Archival News 53.2 (Winter 2014)
Edited by Katherine Groo
1. PRESERVATION
Library of Congress
Announces 2013 Film Registry
Library of Congress
Announces 2013 Film Registry

In December, the Librarian of Congress,
James H. Billington, announced the annual selection of motion pictures to join the
National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Spanning the period
1919-2002, the films named to the registry include Hollywood classics,
documentaries, silent films, independent, and experimental motion pictures.
This year’s selections bring the number of films in the registry to 625, a
small part of the Library’s vast moving-image collection of 1.2 million items.
The 2013 registry list includes Mary Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964), The Quiet Man (John Ford, 1952), Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf(Mike Nichols, 1966). The list also includes Forbidden Planet (Fred Wilcox, 1956), one of the seminal
science-fiction films of the 1950s; The
Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman, 1983), an epic tribute to the pioneers of the
space program; and Decasia (Bill
Morrison, 2002), which was created from scraps of decades-old, decomposing
film.
The silent films tapped for preservation are Daughter of Dawn
(Norbert Myles, 1920), featuring an all-Native-American cast of Comanches and
Kiowas; A Virtuous Vamp (David
Kirkland and Sidney Franklin, 1919), starring Constance Talmadge; and Ella Cinders (Alfred Green, 1926).
Under the terms of the National Film
Preservation Act, each year the Librarian of Congress names twenty-five films
to the National Film Registry that are "culturally, historically or
aesthetically” significant. The films must be at least ten years old. The
Librarian makes the annual registry selections after reviewing hundreds of
titles nominated by the public and conferring with Library film curators and
the distinguished members of the National Film Preservation Board (NFPB). The
public is urged to make nominations for next year’s registry at the NFPB’s
website.
For each title named to the registry,
the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation works to
ensure that the film is preserved for future generations, either through the
Library’s motion-picture preservation program or through collaborative ventures
with other archives, motion-picture studios, and independent filmmakers.
[Above: Image from Decasia (Bill Morrison, 2002)]
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NYTimes: Vinegar Syndrome Saves Aging Pornos
NYTimes: Vinegar Syndrome Saves Aging Pornos
In January, Erik Piebenburg of the New York Times reported
on Vinegar Syndrome, an
organization dedicated to the restoration and redistribution of vintage
pornography and related ephemera from the "golden age of American hardcore
filmmaking: 1969-1986.” Founded by Joe Rubin and Ryan Emerson in 2012, Vinegar
Syndrome serves a growing demand from film theaters and museums for images from
pornographic film history. From the Times:
An
exhibition now at the Museum of Sex in Manhattan is devoted to the actress
Linda Lovelace, who starred in the 1972 film "Deep Throat.” Closing Sunday, at
the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, is the first American museum
show to feature the homoerotic works of the illustrator Touko Laaksonen, a.k.a.
Tom of Finland (1920-91), and the photographer Bob Mizer (1922-92). […]
In
New York, several adventurous film programmers — many too young to remember the
region’s "adult film” past — are teaming with Vinegar Syndrome to present
X-rated releases on the big screen. Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn is partnering
with the company on a yearlong series, Nitehawk Naughties, devoted to
restorations of films from the '70s, including "The Opening of Misty
Beethoven,” which will be shown on Jan. 31. The CineKink festival, which
focuses on sex-related cinema, showed "Misty Beethoven” last year, and hopes to
feature one of Vinegar Syndrome’s restored releases at its next festival in
February, said Lisa Vandever, CineKink’s director.
In
March, Anthology Film Archives, the Manhattan center that focuses on
experimental and avant-garde projects, will continue its "In the Flesh” series
of hard-core X-rated films from Vinegar Syndrome and Distribpix, a distributor
of X-rated movies that through the 1980s actually produced films. All of the
titles will be shown on 35 millimeter, as they were originally. Together, they
reflect the era of what Anthology is calling "porn chic,” which started in the
early ’70s when hard-core sex met high production values.
More information and a slideshow of poster images from the
Vinegar Syndrome collection available here.
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Two Sellers Films Found in Trash Can
Two Sellers Films Found in Trash Can
The
master prints of Dearth of a Salesman (Leslie
Arliss, 1957) and Insomnia is Good (Leslie
Arliss, 1957), two short films co-written by Peter Sellers, have been found
among twenty-one film canisters salvaged from a trashcan outside of Park Lane
Films in London. The building manager, Robert Farrow, found the canisters when
operations shuttered in 1996 and kept them for more than twenty years. When
clearing out his cupboard, Farrow discovered the Sellers shorts inside.
