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."
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.