Animating the Hangman
posted May 31, 2016
The Animation Show of Shows has received a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve "Hangman" (1964), a cautionary animated adaptation of Maurice Ogden’s poem about a town that allows its citizens be executed one by one. Finding the elements of the film has entailed a search that demonstrates the heartening results that film-restoration devotees can achieve when they go terrier-like after their quarry.
Yale to Preserve Documentarian Nick Doob
posted May 24, 2016
Nick Doob has been in the forefront of American documentary-film making for decades, and now the films he made while a college student are being preserved by his alma mater, thanks to a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
39 Institutions Receive Preservation Grants
posted May 18, 2016
In its 2016 round of preservation grants, the National Film Preservation Foundation has awarded grants to 39 institutions to ensure the survival of 64 films, among them "The Streets of Greenwood" (1963), a documentary about civil rights activists registering African American voters in Mississippi, and James Blue’s "The Olive Trees of Justice" (1962), about the torn loyalties of an Algerian/French man during the Algerian civil war, which won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
A Vengeful, but Oddly Unsorrowful Belladonna
posted May 17, 2016
A restoration of a monument of Japanese anime film does it great honor, visually, and prompts some questions about representations of sexual assault, perpetrator presumption, and much else. Eiichi Yamamoto’s 1973 animated Belladonna of Sadness has long been “simply the most beautiful and transcendent film I knew in proportion to both its obscurity, and