Iona College has acquired the Thanhouser Film Archive as a way of celebrating New Rochelle’s history.

The Thanhouser Studio was located in New Rochelle in the 1910s and made over 1,000 silent films.

Iona has struck up a partnership with Ned Thanhouser, the president of the Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc. and grandson of Edwin Thanhouser (the founder of the studio).

This collaboration between Thanhouser and Iona means that Iona will be the home to digitized versions of Thanhouser’s films.

Iona’s involvement in this endeavor has been spearheaded by two professors: Dr. Dean DeFino, Professor of English and Director of the Film Studies program, and Professor David Cundy of the Mass Communication department.

“This is a very big deal for Iona,” Cundy said. “I hope it gets top placement.”

Growing up Thanhouser believed that all of his grandfather’s films had been destroyed because his father had told him that Edwin did not think they merited being preserved.

However, all this changed in 1986, when Ned Thanhouser was watching PBS and found a Thanhouser film being aired.

“Boy was I surprised,” he said. “It turns out for every negative that Edwin burned, there were 30 or 40 prints that went to distribution, and many were saved by private collectors or ended up in archives where they were preserved.”

Since then, he has recovered 225 films.

In addition to having digital copies of the films that Thanhouser has come across, Iona will also have digital copies of several postcards, posters and documents related to the Thanhouser studio.

 “This is an opportunity to talk about our cultural history in New Rochelle, but it’s also an opportunity to kind of own a piece of silent film history, a significant piece of silent film history,” said DeFino, who first proposed the idea of acquiring the film archive around 2009-10.  “This is an opportunity to redress what I think is a gaping hole in the history of film.”

 From 1909 to 1917, the Thanhouser Company produced over 1,000 films in New Rochelle under the direction of Thanhouser and his wife Gertrude.

The stars of the films were extremely popular and received attention from the national press, according to New Rochelle historian Barbara Davis.

The Thanhouser Studio was originally located on Grove Street until a fire burned the building down, forcing the company to relocate to Main Street, where it stayed until its closing.

While these were the locations of the studio, Thanhouser, who was known as the “Wizard of New Rochelle,” used the entire city for his films and would often film ordinary events, such as a fire truck going to fight a fire, for the films.  Shooting these scenes caught the attention of numerous people, who would line up to watch the films being shot.

“I’m thrilled that Iona is going to have this film institute,” Davis said. “The more people that know about Thanhouser and the role that New Rochelle had in early silent movie filmmaking, the better because it really put New Rochelle on the map during that time period, made New Rochelle well known and for very good reason because it was such an important studio.”

The New Rochelle Public Library will also have archives and film festivals and looks to join with Iona in spreading the word about Thanhouser and the profound impact he had on the film industry of the 1910s.

Iona will be receiving the artifacts during the course of the upcoming months.  The pieces will then be inspected and scanned before they will be made available to the public.  The date at which the archive will open has yet to be determined.