How to Celebrate 120 Years of Cinema
posted December 31, 2015
In Durham, North Carolina, Tom Whiteside and the Durham Cinematheque celebrate the 120th anniversary of the day in 1895 when the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, presented a program in Paris of a novel form of entertainment: motion pictures. Whiteside held a free, day-long film event on 28 December 2015 at the Durham Hotel, with some unusual features including a "petting zoo" of old cameras and projectors, and even a small exhibition of some postage stamps from around the world that have commemorated the Lumières.
Apu Trilogy: Revived from Flames
posted December 28, 2015
Even at the time of Satjajit Ray’s death in 1992, aged 70, the films of the astonishing “Apu Trilogy” were in sad shape, to their maker’s great regret. The original prints had been so badly damaged that they had risked being thrown out. Their resurrection, now, in a 4K digital restoration, is a remarkable event in film restoration.
Ken Jacobs’s Dissected Doctor’s Dream
posted December 22, 2015
Ken Jacobs's life in film making got a boost from junk in a surplus store. In the 1970s, he found some dumped 16mm TV films in a shopfront on a rundown Canal Street in Manhattan that were going for $5 per reel. He made one into "The Doctor's Dream," which he is now restoring with a 2015 Avant-Garde Masters Grant.
25 Films Added to US National Film Registry
posted December 16, 2015
The Library of Congress has made its annual addition of 25 motion pictures to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress, bringing the listing to 675 films dating from 1894 to 1997. The films named to the registry this year include Hollywood blockbusters, documentaries, silent movies, animation, shorts, independent and experimental motion pictures. They bring the number of films on the registry to 675, which certainly far from exhausts the potential for additions, because the Library’s moving-image collection runs to some 1.3 million items.
Robert Altman’s Compelling Early Cornball, Preserved
posted December 16, 2015
The Northwest Chicago Film Society has restored, with a 2013 grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation, one of Robert Altman's apprentice films. "Corn's-A-Poppin," which Altman co-wrote in 1955, is one for the Altman completist. Get your local film society to book it, today!
Owen Land’s Strange, Expansive Film World
posted November 15, 2015
By the time Owen Land died unexpectedly in 2011 at the age of 67, he had become a leading figure in American "structural film," film making whose films were about the nature of film making. Now Anthology Film Archives will preserve with an award from the recently announced round of Avant-Garde Masters Grants from The Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Disaster-Porn Shock Horror: Gertie the Galloping Bridge Really Just Lolloped
posted November 12, 2015
Now It Can Be Told: 75 years after the infamous collapse of "Galloping Gertie," the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington State, USA, four physicists have donned moving-image-archivist hats to deduce that famous, much-viewed film footage of the dramatic failure was later greatly speeded up.
Ongoing Greatness and What Brings You to Maine?
posted November 5, 2015
Moving-image archivist and researcher Melissa Dollman attended this year's Wunderkino, an event that Northeast Historic Film holds each year in the near-100-year-old venue, the Alamo Theatre in Bucksport, Maine, and reports on the pleasures of an intimate gathering of archivists, scholars, and artists devoted to the history, theory, and preservation of moving images.
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.
Today is World Day for Audio Visual Heritage
posted October 27, 2015
Today is World Day for Audio Visual Heritage, and it’s the tenth time UNESCO has organized and encouraged events to foster the preservation of moving-image materials and archives.