The
films will be shown at the Southend festival on May 1, 2014. Further details of
the discovery can be found here.
You can watch a clip from Insomnia is Good (Peter
Sellers, 1957) here.
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2. LEGAL
Judiciary Committee Hearing on Scope of Fair Use
Google Wins Fair Use Battle
Google Wins Fair Use Battle
In November, federal Judge for the United States Court of
Appeals Denny Chin dismissed the Authors Guild’s lawsuit over Google’s library
book scanning project. The case had been in litigation for more than eight
years. In
his 30-page decision, Chin delivered a ringing endorsement of Google’s
scanning program and bolstered the concept of fair use.
Chin
found Google easily prevailed on three of the four fair use factors, and lost
slightly on one. According to the ruling, the scans facilitate text and data
mining, "thereby opening up new fields of research.” Further, Google Books does
not "supersede or supplant books,” but rather it "adds value to the original,
and allows for the creation of new information, new aesthetics, new insights
and understandings.”
Chin
acknowledged that Google is "a for-profit entity and Google Books is largely a
commercial enterprise.” However, he noted, "Google does not sell the scans it
has made of books for Google Books; it does not sell the snippets that it
displays; and it does not run ads on the About the Book pages that
contain snippets; it does not engage in the direct commercialization of
copyrighted works.” While Chin conceded that "Google does, of course, benefit
commercially in the sense that users are drawn to the Google websites by the
ability to search Google Books,” the educational benefits outweighed these
concerns.
The American
Library Association
praised the decision.
Further
information on the decision available here.
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New Works Enter
Public Domain on January 1
New Works Enter
Public Domain on January 1
On January 1—Public
Domain Day—dozens of new artists and artworks entered the public domain. A
complete list of new additions to the public domain can be found here.
In addition, Duke
University’s Center for the Public Domain released a
list of the works that would have entered the public domain in the United
States this year, had 1976 Copyright Law never passed. This law extended the
maximum copyright term from fifty-six years after the date of an author’s death
to seventy years.
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EFF Celebrates
Copyright Week
3. INSTITUTIONS AND
ORGANIZATIONS
NZ Antarctic Trust
Discovers Century-Old Shackleton Images
NZ Antarctic Trust
Discovers Century-Old Shackleton Images

Photographic
negatives left a century ago in Captain Scott’s last expedition base at Cape
Evans have been discovered and conserved by New Zealand’s Antarctic Heritage Trust. The
negatives were found in expedition photographer Herbert Ponting’s darkroom and
have been painstakingly conserved revealing never before seen Antarctic images.
The
Trust’s conservation specialists discovered the clumped together cellulose
nitrate negatives in a small box as part of the Ross Sea Heritage Restoration
Project. The negatives were removed from Antarctica by the Trust earlier this
year. Detailed conservation treatment back in New Zealand revealed twenty-two
images. The photographs are from Ernest Shackleton’s 1914-1917 Ross Sea Party,
which spent time living in Scott’s hut after being stranded on Ross Island when
their ship blew out to sea.
The
images are available here.
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Renovation Plans at
the National Film Archive of India
Renovation Plans at
the National Film Archive of India
The National Film Archive of India
(NFAI) will soon be renovated and turned into a digital public library of
archival material, which will include films, movie posters, and movie stills
among other artifacts. The NFAI, which celebrated its fiftieth year on February
1, will also acquire a new vault. The NFAI administration is planning to
reassess their entire collection to develop a comprehensive preservation and
digitization strategy.
For more information see the Times of India.
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Indiana University
Adds 7,000 Titles to Online Catalog
Indiana University
Adds 7,000 Titles to Online Catalog
The Indiana University Libraries
Film Archive just added over 7,000 titles to the online library catalog, IUCat. The titles
come from a 2011 acquisition of 16mm educational films from the school system
of Lane County, Oregon. The 7,000 titles cover 50 years of classroom films from
the 1940s to the early 90s. While the films were primarily directed to
elementary students, the films cover topics of interest to a wide range of
scholarship. Titles include Protecting
the Accident Scene, a 1954 film from the Board of Police Standards and
Training; Bias: A Four-Letter Word(1976),
an examination of how discrimination works; andEmergency Childbirth(1960), a film that trains viewers how to
deliver babies in unexpected circumstances.
