Reproducing Film Colors, and Their Significances
posted March 17, 2016
Barbara Flueckiger is figuring out how best to determine the colors that films have had, throughout cinema history. She is developing means to replicate the colors in digital restorations. Her huge challenge: to understand not only the properties of film colors, but also their origin in cultural tastes for particular color palettes. Her work is shading film interpretation and film history.
Ecstatic Cinema: Romantic Experimental Filmmaking in the 1960s
posted February 20, 2016
Wheeler Winston Dixon celebrates a group of films from the early to mid 1960s whose makers adopted a strategy of sensory overload to draw viewers in so they would experience, without restraint, the sheer joy of existence in a world of seemingly endless possibility. And he worries that they may fall irretrievably far out of public view.
The Music of Film, TV, Video Games, and More
posted January 22, 2016
Film on the radio – or now, on the information superhighway… There’s nothing quite like it. No matter how ardently composers of film scores profess that their work is designed to enhance and uplift the visual element of film, they are hardly likely to complain when their music is placed front and center. Here are web sites that do just that.
2015 – It Wasn’t Too Bad a Year, At All
posted January 4, 2016
We hope you enjoyed coverage in Moving Image Archive News during 2015. Here’s a look back.
How to Celebrate 120 Years of Cinema
posted December 31, 2015
In Durham, North Carolina, Tom Whiteside and the Durham Cinematheque celebrate the 120th anniversary of the day in 1895 when the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, presented a program in Paris of a novel form of entertainment: motion pictures. Whiteside held a free, day-long film event on 28 December 2015 at the Durham Hotel, with some unusual features including a "petting zoo" of old cameras and projectors, and even a small exhibition of some postage stamps from around the world that have commemorated the Lumières.
Apu Trilogy: Revived from Flames
posted December 28, 2015
Even at the time of Satjajit Ray’s death in 1992, aged 70, the films of the astonishing “Apu Trilogy” were in sad shape, to their maker’s great regret. The original prints had been so badly damaged that they had risked being thrown out. Their resurrection, now, in a 4K digital restoration, is a remarkable event in film restoration.
Ken Jacobs’s Dissected Doctor’s Dream
posted December 22, 2015
Ken Jacobs's life in film making got a boost from junk in a surplus store. In the 1970s, he found some dumped 16mm TV films in a shopfront on a rundown Canal Street in Manhattan that were going for $5 per reel. He made one into "The Doctor's Dream," which he is now restoring with a 2015 Avant-Garde Masters Grant.
25 Films Added to US National Film Registry
posted December 16, 2015
The Library of Congress has made its annual addition of 25 motion pictures to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, bringing the listing to 675 films dating from 1894 to 1997. The films named to the registry this year include Hollywood blockbusters, documentaries, silent movies, animation, shorts, independent and experimental motion pictures. They bring the number of films on the registry to 675, which certainly far from exhausts the potential for additions, because the Library’s moving-image collection runs to some 1.3 million items.
Robert Altman’s Compelling Early Cornball, Preserved
posted December 16, 2015
The Northwest Chicago Film Society has restored, with a 2013 grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation, one of Robert Altman's apprentice films. "Corn's-A-Poppin," which Altman co-wrote in 1955, is one for the Altman completist. Get your local film society to book it, today!
Owen Land’s Strange, Expansive Film World
posted November 15, 2015
By the time Owen Land died unexpectedly in 2011 at the age of 67, he had become a leading figure in American "structural film," film making whose films were about the nature of film making. Now Anthology Film Archives will preserve with an award from the recently announced round of Avant-Garde Masters Grants from The Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation.