The Bay Area Video Coalition is looking for an unpaid preservation intern, to begin in February 2012 and work at least three months. BAVC is a leading vendor in the field of archival video and audio preservation and provides training and access to emerging media technologies for public media producers, independent artists, at-risk youths, and non-profit organizations. BAVC a seeking a student in library, archives, or film production or history studies who aspires to learn about the field of preservation, archival audio and video formats, and the developing field of born-digital and tape-based moving image preservation. Details about desired skills, deadlines, and other issues is online.

Democracy Now!, the public- and political-affairs radio/TV news hour broadcasting on 900 stations, is looking for unpaid but subsidized audiovisual archive interns for its 70,000 media elements – books, photographs, artifacts, and audiovisual materials such as field recordings, oral histories, interviews, and news footage from the 1980s to today. The archive serves daily operations and production of Democracy Now! as well as researchers, filmmakers, artists, and educators. The position requires a 10-week commitment and 15-20 hours per week, scheduled flexibly in the company’s Manhattan office. Internships are unpaid, but academic credit can be arranged. Details of how to apply (with cover letter and résumé via email by January 27 2012 – and after that date, for subsequent internships) are online.

In Switzerland, La Cinémathèque suisse is making an 80%-time hire in its conservation and restoration division.

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum seeks a full-time media cataloger to create original and revised descriptive records for a collection of 5,163 ¾” U-matic video tapes in the course of a three-year grant-funded project. The Nashville, Tennesee, institution is in a three-year construction project that will more than double its exhibition and education space and will build a new climate-controlled vault to house its collection of over 1 million photos, audio recording, moving images, and 3D artifacts. Job requirement and other details are online.

The Country Music Hall of Fame is also looking for a media cataloging intern.

In Los Angeles, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is looking for a head of publicity and a development officer to raise money to help raise $150-million to build a museum of motion pictures in Los Angeles, and to lead the Academy’s long-term development operations.

The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh is looking for a full-time research associate for its time-based media collection, to catalog, research, and document its collection of approximately 920 film, video, audio, and computer-based art works; installations that incorporate time-based media; and related archival materials. Details are online including requirements which include a master’s degree in moving image preservation or equivalent combination of academic training and work experience, and an advanced understanding of avant-garde film and video history.

YCM Laboratories, a 35mm motion picture restoration lab in Burbank, California, is hiring hands-on film technicians with skills in nitrate and safety negative/positive repair, with timing and projecting experience preferred. Resumés (no calls) to Eric Aijala, Laboratory Superintendent, YCM Laboratories: ycmaijala@aol.com

Cine Tectonica: Film On The Faultline

Alan Wright of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, has made a call for articles for a book to be titled Cine Tectonica: Film on the Faultline (Intellect Press). Abstracts of 250 words, along with a short biography, are due to him – alan.wright@canterbury.ac.nz – by February 6, 2012.

In his announcement, Wright says:

“The recent earthquakes in Chile, Christchurch, and Japan have left a host of powerful images in the minds and memories of millions of people around the world. Film has always played a crucial role in the imagination of disaster. From its earliest days, cinema has registered the impact of seismic events. The aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake is recorded on film. In New Zealand, footage from the Napier earthquake of 1931 shows the destruction of the town. Hollywood even recast New Zealand in Green Dolphin Street (Saville, 1947) as the fictional setting for a special effects mega-quake and tsunami.

“An earthquake is also a conceptual event of telluric proportions. An emergent seismic consciousness, reflected in a number of contemporary films from Iran, Chile, Haiti, Japan, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Korea, the USA, and New Zealand, has shaken to the core those solid and secure political, economic, ethical, and ontological categories which ground the project of modernity in its current globalised form. Perhaps the spate of earthquakes in 2010-11 can serve a similar function for our present geopolitical formation as the famous Lisbon earthquake of 1755 held for the age of Enlightenment.

“The earthquake indicates a fissure, a rupture that forces us to reconsider our established notions of film history and criticism. Faultlines, by definition, are located on the edges of tectonic plates. Film history and theory too must confront the tectonic shift in focus away from the centre (Europe, North America) toward the periphery (the Southern Cone, the Pacific Rim, China, Central Asia and the Caucasus, the Mediterrean Basin and North Africa).”

Wright invites papers that address any of:

• fictional and non-fictional representation of earthquakes in film
• narrative form, genre, and the cinematic image
• archival footage and digital witnessing (digital camera, phone, YouTube, Facebook…)
• social memory and history
• modernity, film, and ruins
• heritage, home, exile
• mourning, trauma, and survival
• disaster as media spectacle
• alternative forms of film and media production, distribution, and exhibition
• racial, ethnic, and indigenous experience of natural disaster
• urban planning and renewal
• disaster capitalism and compassion fatigue
• local and national politics
• international solidarity and community activism
• banality, catastrophe, and everyday life
• the temporality of crisis, the event, and emergency

September 21-23 2011

Austrian Film Gallery, Krems, Austria

Image: Austrian Film Gallery Krems

In cooperation with Filmarchiv Austria and the Austrian Film Museum, Austrian Film Gallery, Krems, is holding a symposium that offers panels and discussions on various subjects, from restoration ethics to documentation, as well as on practical challenges of new digital technologies.

Participating archives & institutions include George Eastman House, EYE Film Institute Netherlands, Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen, Imperial War Museum London, Fuji Film Corporation, reto.ch Ltd, Danish Film Institute, Arri Group, JOANNEUM RESEARCH, hs art, Filmarchiv Austria, Austrian Film Museum, and others.

Topics of sessions include “The Digital Future of Analogue Film Archives”; “There’s No Such Thing as Digital Restoration”; “Grain and Pixel: Preserving, Restoring, and Presenting Film in Transition”; and “Photographic Film Technology for Digital Image Preservation”

Details, including speakers list and biographies, registration, and links to local accommodations, can be found online.

The Lifecycle of the Digital Audiovisual Asset
Digital Asset Management in the Real World

September 23, 2011
Los Angeles, CA

Registration is now available for DAS 2011 – Digital Asset Symposium, offered by the Association of Moving Image Archivists, the world’s largest association of moving image archivists.

The gathering aims to provide in-depth information on digital technology. Case studies will provide attendees an opportunity to compare approaches in different archiving communities. The sessions will bring content creators, caretakers and vendors together to address the realities with which we are all faced, what works in theory, and what works in the real world. In past years, case studies have included NBC Universal, Warner Bros., BBC Scotland, National Geographic Television, Swedish National Archive, and WNET.

Information and registration are available online.