Of Special Interest

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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Categories: FeaturesOf Special InterestShorts

Want to Preserve and Restore Film and Other Moving Images?

posted March 27, 2013

filmmuseum

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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Categories: FeaturesNewsOf Special Interest

Preserving Exemplary American Films

posted March 17, 2013

yuma still2

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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Categories: FeaturesOf Special Interest

Fit for a Restoration

posted February 2, 2013

Image: huntersaus

A Trip to the Movies, at Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive n It’s always a great pleasure to be reminded of what makes for a successful film restoration. For starters, of course, it’s one that recovers films from obscurity, neglect, or the undersides of history’s high-piled dust heaps. Most viewers of restored films little suspect the technological ...

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Categories: FeaturesOf Special Interest

When Women Made the Movies

posted January 12, 2013

Gloria Swanson, 1928

In her book just out (January 2013) from the University of California Press, Go West, Young Women: The Rise of Early Hollywood, Hilary Hallett explains how, thanks to immigrants seeking out futures and fortunes, Los Angeles became a burgeoning film city – and, in 1920, the only western city where women outnumbered men. Hallett, a ...

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Categories: FeaturesOf Special Interest

Wheeler Winston Dixon Tolls the Death of the Moguls

posted December 19, 2012

Moguls-Cover1

Wheeler Winston Dixon talks about how he went about researching his latest book, Death of the Moguls: The End of Classical Hollywood, which Rutgers University Press released in August 2012. Dixon is a prolific film historian based at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Among his many books are 21st Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era ...

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Categories: FeaturesOf Special Interest

Preserving “Time-Based Art” – An interview with Jeff Martin, IMAP

posted October 11, 2012

Jeff Martin at the Hirschhorn Symposium: Collaborations in Conserving Time-Based Art

Jeff Martin, the executive director of Independent Media Arts Preservation, is a respected authority on a challenging undertaking: to preserve the fast-evolving works known by such titles – never quite inclusive enough – as “time-based art.” Moving Image Archive News interviewed him as IMAP’s Archiving the Arts: A symposium addressing preservation in the creative process approaches ...

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Categories: EventsFeaturesOf Special Interest

NFPF Grant Winner: The Exploratorium

posted October 2, 2012

exploratorium

The Exploratorium, a San Francisco institution that explores the intersections of art, science, and human perception, and helps users to take a curious, playful approach to doing the same, will use a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to conserve Jon Boorstin’s Exploratorium, a documentary short filmed in 1974 that portrays the renowned Bay ...

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Categories: FeaturesNewsOf Special Interest

Work Continues on a Film Trove in Jordan

posted August 14, 2012

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A few years ago, an artist living in Amman, Jordan, saved a trove of 881 film cans and their contents from a trash pile at the defunct Russian Cultural Center. The Royal Film Commission Jordan agreed to store them, and they sat in a garage on a busy market street, largely forgotten. Eventually they came to the ...

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Categories: FeaturesOf Special Interest

Treacherous Subject: Doing Archival Work in Việt Nam

posted July 16, 2012

Photo by Carlos Puma, courtesy of University of California at Riverside

In her book Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism, issued in April by Temple University Press, Lan P. Duong, an associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside, takes feminist perspectives on post-Vietnam war era filmmakers Tony Bui and Tran Anh Hung; filmmaker, writer, and composer Trinh T. ...

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Categories: FeaturesOf Special Interest