On Saturday afternoon, April 25, Yale University will hold an offbeat screening event, of 14 short films made between 1926 and 1982 on a vareity of nonfiction subjects. The films come from a collection donated to the school last year by Bennett Graff of New Haven. Graff’s late father, Herbert Graff, collected the films.
“It is kind of a window into the world from that period, through the screen of a newsreel, so it’s both authentic and slightly propagandistic,” Graff, of New Haven, said.
Graff said he donated the collection to the Yale Film Study Center “just so long as it was named aftfer father, properly catalogued and preserved and made accessible to the research community … otherwise, it’s going to live in my basement and that’s no place for film to live.”
Admission to “The Herb Graff Collection” is free. Showtime is 2 p.m. at Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St. in New Haven.
The film lineup is:
“Bonjour Le Monde, a 1982 Air France promotional film (5:35 minutes); “Newsreel Cameraman / Filming the Big Thrills,” a 1938 short about the adventures of a newsreel cameraman (9:36); “World Adventures / Top of the World,” a Warner Bros. travelogue about Scandinavia, from the 30s (10:30); “Almanac Newsreel / Santa Claus School Is Opened,” a 1930s compilation newsreel about the Charles W. Howard Santa training school (3:24); “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,” a 1927 documentary featuring the only known interview on film with the creator of “Sherlock Holmes” (11:34); “Maker of Water Skis,” a 1965 story of a Maine man who modifies water skis (5:53); “Life Gets Teejus, Don’t It?,” a 1952 musical film featuring Tex Williams (3:40); “The Battle of the Books,” a 1941 British anti-Nazi progaganda film from 1941 (7:32); “Children of Other Lands / Roumania,” a silent 1926 look at lower-class children in Romania (9:35); “The World Parade / Land of the Pyramids,” a 1951 ethnographic travelogue (8:35); “The Monkey and the Organ Grinder,” another musical film, from 1952 (2:51); “Batter Up,” a 1949 look at baseball through the eyes of presidents who threw out the first pitch: Wilson, Harding, Hoover and Roosevelt (10:27); and two promotional films, one from 1936 about 20th Century Fox, featuring Shirley Temple and Myrna Loy, and one for Six Flags Over Texas, from 1963 (6:45) (6:12).
