Bud Woodard

“The Paul Bunyan Winter Carnival 1939”

TRT 14:49

HD transfer of 16mm Reversal

Courtesy of the Beltrami County Historical Society

This footage came to me by way of the much loved and well-known Gary Burger, who passed on into the next world on March 14th, 2014, after a prolonged battle with cancer. Gary was perhaps best known outside of Bemidji, Minnesota for his time spent as the guitarist and vocalist for the band The Monks - a proto-punk group of young American soldiers stationed in Germany who played a loud mix of popular and avant-garde music. But those of us in Bemidji also knew Gary as the man behind the great documentary “Bemidji Between the Wars”, as a recording engineer, the mayor of Turtle River, septic tank installer, and all-around pillar of the community. Gary was known as a treasure trove of technical and artistic knowledge - knowledge that was central to the saving of this rarely seen footage.

When I was looking for early Bemidji footage for my own project about Minnesota’s white colonial legacy, the US-Dakota War and the myth of Paul Bunyan(which I’m currently raising funds to complete), my dad suggested I talk to Gary. When we visited him at his house, Gary was in high spirits, although he it was obvious that he was in intense pain from his cancer and treatment. We chatted and played with his dogs before I brought up the subject of Paul Bunyan. “I need footage of the logging days,” I said. “Footage of Paul Bunyan statues, lumberjacks, logging operations - the olden days! Anything like that. Have you ever seen any old footage like that?” Although I secretly hoped for some treasure Gary might have in his own archive, I knew that it wasn’t likely.

Without a pause, Gary leaned in and squinted at me, raising a single finger. “Bud Woodard,” he said slowly. “Bud Woodard shot some black and white 16mm film of the 1939 winter carnival that we had professionally transferred in LA in the 80s. The Paul Bunyan statue is in that footage. It’s at the historical society. That’s all I know.” He sat back and took a deep breath, clearly exhausted but satisfied at being able to recall all the precise details. He said that he didn’t have a copy anymore, and if I wanted it, I’d have to go straight to the historical society and dig through their collection. “But we packed it up nice,” he said. “With the film, tapes and hard drive and everything. They BETTER still have it!”

At the historical society, which is housed in the old railroad depot on the dusty fringes of downtown Bemidji, I met Dan Karalus, the new Executive Director. Since he had just started working at the society that month, he said he didn’t know where Bud and Gary’s footage was. He pointed me towards a tall and densely packed shelf in the research room that housed different photographs and other bits of ephemera. “If it’s here, it’ll be on that shelf,” he said.

Feeling a sinking feeling in my stomach, I approached the shelf, thinking I had a long night ahead of me. But then, a box caught my eye, directly in the center of the shelf and a bit above eye level. It had a date written on it - 1/07/1987. And underneath the date, the words “Woodard/Burger” were written in a tidy script. I pulled it down and opened it, revealing a time capsule of two cans of film, an HDcam tape, and a squat little hard drive. I plugged in the hard drive to my laptop, and the footage you see here lit up the room and my imagination. It was better than my wildest dreams!

The version I’ve uploaded here is unedited – it has no music or intertitles, to avoid unnecessary editorializing on my part. Much has been written in the past two decades surrounding the questions of veracity, ethics and value of home movies and amateur footage - Rick Prelinger being the most interesting and well respected thinkers on the subject. He speaks eloquently on the issue of context when he wrote an article called “Taking Back History from the Storytellers” on his blog, where he challenges the dominant understanding of the value of what we call ‘archival footage’:

“Of course, there’s nothing wrong with storytelling, whatever it may be, and not all stories are bad. What’s wrong is the assumption, which has become not only pervasive but compulsory, that documentaries need characters, that the narrative arc must reign supreme, and that we’re obliged to show people wrestling with and resolving problems. I’ve sat with PBS gatekeepers and heard them refer to programs as “stories,” not films or shows. Ultimately this insults potential audiences by assuming they’re only able to ingest a limited narrative menu. Is it really true that, when it comes to media, “the best surprise is no surprise?”

…So, where do archives come in? The last 20 years have witnessed the emergence of new kinds of documentation, such as home movies and other unofficial materials. Much of this kind of imagery reflects personal historical perspectives, unlike other kinds of archival material that emanate from institutions, governments, studios and corporations. This is great, but what’s happening (especially with amateur material) is that film is being used to construct histories that emphasize personal experience, that rely on the depiction of struggle and transformation at an individual level, and that constitute “stories” in a narrow rather than broad sense. I’m not advocating socialist realism here, just criticizing the reduction of world-historical events and phenomena to the story of “a day in the life of my cranky grandfather who survived the war and is just about to get evicted.”



Many of us who collect or take care of moving images and sounds feel that original materials tell pretty good stories on their own. Aside from some courageous DVD collections of uncut archival films, a supplement here and there, and several sketchy sites presenting downloadable archival materials, most original materials don’t reach the public without being run through the storytelling Cuisinart. While context is essential to really understand and work with most moving images, overbearing narration, emotionally invasive music and highly personalized visions of history don’t constitute context. Bits and pieces from our collections are being woven into works that don’t really speak to the value of their components.



…Let’s put original, unedited archival material out in the world in such a way that it competes with documentaries. This isn’t going to kill our stock footage income, because producers and directors always feel they can improve on reality by imposing structures of their design, and they’ll still come around. But it will insure that audiences can see original documents without the imposition of artificial layers of narrativity.”

I encourage you to read his article in it’s entirety here.

Of course Rick is right – why layer a new narrative on top of this footage, when it already has one? A man with a movie camera at the 1939 Bemidji Winter Carnival is already a great story.

My own interest in archives stems from a passion for historical artifacts, journalistic truth and the “official record”, but I’m equally interested in archival remix, collage, intervention, appropriation and reuse. While I love Rick’s perspective on the subject, I also believe that “running it through the storytelling cusinart” is one of the most important uses of archival materials. As such, it was hard for me to decide what I wanted to do with this footage. Would I cut it up and make something new, or bring it out to the world and share it as it was found? Since I’m using it in my own film (and imposing an “artificial layer of narrativity”, as Rick would say), I thought it’d be nice to make it freely available in it’s entirety, also.

As to the footage itself, it appears to be two seperate pieces – the first on the 1939 Bemidji Winter Carnival, complete with intertitles (presumably made by or in collaboration with Bud Woodard), which ends at 11:06, and the second appears to be more carnival footage, either from that year or another, with some logging footage in between. Bud Woodard was no amateur. He was the manager of the Bemidji Theater(now the Ben Franklin) in downtown Bemidji(more on Bud here), which I presume accounts for the obvious technical expertise, attention to detail and remarkable coverage apparent in this footage. There’s a lot to see here, so I encourage anybody who recognizes locations, faces or revealing details to share them in the comments.

I heard of Gary’s passing two months ago, when I was editing my own film and looking at this footage every day. It was an eerie moment when I took a break from editing, checked my email and found his Gary’s obituary forwarded to me from my dad. If it weren’t for my chance encounter with Gary in his last year with us, who knows how long this footage might have collected dust on that shelf in the historical society. Because of his diligent work in digitizing Bud’s 16mm original, these special, sad and arresting images will be with us for a little while longer - which is just one more thing that we have to thank him for. Thanks, Gary.

-Nik Nerburn, San Francisco, California

May 13th, 2014