Phipps Home Movies

Old Westbury Gardens

Phipps children playing football in the South Allée circa 1916

Collection Facts

Extent:

Historical Context

Kodak invented 16mm film in 1922 but these home movies circa 1916 pre-date that invention. For home movies to exist prior to 1922, they would have been captured on 35 mm nitrate film by a professional motion picture photographer at that time in the same way any silent film would have been captured. That makes these films from the 1910s, some of the oldest surviving home movies in existence today.

Scope of Collection

The collection consists of home movies that capture the Phipps family during the 1910s as well as in 1930 on the day Peggie Phipps married her first husband, Gordon Douglas.

These films were digitized in July 2017 with cooperation from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program’s Ann Harris, Dan Streible and Ethan Gates. They were exhibited as part of the 2018 Orphan Film Symposium at the Museum of the Moving Image and were uploaded here to New York Heritage in February 2023 in partnership with LILRC’s Accessing Archives project.