Restoring the One-Eyed with Blinkers On: The Curious Case of Marlon Brando’s Muddled Apprenticepiece
posted August 24, 2016
"One-Eyed Jacks" was the only film Marlon Brando directed, and he made it, in 1961, only because he and a young Stanley Kubrick, its intended director, had so many “creative differences” that Brando decided he would take on the job, himself. Now the film has been lavishly restored, and its oddness can be gauged anew.
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.
“Race Films” – Little-Known Screen Gems
posted August 12, 2016
“Race films” were made with African American actors and crews, and for the most part by African American directors and producers; they were popular with African American audiences from the 1920s to the 1940s, but are little known, now. That may change through the efforts of several moving-image archives and the distributor Kino Lorber.
The Mysterious Videos of Bill Domonkos
posted August 8, 2016
Bill Domonkos is taking stock-footage filmmaking in an entirely different direction, moving into the dream world of the unconscious, writes Wheeler Winston Dixon. Using Public Domain found materials, almost exclusively in black and white, mostly from the Internet Archive and The Prelinger Collection, Domonkos creates a dream world of phantasmal and sometimes sinister images that transport the viewer to an entirely different place and time, when black and white was the dominant form of filmmaking, and the repressive values of the 1940s and 1950s went unquestioned.
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."
The Fight for Rights on The Streets of Greenwood
posted July 11, 2016
In their 1963 documentary The Streets of Greenwood, a group of young film-makers provided a close-up view of a Mississippi voter-registration drive, of citizens claiming their basic rights, and of a rally that lifted the spirits of harassed activists.
Joel Archer’s Quest for Film Revival
posted June 27, 2016
In Queensland, Joel Archer brings elderly audiences alive with the movies of their heydays – then he goes out and scours aging or abandoned cinemas for missing screen gems. And he has found some memorable ones.
Ruby Bridges, 6, Symbol of Desegregation
posted June 3, 2016
Thanks to a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation, Amistad Research Center will restore and make accessible rare footage of Ruby Bridges, a little girl who in 1960 found herself at the forefront of school desegregation in New Orleans.
Animating the Hangman
posted May 31, 2016
The Animation Show of Shows has received a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve "Hangman" (1964), a cautionary animated adaptation of Maurice Ogden’s poem about a town that allows its citizens be executed one by one. Finding the elements of the film has entailed a search that demonstrates the heartening results that film-restoration devotees can achieve when they go terrier-like after their quarry.
Yale to Preserve Documentarian Nick Doob
posted May 24, 2016
Nick Doob has been in the forefront of American documentary-film making for decades, and now the films he made while a college student are being preserved by his alma mater, thanks to a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation.