Preserving the Robert and Theresa Davis Collection

FAIN: PG-52397-15

Chicago Film Archives, NFP (Chicago, IL 60616-1120)
Nancy Watrous (Project Director: May 2014 to August 2016)

The purchase of archival supplies for an unusually extensive (77 linear feet) mid-20th-century collection of travelogue films that carries potential for comparative studies across many disciplines, including cultural anthropology, American and world history, geography, architecture, and cinema studies.  Besides the travelogue films—including footage of Cyprus shot between 1960 and 1962 shortly after it gained independence from Great Britain—the collection contains 30 boxes of slides, seven journals, and ten boxes of private letters documenting Robert and Theresa Davis’s travels.

This grant will allow CFA to purchase archival supplies needed to preserve the Robert & Theresa Davis Travelogue Collection. The collection includes 16mm films of mid-twentieth century travels in countries that include Thailand, Iceland (1951), United Kingdom, Canary Islands, Algeria, Yugoslavia, Cyprus (1961), Fiji, Guatemala (1940, 1952), Jerusalem, Flanders Fields of Belgium, Brazil (1939), Cuba (1953), New Zealand (1938), and Sumatra (1938). In addition to the purchase of supplies for time-based media, this grant would allow the purchase of archival supplies needed to preserve journals, newspaper articles, private letters, promotional materials, slides, photographs and maps that are in this collection.