Features

Film Dresses Fashion, Fashion Drapes Film

posted February 2, 2018

When Marketa Uhlirova and her colleagues first organized a festival of fashion in film, in 2006, theirs was a little-studied area of inquiry. So, they threw their net wide, to a range of questions and issues: to pretty much anything relating to fashion and costume and their role in the history and theory of film. And, conversely, film’s role in fashion.

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Diversity and Inclusion in Archiving

posted January 15, 2018

How is the archiving profession faring, when it comes to diversity and inclusion? The Journal of Western Archives will publish a special issue on diversity, inclusion, and cultural diversity during 2018. Its editors have disseminated a call for papers (deadline 1 April 2018), with such potential topics as the history of diversity in the archiving

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The Fuentes Family: Pioneer Home-Film Makers

posted December 22, 2017

Fluid migration has long shaped the Southwest of the United States — certainly since well before the U.S. fashioned the region from large tracts of Mexico during a military invasion in the 1840s, and certainly ever since. Unfortunately, even after the invention of moving film, audiovisual records of Mexican-American life were rare; but the Library of Congress has just designated a collection of home movies from border life during the 1920s as worthy of permanent preservation.

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Hollywood’s Confrontations with Nazism

posted December 16, 2017

What did Hollywood do, when Nazis came calling? Efforts by Nazis to influence Hollywood during the decade before World War II have long occupied historians of the period, resulting in numerous studies. Two new books have in recent months joined that parade, and have cast fresh light on an enormous controversy that arose in 2013 when two other books appeared that dealt with Hollywood’s confrontation with Nazism.

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Films from the National Film Registry Go Online, Free

posted December 12, 2017

To mark the holiday season, the U.S. Library of Congress has made 64 motion pictures that are on its National Film Registry freely available. The films in "Selections from the National Film Registry,” which are available online on the Library’s website, as well as on YouTube, are among hundreds that the Library has designated as worthy of permanent preservation due to their cultural, historical and aesthetic significance.

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Jayson Wall takes us Into the Archives

posted November 15, 2017

Jayson Wall bills his podcast, Into the Archives, as “a lively discussion with leading archivists and preservationist with their stories on saving film, television, and music of the 20th century.” Since August 2017, the longtime film-restoration insider has been hosting lively discussions with archivists and preservationists, and he has been living up to his pledge by eliciting from his subjects many tales from the trenches of film preservation as well as film production and distribution.

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Today is World Day for Audiovisual Heritage

posted October 26, 2017

Today (27 October) is World Day for Audiovisual Heritage. The 2017 theme is "Discover, Remember, and Share." Sharing is what many archives around the world are doing, in varied activities, to bring members of the public and film-archive specialists together to mark the contributions of audiovisual-preservation professionals and institutions. The many, varied events illustrate the range of activities that archives undertake.

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Archive Portrait: The Huntley Film Archives

posted October 23, 2017

The Huntley Film Archives, based in rural Herefordshire, holds a collection of more than 80,000 film titles, which makes it one of the largest commercial film libraries in the United Kingdom. Huntley licenses items to broadcasters and film-production companies, dated from 1895 to the present, in such fields as social history from Britain and around the world in such areas as advertising, architecture, art, education, entertainment, fashion, food, history, industry, media and technology, medicine, public personalities, religion, science, and transport.

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Mexican Film Archive Struck by Major Earthquake

posted September 25, 2017

The major earthquake that struck Mexico City and surrounding areas on September 19 caused loss of at least 319 lives, and destroyed many buildings including thousands of homes. Among structures seriously damaged by the tremor was Permanencia Voluntaria Film Archive, the only independent film archive in Mexico specializing in the collection and preservation of popular films. It is located in Tepoztlán, the epicenter of the quake, an hour from the capital.

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The VHS Legacy Can Be Saved, But Will It?

posted September 18, 2017

The VHS tape was such a clunky medium that it almost invited disdainful treatment. Never the archivist’s or librarian’s first choice of format, it nonetheless won out in the “videotape format wars” of the late 1970s and 1980s, and became the medium of choice. Now, in the era of digital recording and online streaming, those VHS tapes are slowly but surely deteriorating. Will Section 108 of the US Copyright Act save the day?

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