News

Classic Russian Films On YouTube

posted May 18, 2011

How’s your command of Russian, or at least of the Cyrillic alphabet? If you’re capable, with those, you could instantly be well on your way to watching 50 of the Russian film company Mosfilm’s finest productions, thanks to its ongoing efforts to make its gems freely available on the Mosfilm YouTube channel. By year’s end,

Continue Reading »

Kookaburra Goes to the Movies

posted May 2, 2011

Who’d have thought? In movies of old, the kookaburra provided the generic “jungle sound.” BirdNote, as heard on public-radio station KPLU, tells the tale.

Continue Reading »

Filming New York’s Finest

posted April 4, 2011

The New York City Police Museum in downtown Manhattan has artifacts dating from the city’s first settlement by Dutch pioneers, 300 years ago, to September 11 2001. It has early officer-identification forms; it has back issues of Spring 3100, a publication written by and about members of the force; and it has film and video

Continue Reading »

Skip the AV Geek

posted March 30, 2011

Dear moving-image aficionado: How did you come to be one? Skip Elsheimer, who travels far and wide presenting selections from his collection of 23,000 films, describes how he entered the field, and became an “educational film archivist” and self-style “Skip the AV Geek” in a posting on Reesenews, a multimedia magazine devoted to life at

Continue Reading »

The Silents That Schooled Soviets

posted March 29, 2011

On Sunday, March 6 2011, National Public Radio ran a segment about 10 “lost” American silent films that were found in the Russian film archive, Gosfilmofond, which gave them to the Library of Congress. The 10 films are part of a stash of some 200 silents discovered at Gosfilmofond. “American movies were, in fact, distributed

Continue Reading »

Preserving a Moving Revolution

posted March 29, 2011

Revolutions, often great times for freedom, and terrible ones of suffering, also frequently threaten cultural collections. In late February 2011, The Atlantic reported on efforts to preserve Internet content from the Egyptian revolution, including the many moving images that informed and motivated militants and other citizens.

Continue Reading »

Film Title Design

posted March 16, 2011

Ian Albinson has posted his video presentation for the SXSW “Excellence in Title Design” competition screening, his “A Brief History of Title Design.” Among responses to Albinson’s posting is this full-length Spanish-language treatment of the history of title design, by Ferran Albi.

Continue Reading »

Concern for Hungarian Archives

posted February 26, 2011

Archivists and historians are up in arms about a Hungarian government plan to destroy records kept by the country's Communist-era security apparatus.

Continue Reading »

What a Moving Image Archivist Does

posted January 8, 2011

Lance Watsky, the coordinator of the UCLA Moving Image Archive Studies (MIAS) program, is featured in an online interview about the variety of jobs available in the field. And on Friday, January 14 2001, at 4:05pm Pacific Coast Time, he will be featured on “Our Digital Future,” a radio show about libraries and archives that

Continue Reading »

Twenty-Five Films Added to the National Film Registry

posted December 28, 2010

The Library of Congress has named 25 motion pictures that are "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

Continue Reading »

Moving Image Archive News