Abstract: Editor's Note: Undercrank Productions publishes DVDs and Blu-rays targeted toward silent film fans. Many of these releases have been overlooked by the academic community, so we arranged for silent and slapstick comedy scholar Rob King to write a personal essay on the academic value of these works and why scholars should pay more attention to fan communities in general. Titles covered in this review include the following:The world of the hard-to-find silent film attracts a public that splits across a number of related divides, with mutual misgivings on either side: academics versus fan experts, archives versus private collectors, university presses versus Bear Manor and McFarland, Pordenone versus Cinecon, and so ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The Clarke is both a historical library and archives.1 It is one of the major archives and historical libraries in the state of Michigan and the only one in the northern Lower Peninsula. Its major collecting focus is Michigan history, children's literature, and Central Michigan University (CMU) archives. While the primary-source collections include a wide variety of formats, moving image film constitutes only a small part of the overall collection. Of the nearly 8,000 cubic feet of archival collections in the Clarke stacks, approximately 110 cubic feet are 8mm and 16mm films (450,000 linear feet total).Most of the Clarke's films are 16mm acetate film stock, although there is also a small number of 8mm films. The ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: OutTV Atlanta was a public access television program that aired in Atlanta, Georgia (and briefly in Savannah, Georgia), between 1999 and 2001. Created by Atlanta entrepreneur Mike Maloney, the show featured mostly volunteer reporters who covered fund-raising events, artistic performances, nightlife venues, political events, gay rodeos, and more in an attempt to provide a comprehensive and realistic picture of gay and lesbian life in Atlanta around the turn of the millennium. In 2018, Maloney worked with the LGBTQ Institute at the Center for Civil and Human Rights to donate the tapes containing production footage from the show to the Archives for Research on Gender and Sexuality, part of the Special Collections and ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The Cinema Novo movement emerged in Brazil in 1952 and was influenced by Italian neorealism and the French nouvelle vague. It was a critical form of cinema, with its often political and social nature being a striking feature, especially after the 1964 coup led to the military dictatorship in Brazil. This was particularly true of the films of the most renowned filmmakers of the period, such as Glauber Rocha and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade. However, Gerson Tavares (1926-), a Brazilian Cinema Novo filmmaker, rejected themes reduced almost exclusively to the social and political movements of the 1950s and 1960s. He preferred to follow in the steps of the literary movement of the period, which placed a strong focus on plot ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: I'd like to open 19.2 with a heartfelt thank-you to The Moving Image and to the AMIA community more broadly for entrusting me, once again, with this journal. Donald Crafton and Susan Ohmer are exceedingly hard acts to follow, and I hope that my work for the journal comes close to the bar of excellence these fine scholars and colleagues have set. Don and Susan shepherded the journal through some of its most memorable issues, and on behalf of all of us, I want to thank them for believing in its mission, cultivating new contributors and readers, and keeping our field(s) visible and vital.The Moving Image, like the community it serves, is a living, shifting thing. Much has changed in the profession(s) and in our ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: This interview was conducted on April 22, 2020; translation courtesy of Victoria Duckett.Thank you for making time to speak to me. I know it is a difficult time in Italy, particularly in Milan. I am interested in how film archives respond to the current pandemic. From what I have seen so far, your archive is one that responded quickly to the changing needs of the current situation.Yes, we have, but our response was coincidental and fortuitous, in the sense that our streaming initiative began in December 2019. Our intention, at that point, was to make our oldest archival materials visible; we wanted to publish these holdings for everyone to enjoy. This project was part of a national digitization project1 focusing on ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Kirsten Johnson's Cameraperson (2016) blends different documentary aesthetics into one seemingly impenetrable collage. Cameraperson combines camera footage from Johnson's twenty-five years as a cinematographer, stitching together ethnographic work from documentaries focusing on social conflicts and war zones, personal travelogues, and rather sensitive home footage. The film attempts to (re) evaluate the implications of using a camera to document the world and mediate one's position within it equally on the personal and the social-ethical levels.Johnson's deep and varied color palette is perhaps the film's greatest virtue. Whether it be on-the-move fieldwork shots or highly formalist photography, the ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Historians and archivists concerned with the life and time of news on film will find that Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, and the Archive achieves what it says in the title. This book consists of a wide variety of case studies bringing