Features

The Archival Successes and Tribulations of Three Authors

posted May 20, 2013

euro-horror

Exploring archives and other sources of research material for publications on moving-image topics can be a pleasure, or a mighty challenge. Here, three authors of recent books describe the range of experiences they had as they prepared their books, published over the last few months. In preparing his Euro Horror: Classic European Horror Cinema in Contemporary American ...

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Amateur Newsreel Footage Brings It Home

posted April 22, 2013

Among features of the 7th Street Theater are lobby stencils. The "Hoquiam American," on July 5, 1928 reported: “Bordering the upper walls of the lobby are stenciled likenesses of the fabled ornythorinkus, vamupus cat, and sidehill gouger, conceived by modern man as having once populated the forests and mountains of the Olympic Peninsula.”

By Rachel Price n n Grays Harbor County, in the far western part of Washington state is, at this moment, drawing thousands of visitors to its shore, there to gawk at scores of migrating shorebirds refueling in the coastal mud flats. Last month, I braved Interstate 5 from Seattle to head out to the area for a different ...

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Video of the Day: Films from the Home Front

posted April 18, 2013

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With an image of a nurse caring for a man swaddled in bandages, voiceover says: “These boys must live for a long time among us, sometimes for years.” The patient is a soldier. After initial stabilization, the voice-over relates, “one of the wounded, a flier pulled from a crashed fighter plane, moves into a general ward.” Other ...

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Scorsese Uses Jefferson Lecture to Plead for Archiving

posted April 17, 2013

Horses galloping in a cave near Chauvet, France

The legacy of motion pictures is at risk. That was a key theme – all too familiar to moving-image archivists – that Martin Scorsese developed in his 2013 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, early this month [April 1, 2013]. He used the prestigious event to plead for greater ...

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Rediscovering Films, The Film Foundation, and Martin Scorsese

posted April 2, 2013

Still from "The Red Shoes."

“A barn. A warehouse. A closet at a mental institution. These locations have something in common: They all contained films or parts of films that were missing and presumed lost forever.” In the March/April issue of Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Marilyn Ferdinand, who blogs at Ferdy on Films (www.ferdyonfilms.com) ...

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Martin Scorsese Delivers Jefferson Lecture – Today

posted March 31, 2013

Martin Scorsese. Image: Brigitte Lacombe

Today, Monday April 1 2013, acclaimed director Martin Scorsese delivers this year’s National Endowment for the Humanities 2013 Jefferson Lecture. And the event will be streamed live and free of charge at 7:30pm, US East Coast time. Viewers can also join the conversation about film and the humanities via Twitter at #JeffLec2013. The Jefferson Lecture is ...

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Video of the Day: Archive of American Television

posted March 28, 2013

Andy Griffith in "No Time for Sergeants" in 1955, his first on-screen appearance.

In 1955, in the first on-screen appearance of his memorable career in television comedy, Andy Griffith appeared in a U.S. Steel Hour episode entitled “No Time for Sergeants,” a television version of his first stage success on Broadway, later the same year. Born Andy Samuel Griffith in Mount Airy, North Carolina, in 1926, the fine comic ...

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Want to Preserve and Restore Film and Other Moving Images?

posted March 27, 2013

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Ever wanted to restore, preserve, or archive film and television programs, or work in some other area of preserving and restoring artifacts in all the moving-image categories including some that are being created right now? The United States has three master’s level programs in moving image archiving, while one other is at the University of Amsterdam, ...

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Significant American Sound Recordings Announced

posted March 25, 2013

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Late last year, The Library of Congress named its 2012 list of 25 films that would join some 350 others on the National Film Registry. Making the announcement, James M. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, said: “These films are not selected as the ‘best’ American films of all time, but rather as works of enduring ...

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Preserving Exemplary American Films

posted March 17, 2013

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Keeping culturally influential films in good shape is no easy task. It is costly, and can require huge efforts just to track down films that may have become damaged, or have become hard to find – in whole or in bits and pieces. In a project designed to assure preservation of the highest caliber to a ...

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