Media Preservation Introduction

This study explores artistic choices in cinema exhibition, focusing on film theaters, film festivals, and film archives and situating film-curating issues within an international context. Artistic and commercial film availability has increased overwhelmingly as a result of the digitization of the infrastructure of distribution and exhibition. The film trade's conventional structures are transforming and, in the digital age, supply and demand can meet without the intervention of traditional gatekeepers--everybody can be a film curator, in a passive or active way. This volume addresses three kinds of readers: those who want to become film curators, those who want to research the film-curating phenomenon, and those critical cinema visitors who seek to investigate the story behind the selection process of available films and the way to present them.

Film is in a state of rapid change: the transition from analog to digital is profoundly affecting not just filmmaking and film distribution but a number of other facets of the industry, including the ways in which films are archived. In From Grain to Pixel--the first volume in the new Framing Filmseries from Amsterdam University Press--Giovanna Fossati brings together scholars and archivists to discuss their theories on digitization and to propose new possibilities for future archives.            

Orphan works, or artworks for which no copyright holder is traceable, pose a growing problem for museums, archives, and other heritage institutions. As they come under more and more pressure to digitize and share their archives, they are often hampered by the uncertain rights status of items in their collections. The Greatest Films Never Seen: The Film Archive and the Copyright Smokescreenuses the prism of copyright to reconsider human agency and the politics of the archive, and asks what the practical implications are for educational institutions, the creative industries, and the general public.

The first international anthology to explore the historical significance of amateur film, Mining the Home Movie makes visible, through image and analysis, the hidden yet ubiquitous world of home moviemaking. These essays boldly combine primary research, archival collections, critical analyses, filmmakers' own stories, and new theoretical approaches regarding the meaning and value of amateur and archival films. Editors Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann have fashioned a groundbreaking volume that identifies home movies as vital methods of visually preserving history. The essays cover an enormous range of subject matter, defining an important genre of film studies and establishing the home movie as an invaluable tool for extracting historical and social insights.

Foreword / James H. Billington -- Executive summary -- Introduction -- The silent film era comes to an end -- Overview of what has been lost -- Evolving views of silent cinema -- The cultural loss -- The cinematic loss -- Methodology, definitions, and scope of this study -- Purpose of this study -- Definition of an American silent feature film -- Historical period of study -- Sources of data -- Findings -- Most American silent feature films are lost -- Not all surviving films are complete -- Films survive in different formats -- The preferred edition is the 35mm domestic-release version -- Many films survive only in small-gauge formats -- Summary of surviving film elements -- Source of the surviving copies -- Studios -- Independent producers -- Stars and directors -- Private collectors -- Films surviving only in foreign archives -- Foreign distribution -- American films recovered from foreign archives -- Identification and repatriation -- The likelihood of future discoveries -- Additional considerations -- Conclusions and recommendations -- Appendix: FIAF Archives reporting holdings of American silent feature films.

Based on the experiences of members of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAI).