Kartemquin’s Archive in Good Hands
posted December 28, 2020
The award-winning Kartemquin Films, a leading American producer of social justice-related films, has been keeping its archive in a storage facility for three decades, but now is celebrating its placement of the collection with the film archive at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
Jack Shaheen’s Preservation of a Troubling Film Legacy
posted May 2, 2018
Hollywood and other branches of the American entertainment industry have frequently disparaged and abused Arabs, Muslims, and Americans of those ethnicities. Adverse depictions have long been so common as to be almost automatic. Those stereotypes are the study of a project at New York University based on an unusual collection: the archive donated by Jack G. Shaheen.
Keeping Frank and Caroline Mouris Animated
posted June 25, 2015
Three films that animator Frank Mouris prepared while a graduate student at Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture, and that are now in the possession of Yale’s Film Study Center, have just been guaranteed preservation through a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
J. Fred MacDonald
posted April 22, 2015
One of the true originals of moving-image archiving, J. Fred MacDonald, has died. A longtime professor of history at Northeastern Illinois University until his retirement, he amassed one of the world’s largest personal collections of films of celebrated variety.
New Books on Moving Images and Archiving
posted July 1, 2014
New books on moving-image works and related issues of discovery, archiving, preservation, and restoration run like wine. Here are some books that have appeared this year.
The Great War in Film and Cultural Memory
posted February 3, 2014
"Europeana 1914-1918," a vast online amalgamation of resources relating to World War I, includes some 660 hours of film reflecting the military and civilian involvement of many nations.
“Men and Dust”: Breath That Kills
posted January 16, 2014
Miners have been dying from varieties of pneumoconiosis since they have been shuttled via mine elevators to toil in shafts thick with dust that, once it sufficiently scars the lungs, suffocates its victims. In 1940, Sheldon Dick bore witness to the plague in his "Men and Dust."
The 1966 March on Cicero, A Step Towards Equity
posted January 2, 2014
"Cicero March," an eight-minute, black-and-white film from 1966 that depicts the fraying of African American patience with the slow redress of racial inequity, is among 25 films that the Library of Congress last week selected for permanent preservation.
More on the Mysterious Life of A Cache of Sports Films
posted October 3, 2012
Back in our early days, Hannah Palin described her work at the University of Washington Libraries Special Collections, hunting down and spruicing up a large collecting of her institution’s sports films. Here’s an update on those, in the form of a video feature from the university.
All the News That’s Fit to Archive
posted September 21, 2012
The New York Times published an article on 18 September 2012 about Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive’s latest accomplishment: The archive’s online collection now includes the total news production footage of 20 channels over the last three years. That’s more than 1,000 news series and 350,000 separate programs.