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)]

Close

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.

Close

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.

Close

Judiciary Committee Hearing on Scope of Fair Use

On January 28, 2014, the United States House of Representatives Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet heard testimony on the scope of fair use from Professor Peter Jaszi, Professor June Besek, Ms. Naomi Novik, Mr. David Lowery, and Mr. Kurt Wimmer. Testimony transcripts and complete schedule details can be accessed here.

Watch a recording of the hearing here.

Close

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.

Close

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.

Close

EFF Celebrates Copyright Week

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) celebrated Copyright Week with a series of posts dedicated to copyright reform and fair use. Themes included Transparency, Building and Defending a Robust Public Domain, Open Access, You Bought It / You Own It, Fair Use Rights, and Getting Copyright Right.

For further details, see EFF Copyright Week.

Close

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.

Close

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.

Close

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.

Close

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.

Close

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]

Close

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.

Close

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.

Close

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.

Close

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.

Close

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.

Close

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.

Close

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.

Close

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.

Close

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)]

Close

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.)]

Close

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]

Close

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.

Close

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.

Close

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]

Close

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.

Close

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.

Close