""How in the world did they distribute this? Who paid for this? Who was watching this?" Sure, the government pays for them, universities buy them and academics screen them for students, but these filmmakers are also studied and appreciated within cinephile circles in a way that, say, 1940s newsreel directors are not. How did these filmmakers find an audience outside the ivory tower?"
"Then, I found Folkstreams, a website that exclusively hosts documentaries about American folkways and folklore. The films are sometimes academic, as they're the work of professional anthropologists and ethnographers. Others are works celebrating American folk art and culture, where the amateurish production is directly proportional to the film's love for its subject. The films typically range anywhere from two minutes to two hours, and not a single one is "marketable" in the traditional sense. Yet here they are, completely free to watch."
"This is largely thanks to the continuous work of filmmaker Tom Davenport, who founded Folkstreams in 1999 in order to serve these films' niche market and further expand their audience. That Davenport could watch these videos in primitive codecs on a dial-up connection and still feel that this was the future of independent film distribution speaks to his powers as a soothsayer."
Anthropologists Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner, and Timothy Asch made films instead of books, prompting questions about funding, distribution, and audiences for academic cinema. Folkstreams, founded in 1999 by Tom Davenport, exclusively hosts American folkways and folklore documentaries ranging from two minutes to two hours. The archive includes both academic ethnographic films and amateur celebrations of folk art, many not marketable in traditional terms, yet offered free online to broaden viewership. Davenport maintains the site daily from his Virginia home and enabled access even over dial-up, allowing niche films to reach students, academics, cinephiles, and wider audiences beyond institutional channels.
Read at Filmmaker Magazine
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