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Featured Film
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New England Fiddles This 1984 film by John Bishop and Nicholas Hawes presents seven of the finest traditional musicians as they play in their homes and at dances and contests, passing their styles to younger fiddlers, and commenting on their music. Featured are Ron West (Yankee), Paddy Cronnin (Irish), Ben Guillemette(Quebecois), Wilfred Guillette (Quebecois), Harold Luce (Yankee), Gerry Robichaud (Maritime), and the Cape Breton style of Joe Cormier. Notes on the film are by Nicholas Hawes.
28 minutes | Read More |
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Alex Stewart: Cooper
A 1973 film of Alex Stewart, a mountain craftsman from near Sneedville, Tennessee, constructing a churn. Film includes discussion of the use of non-powered tools and skills handed down in Stewart's family in making wooden containers, such as buckets and barrrels.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Work / Appalachia / 1973
11 minutes | Read More
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Appalachian Journey
Alan Lomax travels through the Southern Appalachians investigating the songs, dances, and religious rituals of the descendents of the Scotch-Irish frontiers people who have made the mountains their home for centuries.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Dance, Music, Narrative & Verbal Arts, Religion, Aging / Appalachia / 1991
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Basketmaker: Elizabeth Proper
1973 16-mm film of Elizabeth Proper, the last of the white oak basketmakers in a community near Taconic Hills in eastern New York State.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Women / Northeast / 1973
07 minutes | Read More
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Ben's Mill: Making a Sled
Ben Thresher's mill is one of the few water-powered, wood-working mills left in this country. Operating in rural Vermont since 1848, the mill is a unique link between the age of craft and the age of modern industry.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Work, Regional / Northeast / 1981
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| Crawdad Slip |
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Edd Presnell: Dulcimer Maker
Edd Presnell, a mountain craftsman and native of Watauga County, North Carolina, demonstrates and comments on the construction of a dulcimer. Presnell learned his craft from his father-in-law. Film includes a brief performance on a finished dulcimer by his wife, Nettie.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Work / Appalachia / 1973
06 minutes | Read More
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Eskimo Artist: Kenojuak
This documentary shows how an Inuit artist's drawings are transferred to stone, printed and sold. Kenojuak Ashevak became the first woman involved with the printmaking co-operative in Cape Dorset.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Women, Family, Native American / Canada / 1963
19 minutes | Read More
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Final Marks: The Art of the Carved Letter
A documentary about lettercutting, in both monumental inscriptions and on gravestones. The filmmakers were given complete access over a two year period to the work of the craftsmen of the John Stevens Shop in Newport, Rhode Island, the oldest business in the United States still in continuous operation in the same colonial building. It chronicles the work of John ‘Fud’ Benson, then the owner and principal designer, and, arguably, one of the most accomplished letter cutters in the world.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Work / Northeast / 1979
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| The Grand Generation |
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Gravel Springs Fife and Drum
Othar Turner, a fife-maker and musician, owns his farm in the Gravel Springs community in northwest Mississippi. The rhythmical music he and his friends play is called "fife and drum." A 1971 film by Bill Ferris, Judy Peiser, and David Evans from the Center for Southern Folklore.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Customs, Music, African American Culture / South / 1972
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How to Build an Igloo
This classic short film shows how to make an igloo using only snow and a knife. Two Inuit men in Canada’s Far North choose the site, cut and place snow blocks and create an entrance--a shelter completed in one-and-a-half hours.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional / Canada / 1949
10 minutes | Read More
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Its All In My Hands: John Prince, Shoemaker
Young Italian American shoemaker John Prince, following in his father Tony's footsteps, invites you into his shop to share the pleasure and pride he feels from his work.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Ethnic & Immigrant Cultures, Work / Middle Atlantic / 1972
08 minutes | Read More
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Kathleen Ware, Quiltmaker
From the placing of an order to the completion of the last stitch, the film details the entire process of creating a traditional Lone Star quilt. As the quilt grows, so does our knowledge of Kathleen Ware's vibrant spirit as quiltmaker, wife, mother, and grandmother. A film by Sharon Sherman.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Women, Aging / Pacific Northwest / 1979
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The Last Shovel Maker
Harvey Ward, age 87, carves beautiful grained shovels with a double edged axe. Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Work, Aging / Middle Atlantic / 1974
10 minutes | Read More
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Learned it in Back Days and Kept It: A Portrait of Lucreaty
Portrait of Lucreaty Clark (1903 - 1986), an African American oak basket maker from rural Florida. Clark embraced a wide repertoire of traditional African American songs, games and folk knowledge essential to rural life. She was a remarkable representative of an era that seems very far away today.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Play, Rural Life, Aging, African American Culture / South / 1981
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Lige: Portrait of a Rawhide Braider
Henry Elijah "Lige" Langston was born in 1908 in the Great Basin outback on a homestead. He worked his entire life as a wrangler and rawhide braider in the region known as the Sagebrush Corner of northeastern California and northwestern Nevada.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Narrative & Verbal Arts, Work, Rural Life / West / 1985
