Caleb Allison

Biography

Caleb Allison is a passionate scholar-practitioner, moving image archivist, and an award winning independent and experimental filmmaker, specializing in small gauge formats, including super 8mm and 16mm. His professional interests are split between film production, with a focus on scriptwriting, cinematography, and experimental techniques, and film and media preservation.

His scholarly research is focused on moving image archives and restoration practices, cinephilia, industy and platform studies, home video, taste politics, film exhibition and spectatorship, and experimental film practices.

He is the recipient of the inaugural 2021 Jorgensen-IU Libraries Moving Image Archive Fellowship, as well as a 2023-24 Graduate Pathways Fellowship, contributing to strengthening generative collaboration and communication between academia and moving image archives.

As a filmmaker he loves the look and feel of small gauge celluloid, and uses super 8mm and 16mm whenever the occasion and resources allow it. The continued use, preservation and education of celluloid is vital not only as a critical link to our collective cinematic history but for its aesthetic and political potential. It also teaches one the valuable lessons of patience, planning, and creative limitations.

His most recent film, Sol Folium, explores the impressionistic abilities of the Bolex H16 to translate and express the grace of the fall season into a dizzying mosaic of movement, emotion, color, and memory. Shot entirely in-camera on a 100′ roll of Kodak’s 16mm Ektachrome, the film was a self-conscious challenge to slow down, exist in the present, and appreciate the simple beauty of our natural world.

He also served as cinematographer for In the Morning Kitchen, a commissioned 16mm film written and directed by Oscar Nominated actor Jesse Eisenberg for A Century of 16mm – a conference and celebration dedicated to the centenary of the 16mm format.

He is the chair of the IU Cinema’s City Lights Film Series, dedicated to programming key masterworks of the 20th century from the David S. Bradley Film Collection. He was a regular contributor to IU Cinema’s blog, Establishing Shot, and has written about film for the Center for Documentary Practice and Research’s (CDRP) DocTalk.

Allison, Caleb and Rachael Stoeltje. Century of 16mm: A Celebration of the 100-Year Anniversary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Forthcoming in 2025/26. 

Allison, Caleb. “Losing Film and Finding Gadgets: Designing the Amateur Cinema Gadget during WWII.” In Century of 16mm: A Celebration of the 100-Year Anniversary, edited by Caleb Allison and Rachael Stoeltje. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Forthcoming in 2025/26.

Allison, Caleb. “Ciné-Kodak Model B (f/1.9) – Ostrich Leather Edition.” In Tales from the Vaults: Film Technology over the Years and across Continents, edited by Louis Pelletier and Rachael Stoeltje, 80-81. FIAF/Technès, 2023.

Allison, Caleb. “Revere Model 88.” In Tales from the Vaults: Film Technology over the Years and across Continents, edited by Louis Pelletier and Rachael Stoeltje, 204-205. FIAF/Technès, 2023.

Allison, Caleb. “Upscaling Hollywood: Artificial Intelligence and the Remastering of the Blockbuster’s Material History on Home Video.” Paper Presented at the Blockbuster Futures Conference, Bloomington, IN, Forthcoming in October 2024.

Allison, Caleb. “Formal Slacking: Aestheticizing Idle Resistance in Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1990).” Paper Presented at the 21st Annual Interdisciplinary Conference, Bloomington, IN, March 2024.

Allison, Caleb. “Losing Film and Finding Gadgets: Designing the Amateur Cinema Gadget during WWII.” Paper Presented at the Century of 16mm Conference, Bloomington, IN, September 2023.

Allison, Caleb. “Rediscovered, Restored, and Released: Milestone Film & Video’s Restorative Politics.” Paper Presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference (Virtual), March 2021.

Allison, Caleb. “Restorative Politics: Notes on the Exhibition of Digital Film Restoration.” Paper presented at the Conversations Around Materials for Interaction Symposium (Cultural Studies Program), Bloomington, IN, March 2020.

Allison, Caleb. “Homemade and Jerry-Rigged: The Amateur Cinema Gadget during WWII.” Paper presented at the Film & History Conference, Madison, WI, November 2019.

Allison, Caleb. “Starlight Gazing.” Experimental short film screened at the Common Ground Conference, Bloomington, IN, March 2019.

Allison, Caleb. “Collecting the Uncollectible: Residual Hardware, Streaming Aesthetics, and the Criterion Collection.” Paper presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Seattle, WA, March 2019.

Allison, Caleb. “Our Shining Beast: The Technological Uncanny and Postmodern in The Qatsi Trilogy.” Paper presented at the IU Landscape, Space, and Place Conference, Bloomington, IN, March 2018.

Allison, Caleb. “’I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing…’ Not Even Armageddon: Negotiating Fan Collecting Practices and Production Strategies of The Criterion Collection.” Paper presented at the Film & History Conference, Milwaukee, WI, November 2017.