scanner at the Pro8mm lab 5. Send your home movies through email and post them on Facebook. Sharing your favorite memories with your loved ones is easy when you digitize your footage. Get your home movies online and preserve them for generations to come. *BONUS* 6. Get a tax write-off! Contribute your digitized footage to the installation or to the USC Digital Archive and get a tax write-off for the cost of the transfer. Above all, we want to encourage people to come out and have fun. Come anytime between 11:00 AM and 5:00 PM. Bring your films, no matter the format, and we will screen them. Bring friends and family too. Cinema is a shared experience and we would love for you to share yours with us. See you July 19th!

A Pro8mm technician at work The USC Jewish Home Movie Collection Day is inspired by, but not directly affiliated with, the international Home Movie Day event or The Center for Home Movies. Please visit their web sites for additional information about amateur film preservation and this year's Home Movie Day event, which will be observed in cities worldwide on Saturday, October 17. What is Jewish Homegrown History? Jewish Homegrown History is the latest multimedia project from USC’s pioneering research initiative, The Labyrinth Project, which has been producing award-winning installations, websites and DVDs for the past ten years.

The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River, a museum installation by Peter Forgács and the Labyrinth Project, featuring home movies

Jewish Homegrown History creates an interactive narrative of the American Jewish experience on a global and local scale. Starting with California, the team at Labyrinth has been collecting images, text and video to build a historical foundation for our online database and upcoming museum installation. There are three central themes we hope to explore: Immigration, Identity, and Intermarriage. Although archival material and published histories have been key in our research, what we really want are the personal accounts and homegrown details that bring these themes to life. We are interested in your home movies to help us tell these stories. Your footage will be screened alongside passages from relevant literature, photos from digital archives, and interviews we’ve conducted with scholars, entrepreneurs and historians across California. The goal of this project is to create a productive dialogue between official history and personal narrative. We want to see how events publicized in traditional sources relate to the people who actually lived through them. We want to see the faces of the men and women who worked hard and fought bravely when the country went to war. We want to see the houses with picket fences and big backyards when families moved to the suburbs. We want to see the bride and groom together in love when larger forces conspired to keep them apart. Ordinary people doing ordinary things. At Home Movie Collection Day we will be looking for these kinds of images that enrich and contextualize the broader stories we are telling with our research. But we also welcome divergent points of view. We expect what we see to both reinforce and challenge our own experiences and theories. We are less concerned with telling you how history happened, but rather how you can share your perspective with us. At Labyrinth we believe that there are many paths to a destination, so for this story we encourage contributions from as many voices as possible.

The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River, a museum installation by Peter Forgács and the Labyrinth Project, featuring home movies

We are currently focused on representing Jewish life in California, with special emphasis on Jewish neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, the Fairfax District, the Pico-Robertson Area, Hancock Park, and the Valley. We are also featuring Riverside County resorts like Murietta Hot Springs, Lake Elsinore, and Highland Hot Springs. We are especially interested in older films or videos but will look at anything up through the1980s. Additionally, we are seeking almost anything that represents Jewish life in California including:

• Worship at synagogues • Holiday celebrations • Dinner parties • Recreational activities • Places of business • Portraits of neighborhoods and people • Interfaith and interethnic relationships • Political and social events

For additional information, contact: By email: mkinder@usc.edu By telephone, call: 213-740-5112 By postcard or letter, write: The Labyrinth Project School of Cinematic Arts, LPB 118, University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA 90089-2211 Attention: Marsha Kinder Feel free to visit our website at http://college.usc.edu/labyrinth/