Physical Characteristics Of Early Films As Aids To Identification

Any archivists who have held a piece of fi lm in their hands, wondering how to go about identifying it, recognize the true value of fi lm preservationist Harold Brown's work. In 1967 Brown delivered a pioneering lecture on the identification of early films at the annual Congress of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) in East Berlin. Years of working with Britain's National Film Archive collections, and the close examination of thousands of nitrate prints of the silent period, made Brown a leading authority on early fi lm identification, and an unsurpassed model of methodological consciousness in the archival field. In 1990, FIAF published Brown's Physical Characteristics of Early Films as Aids to Identification, an updated version and a continuation of his 1967 lecture. This publication has long been archivists' trusted companion, constituting a concentrated encyclopedia on all the information that can be discovered or verified through aspects of the fi lm other than the actual projected image – such as perforation shapes; embossed and punched marks; stock manufacturers' and producers' edge marks; frame characteristics; title styles; and production serial numbers. It also included essays on key individual production companies of the silent era. Over the last 30 years, this manual – a basic typewritten 100-page volume (including 20 pages of black & white illustrations), with its easily recognizable red cover – has been an invaluable reference for fi lm archivists and scholars. However, as Brown himself acknowledged in the 1990 edition, the manual was far from definitive. Camille Blot-Wellens, the editor of this new, expanded edition of Brown's 1990 book, belongs to the new generation of researchers who have used Physical Characteristics extensively in their work and have gathered considerable new information on the subject. This new edition is the result of a project she initiated in 2014 with FIAF's support. Brown's original text is now augmented with new original research on key fi lm manufacturers and producers by Camille Bolt-Wellens and other leading archivists and researchers in the field. Richly illustrated (the book contains over 900 images, including 125 in full color), this new 336-page edition of Harold Brown's seminal manual will be welcomed by many, and will no doubt become a must-have working tool for many in the fi lm archiving and academic fields.

Any archivists who have held a piece of fi lm in their hands, wondering how to go about identifying it, recognize the true value of fi lm preservationist Harold Brown's work. In 1967 Brown delivered a pioneering lecture on the identification of early films at the annual Congress of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) in East Berlin. Years of working with Britain's National Film Archive collections, and the close examination of thousands of nitrate prints of the silent period, made Brown a leading authority on early fi lm identification, and an unsurpassed model of methodological consciousness in the archival field. In 1990, FIAF published Brown's Physical Characteristics of Early Films as Aids to Identification, an updated version and a continuation of his 1967 lecture. This publication has long been archivists' trusted companion, constituting a concentrated encyclopedia on all the information that can be discovered or verified through aspects of the fi lm other than the actual projected image – such as perforation shapes; embossed and punched marks; stock manufacturers' and producers' edge marks; frame characteristics; title styles; and production serial numbers. It also included essays on key individual production companies of the silent era. Over the last 30 years, this manual – a basic typewritten 100-page volume (including 20 pages of black & white illustrations), with its easily recognizable red cover – has been an invaluable reference for fi lm archivists and scholars. However, as Brown himself acknowledged in the 1990 edition, the manual was far from definitive. Camille Blot-Wellens, the editor of this new, expanded edition of Brown's 1990 book, belongs to the new generation of researchers who have used Physical Characteristics extensively in their work and have gathered considerable new information on the subject. This new edition is the result of a project she initiated in 2014 with FIAF's support. Brown's original text is now augmented with new original research on key fi lm manufacturers and producers by Camille Bolt-Wellens and other leading archivists and researchers in the field. Richly illustrated (the book contains over 900 images, including 125 in full color), this new 336-page edition of Harold Brown's seminal manual will be welcomed by many, and will no doubt become a must-have working tool for many in the fi lm archiving and academic fields.

