posted June 15, 2017
The Washington University Libraries’ Film & Media Archive has completed the preservation and digitization of The Streets of Greenwood, a rare civil-rights documentary film from 1963, and has made it freely available, online. The Archive completed the work with a Basic Preservation Grant it received in last year’s round of funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation. One purpose of the grants is to allow archives to make noteworthy films publicly available.
posted June 13, 2017
The National Film Preservation Foundation has announced (13 June 2017) grants to save 57 films, including Code Blue (1972), a recruitment film aimed at bringing minorities into the medical field made by Henry Hampton’s Blackside Inc., the Emmy-winning producer of Eyes on the Prize, and Broken Barriers (1919), the first motion-picture adaptation of the Sholem Aleichem story that inspired Fiddler on the Roof.
posted May 10, 2017
Few film fans would think to seek out films that corporations, schools, and religious and political organizations made to pitch their various causes and campaigns. And yet, as film collector and historian Rick Prelinger demonstrated in 2006 with his The Field Guide to Sponsored Films, such works can be of considerable historical, cultural, or artistic interest. Now an online companion to the Guide has been launched, the Online Field Guide to Sponsored Films.
posted April 24, 2017
A crowdsourcing project promises to demonstrate that when it comes to providing access to audiovisual archives, not only users with visual or hearing disabilities benefit. All users may.
posted April 6, 2017
Nothing brings civic attitudes into sharper relief than a civil-rights test case. It doesn’t have to be about race — a case about the rights of people with disabilities serves just as well. Take the curious matter of the “disappearing” University of California at Berkeley videos.
posted March 9, 2017
Through a communist lens, the 20th Century looked quite different than it did through the eyes of the West. The British Film Institute is collaborating with an imprint of SAGE Publishing to issue a three-“module” set of rare film footage, Socialism on Film: The Cold War and International Propaganda.
posted January 4, 2017
The archives of 50 little-known woman filmmakers, as well as films about US-Cuba relations and Iowa birds, are to be digitized and made more readily available thanks to grants from The Council on Library and Information Resources’ second round of support in its Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives program.
posted November 3, 2016
David Peck's San Diego-based Reelin’ In The Years Productions has joined with Dutch production company Double 2 BV to buy the rich archives of Countdown, the Dutch television program that from 1977 to 1993 was Europe’s leading showcase of popular rock music, and to make it available for licensing to filmmakers, television producers, and other entertainment-industry clients.
posted October 28, 2016
While countries commonly require that books be deposited in a national library, upon publication, that appears to be less the case with films and other audiovisual publications. To get a sense of how common such requirements are, and where, is the goal of a new project: an ambitious survey of audiovisual-deposit laws around the world.
posted October 20, 2016
To the growing stable of online, streaming film services, add one more – one that the Wall Street Journal has dubbed “Netflix for film nerds.” FilmStruck, a collaboration of Turner Classic Movies and the Criterion Collection, at least initially available only in the US, will emphasize art and cult films from independent film companies, but will also offer some Hollywood studio products.
