Conservation of Matter: The Fall and Rise of Boston’s Elevated Subway

Tue, Apr 07, 2015
12:00 pm
Snell Library 90
Free

 

Conservation of Matter: The Fall and Rise of Boston’s Elevated Subway, traces the fate of 100,000 tons of steel from the Boston Elevated Subway, which was erected in 1898, demolished in 1987-89, then shipped eight thousand miles away to be melted and re-formed into steel bars. Those products then cross the ocean again, where they are ultimately re-fabricated into a remarkable new structure in a surprising location. Workers, historians preachers, politicians, artists, riders, architects, astrophysicists and street people on two continents address the significance of the process as it unfolds. 

We will also show rare films produced by the Super 8mm collective Jamaica Plain Newsreel.

Credits: Direction, Editing: Tim Wright // Principal Photography: Karen Ellzey, Michael Underwood // Music: Jusef Sharif


Neighborhood Matters is a lunchtime series that celebrates the ways in which community groups have shaped the neighborhoods surrounding the Northeastern campus. This series is co-curated by the Northeastern Center for the Arts and the Archives and Special Collections at the Northeastern University Library.

Lunch will be served.

Partners: Northeastern Center for the Arts and Archives and Special Collections, Northeastern Libraries. Special thanks to the Northeastern Department of City and Community Affairs.

Special Guest: Tim Wright

Tim Wright is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, the founder of Blinktank, a collective of media producers and analysts, and a blogger for The Public Humanist. With degrees from Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University, Tim has spent the past twenty years teaching and developing media production and media literary curricula at venues in New England, among them: Boston University, The University of Massachusetts, The Boston Film/Video Foundation, The Boston Children’s Museum, Cambridge Community Television, and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities.

Tim has been designated by the Massachusetts Cultural Council as a Creative Teaching Partner,developed seminars on Film and Architecture and Visual Literacy for the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, and is a past member of the National Endowment for the Arts Advisory Committee on Arts Education. 

Tim’s documentaries include Conservation of Matter: The Fall and Rise of Boston’s Elevated Subway, winner of the 1996 New England Film/Video Festival and the 1997 U.S. Super 8mm Film & Video Festival, and Shooting the Strangler’s Wife, a documentary on the making of a Roger Corman produced ‘exploitation’ film.

Location

Snell Library 90

360 Huntington Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115