“MacMillan is coming!” More than 50 years ago these words announced an exciting event in communities across the country: famed Arctic explorer Donald B. MacMillan would be in town with his motion pictures to tell eager audiences about his latest exploits.
Now people can relive this experience in a new DVD to be released by The Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum in January 2011. The Far North recreates a lecture given by MacMillan in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, in 1959.
MacMillan was a very popular, and much-loved lecturer in a time when presentations by explorers and adventurers were a major form of popular entertainment. Typically he showed two reels of silent film, each about 45 minutes long, that he narrated while on the stage.
As he toured the country over the years he continually updated his film with new material from his latest trips. He made his last trip north in 1954, and continued to lecture until he was well into his 80s.
The film on this DVD has been reconstructed from MacMillan’s 16mm color film footage and a digitally restored audiotape made at a lecture he gave in the Boothbay Opera House in 1959.
Both the film footage and audiotape are held by the Arctic Museum. Film archivist Audrey Amidon, of the Bowdoin Class of 2003, an Arctic Museum intern in 2004, first reconstructed the newly digitized film footage based on what were thought to be MacMillan’s lecture notes.
www.bowdoin.edu