Archive for 2012

National Film Registry Additions for 2012 Announced

posted December 19, 2012

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The Library of Congress today named 25 motion pictures that have been selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Among them is Sons of the Desert (1933), a riotous comedy that starred Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, along with comedian Charley Chase. Veteran director William A. Seiter for Hal Roach ...

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Wheeler Winston Dixon Tolls the Death of the Moguls

posted December 19, 2012

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Wheeler Winston Dixon talks about how he went about researching his latest book, Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical Hollywood, which Rutgers University Press released in August 2012. Dixon is a prolific film historian based at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Among his many books are 21st Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era ...

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Categories: Features • Of Special Interest

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Saving Albania’s Film Legacy

posted December 5, 2012

A still from "Nentori i Dyte," from 1982, the first film restored by the Albanian Cinema Project and its friends.

Few filmgoers know much about Albanian cinema. That’s a safe bet. Most might be surprised to learn the country had one. After all, from 1944 until his death in 1985, the dictator Enver Hoxha imposed a reign of oppression. In his mix of delusion, paranoia, and calculation, he order Albanians to stave off a concocted military ...

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How Protestants Molded Hollywood’s Moral Qualms

posted November 30, 2012

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Film-ratings systems in the United States have a history of contention. But one aspect of the first attempts at imposing a code, in the 1930s, has been largely overlooked, writes William D. Romanowski in Reforming Hollywood: How American Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies, which Oxford University Press issued in July 2012. Well documented, notes the ...

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Soviet Witness to the Holocaust

posted November 29, 2012

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Images of the Nazi atrocities of World War II haunted the second half of the 20th century, and continue to do so, in the 21st. But not all the film and photography of those events has been available to historians and the public. Jeremy Hicks set out to expand the visual record of the Holocaust by ...

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New Books, and Lots of Them

posted November 26, 2012

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You’ll find descriptions of plenty of new and recent books relating to moving-image archiving on our books pages. You can also read about how authors went about the archival tasks needed to complete two of those books: The Cinema and Cinema-Going in Scotland, 1896-1950 and Reel Time: Movie Exhibitors and Movie Audiences in Prairie Canada, 1896 ...

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Categories: Features • News • Shorts

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The Scots Go to the Movies, and How

posted November 26, 2012

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Trevor Griffiths had a wide-open research topic when he decided to write a book about Scottish film-going habits of the early 20th century and to set them in social and historical context. In his new book, The Cinema and Cinema-Going in Scotland, 1896-1950, from Edinburgh University Press, distributed in the US by Columbia University Press), Griffiths, ...

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Movies on the Canadian Prairie

posted November 26, 2012

reel-time

“At times,” say Tamara P. Seiler and Robert M. Seiler, “it felt as if we were chronicling the history of western culture.” They didn’t expect that, when they set out in 2000 to investigate the history of movies in Prairie Canada during the early days of film. Their ambitious project has now borne fruit in their new ...

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New Books on Moving Image Works

posted November 20, 2012

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As is often the case, summaries of plenty of new books have been added to our Books pages. You can read summaries of books, and in some cases authors’ thoughts on the process of searching through archives for the material they needed.

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The Open Video Project’s Dual Purposes

posted November 14, 2012

sA screen grab from a 1944 film of Apa Tani shamans and their rituals from the Digital Himalayas project of the University of Cambridge and Yale University. The footage was recorded in Arunachal Pradesh (“land of the dawn-lit mountains”), a province in the far northeast of India, most of whose residents are Tibeto-Burman.

Sooner or later, we will all have access to large digital libraries of video. The dream is for such access not only to come about, but to be easy. Free, would be nice. Many historical, research, and educational collections are already providing unhindered public access, at least for viewing and sometimes for download. So, three core factors ...

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