Disaster-Porn Shock Horror: Gertie the Galloping Bridge Really Just Lolloped
posted November 12, 2015
Now It Can Be Told: 75 years after the infamous collapse of "Galloping Gertie," the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State, USA, four physicists have donned moving-image-archivist hats to deduce that famous, much-viewed film footage of the dramatic failure was later greatly speeded up.
Ongoing Greatness and What Brings You to Maine?
posted November 5, 2015
Moving-image archivist and researcher Melissa Dollman attended this year's Wunderkino, an event that Northeast Historic Film holds each year in the near-100-year-old venue, the Alamo Theatre in Bucksport, Maine, and reports on the pleasures of an intimate gathering of archivists, scholars, and artists devoted to the history, theory, and preservation of moving images.
Films by Gregory J. Markopoulos and Four Other Avant-Gardists Win Preservation Grants
posted November 3, 2015
In this year's round of Avant-Garde Masters Grants from The Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation, Twice a Man, a 1963 film by Gregory J. Markopoulos, was among seven films granted preservation grants. In the mid-1960s, two decades into his highly idiosyncratic filmmaking career, Markopoulous, born in 1928 in Ohio of Greek immigrants, became so disgusted by American critics’ reception of American film avant-gardism that he told a New York Film Festival panel of critics that they were "soulless morons,” packed up, and moved to Greece.
Today is World Day for Audio Visual Heritage
posted October 27, 2015
Today is World Day for Audio Visual Heritage, and it’s the tenth time UNESCO has organized and encouraged events to foster the preservation of moving-image materials and archives.
UCLA Inaugurates New Education Approach
posted September 30, 2015
The University of California at Los Angeles is changing the focus of its master’s-degree education in moving-image archiving, and the move signals evolution in employment opportunities for graduates. Less film theory, less confusion between cultural-studies and archival-studies components, and more attention to emerging career opportunities, underpins the new formula.
An Odd Couple: Samuel Beckett & Buster Keaton
posted September 3, 2015
A noted film archivist's NOTFILM presents his meditation on one of the most surprising of cinema collaborations: Samuel Beckett's only film, starring Buster Keaton in an unfamiliar role.
Black-and-White is Dead. Long Live Black-and-White
posted August 31, 2015
In "Black and White Cinema: A Short History," his lament and celebration of a great film art, Wheeler Winston Dixon also looks at what the passing of a film standard augurs for Hollywood's future.
Redress for A Giant of Costume Design
posted August 12, 2015
In the 1950s, Hollywood gave Orry-Kelly his due: three Oscars for costume design. Now he is being belatedly recognized in his native Australia with a biographical film, a major exhibit, and publication of his rediscovered (but never quite lost) memoir.
T-Model Hank Rides and Tucson Boys Sing
posted July 28, 2015
Thanks to a grant from the federally backed National Film Preservation Foundation, two films from Arizona are assured preservation: one about a T-Model Ford tour guide, the other about a Tucson choir for boys. They join films the NFPF supported last year, about Yaqui ceremonies and a grand church mission complex from the 18th century.
Crumbling Movie Houses that Were Main Attractions
posted July 17, 2015
With his riveting images, photographer Matt Lambros seeks to preserve the magic, if not the bricks and mortar, of the shuttered cinema palaces of America.