main features
What Researchers Are Saying About Charlie Chaplin, and a Rare Chaplin Film is Rediscovered
posted by MIAN on August 27, 2010
It remains shocking to many film enthusiasts that the reception of Charlie Chaplin in America does not compare with the reception of Charlie Chaplin in, say, the United Kingdom, Europe, or even Japan. Even in the 1960s, children in many other nations grew up watching the Little Tramp and Chaplin’s other alter egos. Not so, in the United States, although a schooling in other greats of the silent era – Fatty Arbuckle, or Buster Keaton, say – has been, and remains, even more lacking. Still, a slowing of Chaplin-related publications, American or not, seems highly unlikely. MORE >>
Detecting the History of Sound-on-Film
posted by MIAN on August 24, 2010
Twenty-four frames of one of the earliest surviving recordings of sound-on-film, a test strip that Eugene Lauste made between 1910 and 1912, merely hints at the revolution that was to come. Only 24 frames long, it belongs to a Florida collector who bought it at an estate sale along with other items from Lauste’s obscure career. Alongside the frames, which show nondescript images of plants, lies a series of black squiggles that encode sound – perhaps the first sound ever simultaneously reproduced with images on film. It is not particularly impressive sound, to be sure. That was evident on the July 5 edition of the PBS program, History Detectives, where the footage was featured. (The segment can now be viewed online.) MORE >>
Going Dutch on a Moving Image Archiving Degree
posted by MIAN on August 17, 2010
If you’re contemplating completing a master’s degree in moving-image archiving, you could hardly find a more appealing place to do so than Amsterdam. Apart from everything else – bike-friendly, crisscrossed with scenic canals, liberal beyond American dreams – it is home to world-class film collections and institutions that excel in restoration, research, and educational programs, and several of those have been involved in the University of Amsterdam’s archiving program since its inception in 2003. The program, in its seventh year, boasts an impressive record of combining solid schooling in the skills of the trade with a firm grounding in film history and related subjects. In Amsterdam’s master’s-degree program in the preservation and presentation of the moving image... MORE >>
Welcome to Moving Image Archive News
posted by Rachel Price on July 23, 2010
Film preservation, moving image archiving — whatever the most all-encompassing term du jour is — sometimes makes its way into wider public awareness. Martin Scorsese talked up The Film Foundation, which he created, at the most recent Oscar ceremony. (Not Oscar categories, yet: Best Rediscovery of a Forgotten Film and Best Critical Research on MORE >>
Taking Stock of Cinema Treasures
posted by MIAN on May 28, 2010
All but about 17 movie fans in all of creation have had a favorite cinema – the one where they learned their love of the moving image, or the taste of their first love’s lips; the one that smelled of the sea and only half-blocked the rush of passing traffic; the one where they heard dropped Milk Duds roll from the back to the front of the house; the one where they sat, gobsmacked, at the rippling pecs of George Lazenby, or at the undress of Ursula Andress – in her breakout Dr. No (1962), or perhaps later, in Mountain of the Cannibal God (1978). MORE >>
The American Indian Film Gallery Retrieves Images from 20th Century Life
posted by MIAN on May 22, 2010
A Hollywood staple, for decades, was Indians yelping from pinto ponies, brandishing tomahawks with bloodcurdling cries, and plummeting rifle-shot from rocky outcrops. MORE >>
Peter Clifton Finds His Lost Easybeats Film
posted by MIAN on June 20, 2010
At the beginning of his career in making films about music, Australian director and producer Peter Clifton created a documentary about the 1967 tour of England by The Easybeats, a fabled fivesome who put an Antipodean spin on the British Invasion bands of the era. The Easybeats’ claims to fame include being the first Australian rock-and-roll group to score an international rock hit. They did that with their 1966 single "Friday on My Mind." MORE >>
Can that Laughter
posted by MIAN on July 22, 2010
In its online “Daily” feed, The Paris Review has reprinted an interview with Ben Glenn II, a TV historian and expert in the history of canned laughter. It’s from Mike Sacks’ book, from last year, And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on their Craft (Writers Digest Press). MORE >>
Keeping an Eye on Surveillance
posted by MIAN on July 23, 2010
Torin Monahan explores what happens when social anxiety reigns, and surveillance seems to offer a remedy, in his latest book, Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity (Rutgers University Press). There, the associate professor of human & organizational development and associate professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University examines the interplay of insecurity, surveillance, and inequality in MORE >>