Thomas Cripps: Scholar of African Americans in Film
posted December 28, 2018
The history of black Americans in film would have been far less well understood if not for the lifetime of research by Thomas Cripps. The leading American scholar of the black presence in film, he died in Baltimore from complications of Alzheimer’s disease on 17 September 2018, his 86th birthday.
25 Additions to the National Film Registry
posted December 20, 2018
U.S. Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced on 12 December 2018 the annual selection of 25 influential American motion pictures to be added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Induction marks films’ cultural, historic, and aesthetic importance to the nation’s film heritage, and being added to the registry ensures that chosen films are permanently preserved.
The Fan Edit: What Do You Mean, It’s Not Our Film?
posted November 26, 2018
If you object to the way a director or studio revises a film you particularly like, and the original is not readily available, why not recreate the original and distribute it among fellow enthusiasts? All you need to do is to stitch together the original from available elements, and probably spruice them up digitally into modern, high-tech shape.
Home Movie Day 2018 is Here
posted October 20, 2018
Your family members and friends may blanch at the idea of sitting through your home movies, but plenty of people do want to see them – so much so that the Center for Home Movies holds an annual event to facilitate and encourage the sharing of such records of everyday life. This year, takes place today, Saturday, 20 October. Events are being held around the world over this weekend, while other events take place throughout the year.
CLIR Helps Preserve Collections at Risk
posted October 13, 2018
Film of key events in late-1960s political life, footage of Native American song and ceremony, and audiovisual records of diasporic Jewish life in India and other nations are to be preserved thanks to grants from the nonprofit Council on Library and Information Resources. Those films are among the collections of audiovisual content of high scholarly value that have recently received financial support as part of the CLIR’s Recordings at Risk grant program.
Library of Congress Launches Its National Screening Room
posted September 26, 2018
Rare glimpses of George and Ira Gershwin working and socializing… Mid-20th century newsreels made for African-American audiences… Paper prints of D.W. Griffith shorts… Footage of the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, William McKinley, and Frank Sinatra… Those are among hundreds of hours of motion pictures that The Library of Congress has digitized and made freely available on its newly launched National Screening Room website.
A Solution for All Data Storage Woes?
posted September 3, 2018
When Hernando Colón dreamed in the early 16th century of collecting all the world’s knowledge in one place, he could not have imagined that one day it might all fit within a space the size of a sailor’s trunk. But thanks to stunning advances in storage science, perhaps it could.
Calling All Believers
posted August 5, 2018
WELCOME TO THE INTEGRATRON Just a degree or two off the narrow path of rationally agreed reality lies a squirrelly track that heads out into deep space, into a la-la land where much is conceivable and pretty much anything is plausible. One stop along that way is located in the Yucca Valley of California, 120
Funds for Collections on Black Champions, Yu’Pik Life, and Censorship
posted July 16, 2018
The National Historical Publications and Records Commission has announced 31 grants to archives to preserve moving-image collections. The awards, announced by David S. Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, totaled over $4-million. Grants relating to moving-image collections went to Washington University’s William Miles collection, Bethel Broadcasting in Alaska, Indiana State Library, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, and Rutgers University of New Jersey’s Papers of Thomas A. Edison project.
Tribesourcing the American Indian Film Gallery
posted June 25, 2018
In 2011 Jennifer Jenkins brought the American Indian Film Gallery, a digital archive of almost 500 films about Native peoples of the Americas, to the University of Arizona. The films in the Gallery, most of them nonfiction “educational” titles, came with one tricky issue.