✨ Ringling Museum Revives Circus Heritage with Filmic Technologies–Part I: A Daughter’s Memory, A Fragile Legacy

When Dolly Jacobs, founder and vice president of the Circus Arts Conservatory, is asked what it was like to grow up with a father who was a clown, her answer is disarmingly tender: “He was my cheerleader, my best supporter. I miss him so much.”

At The Ringling Museum in Sarasota, thousands of fragile circus films from the 1920s sat in the archives—reels that carried not just images, but lives, artistry, and family legacies. Fathers, daughters, costumes, and acts that defined an era.

But film is fragile. “There’s so much film that needs to be digitized. If we don’t save that content, what we’re going to be losing is part of who we are,” explains Heidi Connor, Chief Archivist at The Ringling.

Keeping reels cold and dry can slow deterioration—but it cannot stop it. Every archive faces the same challenge: vast backlogs of material, too costly and too complex to digitize in time.

This is the urgent challenge every archive, museum, and library must face: when time itself becomes the enemy of memory.

👉 Stay tuned for Part II—how Filmic Technologies helped turn this challenge into a roadmap for preserving Sarasota’s cultural heartbeat.

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