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New Life
A.R. Cole began building a barn in 1927 and asked his wife if it should be for tobacco or pottery. She did not have a preference and realized it was to be for pottery when the rafters were too short for tobacco. Thus continued the Cole family tradition begun in the 1600s in Staffordshire, England. Neolia (who was born on the day in 1927 when A.R. fired his first batch of pottery) and Celia, his daughters, continue the tradition today with Neolia's grandson, Kenneth, at their shop in Sanford, NC.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Work / South / 2000
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Onondaga: The Lacrosse Stick Makers
An Onondaga father and son make lacrosse sticks in the traditional way.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Sports/Hunting, Native American / Northeast / 1973
06 minutes | Read More
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Ott Blair: Sledmaker
Demonstration of and commentary on the mountain craft of building wooden farm sleds by Ott Blair, a native of Heaton, North Carolina. Discussion includes first selling sled and his attitudes toward economic self-sufficiency.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Work, Agriculture / Appalachia / 1973
05 minutes | Read More
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Our Lives in Our Hands
This 1986 film examines the traditional Native American craft of split ash basketmaking as a means of economic and cultural survival for Aroostook Micmac Indians of northern Maine. This documentary of rural off-reservation Indian artisans aims to break down stereotypical images. Basketmakers are filmed at their craft in their homes, at work on local potato farms and at business meetings of the Basket Bank, a cooperative formed by the Aroostook Micmac Council. First person commentaries are augmented by authentic 17th century Micmac music.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Work, Rural Life, Native American / Northeast / 1986
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The Pirogue Maker
In 1948, Robert Flaherty was working on "The Louisiana Story." He was searching for a small boat, or "pirogue" for his young hero. Flaherty soon became aware that pirogue-making was a disappearing art. Finally, when he found Ebdon Allemon, a Cajun craftsman, he persuaded him to make the pirogue. It may well have been the last piroque made in Louisiana. This is a record of that event.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional / South / 1949
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Quilts in Women's Lives
Quilts was a ground breaking film used by folklorists, anthropologists and historians of art and womens history that presented the lives, art, work and philosophy of ordinary women in the days when few documentaries came from women filmmakers. This deceptively simple film won most of the major awards for independent films during the years after its release in 1981, including Emily Grand Prize, American Film Festival; 1st Place Fine Arts, San Francisco International Film Festival; Best of Festival, National Educational Film and Video Festival, New York International Film Festival, Margaret Mead Film Festival.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Women / West / 1981
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Stoney Knows How
Stoney Knows How is an extended interview with 'Stoney' St. Clair, an ebullient little man with the gift of gab of a circus tout and a fund of bizarre stories about tattooing and other matters. One of these is the tale of a Florida snake handler and tattoo artist who was squeezed to death by his own python. His widow made a fortune touring the South with the guilty snake. "After all," says Stoney, "how often do you get a chance to see a snake that's squeezed a man to death?" Not often, nor does one often have the opportunity to meet a man like Stoney. The filmmakers treat him with respect, fondness and appreciation, and he responds in kind. Vincent Canby, The New York Times.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Aging / South / 1981
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Tinker: John Forshee
John Forshee was born about 1883 and died in 1974 at Cincinnatus, NY. He was a third generation tinsmith and he was filmed in 1973, using his grandfather's patented tinsmithing tools.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional / Northeast / 1973
11 minutes | Read More
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Tradition Bearers
A documentary about Finnish American history and folk art expressed through the lives and repertories of our folk artists living in the western Great Lakes Region. Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Customs, Ethnic & Immigrant Cultures, Music, Regional, Rural Life, Aging / Midwest / 1983
48 minutes | Read More
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Unbroken Tradition
Unbroken Tradition is a portrait of Jerry Brown, a ninth generation potter from Hamilton, Alabama. It looks at the continuation of this family tradition since Jerry's great-great-great grandfather set up his potter's wheel in Georgia around 1800.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Work / South / 1986
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Water From Another Time
A film document of three elderly residents of Orange County, Indiana. Featured in the film are musician Lotus Dickey, clock builder and tinkerer Elmer Boyd, and self-taught artist Lois Doane.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Music, Women, Arts, Visionary and Outsider, Aging / Midwest / 1982
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Weaving Bitter with the Sweet
A portrait of a Lao refugee woman Mone Saenphimmachak who seeks to overcome loss through the weaving for which her people are famous. Mone Saenphimmachak is a National Heritage Award winner.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Ethnic & Immigrant Cultures, Women, Costume/Dress, Asian American Culture / Midwest / 2003
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With These Hands: The Story of an American Furniture Factory
In March 2007, unable to compete with cheaper offshore production, Hooker Furniture Company closed its plant in Martinsville, Virginia, after 83 years in operation. “With These Hands” follows the last load of kiln-dried wood down the assembly line as it is cut, honed, and assembled into fine furniture. Along the way, employees at the factory share their perspectives on work, community, and survival in a country devastated by deindustrialization and outsourcing.
Arts & Crafts, Traditional, Work, Social Justice/Protest / South / 2009
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