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
How to Break into Movies — in 1907
posted April 12, 2016
With a long-ago birthday present from his grandmother, Darren Nemeth, a Michigan early-film enthusiast, has been able to publish a refurbished edition of a 1907 catalog that told traveling film exhibitors everything they needed to know if they were to succeed in the burgeoning business.
Who Is Crazy? Always a Good Question
posted March 31, 2016
"Who's Crazy?," a 1965 film by Thomas White, a young American in Paris with performances by members of the Living Theater and soundtrack by Ornette Coleman, has turned up in a New York garage, and has been restored to throw light on experimental cinema of its day.
Reproducing Film Colors, and Their Significances
posted March 17, 2016
Barbara Flueckiger is figuring out how best to determine the colors that films have had, throughout cinema history. She is developing means to replicate the colors in digital restorations. Her huge challenge: to understand not only the properties of film colors, but also their origin in cultural tastes for particular color palettes. Her work is shading film interpretation and film history.
Ecstatic Cinema: Romantic Experimental Filmmaking in the 1960s
posted February 20, 2016
Wheeler Winston Dixon celebrates a group of films from the early to mid 1960s whose makers adopted a strategy of sensory overload to draw viewers in so they would experience, without restraint, the sheer joy of existence in a world of seemingly endless possibility. And he worries that they may fall irretrievably far out of public view.
The Music of Film, TV, Video Games, and More
posted January 22, 2016
Film on the radio – or now, on the information superhighway… There’s nothing quite like it. No matter how ardently composers of film scores profess that their work is designed to enhance and uplift the visual element of film, they are hardly likely to complain when their music is placed front and center. Here are web sites that do just that.
2015 – It Wasn’t Too Bad a Year, At All
posted January 4, 2016
We hope you enjoyed coverage in Moving Image Archive News during 2015. Here’s a look back.