Amherst Cinema Arts Center to screen rare baseball film footage Aug. 13

AMHERST ? These days you can watch baseball on your telephone or your computer, or get news texted to you 24 hours a day, but there was a time when people had to go to the baseball park or watch newsreel footage at the movie theater to see the American Pastime.

David Filipi of the Wexner Center for the Arts in Cleveland has collected footage from those days from the National Baseball of Hall of Fame. He will be at the Amherst Cinema Center Aug. 13 to screen the footage and talk about it in a ?Rare Films from the Baseball Hall of Fame? program at 7:30 p.m.

Highlights include a 1945 Look magazine photo shoot intended to announce Jackie Robinson's signing with the Dodgers, early baseball films shot by the Edison Co. in 1898 and a film on Cleveland Indians legend Bob Feller.

Filipi began assembling footage for the program in 2004 and since then has compiled several different programs.

He said he started the project because the arts center wanted ?do some kind of programing that was baseball themed. We didn?t want to show ?Field of Dreams? and ?The Natural.? I wanted to do something different.?

So he called the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., and asked about what they had. They told him they couldn?t let the films out of the building, but would allow him to use the film if it were transferred to video.

And so he did.

Wanting to create a new program every year for Wexner, he eventually exhausted the material there and moved onto the University of California at Los Angeles archives to create more programs. He?ll show the original program at Amherst.

The screening is about two hours long, including the film footage and his introductions. ?Some of the clips are completely self explanatory,? he said. But he said others aren?t.

He said the program is definitely for ?people who are really into baseball history.? But he said the program will also appeal to people who are interested in American culture, history and archival films. The program is a mix of home movies, newsreel clips and television, among other sources.

Tickets at the Amherst Cinema box office and online at www.amherstcinema.org. ??Admission is $10 for Amherst Cinema members and $15 for the general? public.

Source: http://www.masslive.com/sports/index.ssf/2013/07/post_444.html

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