For more information on this project please contact: filmarch@indiana.edu. See also here, here, and here.
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4. EXHIBITIONS
CNC Presents "Voix du
Fantôme”
CNC Presents "Voix du
Fantôme”

As part of the 2014 Viva
patrimoine! festival, the Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée
(CNC) in Paris hosted a series of film workshops, roundtable discussions, and
events, including "Voix du fantôme” (Voices of the Phantom) on February 5-6. "Voix
du fantôme” showcased newly-restored silent films with original sets and a soundscape
that included a Wurlitzer electric piano, a viola, and drums that mixed
acoustic with electric sounds.
Further festival event details can be found here.
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Deutsche Kinemathek:
"Unseen Seen”
Deutsche Kinemathek:
"Unseen Seen”

From January 23 until April 27, "Unseen Seen,” an exhibition
curated by Austrian photographer Reiner Riedler and film archivist Volkmar
Ernst will be on display at the Deutsche
Kinemathek (DK). The exhibition includes large-scale images from reels of archival
film. During several visits to the
Kinemathek archives, Riedler photographed backlit archival materials, emphasizing
the physical properties and composition of each object. The exhibition strives
to make the aesthetic quality of celluloid materials, known primarily only to
archivists and projectionists until now, accessible to a wider audience. In
addition, every visitor is invited to "project” his or her own cinematic and
filmed memories onto the photographs of films.
Complete event details available from DK.
[Above left: Ginger E
Fred (Federico Fellini, 1986); Above right: Trois Couleurs: Bleu (Krzysztof Kieslowski). Photo/Copyright:
Reiner Riedler]
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HK Film Archive
Screens Four Restored Chinese Films
HK Film Archive
Screens Four Restored Chinese Films
The Hong Kong Film
Archive (HKFA) and the China
Film Archive (CFA) have collaboratively restored more than 200 films,
including many early classics. Between February and April 2014, the HKFA’s
"Restored Treasures” series will screen four digitally-restored films from the
first decades of Chinese cinema, including the earliest extant Chinese film, Laborer’s Love (Zhang Shichuan, 1922); Red Heroine (Yimin Wen, 1929); Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, 1948); and
Captain Guan (1951), starring and
directed by renowned actor Shi Hui.
To complement the screenings, a seminar entitled "Digital Restoration Strategies
of the China Film Archive” was held on February 23 at the Cinema of the HKFA.
The Deputy Director of the Technique Division of the CFA, Zuo Ying, and the
Deputy Manager of the Technique Department of the CFA, Wang Zheng, discussed
contemporary restoration and digitization practices in China.
For more details and a complete screening schedule, see here.
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5. CONFERENCES, SYMPOSIA, AND WORKSHOPS
Annual AMIA Conference
Annual AMIA Conference
The Association for Moving Image Archivists’ annual
conference was held in Richmond, Virginia on November 6–9. Conference panel
themes included (among others) the future of film stock for archival
preservation; recent discoveries and preservation methods for sound-on-disc
technologies; video game preservation; and queer perspectives on the archives.
In advance of the event, several day-long workshops were held, including "Small
Gauge Projection and the Art of Projector Maintenance and Repair” and
"Community Archiving,” along with Reel
Thing XXXI, a series of presentations and screenings dedicated to
preservation and restoration technologies.
For a complete program, see AMIA.
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Huntley Film Archives Offers "Practice
of Film Archiving” Workshop
Huntley Film Archives Offers "Practice
of Film Archiving” Workshop
From March 31 to April 2, the Huntley Film
Archives will host a film-handling course for beginner archivists in the United
Kingdom. The event will take place over three days, with participants residing
at the archive in order to spend as much time as possible learning hands-on
practical skills. The course will cover nitrate identification and handling, 35
mm and 16 mm Steenbeck use, small gauges, simple film restoration skills, storage know-how, cataloguing,
screening and access, copying, and digitizing.
For a full timetable or more information, please contact caroline@huntleyarchives.com.
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Personal
Digital Archiving 2013
Personal
Digital Archiving 2013
On February 21–22, the Personal Digital
Archiving 2013 Conference welcomed a broad community working to ensure
long-term access for personal collections and archives. This year, the
conference theme focused on the relationships between collective and individual
actions in preserving personal digital content. Presentations addressed the challenges
of archiving family photographs and home movies, personal health and financial
data, blogs, email and other correspondence. Participants also explored interface
design for archives; institutional practices; community outreach; archive tools;
and funding models.
