On a fortuitously mild Saturday morning in February, a dozen or so volunteers gathered at a storage unit facility in Southeast Portland. Armed with a rented U-Haul, a borrowed van, a hodgepodge of other vehicles, a pair of dollies, several sets of work gloves, a back brace or two, and plenty of coffee and donuts, this group, few members of which would be readily confused with professional movers, managed over the next 36 hours to transport several tons of celluloid from those units to a new, more permanent home. Why would these folks surrender a perfectly serviceable weekend and risk all manner of skeletomuscular embarrassment this way? There are several reasons, but only one that each valiant schlepper shared.
They did it for Dennis.
When Dennis Nyback, the Portland-based, world-travelled film archivist, raconteur, and onetime theater owner, passed away in 2022 at the age of 69, he left behind a trove of thousands of the mostly 16mm films he had collected over the preceding decades. Like many collectors, Nyback’s zeal could outstrip his discipline, and those films were located in a variety of storage units and homes. There was no way to tell how many there were or what they contained, especially considering that many of their cannisters were either unlabeled or incorrectly identified. Over a period of months, fellow analog enthusiasts, with assistance from Nyback’s sister Debra Nyback Rogers, corralled the miles of film into a pair of rented units and the laborious process of organizing and archiving them began. This led, beginning in early 2024, to a series of public screenings featuring a bewildering assortment of cinematic ephemera culled from those early efforts.
Now, the next step in the preservation of this invaluable, if offbeat, resource has been achieved. Following that February weekend’s move, the Nyback Archive resides in the basement of a Southeast Portland community center, in a space adjacent to the headquarters of the nonprofit NW Documentary. Now, with significantly more elbow room and a more sustainable financial situation, the work of viewing, identifying, and recording each reel should be able to proceed in a more regular and efficient manner. The archive has become a center of gravity for a group of Portlanders who adhere to the mantra Film is Dead. Long Live Film. That also happens to be the title of a documentary that Greg Hamilton, long a member of the 16mm community and a driving force behind the Nyback Archive, is presenting at the Clinton Street Theater on Monday, March 17. Other stalwarts in the battle to keep these films and others like them are Ioana Cherascu and Garrett Schroeder, who will be hosting the latest in their series of 16mm discoveries, Underground Women: Experimental Film by Women and More, the following night at the Clinton—not coincidentally, the theater that Nyback, once upon a time, owned.
What’s the appeal? These relics serve, for Cherascu, as “a history lesson, a tangible and candid link to the not-so-distant past that reminds me how quickly circumstances change and how often that change is superficial.” It’s certainly true that many of the issues either addressed or obliquely represented in these 20th-century time capsules are the same ones that continue to bedevil society today. The 16mm format in particular has been an economical medium that allowed filmmakers to experiment with form and substance at the same time it facilitated the creation of works that were not intended for commercial use, be they home movies, educational reels, or industrial films. Schroder’s first exposure to projected film was his grandparents’ home movies, and seeing them, he says, “inspired me to start messing around with a Bolex camera in high school and eventually picking up film prints here and there at thrift stores.” Several years ago, the pair came into the possession of the entire film collection of the Coos County Public Library, likely saving it from a trip to the landfill. It was that collection from which they drew for a series of screenings at the Hollywood Theatre, where they had their one and only close encounter with Nyback himself. “Dennis passed us like a ship in the night,” recalls Cherascu. “He came to our first show, didn’t talk to us, and then disappeared into the darkness.” There’s a torch-passing quality to that anecdote, one that’s also reflected in the way this next generation of curators and preservers has gotten to know Nyback solely through his collection, which may well be as good a way as any.
Ian Sundahl hosts a monthly series at the Hollywood Theatre called Repressed Cinema, focusing on the neglected niches of bizarro cinema, which coincidentally also has a screening scheduled on Tuesday. (It’s the bonkers 1970 effort Guru the Mad Monk from the low-budget, grindhouse auteur Andy Milligan, and like all Repressed Cinema screenings, it’s on analog film, in this case 35mm.) Like Hamilton, he’s been involved in this subculture for a long time. “Dennis was one of the first film collectors I met when I moved to Portland in 2006,” he recalls. “If it weren’t for collectors like Dennis and the rest of us, these often-ephemeral films, some of which are one of a kind, would be lost to history.”
Of course, simply protecting these cannisters and their contents from being lost or destroyed is only the tip of the iceberg as far as turning them into a usable resource, and one person who’s an integral part of creating an organizational system for the archive is Thomas Phillipson, a former longtime programmer for the Northwest Film Center who got to know Nyback through that venue and had a memorable experience during one of his visits to Europe. “A couple of years after I moved to Germany,” he says, “I was delighted when Dennis booked a screening at my local favorite cinema, the Nürnberg Filmhaus. I spent a memorable day showing Dennis and his nephew around Nürnberg and was especially gratified to see how devoted his German fans were. He was a revered celebrity with the crew of cinephiles that invited him.” Now back in Portland, Phillipson contributes what he calls his “sometimes obsessive pursuit of organizational efficiency” to the seemingly Sisyphean task of cataloguing over 5,000 titles.
Sponsor
If there’s an MVP of this entirely volunteer effort, though, it’s Hamilton, whose acquaintance with Nyback and his screenings goes back 20 years. “His programming was the inspiration for my fascination with 16mm film and ‘variety hour’ programming to audiences,” which includes “Psychotronic” collections of educational or holiday-related material, annual tributes to documentarian Les Blank, and much more. “My motivation is fun,” he says. “I love taking cultural ephemera and remolding it into new works of art and commentary. Dennis used to say, ‘Give me a topic and I’ll give you a program.’ That’s one of the goals of this archive. We want to be a curated cinematic library that recycles ideas and turns them into new works of art.”
Full disclosure: I participated in that February effort, and I felt the consequences for days afterward. The one indisputable advantage that digital media has over the analog sort is that it weighs a heck of a lot less. Of course, it’s more convenient in many other ways as well, and even a humble DVD video file can easily match a 16mm film for clarity and vibrancy. But that, if it isn’t already clear, is hardly the point. These misbegotten, overlooked, and disrespected formats, and the snapshots of culture they preserve, are quite literally irreplaceable. They speak to a tactile past of imperfections and artisanal (if frequently amateur) enthusiasms. They remind us of how far we’ve come in such a short time, and make us question whether that movement has been in the right direction, or even in a straight line at all. And for these reasons and others, they inspire an almost spiritual fervor among those dedicated to keeping them alive and accessible. As Schroeder puts it, “Ultimately, we hope to preserve these films and project them for the rest of our lives, or as long as anyone is willing to watch them. It’s the closes thing we have to time travel.”