depth and originality to an area of research that has long needed reappraisal, especially considering that Raymond Fielding's 2006 edition of his seminal study added little to his original 1976 version.1 Furthermore, the present volume focuses on the United States, hence keeping step with recent publications that have concentrated on European cases.2 One of the book's main ideas results from the conceptualization of the key term newsfilm, which the editors define ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Paolo Cherchi Usai first published the English-language version of Burning Passions: Introduction to the Study of Silent Cinema in 1994, which he followed with the revised and retitled Silent Cinema: An Introduction in 2000. Neither of these previous titles worked particularly well for a book that primarily acts as an introduction to film archives, archival research, and silent-era motion picture technology. Nineteen years after his last update, Cherchi Usai's far more accurately titled Silent Cinema: A Guide to Study, Research, and Curatorship is far more than a mere third edition. The former senior curator of the Moving Image Department at the George Eastman Museum and current director of the School of Film ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: This interview was conducted on May 6, 2020.Thank you for making the time to speak with me. I will begin by asking when the NFSA [National Film and Sound Archive] first started to respond to COVID-19. Was it in February or March' I'm thinking of all the other disasters that were happening in Australia as well, because basically we have had these since the beginning of the year.I would also link it with all the other disasters that have been happening. The NFSA, like all of Canberra, has been dealing with fire, then we had hail. Actually, most of the cars at the archive got written off because we were directly in the line of the hailstorm when it hit [January 20, 2020]. It was extraordinary. And then COVID-19 came ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Any scholar of film with a finger on the pulse of the myriad movements against a uniform notion of film history (i.e., home movies, useful cinema, orphan films, etc.) understands the value of moving image production that intentionally resides outside of traditional production contexts. One such extension of this alternative way of knowing moving image history has focused, rightly so, on ethnographic researchers and their use of technologies like film to capture their observations. Ripe within this focus are generative new ways of learning the nuanced mechanical aspects of early film-making, moments to disrupt the seemingly inextricably formed boundaries of auteur and amateur, and lenses with which to better ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Haidee Wasson and Lee Grieveson's edited volume Cinema's Military Industrial Complex delves into aspects of film history that have been largely ignored by academics until recently. Much of the previous work on military films, while interesting, focuses on connections to Hollywood, as if films could only be important if they were associated with a famous name like Capra or Ford. It is not difficult to find writing about the First Motion Picture Unit or John Huston's activities during World War II, but the various authors in Cinema's Military Industrial Complex clearly show that the U.S. military impacted society at large through motion picture production, distribution, and exhibition practices. This volume of ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Like its title playfully suggests, in Ainsi naquit Hollywood, Marc Vernet tells the story of the short and tumultuous life of the Triangle Film Corporation, from its genesis in 1915 to its downfall in 1919, as a case study to better understand the crucial transitional years leading to Hollywood's studio system. The project is an impressive undertaking, as Vernet surveyed every known archival collection related to Triangle, mobilizing a network of archives and archivists, first from Paris (Cinémathèque française, Archives françaises du film) and Madison (Wisconsin Historical Society), which led him to Brussels (Cinémathèque royale de belgique), Culpeper (Library of Congress), Los Angeles (Margaret Herrick Library) ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Approximately 73 percent of American silent feature films are believed lost forever.1 David Pierce's 2013 report on the survival status of the American silent cinema, commissioned by the National Film Preservation Foundation, adds some interesting detail. Early home movie releases have played a significant role in preserving some otherwise lost films, as 365 American silent features only exist in 16mm versions.2 Of the 129 American features released on 9.5mm, 56 survive only in this form.Pathé introduced the 9.5mm format as the first practical home movie gauge in 1922, a year before Kodak's 16mm.3 It was aimed more at home showmanship than at amateur filmmaking, shown by the fact that the projector was on the ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Charlie Musser's research has helped to define the fields of film history, early and silent cinema, and documentary film scholarship. His work in the last of these areas is informed by his background as a documentary filmmaker, including two years on the editing team for Hearts and Minds (1974) before he directed two of his own films, An American Potter (1976) and Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter (1982). Musser has returned to documentary production in recent years, and his most recent film and accompanying book, Our Family