The event was co-sponsored by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the
Humanities, the National Digital Information Infrastructure Program at the Library
of Congress, and the University
of Maryland Libraries.
Presentations, photos, and other materials from
the conference can be found at The Internet Archive.
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6. AWARDS
Mike Mashon Receives Career Achievement Award
Mike Mashon Receives Career Achievement
Award
The Denver Silent Film Festival awarded
Mike Mashon the Career Achievement Award at its Opening Night Reception on
February 28. Mashon is Head of Moving Images for the Library of Congress Motion Picture,
Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, where he has responsibility
for one of the world’s largest film and video collections. Under his direction,
the Moving Image Section is responsible for the acquisition, conservation,
cataloging, storage, preservation, and researcher accessibility of the more
than 1.3 million film and video items held at the Packard Campus for Audio
Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Virginia.
Mashon has supervised many film
restoration projects, and is the author of several articles on media history
and preservation.
The Denver Silent Film Festival is a
nonprofit organization that celebrates silent cinema via its exhibition of
films from around the world and through community outreach to entertain and
educate audiences about the historical, cultural, and artistic importance of
silent movies.
For more information, see here.
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NHF Named 2013 Silver Light Award Winner
NHF Named 2013 Silver Light Award
Winner
The Association of Moving
Image Archivists (AMIA) recognized Northeast
Historic Film (NHF) with their Silver Light Award, which acknowledges
career achievement in moving image archiving. Measures of achievement may
include substantial contributions to the field over an extended period,
leadership in the field, work in professional societies or other professional
activities, writings or publications, preservation and restoration projects,
innovations that advance the cause of preservation, and patronage donated to
archives or archival projects.
NHF is a non-profit moving image archive located in the Alamo Theatre, a
1916 cinema building, in Bucksport, Maine. Their
mission is to collect and preserve the film and video record of northern New
England (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts), and to provide
public access to the history and culture of the region embodied in it.
Andrea McCarty of the Wesleyan
University Cinema Archives presented the award. She stated, "The impact of
Northeast Historic Film on the field reflects the founders’ ingenuity,
perseverance, creativity and, above all, vision executed with the highest
standards. Many younger moving image archivists have been nurtured as interns,
fellows, or employees of NHF. Now they, like so many apple seeds, have
scattered across the landscape dedicating themselves to our moving image
heritage and influencing the course of the future.”
McCarty’s full remarks can be read here.
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7. PUBLICATIONS AND
DVDS
David Pierce, "The
Survival of American Silent Feature Films, 1912-1929”
David Pierce, "The
Survival of American Silent Feature Films, 1912-1929”
In December, the Library of Congress published "The Survival of American Silent Feature
Films: 1912–1929," the first comprehensive survey of American feature
films that survived the silent era of motion pictures. Previous documentation
established that nearly 11,000 (10,919) silent feature films of American origin
were released from 1912 through 1929. There was, however, no definitive,
systematic study on how many of these films still existed and where any surviving
elements were located in the world’s leading film archives and private
collections.
The study reveals some startling facts
about America’s endangered silent-film heritage. Only 14 percent—about 1,575
titles—of the feature films produced and distributed domestically from 1912–1929
exist in their original format. Five percent of those that survived in their
original 35 mm format are incomplete. Eleven percent of the films that are
complete only exist as foreign versions or in lower-quality formats.
Commissioned by the NFPB, the study was
written by historian-archivist David Pierce and published by the Council on
Library and Information Resources (CLIR). It is one of several congressionally
mandated studies of the nation’s cinematic and recorded sound patrimony. The
report is available as a free download at the NFPB’s
website as
well as CLIR’s website. As part of the research for the study,
Pierce prepared an inventory database of information on archival, commercial,
and private holdings—who has custody of the films, how complete they are, the
films’ formats and where the best surviving copies can be found. The report
concludes that the existence of the database will allow the repatriation of
lost American movies. Films initially thought lost have been found and
repatriated from Australia, New Zealand, France, and many other countries.
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Jaimie Baron, The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the
Audiovisual Experience (Routledge, 2014)
Jaimie Baron, The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the
Audiovisual Experience (Routledge, 2014)
The Archive Effect examines the problems of
representation inherent in the appropriation of archival film and video footage
for historical purposes. Baron analyzes the way in which the meanings of
archival documents are modified when they are placed in new texts and contexts,
constructing the viewer’s experience of and relationship to the past they
portray. Rethinking the notion of the archival document in terms of its
reception and the spectatorial experiences it generates, she explores the
‘archive effect’ as it is produced across the genres of documentary,
mockumentary, experimental, and fiction films. This work discusses how, for
better or for worse, the archive effect is mobilized to create new histories,
alternative histories, and misreadings of history.
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Criterion Releases
Six World Cinema Project Films
Criterion Releases
Six World Cinema Project Films

Criterion has collected six restorations from Martin
Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation
(WCF)—in each case either making their digital debut or arriving back in print—in
a new box set, with two films included on each of three Blu-ray discs. Titles
include the first WCF restoration project Trances
(Ahmed El Maânouni, 1981); Redes (Fred
Zinnemann and Emilio Gómez Muriel, 1936); Dry
Summer (Metin Erksan, 1964); Touki Bouki
(Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973); A River Called Titas (Ritwik Ghatak,
1974); and The Housemaid (Ki-young, 1960). Each of the six films
includes a short introduction by Martin Scorsese, followed by a longer
interview segment (or in the case of Redes, a visual essay) featuring
someone involved with either the original film or its restoration.
For further details see Criterion
and the NYTimes.
[Above: Image from Touki
Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973)]
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8. ONLINE RESOURCES
British Library
Releases Over One Million Images
British Library
Releases Over One Million Images

The British Library has released over a
million images onto Flickr
Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. Theseimages were taken from the
pages of 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century books and cover a wide range of
subjects and formats, including maps, geological diagrams, illustrations,
comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, landscapes, wall paintings,
and more.
The British Library hopes that users will help identify the
images and, to this end, plans to launch a crowdsourcing application at the
beginning of next year. The Library
would like to collaborate with researchers and anyone else with ideas or
suggestions of how to markup, classify, and explore this set of visual data.
They are looking to crowdsource information about what is depicted in the
images themselves and use analytical methods to interpret them as a whole.
The British Library also hopes to stimulate and support research concerning
printed illustrations, maps, and other material not currently studied.
More information on the project can be found here.
[Above: Image
taken from page 582 of The United States
of America: A Study of the American Commonwealth, Its Natural Resources, People,
Industries, Manufactures, Commerce, and Its Work in Literature, Science,
Education and Self-Government. (By various authors.)]
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BFI Announces Video-on-Demand
Service
BFI Announces Video-on-Demand
Service

In January, BFI Chair Greg Dyke unveiled the BFI Player, a new video-on-demand platform that
offers a wide range of free and pay-per-view moving-image material. The content
of the player is divided into seven different collections: London Film
Festival; British Cinema funded by the BFI Film Fund; Edwardian Britain, which
includes 28 hours of rare footage from Sagar Mitchel and James Kenyon; Cult
Cinema; Sight and Sound Selections; Gothic Cinema; and Inside Film, which
showcases films about filmmaking and filmmakers.
[Above: Image from Epic
of Everest (Captain John Noel, 1924), which was restored by the BFI; it
premiered on the BFI player on the same day it was screened at the BFI London
Film Festival]
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Film Archives UK
Launches New Website
Film Archives UK
Launches New Website
Welcome to FA UK! from Film Archives UK on Vimeo.
Sunday, October 27, 2013, marked the UNESCO World Day for
Audiovisual Heritage and archives around the world joined together to celebrate
audiovisual collections and the organizations working to protect, preserve, and
provide access. As part of the celebrations, Film Archives UK (FA UK) launched
a new website and, in the
coming year, will be encouraging more individuals and institutions to join FA
UK, a network of industry professionals, archivists, conservators, scholars,
and associated organizations and individuals interested in and committed to the
work and development of the UK’s public sector film archives.
More information available
here.
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German Culture and Media Commission
Introduces "Europeana 1914-1918”
German Culture and Media Commission
Introduces "Europeana 1914-1918”

In January, the German Deputy Federal
Government Commissioner for Culture and Media, Günter Winands, launched Europeana 1914-1918, an important pan-European collection of original First
World War source material. The online archive is the result of three years of
work by 20 European countries and includes 400,000 rare documents digitized by
10 state libraries and two other partners in Europe; 660 hours of unique film
material digitized by audiovisual archives; 90,000 personal papers and
memorabilia of some 7,000 people involved in the war, held by their families
and digitized at special events in 12 countries.
