Western Balkans Film Archives Need Help
posted September 27, 2016
Since 2012, the Albanian Cinema Project has been working to save the little-known legacy of Albanian film. Now it is expanding to help preserve the moving-image record of the whole of the Western Balkans, and is building regional partnerships among moving-image archives by holding workshops for archivists, the first during October, in Tirana, Albania. And it needs help to buy a film scanner that will stay in the region and enable high-resolution scanning of threatened films.
Nitrate Film to Light Up the Egyptian Again
posted August 17, 2016
In the early years of motion pictures, movies were conveyed on nitrate film stock. That medium had a major shortcoming: it could burst into flame during projection. The Egyptian Theater in Hollywood is undergoing renovations that will make it possible for the facility to screen nitrate film regularly for the first time since the early 1950s.
Nitrate Film Makes A Comeback
posted July 27, 2016
Wheeler Winston Dixon applauds the return of nitrate-film projection to the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles. He writes: "Projecting nitrate is certainly not without risk – it’s highly flammable, and needs to be treated with the greatest care during projection and preservation – but for more than half a century it was the dominant medium for film production, and for quality of image, it simply is in a class by itself."
39 Institutions Receive Preservation Grants
posted May 18, 2016
In its 2016 round of preservation grants, the National Film Preservation Foundation has awarded grants to 39 institutions to ensure the survival of 64 films, among them "The Streets of Greenwood" (1963), a documentary about civil rights activists registering African American voters in Mississippi, and James Blue’s "The Olive Trees of Justice" (1962), about the torn loyalties of an Algerian/French man during the Algerian civil war, which won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Who Is Crazy? Always a Good Question
posted March 31, 2016
"Who's Crazy?," a 1965 film by Thomas White, a young American in Paris with performances by members of the Living Theater and soundtrack by Ornette Coleman, has turned up in a New York garage, and has been restored to throw light on experimental cinema of its day.
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.
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.
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.
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.