Tag Archives: film preservation

Researching and restoring Universal’s King of Jazz (1930): an interview with James Layton and Crystal Kui

Posted on 10 May 2016 by silentsplease

1930 saw the release of a film that Universal Pictures expected to be a smash hit: King of Jazz, a musical revue starring Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra. Shot in two-strip Technicolor, King of Jazz featured a grand set-piece in … Continue reading →

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Romance of celluloid: celebrating nitrate film

Posted on 29 April 2016 by silentsplease

Nitrate film: shimmering, unstable, explosive. Very shortly, the second annual Nitrate Picture Show will kick off at George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. Billing itself as “the world’s first festival of film conservation”, this festival includes screenings of vintage … Continue reading →

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Silent cinema from the vaults to the world: an interview with film archival scholar Grazia Ingravalle

Posted on 22 April 2016 by silentsplease

Silent cinema is gaining more prominence and availability than ever before—but how does the work of archives and cinémathèques drive the way we perceive it? Grazia Ingravalle is a doctoral student at the University of St Andrews in Scotland whose … Continue reading →

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Book review: Jean Desmet’s Dream Factory: The Adventurous Years of Film (1907-1916)

Posted on 4 April 2015 by silentsplease

The Desmet collection is a key jewel in the crown of EYE Filmmuseum: a huge and relatively intact corpus of films, posters, promotional materials, and company records deriving from the business activities of Jean Desmet, a key film distributor and theatre … Continue reading →

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An interview with Bin Li, nitrate film specialist

Posted on 31 March 2015 by silentsplease

Since July 2014, Bin Li has been working for Haghefilm Digitaal in Amsterdam, one of the most esteemed film preservation/restoration laboratories in the world. A graduate of the MA Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image course at the Universiteit … Continue reading →

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Odds and ends

Posted on 30 September 2014 by silentsplease

A quick roundup before I head to Le Giornate del Cinema Muto! First, a few more notes on film preservation, which seems to be having a moment of mainstream attention. In this short article, head staff at NARA and the LoC are quoted; the … Continue reading →

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Some thoughts on the archival life of film

Posted on 7 September 2014 by silentsplease

This post is just a brief aside … lately I’ve been thinking a lot about analogue film in a medium, both in relation to my own work, Kodak’s recent announcement that they’re stopping production of several black & white 16mm … Continue reading →

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