New York University: NYU Fales Library Releases Flaherty Seminar Recordings, Unveiling Fifty Years of Cinematic History. “New York University’s Division of Libraries today announced the public release of more than 700 audio recordings from the Flaherty Seminar, the longest continuously running film event in North America, named in honor of seminal filmmaker and ‘father of documentary film’ Robert Flaherty. The annual event’s fifty-year history is captured through recordings of various activities and discussions, joining collections in the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives and the University Archives chronicling the evolution of the moving image in the 20th century. The Flaherty Seminar recordings are held within the special collections of NYU’s Fales Library.”
films
China Focus: Frame by frame, China’s film restorers revive classics (XinhuaNet)
XinhuaNet: China Focus: Frame by frame, China’s film restorers revive classics. “Jiao Xiang, 31, a true film aficionado, watches movies frame by frame. Jiao stares at a screen for hours to spot flaws in old films so they can be restored. His waist hurts and head spins after a day’s work. But that is the life of a film restorer at the China Film Archive.”
WRVO: Film professionals hope new database will bring more movies to central NY
WRVO: Film professionals hope new database will bring more movies to central NY. “A non-profit group is rolling out a set of resources it hopes will make it easier for film companies to shoot a movie in central New York. CNY Film Professionals is creating a new database on its website that movie makers can use to find any of the 50-500 people, on average, needed to staff a movie set. Elias Gwinn is president of the organization and said it fills a gap that’s kept the movie industry from taking off.”
MEHR News Agency: FIFF36 to launch Cicinema, new digital encyclopedia on Iranian Cinema
MEHR News Agency: FIFF36 to launch Cicinema, new digital encyclopedia on Iranian Cinema. “A new digital encyclopedia on Iranian Cinema called ‘Cicinema’ will be launched concurrent with the start of the 36th edition of Fajr International Film Festival (FIFF36) in April. The announcement was made by the creator of the website Iraj Taghipour… ‘We collected and archived data on 4,000 feature films which is roughly the total number of films produced in Iran thus far. We also collected and archived information on 6,500 short films. The website now has a comprehensive database on about 10,500 Iranian movies in total.'”
Scroll: With rare photos and letters, a web archive is piecing together the life of film historian BD Garga
Scroll: With rare photos and letters, a web archive is piecing together the life of film historian BD Garga. “Bhagwan Das Garga’s contributions as a documentary filmmaker and unparalleled chronicler of Indian cinema are widely known. But who was Bhagwan Das Garga, the person? For the past two years, the Delhi film collective Lightcube has been working hard to produce an answer. A team of five people, along with BD Garga’s wife Donnabelle, is developing an online archive that will provide a peek into lesser-known aspects of the film historian’s life and adventures.”
Now online: Never-before seen footage of 1900s Jewish Britain (Times of Israel)
Times of Israel: Now online: Never-before seen footage of 1900s Jewish Britain. “The images tumble from the screen, in glorious Technicolor or flickering black-and-white. The quality is highly variable and so is the subject matter, ranging from the utterly banal to the high-flown. And yet, there is a connecting thread — the celebration of ‘Jewish Britain on Film,’ a collection which has just been released by the British Film Archive. And, curator Simon McCallum explains, this is part of a much bigger project– ‘Britain on Film’ — where researchers are attempting to digitize more than 10,000 titles.”
Library of Congress: 2017 National Film Registry Is More Than a ‘Field of Dreams’
Library of Congress: 2017 National Film Registry Is More Than a ‘Field of Dreams’. “Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden today announced the 2017 selections to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Selected for their cultural, historic and/or aesthetic importance, these 25 motion pictures range from an early film of the New York subway in 1905 and the musical biopic “La Bamba” to the holiday action thriller “Die Hard” and “The Goonies,” the adventure tale of a band of misfits.”