On the occasion of the launch, Minister
of Culture Monika Grütters stated: "Among the numerous projects the Federal
Government of Germany is initiating and financially supporting during the current
Centenary 2014, Europeana 1914-1918 is a highlight due to its pan-European
dimension. It shows the stark difference between the European disruptions of
that time and our way of cooperating nowadays. It is vital for the Government
to point out, especially to young people, that today’s Europe is a union based
on shared values, policies and justice. That’s the best way to avoid the wars,
terror and fragmentation that Europe suffered in the 20th century. We don’t
just want to show historical events, we want to use them for the present and
the future. The Europeana project will help shape our views of that time and it
will make a great contribution to the mutual understanding of the European
people, despite the conflicts of history.”
Further information can be found here.
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Internet
Archive Residents Create Tumblrs of Virtual Curiosities
Internet
Archive Residents Create Tumblrs of Virtual Curiosities

Last year, a group of Internet
Archive
digital residents created Tumblrs using the things they found interesting in
the Internet Archive. In January, the Internet Archive began unveiling these
projects. One per week will be released throughout the year. They will be
posted at the Internet Archive tumblr and, thereafter, will be accessible at
their own URL.
Several projects have been released so
far, including A History of Linux Websites by Steven
Ovadia,
which traces the history of Linux through the screenshots of the web sites of
Linux distributions and projects; Most Frequent Word Search by Jeff Thompson; and, more recently, Entropic Me, a project created by Angela Smith. Smith searched the Archive for images using the tags "selfie,”
"self-portrait,” "self,” and "self photography” and then created a new archive with these pieces glitched alongside her own
modified self-portrait images.
[Above: Image from Entropic
Me by Angela Smith]
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9. TECHNOLOGY
Video Innovation
Restores Holocaust Testimony
Video Innovation
Restores Holocaust Testimony
In the mid 1990s, the USC
Shoah Foundation
crossed the globe collecting testimony from survivors and witnesses of the
Holocaust. In just a few years, they had taped nearly 52,000 testimonies in 56
countries. But there were unfortunate consequences of capturing so many
testimonies so quickly; over the years, the post-production team discovered many
technical problems: misaligned cameras and malfunctioning microphones left
pockets of static and flicker on a fraction of the 235,000 tapes. Some of the
flaws were so severe that the faces of the survivors were not even visible in
parts of their testimony.
The original testimonies were recorded
on Beta SP tapes. In 2009, the foundation began transferring the entire 105,000
hours of testimony to a digital format using robotic migration technology. In
the process, 12,000 tapes with technical problems were flagged. Using a
combination of technologies, including Picasa’s facial recognition software,
the restoration team was able to identify "bad” source images and replace them
with the nearest "good” one.
For further details on the restoration
project, see Wired.
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Paramount Becomes
First Studio to Stop Distributing Film Prints
Paramount Becomes
First Studio to Stop Distributing Film Prints
Paramount Pictures has become the first
major studio to stop releasing movies on film in the United States. Paramount
recently notified theater owners that Anchorman
2: The Legend Continues (Adam McKay, 2013) would be the last movie it would
release on 35 mm film.
The decision will likely encourage
other studios to follow suit, accelerating the complete phase-out of film,
possibly by the end of the year. "It’s
of huge significance,” said Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film
& Television Archive. "For 120 years, film and 35 mm has been the format of
choice for theatrical presentations. Now we’re seeing the end of that. I’m not
shocked that it’s happened, but how quickly it has happened.”
Further details can be found here and here. Jan Christopher Horak’s interview with NPR on the Paramount decision
can be found here. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody reflects on Paramount and the end of
film here.
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"Archival News” reports recent news highlights from the media archive community for the Cinema Journal readership. Some information in this column comes courtesy of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) listserv, along with institutional newsletters, websites, and press releases. This column is updated quarterly. Contributions to this column are welcomed. Information should be sent to Katherine Groo, Lecturer, Film and Visual Culture, School of Language and Literature, University of Aberdeen, Taylor Bldg. A, Aberdeen AB24 3UB, Scotland; phone +44 (0)1224-701590; email: k.groo@abdn.ac.uk.
Past issues of Archival News are located here.