Digitraining: Open call for European cultural heritage institutions

DigiTraining, Digital & Audiovisual Capacity Building for Accessible Heritage, a project co-funded by the European Commission under the Creative Europe Programme, has launched an Open Call for European cultural heritage institutions.

The digital shift in the cultural heritage sector is important but can be quite challenging: successful applicants will receive training and support in the process to innovate and integrate new technologies in their organisations. For some this means personalised and
tailor-made support and digital production services directly adapted to their needs and mission to facilitate accessibility to culture.

1 April 2021

A Season of Classic Films: Discover Czech silent films

From April to June, the Czech National Film Archive will offer free online access to seven silent films with contemporary music, in the frame of ‘A Season of Classic Films’. The selection includes some of the first movies shot in the Czech lands, Karel Lamač’s films and performances by Vlasta Burian and Anna Ondráková. Some screenings will be followed by live discussion on topics related to silent film and its presentation.

The first screening of the Czech retrospective is Karel Lamač’s Bílý ráj (White Paradise, 1924, 73’) with music by multi-instrumentalist Tomáš Vtípil on Thursday 8 April, starting at 17:00 CET. In this film, Nina falls for the good heart and piercing eyes of an escaped prisoner and decides to help him visit his dying mother for the last time. An ingeniously written script and the involvement of ‘The Strong Four’ – one of the most distinctive creative teams to come out of Czechoslovak cinema: director and actor Karel Lamač, cameraman Otto Heller, actress Anny Ondra and screenwriter Václav Wasserman – contributed to the international success of the film and established Lamač and Ondra as major forces of early cinema. Other prominent figures of early Czech cinema participated in the production, such as Martin Frič and Gustav Machatý. The new film digitisation originates from a 35mm coloured restored print, for which a unique tinted and toned nitrate film provided source material.

 FILM + MUSIC PERFORMANCE: WHITE PARADISE

The premiere screening on 8 April will be followed by the discussion ‘Classics Today’, which provides a framework for the entire Czech retrospective. What the term ‘classic’ means in architecture, music, literature and why using this term, will be some of the questions discussed by guests from various cultural fields and moderated by the General Director of the Czech National Film Archive, Mihal Bregant.

29 March 2021

Celebrate the 125th anniversary of the first film screening with Film Archiv Austria

During this pandemic, Film Archiv Austria has been offering its audience with HOME CINEMA the possibility of broad access to Austria’s film heritage free of charge, including key works of the feature film, weekly news reports, rare documentary and amateur recordings or, in some cases, historical film documents that are being viewed for the first time. The selection is carefully curated and accompanied by essays and other works.

This time, the film archive wants to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the first film screening, which took place in Vienna on March 20, 1896. The first apparatuses projected moving pictures onto the screen and so it began: with ively manifestos of pure curiosity and a new visual culture that reflect the pioneering and inventive spirit of this time in their unrestrained creativity and fantasy.

The Filmarchiv Austria looks back on the first years full of marvel until April 21 and invites you to a festival of curiosity with selected collections. The program of the digital home cinema changes weekly. You can click here to discover the collections and here to read the Digitorial.

26 March 2021

A tribute for the founder of Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Maria Adriana Prolo

On February 20, 1991, Maria Adriana Prolo died. She was a passionate and tenacious, competent, visionary and nonconformist woman and founder of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin (Italy). She did everything to make the dream of a museum dedicated to the Seventh Art come true.

The National Cinema Museum, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of her death, decides to homage her with MARIA ADRIANA PROLO: A MUSEUM, ITS FOUNDER, a selection of images that portray her from the 1920s to the end of the 1980s, hosted on the external gate of the Mole Antonelliana. The private shots, also from the family archive, are accompanied by some of the photographs on display at the exhibition dedicated to the first seat of the Museum in Palazzo Chiablese, curated by Lorenzo Ventavoli, and the images taken by Elena Bosio on the set of the documentary Occhi che videro by Daniele Segre (Italy 1989, 50′), a film in which Maria Adriana Prolo and her Museum were the absolute protagonists. The film and the extra contents are presented as a unique document capable of capturing the vitality of Maria Adriana Prolo. The documentary will be available online on the Museum’s Vimeo channel for the duration of the tribute.

