A Curtain Tells of a Town’s Cinema History
posted April 14, 2021
An almost 100-year-old canvas cinema curtain in Queanbeyan, a southeastern Australian town, bears telling witness to the life of the settlement, and to the early history of film exhibition in the region, and the whole country. It’s held in the Queanbeyan Museum and is too big for curators to roll out in their facility, a former police sergeant’s residence. The Museum’s curators count the curtain, which doubled as a sort of advertising hoarding, as one of their most cherished items, in good part for the tale it tells of Queanbeyan life in the 1920s.
Looking Again at Eyes on the Prize
posted April 1, 2021
The civil rights era in the United States was a time of great upheaval, of continuing and at times intensified injustice, and of both triumph and tragedy. Now the Boston-based American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) has released a new online exhibit – Freedom Song: Interviews from Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965 – that explores what went into making the groundbreaking 1987 television series, Eyes on the Prize, which famously depicted the era.
Hagley Library’s Collection Tells How Industry Worked
posted March 22, 2021
The range of fascinating pitches made in “industrial” films during the heyday of that sprawling genre is evident in the Cinecraft Production collection, which the Hagley Library in Wilmington, Delaware, has acquired and is now promoting. How were workers in the mid-20th century assured that capitalism and industrialism were wholesome forces? How did consumers in 1947 learn about the introduction of FM radio, and how the technology operated? If you were an industrialist, how did you tell members of the public about your industry, if otherwise word would likely never get out?
The Israel Film Archive, Online
posted March 5, 2021
What did the State of Israel look like at its founding in 1948? What ads ran on TV in 1970? What did vacationing on the seaside look like in 1968? Since the Israel Film Archive launched its new website in September 2020, it has attracted well over 500,000 visits from people interested in finding out. Visitors have also been able to stream feature films, there, and many other audiovisual recordings.
A Lifetime of Movie Research, Digitized
posted February 2, 2021
For decades, Lillian Michelson performed research in support of Hollywood film producers, directors, designers, and other creatives. With material she gathered in the course of her work, in 1969 she began the Cinema Research Library that now bears her name. A new chapter in the vast collection has begun with Michelson’s donation of the material to the Internet Archive.