Kartemquin’s Archive in Good Hands
posted December 28, 2020
The award-winning Kartemquin Films, a leading American producer of social justice-related films, has been keeping its archive in a storage facility for three decades, but now is celebrating its placement of the collection with the film archive at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
What COVID-19 Means for Moving Image Archiving
posted December 8, 2020
“One of the most remarkable ripple effects of the 2020 COVID-19 crisis is the blurring in the public perception of the distinction between natural and human-made disasters,” and this has implications for film preservation, writes Paolo Cherchi Usai in a keynote article of a special COVID-themed issue of FIAF’s Journal of Film Preservation.
Eastman’s South Asian Treasure Trove
posted November 6, 2020
Thanks to a substantial grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the George Eastman Museum is hard at work restoring an unusual collection of films from South Asia. The grant was made through the IMLS Museums for America grant program. Eastman is using it to restore 1,285 Indian and Pakistani film prints. Archivists there believe their collection to be largest of its kind outside India.
47 Orphan Films To Be Preserved with Federal Grants
posted October 1, 2020
The National Film Preservation Foundation has announced annual grants to U.S. 34 institutions to allow them to preserve 47 “orphan” films from their collections. (“Orphan film” is defined as a film in any form that has been abandoned by its owner or caretaker.) Since 1998 the NFPF has provided preservation resources to 315 organizations in all 50 American states as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to help save 2,547 films.
The Total Television Guerrillas Who Upturned Conventions
posted September 30, 2020
There once was a time when cellphones didn’t capture just about everything that happens in public. Until the 1970s, filming for broadcast was generally constrained, for starters, by the size and weight of cameras. TV cameras and their tape setups, shackled to power sources, were the size of half a car. Then along came the Sony Portapak video camera, and the pioneers of "guerrilla tv."
Digitizing the First Days of Public Access Television
posted September 2, 2020
Public access to free-to-air and cable television resulted from a lot of activism by pioneers in the face of many obstacles. From 1971, the plucky New York state collective, Portable Channel, created some of the earliest citizen-made documentary television in the United States. Now Visual Studies Workshop, based in Rochester, NY, is digitizing and making available hundreds of video tapes created by members of Portable Channel.
A Home Movie Day Unlike the Others
posted August 17, 2020
Home Movie Day won’t be quite the same, this year. But as sometimes happens, restrictions — in this case, imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic — will force changes that may turn out to be fruitful innovations. In 2020, Home Movie Day goes virtual, and with that the local becomes global.
Israel Film Archive Wants All Israeli Film
posted August 12, 2020
The Israel Film Archive wants your home movies, whether you’re within Israel or anywhere in the Jewish diaspora. But collecting home movies is just part of a larger project of Russo Meir and his colleagues at the Archive. As the Archive is the official institute responsible for the collection and preservation of Israeli films, they want to be able to provide original reels or digital copies of every film ever made in the country.
George Eastman Museum Offers Films from its Collection, Free
posted August 6, 2020
The George Eastman Museum is providing free online access to a selection of digitized films from its moving image collection. So far, it has released 23 digitized films for general viewing. Films by groundbreaking documentary maker Leo Hurwitz are among selections from the Eastman collection that you can now watch on the museum’s website.
Film Archivists Preserve Accounts of What COVID-19 Has Wrought
posted June 12, 2020
How is the Covid-19 pandemic disrupting film archivists and archives? Christopher Dupin, who as Senior Administrator runs the day-to-day operations of the International Federation of Film Archivists, wants to know: “Being an historian, myself, I always think about the future and what we want historians in 20 or 30 years to remember about this."