4 March 2021

Questionnaire on future digital services for ACE members – Summary of results

In July 2020, ACE asked their membership to participate in a survey that would give insight into where ACE member archives currently publish their collections online, who they consider their main target audiences and what functionalities and services they find important in online platforms. The aim of the survey was to get a general sense of where ACE members generally stand with regard to their publication efforts and to find out what they would expect from a digital service, should ACE decide to offer one. This report summarizes the replies of 34 ACE archives that answered the survey.

25 February 2021

Cinemateca portuguesa online proposals for the second lockdown

As happened in the first lockdown last year, Cinemateca Portuguesa continues to promote a set of online experiencies to fulfill the lack of presential activities. The main focus is still on the virtual platform Gestos & Fragmentos (Gestures & Fragments, as in the title of a well known movie directed by the portuguese filmmaker Alberto Seixas Santos), this time refreshed in the form of a new website where visitors can find various sections dedicated to Cinemateca’s collections, from objects of pre-cinema era, to virtual exhibitions or articles on some of the most valuable items from its library.

The website also presents a collection of feature films from the silent period made in Portugal, that were recently restored by Cinemateca Portuguesa and will be available until the end of the lockdown, one feature per week. For those who want to dive in cinema’s history, Cinemateca added a new set of the conferences Histórias do Cinema to the website, this time dedicated to the films of Straub-Huillet, Ernst Lubitsch, Otto Preminger and some thematic conferences.

Finally, a new thematic section with a choice of moving images from different cities and regions of Portugal, from different periods, highlighting the digital platform Cinemateca Digital where digital representations of these films are available for public access.

All this and many more are available at http://gestosefragmentos.cinemateca.pt/

23 February 2021

Discover rare gems of Soviet and Russian cinema with Open Collection

The Russian Film Archive Gosfilmond and the portal Cultura.RU have announced the start of a joint project called Open Collection. For this project, employees of the scientific department of the State Film will prepare more than 20 rare films for publication each month.

Elena Filatova, General Director of the State Film Fund of the Russian Federation, says that the Open Collection project will let audiences meet rare examples of Soviet and Russian cinema, many of which until recently could only be viewed by researchers until now.

3 February 2021

Vive le cinéma! – EYE’s exhibition for its 75th anniversary

For this jubilee exhibition Vive le cinéma! (from February 10th through May 9th 2021), EYE and the International Film Festival Rotterdam asked five major film directors from five continents – Jia Zhang-ke (Asia), Lucrecia Martel (South America), Nanouk Leopold (Europe), Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese (Africa), and Carlos Reygadas (North America) – to make a work that exploits the potential of the three-dimensional exhibition space instead of the two-dimensional cinema screen. For some of them, this is the first time that they are creating a cinematographic installation that explores the boundaries of their own work and the art of film in general.

2 February 2021

NFI celebrates the 120th birthday of the first Hungarian film

On April 30th 2021, The Dance, the first Hungarian film, will celebrate its 120th birthday and for this occasion the National Film Institute is launching a series of programs.

As the opening event of the series celebrating 120 years of Hungarian cinema, the National Film Institute will hold the Hungarian Film Day on April 30, the 120th anniversary of the famous day, when the works of Béla Zsitkovszky and Gyula Pekár, The Dance, were presented. Only photographs of the first Hungarian film have survived.

As part of the celebration, the National Film Institute is launching an International Motion Picture Research Program to search for, make accessible and, if possible, repatriate Hungarian and Hungarian-related film historical heritage. More than a third of the films made during the 120 years of Hungarian film history – including the first film, The Dance – are still lost or lost. “The digitization of collections, the active involvement of the National Film Institute in the International Association of Film Archives and the online space provide conditions for finding and identifying films that we could not have dreamed of decades ago. ” – said György Ráduly, director of the NFI Film Archive.

27 January 2021

New traineeship program at EYE Filmmuseum

In September 2021 Eye will start a new traineeship program for young film conservators and collection specialists, that will last ten months providing the participants with insights in both theory and practice. This training has been made possible thanks to the Gieskes-Strijbis Fund and the Hendrik Muller’s Vaderlandsch Fund.

The program, starting in September 2021, will be supervised by Giovanna Fossati, Eye‘s Chief Curator and Professor of Film Heritage and Digital Film Culture at the UvA. The traineeship, set up in collaboration with Haghefilm Digital, offers accommodation for three years to two starting restorers and collection specialists (annually changing).