Film Preservation
-
“We Digitized Every Frame”: Andrew Sherburne on Saving Brinton and Film Preservation
“I like to save things,” Mike Zahs says in the opening seconds of Saving Brinton, “especially if they’re too far gone.” He’s referring, in the moment, to the stray animals that have hobbled onto his property over the years: a lost cat that birthed 11 kittens, a rotund dog named Tuesday. He’s also alluding to his great passion project, which originated at an estate sale in 1981. Zahs found a cache of mysterious boxes from the estate of Frank Brinton, a showman who traveled the country with his wife from 1895 to 1909 to project films and other pre-cinema entertainments […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Nov 14, 2017 -
The Campaign to Revive Early Films from Christine Vachon and Todd Haynes
Led by IFP founder Sandra Schulberg, who serves as its president, the nonprofit IndieCollect is working to conserve independent cinema. In just two years, the company has rescued and archived more than 3,500 film negatives, according to Schulberg, the president of IndieCollect. IndieCollect recently located the master picture and sound elements for eight of the shorts Vachon and Haynes produced in the ’80s and ’90s with Barry Ellsworth under their non-profit Apparatus banner. Apparatus backed a number of other directors, including Suzan-Lori Parks, Mary Hestand, Susan Delson, Brooke Dammkoehler, Larry Carty, and Evan Dunsky. Now the company has launched a Kickstarter campaign with hopes of raising […]
by Paula Bernstein on Jun 28, 2016 -
IndieCollect, a Film Preservation Initiative, Receives $200,000 Challenge Grant from Ford Foundation
IndieCollect, a film documentation and preservation initiative, has received a $200,000 challenge grant from the Ford Foundation to set them on their goal of archiving 6,000 films in the next three years. With digital as the new standard, many filmmakers are leaving their prints to rust, but IndieCollect aims to foster preservation threefold by, “creating a comprehensive, searchable, IndieCollect Index of American independent film, video and digital titles; developing an IndieCollect Encyclopedia for scholars, programmers and cinephiles; and doing outreach to hundreds of filmmakers and film advocacy organizations to Identify and Collect the works that need archival repositories.” From the press […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Aug 14, 2014 -
Cool Sounds from the Vault: A Cinematic Detective Story
Editor’s note: We originally ran this story about the resurrection of Sidney J. Furie’s Canadian independent feature film A Cool Sound from Hell (1959) in June 2014. Now, as Daniel Kremer‘s biography Sidney J. Furie: Life and Films finally hits the book stands, we are rerunning the article in a slightly updated and revised form. Kremer‘s book, the first ever written about Sidney J. Furie, features never-before-recorded stories about working with Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Peter O’Toole, Robert Redford, and many others. Having a “Scorsese moment” could mean many things. If you walk into a bar feeling like the flurry of activity around […]
by Daniel Kremer on Jun 23, 2014 -
“THESE AMAZING SHADOWS” DIRECTORS PAUL MARIANO & KURT NORTON
Although any cinephile worth his salt knows that movie watching is but a fleeting experience, few comprehend that it may be one they won’t be able to repeat. The studios who produce films aren’t museums — they’re in the business of protecting their own assets, not our cinematic history. Without intervention, scenes, moments and entire back catalogues might be lost to the inevitabilities of decay. Sundance newcomers Paul Mariano and Kurt Norton’s These Amazing Shadows tells the story of the National Film Registry, a government-appointed body that each year adds another 25 films it deems “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Jan 22, 2011
