May 2, 2023
Hoover Institution | Stanford University
On Tuesday, May 2, a film screening of America’s Gift to Famine-Stricken Russia (1922), included a live musical accompaniment. Commentary was provided by Bertrand Patenaude. The formal program was a hybrid and began at 6 pm PT (60 minutes).
America’s famine relief mission to Soviet Russia in 1921–22 was chronicled in photographs and motion pictures taken by Floyd Traynham, a young cameraman from Atlanta, Georgia. Traynham’s films of American food being transported across the frozen Volga River and fed to hungry Russian children on the edge of starvation were shown in movie theaters across the United States. In 1922, a two-reel (22-minute) feature was compiled from Traynham’s movies. On May 2, that film, “America’s Gift to Famine-Stricken Russia,” had its first public screening in a century. The film was accompanied by the performance of a string quartet of students from the Stanford Department of Music, with music arranged by cellist Jonathan Pak.