7 October 2013 – During this year’s Pordenone Silent Film Festival, EFG1914 partners show highlights from their collections related to the First World War. The presentation will take place on Wednesday, 9th October from 14:30 – 16:30h in the Auditorium della Regione (Via Roma 2).
Within the scope of the EFG1914 project, 21 film archives are digitising a considerable amount of their WWI collections. For the Centenary of the First World War in early 2014, more than 600 hrs of documentaries, newsreels, amateur footage and feature films from and related to WWI will be available on the European Film Gateway and Europeana websites. As approximately 80% of films from this period are considered lost, the material provided through EFG1914 represents a considerable share of what has been preserved from the time in Europe’s film archives.
31 January 2013 – Filmoteca Española has recently given free online access to the Spanish newsreel NO-DO (Noticiarios y Documentales, 1943 – 1981). Users can also find a selection of feature films, shorts and documentaries, among them ” Un perro andaluz” and other important films from the collections of Filmoteca Española. The videos were published in co-operation with Radio Televisión Española – RTVE.
27 July 2011 – After nearly three years of preparation and development, the European Film Gateway – EFG is now online. The portal to the digital collections of European film archives and cinémathèques offers free access to currently about 400,000 digital videos, photos, film posters and text materials. By September, the number of digital items will increase to 600,000 from 16 film archives.
“The European Film Gateway creates a central online access to Europe’s film heritage for the first time. Previously, this remarkable record of 20th century European cinema had been dispersed on different national platforms,” says Claudia Dillmann, director of the Deutsches Filminstitut, which co-ordinates the project. “Now the films and information about them are more accessible, not only to scholars, journalists and creatives, but also by a broader audience interested in film.”
“EFG also provides access to material in film archives that was hitherto hardly known, and some is now online for the first time,” says project manager Georg Eckes. These include unique magic lantern slide collections from France, erotic films made in Austria in the early 20th century, advertising films from Norway, newsreels from Lithuania and a comprehensive film poster collection from Denmark. Hidden treasures can be discovered from 15 European countries. Cinecittá Luce from Rome, for example, contributes not only a famous Italian newsreel collection reporting on important film-related events and persons, but also a fine collection of early films by great masters like Rossellini, Antonioni, Comencini, and other famous names of Italian filmmaking. An extensive collection of set photos to films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder contributed by the Deutsches Filminstitut will be available for the first time online from August on.
Users of the portal can search for people, for example Marlene Dietrich, but also by film title or keywords. They get an overview of related digital objects from the film archives which can be viewed directly in the portal. The portal always links back to the website of the relevant archives, and therefore also works as a search engine for selected digital holdings of European film archives.
EFG is a component of Europeana, the platform for the cultural heritage of Europe. EFG gathers the indexing and access information, so-called “metadata”, and provides it to Europeana in a structured form. By doing so, the European Film Gateway and Europeana bring together the collections of European film archives with holdings of libraries, archives and museums in Europe, and put them in a transnational and multicultural context.
The EFG portal is the result of the EFG project which was developed by the Deutsches Filminstitut together with the Association des Européennes Cinémathèques and its members. It started in September 2008 and will end in September 2011. The coordination of the project lies with the Deutsches Filminstitut in Frankfurt am Main. It will operate the site on behalf of the project partners even after the project period has ended. The technological infrastructure was provided by the IT research institute of the Italian national research council, CNR-ISTI in Pisa. The project was funded by the eContentplus Programme of the European Commission.
7 April 2011 – Ximon.nl, the new online streaming platform of the Dutch film and TV heritage institutions, was launched today. Over 650 hours of high quality feature films, documentaries and TV drama are now available for online viewing. The earliest work dates from 1901 and the latest productions were made in 2010. Prices start from 0.99 eurocents for a video. Ximon’s platform automatically adjusts the quality of the video stream, even up to full HD (1080p), depending on the end-users’ bandwidth and local computer power. Initiators EYE Film Institute Netherlands (Film) and the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (TV) plan to make their whole digitised repository available through Ximon in the next couple of years. Selected films from the EYE Film Institute will also be made available via the European Film Gateway.
20 February 2011 – As of 10 February 2011, more than 300 archival films are available online for free at filmarkivet.se, a joint project between the Swedish Film Institute and the National Library of Sweden. The majority of the films originates from the Swedish Film Institute’s Archival Film Collections; mainly shorts, non-fiction films, newsreels and commercials – films that reflect the transformation of Swedish society over the last century.
The selection of films is being done by an editorial board with representatives from both institutions. Many of the films selected are virtually unknown but the locations, events and people depicted in them are very familiar. Each film is presented with a short synopsis and production credits. Many also contain longer texts to put the films into context.
Besides an English project description, filmarkivet.se is available in Swedish only.
8 February 2011 – Instant Cinema is a new global online platform for experimental and art film, launched by EYE Film Institute Netherlands during the International Film Festival Rotterdam end of January. The goal of the project, initiated by filmmaker and multimedia expert René Daalder, is to make the remarkable works of experimental filmmakers and artists accessible to audiences worldwide. The platform features both classics from the experimental genre as well as new films by young filmmakers. Instant Cinema is a community website that enables filmmakers to create custom-designed portfolio pages, where they can upload and manage their own content. Curators, museums and other institutions can also upload films to the website, create online exhibitions, cross-link to each other, and react to one another. To view the full press release, please click here.
4 February 2011 – Videos and photos from Cineteca di Bologna’s diverse collections as well as the institution’s book and DVD editions are now available online at the Cineteca’s new cultural digital store CINESTORE. Many items offered by CINESTORE will also be made accessible via the European Film Gateway. Soon CINESTORE will also be available in English.
10 August 2010 – On 30 September – 1 October 2010 the EFG project is organising its annual EFG Plenary Board Meeting in Frankfurt, Germany. During the conference, consortium members will get a preview of the functions and design of the EFG portal, which is about to be launched in 2011, discuss the latest dissemination strategies and learn how to do cataloguing work for EFG.
8 June 2010 – Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889-1968) is one of the icons of international cinema. In May 2010, the Danish Film Institute launched a new website on Dreyer – generally considered the greatest Danish filmmaker of all time – and his work.
Audiences around the world are invited to explore the full extent of Dreyer’s ingenious art through a rich collection of original material and fresh perspectives contributed by Danish and international advocates of the filmmaker’s legacy.
7 October 2013 – During this year’s Pordenone Silent Film Festival, EFG1914 partners show highlights from their collections related to the First World War. The presentation will take place on Wednesday, 9th October from 14:30 – 16:30h in the Auditorium della Regione (Via Roma 2).
