Clip of the Day: Life in Japanese America
posted March 26, 2012
Now, footage of the internment of Japanese Americans in camps in the Western United States is as hard to fathom as scraps of film footage can be to make out through the injuries of time. The Japanese American National Museum is dedicated to preserving such memories, and others from the long residence in North America
Video of the Day: Puff on This
posted March 20, 2012
What did the busy doctor of 1949 do to catch a moment’s pause on his busy rounds? [Please note: This scenario refers to a now-mythic era in American life when doctors actually left their offices and went to where the sick lay ailin’.] Why, of course, they smoked, as several items in a collection of
Film of the Day: Carib Gold
posted March 16, 2012
Carib Gold, a 1956 drama, is a rare document of its time: its cast was largely African American.
Arcadia Funds UCLA Collection of Middle East Media
posted March 14, 2012
The University of California at Los Angeles Library has announced a gift from the Arcadia Fund of $3.4-million to help it to preserve “ephemeral media” including a wide range of media artifacts that are serving to capture the rapidly evolving political changes in the Middle East. The new International Digitizing Ephemera Project’s goal is to
8th Orphan Film Symposium
posted March 13, 2012
Orphans 8: Made to Persuade 8th Orphan Film Symposium April 11-14, 2012 Museum of the Moving Image (Astoria, NY) The term “orphan film” refers to film in any form that has been abandoned by its owner or caretaker. For the eighth time since 1999, the Orphan Film Symposium will present a variety of daytime and
Rosebud: Not Just a Sled
posted December 30, 2011
Much has been written about how Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane so annoyed its quasi-subject, media baron William Randolph Hearst, that he set the dogs on Welles. Peter Rainer, a Bloomberg News arts and culture critic, revisits the sordid response, on the occasion of Warner Home Video’s 70th-anniversary re-issue of the film in a restored, three-disc
Three Films Unearthed in New Zealand
posted December 30, 2011
The National Film Preservation Foundation is presenting, on its website, three more films preserved through its collaboration with the New Zealand Film Archive. This second round of films includes Won in a Closet (1914), directed by and starring Mabel Normand, a 1917 automobile manufacturing saga from the Dodge Brothers, and the comedic short A Bashful
Rebirth of a Nation
posted December 30, 2011
D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation was the cinematic supercolliding superconductor of its day. Although odious in many respects, it helped shape film into a sometimes-more-than-middlebrow endeavor in the United States. Its reissue last month by Kino International in Blu-Ray ($39.95) and DVD ($29.95) versions prompted the New York Times to look
David Bowie Unearthed
posted December 30, 2011
Dr Who is not the only superhero to turn up in recent days. David Bowie footage, from the Ziggy Stardust period of his meteoric rise to fame, also has been rediscovered. In 1973, Bowie and band went onto the British hitmaker TV show, Tops of the Pops, to perform “Jean Genie.” The film went to
Whither Doctor Who?
posted December 27, 2011
Two early episodes of Dr Who can now be crossed off the long list of those feared lost.