The Face of AIDS film archive at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, consists of more than 700 hours of unedited and edited footage, shot over a period of more than thirty years and all over the world by filmmaker and journalist Staffan Hildebrand. The material documents the HIV/AIDS pandemic and includes scenes from conferences and rallies, and interviews with activists, physicians, people with the infection, and researchers. It represents a global historical development from the early years of the AIDS crisis to a situation in which it is possible to live a normal life with the HIV virus. This volume brings together a range of academic perspectives – from media and film studies, medical history, gender studies, history, and cultural studies – to bear on the archive, shedding light on memories, discourses, trauma, and activism. Using a medical humanities framework, the editors explore the influence of historical representations of HIV/AIDS and stigma in a world where antiretroviral treatment has fundamentally altered the conditions under which many people diagnosed with HIV live. Organized into four sections, this book begins by introducing the archive and its role, setting it in a global context. The first part looks at methodological, legal and ethical issues around archiving memories of the present which are then used to construct histories of the past; something that can be particularly controversial when dealing with a socially stigmatized epidemic such as HIV/AIDS. The second section is devoted to analyses of particular films from the archive, looking at the portrayal of people living with HIV/AIDS, the narrative of HIV as a chronic illness and the contemporary context of particular films. The third section looks at how stigma and trauma are negotiated in the material in the Face of AIDS film archive, discussing ideas about suffering and culpability. The final section contributes perspectives on and by the filmmaker as activist and auteur. This interdisciplinary collection is placed at the intersection of medical humanities, sexuality studies and film and media studies, continuing a tradition of studies on the cultural and social understandings of HIV/AIDS.

Remnants of early films often have a story to tell. As material artifacts, these film fragments are central to cinema history, perhaps more than ever in our digital age of easy copying and sharing. If a digital copy is previewed before preservation or is shared with a researcher outside the purview of a film archive, knowledge about how the artifact was collected, circulated, and repurposed threatens to become obscured. When the question of origin is overlooked, the story can be lost. Concerned contributors in Provenance and Early Cinema challenge scholars digging through film archives to ask, "How did these moving images get here for me to see them?" This volume, which features the conference proceedings from Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema, 2018, questions preservation, attribution, and patterns of reuse in order to explore singular artifacts with long and circuitous lives.

A COMPANION TO EARLY CINEMA “This collection of essays by early cinema scholars from Europe and North America offers manifold perspectives on early cinema fiction which perfectly reflect the state of international research.” – Martin Loiperdinger, Universitaet Trier “A fabulous selection of first-rate articles!” – Rick Altman, University of Iowa “One of the most challenging books in recent film studies: in it, early cinema is both a historical object and a contemporary presence. As in a great novel, we can retrace the adventures of the past – the films, styles, discourses, and receptions that made cinema the breakthrough reality it was in its first decades. But we can also come to appreciate how much of this reality is still present in our digital world.” – Francesco Casetti, Yale University A Companion to Early Cinema is an authoritative reference on the field of early cinema. Its 30 peer-reviewed chapters offer cutting-edge research and original perspectives on the major concerns in early cinema studies, and take an ambitious look at ideas and themes that will lead discussions about early cinema into the future. Including work by both established and up-and-coming scholars in early cinema, film theory, and film history, this will be the definitive volume on early cinema history for years to come and a must-have reference for all those working in the field.

One-volume reference work on the first twenty-five years of the cinema's international emergence from the early 1890s to the mid-1910s.

Documentary film can encompass anything from Robert Flaherty's pioneering ethnography Nanook of the North to Michael Moore's anti-Iraq War polemic Fahrenheit 9/11, from Dziga Vertov's artful Soviet propaganda piece Man with a Movie Camera to Luc Jacquet's heart-tugging wildlife epic March of the Penguins. In this concise, crisply written guide, Patricia Aufderheide takes readers along the diverse paths of documentary history and charts the lively, often fierce debates among filmmakers and scholars about the best ways to represent reality and to tell the truths worth telling. Beginning with an overview of the central issues of documentary filmmaking--its definitions and purposes, its forms and founders--Aufderheide focuses on several of its key subgenres, including public affairs films, government propaganda (particularly the works produced during World War II), historical documentaries, and nature films. Her thematic approach allows readers to enter the subject matter through the kinds of films that first attracted them to documentaries, and it permits her to make connections between eras, as well as revealing the ongoing nature of documentary's core controversies involving objectivity, advocacy, and bias. Interwoven throughout are discussions of the ethical and practical considerations that arise with every aspect of documentary production. A particularly useful feature of the book is an appended list of "100 great documentaries" that anyone with a serious interest in the genre should see. Drawing on the author's four decades of experience as a film scholar and critic, this book is the perfect introduction not just for teachers and students but also for all thoughtful filmgoers and for those who aspire to make documentaries themselves. About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.