Philly's home of vintage films offers a glimpse into history

Secret Cinema, a floating repertory film program in Philadelphia, is a trove of old B-movies, decades-old science films, high school hygiene films, promotional films and newsreels. It's unlikely that such a collection exists anywhere else in the world. Oliver Gaycken, an assistant professor of English at Temple, praises the collection's curator, Jay Schwartz, and says these celluloid artifacts bring history alive in vivid images. "On the one hand, you could look at the kind of films that Jay collects and think of them as ephemeral, but on the other hand, they are as important as Hollywood films in terms of the roles they play in our cultural life."
May 8, 2011 | Philadelphia Inquirer