Album (2019), are perhaps the most personal creative or academic work he has produced throughout the course of his entire career. Codirected with his wife ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Once upon a time, industrialized cinema killed the local film. Such was the story prominent scholars of early film history told, at least, claiming that the draw to early movies was the spectacle of seeing life reproduced on film—a "cinema of attractions" made all the more enticing if the audience recognized themselves on the big screen. Also called the "local view," this filmmaking practice, they purported, ended with the growth of film studios that sought to create reliable box-office returns by standardizing fictional narratives. The local view, less practical for modern, centralized institutions, was a regrettable casualty in this transition.Martin L. Johnson connects his own work to the development of the ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: No longer a fixed object, documentary is moving to iterative, shape-shifting forms. With multiple screens and transmedia structures, it continues a parallel documentary history that displaces the auteur, character development, and story arcs. These parallel histories recalibrate documentary with a more place-based, political practice of collaboration, collectivity, and community. They tell what postcolonial historiographers call crooked stories, an incomplete, fragmented process."DOCUMENTARY NOW! AND THEN . . ." By the time an intellect, researcher, and writer has published more than two hundred research articles and essays, her areas of expertise and proclivities surface and could become synonymous with the ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: How have different film archives in different cities and countries responded to the coronavirus pandemic' What does this reveal about the priorities and practices of a given archive' What are the procedures that have been put in place to deal with the extraordinary coronavirus crisis' I chose to conduct interviews with Matteo Pavesi, the director of the Cineteca Italiana (Italian Film Archive) in Milan, and Meg Labrum, the general manager, Collections Branch, at the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), Canberra, to answer these questions. I wanted to better understand how COVID-19 was differently impacting film archives and was particularly interested in ones based in frontline cities such as Milan. What I ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In addition to daily print, radio, and online journalism, television news captures its own first rough-draft version of history 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Often, the broadcast photographer's ability and intuition to be in the right place at the right time produce the kind of reportage that can be quite visceral, revealing the depth and complexity of human nature.Documentaries that focus on the people and events of the last seventy years—a period broadly covered by local, network, and cable television news—are regularly shown on cable networks and public television and streamed via platforms such as Netflix. Their stories, which vary widely in subject matter, are often told through excerpts from originally ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The ease with which we currently stream moving image content in the United States makes it hard to envision the labor and physical mechanisms that undergird media distribution. Access a web-based platform, click a button, and content appears, almost instantaneously and on demand.1 While broadcast television and cable have long transmitted moving images directly into homes and other screening sites, the advent of digital delivery has rendered distribution processes and infrastructures virtually invisible, tucking them away in remote data centers and the cloud.2 The physical aspects that long characterized content delivery have largely retreated from collective consciousness. This is particularly the case for film ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: It is difficult to overstate the value of Hope Reports's (HR's) extensive archival collection. As is now clear, institutions of the twentieth century thrummed with whirring projectors and chiming filmstrips before being hit with an avalanche of CRT snow in the 1970s. Prisons, hospitals, schools, military bases, factories, banks, Rotary Clubs, and other institutions all made prolific use of electronic communications for training, education, sales, and other applications. Anthologies ranging from Useful Media to Learning with the Lights Off (to name but two of an increasingly lengthy bibliography) have revealed the centrality of moving images to the chief cultural and political knowledge projects of the most powerful ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In recent years, AMIA has given commendable attention to indigenous issues in the moving image archival context, with the 2018 plenary on "Indigenous Cultural Heritage: Ethical Stewardship" in Portland and the dedicated 2019 stream "Stewardship of Indigenous Materials in AV Archives" in Baltimore. For those who have followed these initiatives, the paperback reissue of this impressive centennial collection of fifteen essays, two photo essays, and four appendices of ephemera associated with E. S. Curtis's film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914) will be of interest. The film, a hybrid documentary-fictional romance, was made in collaboration with the Kwakwaka'wakw people of the Pacific Northwest region of Canada ... Read More PubDate: 2020-12-18T00:00:00-05:00
Subscription journal
[306 journals]
