Phipps Home Movies

Old Westbury Gardens

Phipps children playing football in the South Allée circa 1918

Collection Facts

Extent:

Historical Context

Kodak invented 16mm film in 1922 but these home movies circa 1918 pre-date that invention. For home movies to exist prior to 1922, they would have been captured on 35mm 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, 1930s, and 1940s.

The films circa 1918 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 first 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.

The remaining films in the collection were digitized by Historic Films in Greenport, New York in 2025 thanks in partnership to LILRC's digitization grant.