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Mondo Cine
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An ongoing personal discussion (tinctured with some actual experience) on the world of film exhibition, film preservation, and film appreciation.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'archiving'
Dark Archives
In film archiving programs much like the one I am in, what you end up learning is a lot more about library studies than actual preservation of film.What's important now is not trying to find an extant copy of an old lost classic. Let's presume that ...
Data, Metadata, and Statistics
Digital objects exist in a different way beyond mere objects in the physical world. They're created and the information by which they are described is added to the object, so it can be found.This is "metadata" - kind of like the stuff that gets stuc...
Something/Anything?
Readers going past the last couple of posts here will note clearly I've gone through various stages of thinking about what this blog discusses.I started out bemoaning the de-sacredification (new word) of the movie-going experience (such as in Hollywo...
Prints And The Revolution
Film prints, it is reported, can last upward of 200 years if treated properly, kept in a dry and dark place, with a minimum of humidity and not stored next to gasoline, mold, or other vinegars.Yet there is a move nowadays to digitize everything, and ...
Insurance Insurance
I recently got a small (if you call a terabyte hard-drive "small") portable back-up for my computers at home. It plugs in and automatically copies any new files or changes since the last time, once an hour if you'll let it, and makes a full back-up ...
The Worthy Actioners
The magnetic tapes of Glyn Johns' original acetate of the "Let It Be" sessions, originally known as "Get Back," survive and allow future generations to hear the original versions of what was supposed to be the Beatles' return-to-their-roots record, a...
Rep
I miss the film repertory houses that I spent so much time in during my formative movie-going years. It was my film school, and the curriculum was created very much haphazardly. I was pretty much on my own to see what I chose.It's not just the films...
The Border Between Calm and Catastrophe
There is a deeply ambivalent feeling about the rise of digital among the hardwired film fans I know. (And I am one of them.)The prevailing wisdom is that digital is taking over in all avenues of media, that film as a production medium is dead, that ...
Fin de Cine
(Being an unofficial continuation of the discussion "Where Were You in '92?" about the disappearance of films - on film.)In the '80s many t.v. stations stopped showing 16mm sources and converted to videotape technology. They sold off their massive 16...
OBJECT/SUBJECT
I've written elsewhere (here, in fact) on how actual prints of films reflect the history and the wear they've acquired as they've travelled through the world, through many projectors, and many hands. Each showing of a film, by dint of its physicalit...
Nice Things Destroyed
In 1922, Buster Keaton produced a short film called “The Blacksmith” (he was about 1 year away from making his first feature) in which an inept garage mechanic inadvertently ruins a white Rolls Royce with the oil on his hands, smearing it all ove...
Through Being Cool
My second job ever was at a movie theatre (my first job was in Sea World, near Mission Beach, so I guess technically that was in show business as well). Working in a theatre was always a very chill job; you slept in, stayed out late, got the ladies ...
The Night The Carousel Burnt Down
The Universal lot in Los Angeles caught fire last weekend, and a vault holding prints and video tapes burned to the ground. While no unique copies of any films were destroyed, it's become clear that apparently the entire collection of 35mm prints a...
The Cone Caper
