Public Broadcasting’s Future and Its Contributions to Broadcasting’s Future
posted January 5, 2011
The new day is all digital. Motivated by that ongoing revolution, public-broadcasting planners have undertaken a broad survey of prospects and challenges.
Bill Morrison Revivifies Dying Filmstock
posted December 29, 2010
Renowned experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison has an unusual relation to the world of moving-image archives: He uses decaying film stock as his raw material. He uses the qualities of deteriorating nitrate film stock for various artistic, expressive ends. He speaks here with MIAN.
Historic Cricket Footage Found in a Shed
posted December 22, 2010
A family in England has discovered film from 1928-29 that is of great significance to both English and Australian histories of the game.
San Francisco, Days Before the Great Earthquake
posted December 8, 2010
From the Better Late Than Never department: The CBS News program, 60 Minutes, aired a fascinating segment in October 2010 about historic 1906 film of San Francisco’s main thoroughfare, Market Street, just days before the street and much of city were devastated by the great earthquake of 1906 and subsequent fire. The segment was about
Framing German Wartime Suffering
posted November 21, 2010
The more comfortable you are with the notion of retributive justice – and with its gory manifestations – the less bothered are you likely to be with what happened to German citizens in the closing phases of the Second World War. Some cultural and film commentators are revisiting those events, the way they continued to haunt individual and collective German memories, and how those traumas have found expression (often of an appallingly unreflective kind) in feature films.
Taking Stock of Cinema Treasures
posted November 4, 2010
All but about 17 movie fans in all of creation have had a favorite cinema – the one where they learned their love of the moving image, or the taste of their first love’s lips; the one that smelled of the sea and only half-blocked the rush of passing traffic; the one where they heard dropped Milk Duds roll from the back to the front of the house; the one where they sat, gobsmacked, at the rippling pecs of George Lazenby, or at the undress of Ursula Andress – in her breakout Dr. No (1962), or perhaps later, in Mountain of the Cannibal God (1978).
What Researchers Are Saying About Charlie Chaplin, and a Rare Chaplin Film is Rediscovered
posted August 27, 2010
It remains shocking to many film enthusiasts that the reception of Charlie Chaplin in America does not compare with the reception of Charlie Chaplin in, say, the United Kingdom, Europe, or even Japan. Even in the 1960s, children in many other nations grew up watching the Little Tramp and Chaplin’s other alter egos. Not so, in the United States, although a schooling in other greats of the silent era – Fatty Arbuckle, or Buster Keaton, say – has been, and remains, even more lacking. Still, a slowing of Chaplin-related publications, American or not, seems highly unlikely.
Detecting the History of Sound-on-Film
posted August 24, 2010
Twenty-four frames of one of the earliest surviving recordings of sound-on-film, a test strip that Eugene Lauste made between 1910 and 1912, merely hints at the revolution that was to come. Only 24 frames long, it belongs to a Florida collector who bought it at an estate sale along with other items from Lauste’s obscure career. Alongside the frames, which show nondescript images of plants, lies a series of black squiggles that encode sound – perhaps the first sound ever simultaneously reproduced with images on film.
Going Dutch on a Moving Image Archiving Degree
posted August 17, 2010
If you’re contemplating completing a master’s degree in moving-image archiving, you could hardly find a more appealing place to do so than Amsterdam. Apart from everything else – bike-friendly, crisscrossed with scenic canals, liberal beyond American dreams – it is home to world-class film collections and institutions that excel in restoration, research, and educational programs, and several of those have been involved in the University of Amsterdam’s archiving program since its inception in 2003. The program, in its seventh year, boasts an impressive record of combining solid schooling in the skills of the trade with a firm grounding in film history and related subjects. In Amsterdam’s master’s-degree program in the preservation and presentation of the moving image...
Keeping an Eye on Surveillance
posted July 23, 2010
Torin Monahan explores what happens when social anxiety reigns, and surveillance seems to offer a remedy, in his latest book, Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity (Rutgers University Press). There, the associate professor of human & organizational development and associate professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University examines the interplay of insecurity, surveillance, and inequality in