Gonzalez Family Home Movies

CONSERVATION & CAPTURE

Grant year: 2022

Grant category: Al Larvick National Grant

Grant recipient: Jim Hubbard

Collection title: Gonzalez Family Home Movies

Primary maker(s):  Gladys Gonzalez, Manuel Gonzalez

Original format: Super 8 film, black and white, color, silent. Various VHS videotape formats, color, sound

Circa: c. 1968 - c. 2000

Collection size: 18 reels of film equaling approximately 1050 feet; 23 videotapes of varying length.

Grant support: Cleaning and repair and digital capture of entire collection.

Digital capture format: Scanned at 2k resolution for films and uncompressed video capture for videotapes

Lab: Pro8mm and Secure Media Transfer

Status:  Conservation and digitization completed

Online Access: TBD

Creative Commons License: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 

GRANTEE

Jim Hubbard has been making films since 1974.  He made United in Anger: A History of ACT UP, a feature length documentary on ACT UP, the AIDS activist group, which won Best Documentary at MIX Milano and Reel Q Pittsburgh LGBT Film Festival and has played at over 150 museums, universities, and film festivals worldwide. 

Sarah Schulman and he completed 187 interviews as part of the ACT UP Oral History Project.  One hundred and two of those interviews were on view in a 14-monitor installation at the Carpenter Center for the Arts, Harvard University as part of the exhibition ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993, October 15 – December 23, 2009.  A version with 114 interviews showed at the White Columns Gallery in New York, September 8 – October 23, 2010. He, along with James Wentzy, created a 9-part cable access television series based on the Project. 

Among his 25 other films are Elegy in the Streets (1989), Two Marches (1991), The Dance (1992) and Memento Mori (1995).  His films are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and have been shown at the Warhol Museum, ICA Boston, the Harvard Film Archive, Tokyo University, der Zürcher Museen, mumok (Vienna), Mudam (Luxembourg), the Berlin Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, the New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Torino and many other Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals.  His film Memento Mori, which won the Ursula for Best Short Film at the Hamburg Lesbian & Gay Film Festival in 1995, is being preserved by the Academy Film Archive. 

He co-founded MIX - the New York Queer Experimental Film Festival.  Under the auspices of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, he created the AIDS Activist Video Collection at the New York Public Library.  He curated the series Fever in the Archive:  AIDS Activist Videotapes from the Royal S. Marks Collection for the Guggenheim Museum in New York.   The 8-program series took place December 1-9, 2000.  He also co-curated the series, Another Wave:  Recent Global Queer Cinema at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, July and September 2006. In 2013-14, he curated an 8-program series of AIDS activist video from the collection of the New York Public Library to accompany their landmark exhibition Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism.  In 2018 and 2019, he received grants from the Al Larvick Conservation Fund to digitize footage from Lesbian & Gay Pride March and other Queer demonstration footage and Queer home movies, spanning more than 40 years.

FILMMAKERS

Manuel Gonzalez (known as Manny or Pinin) was born in Havana in 1930.  He studied accounting at the University of Havana and graduated in 1952.  He began working at the Cuban Lumber distribution company.  By the late 1950s, he had risen to become the equivalent of the Chief Financial Officer.  He married Gladys Estrella in 1954.  In the late 1950s, he was a supporter of the Cuban Revolution, but soon after Castro’s victory, he became disillusioned.   He provided logistical support from the Cuban side to the Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961.  By November of that year, his superior in the counter-revolutionary organization had been arrested and Manny realized that it was only a matter of time before he would be arrested as well.  He went home, according to family legend, and announced that they were going to the United States the next day.  Within 48 hours the family was in Miami.  They considered Miami and San Francisco, before settling in New York.  They lived in a rat-infested tenement on Henry Street on the Lower East Side at first, moving to Astoria in 1965.  They bought a house in Corona, Queens in 1983.  Manny always worked two jobs as a bookkeeper/accountant for the Standard Folding Box Company and for the Chase Manhattan Bank.  He retired in 2001 and died in 2008.

Gladys Gonzalez was born in Havana in 1937.  She and Manny had two children:  Marta, born 1954 and Nelson, born 1959.  In the United States, she worked for Pan American World Airways negotiating international fares between Pan Am and other airlines from 1963 until Pan Am went out of business in 1991.  She died in January 2022.

THE COLLECTION

The Gonzalez Family Home Movie Collection consists of 15 reels of Super-8 film, a total of 1,050 feet, and 16 VHS tapes of unknown length. 

The Super-8 is believed to have been shot almost exclusively by Manny and includes family trips to Mexico, The Netherlands, Spain and the Dominican Republic.  It also includes more domestic footage of family members at home and their daughter Marta’s Quinceañera.

The videotapes consist of family trips to Disneyland and Miami, Floride with the Grandchildren 1986; Disney 1989; Rome. Family At Home such as Manny’s (Patriarch) 70th Birthday Party; Mikey’s (Grandson) Communion c. 1992; Erika’s (Cousin) Wedding; Tina’s (Granddaughter) Communion c. 1992; 40th Wedding Anniversary (Gladys & Manny) 1994.