Cinema Ephemera: Believers!

Take a step into the old, weird America the night before Halloween. Curated and hosted by Emmy Award-winning archival producer Rich Remsberg and Williams College film history professor Shawn Rosenheim, this haunting collection of forgotten films reveals the strange underbelly of American culture, hear and see: Declassified military training • Vintage hygiene guides • Industrial animations • Lost children’s TV • Religious propaganda • NASA experiments • Amateur disco exhibitions “These films weren’t meant to last. They weren’t even meant to be considered films.” Rescued from government archives, flea markets, and forgotten basements, these ephemeral fragments form an unintentional time capsule—some hilarious, some disturbing, all unexpectedly beautiful. Rich Remsberg is an Emmy Award-winning and Oscar-nominated archival producer, consulting with such directors as Ron Howard, Ben Stiller, and Lawrence Kasdan for documentary films on Netflix, HBO, Disney+, and PBS. The Human Machine’s films are the fruits of Remsberg’s 25 years of combing through rare and obscure footage. Shawn Rosenheim teaches film, nonfiction audio, and literature at Williams College, where he co-founded the Documentary Today conference. He has consulted on Errol Morris’ documentaries, and his work includes interviews at MASS MoCA and Williams College with Werner Herzog, Ken Burns, and Frederick Wiseman, among others. He is the director of Biosphere 2.