BFI seeks Project Manager

2009-06-17 | The British Film Institute is seeking a Project Manager to ensure the successful delivery of a new Collections Management System for the BFI National Archive - one of the world's most renowned film and television heritage Collections.

>>Official job advertisement (Note: Deadline for applications has passed beginning of July)

Magyar Nemzeti Filmarchívum:
The Rescue of "Hyppolit, the Butler"

2009-03-11 | Shot and premiered in 1931, "Hyppolit, the Butler", an immortal piece of Hungarian film history, reaping success in Hungary and abroad over decades, has been restored and saved for posterity with the support of the Hungarian Development Bank.

Directed by István Székely, "Hyppolit, the Butler" is an evergreen of Hungarian film history. After almost a decade of it’s completion in July 1945 it was played again in the movies. The 25th anniversary of Hungarian sound film was celebrated by its revival in October 1956. The next return was on 8 June 1972: In that year more than one million people saw it. Each time it was revived, the success was the same. According to the 1980 statistic data of Mokép, "Hyppolit" had attracted more than three and a half million viewers after its revival in 1956. In the 77 years since its making it lost nothing of its appeal, it has remained an unfading favorite of the Hungarian public. Its significance in Hungarian film culture is equivalent to the place of Mihály Kertész’s film "Casablanca" in global film culture.

Recorded on flammable nitro raw material, the sound and picture negative has luckily survived in the collection of the Hungarian National Film Archive. But in the almost eighty years since the shooting it has shrunk as badly as to become unsuitable for any copying by the traditional contact technology.

The Hungarian National Film Archive has restored the film with the support of the Hungarian Development Bank. The Hungarian Film Laboratory performed the digitzation and restoration of the motion picture material, and the Hungarian Film Archive carried out the digital cleaning of the sound. The restored picture and sound negative as well as a copy were generated in the Hungarian Film Laboratory.

Laterna Magica slides available online

2009-02-06 | The Cinémathèque Française holds a collection of 17’000 magic lantern slides from the 18th century to 1920. Now, the website www.laternamagica.fr gives access to a first selection of these slides. Since 1936, archivists of the Cinémathèque as well as several private collectors, among them Will Day (1873-1936), one of the first film historians, have assembled this exceptional collection over the years. Today, the stock is still growing, thanks to donations, acquisitions as well as to the funding of la Fondation Electricité de France. As the fragile glass paintings are likewise difficult to access for researchers as for the broader public, it was decided to first restore and then digitise the material. The digitisation has been supported by the Mission de la recherche et de la technologie du Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. Two important collections are now available online: The “Life Models” series containing colourised photographic slides as well as hand painted large scale slides from the Royal Polytechnic Institution. Further digitised items will be added to the website successively. Coming up next is the “Lapierre” collection in autumn 2009.

filmarchives online Press Release

2009-01-27 | A groundbreaking project sees its successful completion in January 2009: three years ago, the EU-supported MIDAS project took up the challenge to integrate catalogue information from 18 European film archives and to make these resources accessible online via a single site. Now this outstanding project is realised. Via filmarchives online, about 25,000 cinematographic works are available fast and direct for research via the internet. And the portal keeps on growing: information, images and digitised films are added successively, as further archives are invited to join...

read full release

Cinémathèque municipale de Luxembourg looking for head of Archive

2009-01-08 | official job advertisement ...

filmarchives online Screening Event in Thessaloniki

2008-11-17 | A further filmarchives online screening showing "Scenes from Europe's Urban Past" will be presented at the 49th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Greece's grandest film festival. The screening will take place on November 20th in Olympion theatre (10, Aristotelous Square), room Pavlos Zannas, at 13:00. We are looking foward to meeting you there!

Thessaloniki International Film Festival

Building the European Film Gateway

2008-06-23 | Work on a joint European online film portal, the European Film Gateway, begins on September 21 with an inaugural meeting in Frankfurt am Main. The 2-day event brings together 20 partners, including 15 European film archives and museums. Their aim is to set up a central point of access to the European film heritage, overcoming institutional and language barriers. The Deutsches Filminstitut is responsible for the co-ordination of the European Film Gateway (EFG), and the project is funded by the European Commission’s eContentplus programme. By the end of the three-year project in 2011, more than 700,000 photographs, posters, texts, audio documents, and of course entire films and film clips, covering more than 100 years of film history, will be ready for access by professionals, students and film buffs. The platform is set to go online in 2010.

official press release

Proiezione speciale di filmarchives online:
“Scene dal passato urbano europeo”

Il 3 luglio, nell’ambito del festival Il Cinema Ritrovato di Bologna, saranno presentati in una proiezione speciali quattordici tesori cinematografici dal 1909 al 1978. Questo programma di cortometraggi esplora la vita urbana dell’Europa del XX secolo da molteplici prospettive, ed è stato curato dagli archivi che contribuiscono a filmarchives online. Vi aspettiamo a Bologna!

Scarica il programma della proiezione

New Collections Online

2008-06-25 | The integration of further data contributions is making continuous progress. During the last weeks, catalogue information of Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique (Brussels), Deutsche Kinemathek - Museum für Film und Fernsehen (Berlin), Fondazione Cineteca Italiana (Milan), IWF Media and Knowlegde (Göttingen), LICHTSPIEL - Kinemathek Bern, Magyar Nemzeti Filmarchívum (Budapest) and Tainiothiki tis Ellados (Athens) have been made available online. In total, there is information on more than 20.000 film works available by now. The integration of further data is currently in the state of preparation.

more on the collections made available by the archives

filmarchives online Screening Event in Thessaloniki

2008-11-17 | A further filmarchives online screening showing "Scenes from Europe's Urban Past" will be presented at the 49th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, Greece's grandest film festival. The screening will take place on November 20th in Olympion theatre (10, Aristotelous Square), room Pavlos Zannas, at 13:00. We are looking foward to meeting you there!

Thessaloniki International Film Festival

Proiezione speciale di filmarchives online:
“Scene dal passato urbano europeo”

Il 3 luglio, nell’ambito del festival Il Cinema Ritrovato di Bologna, saranno presentati in una proiezione speciali quattordici tesori cinematografici dal 1909 al 1978. Questo programma di cortometraggi esplora la vita urbana dell’Europa del XX secolo da molteplici prospettive, ed è stato curato dagli archivi che contribuiscono a filmarchives online. Vi aspettiamo a Bologna!

Scarica il programma della proiezione

Demo version of Europeana.eu online

2008-02-20 | The web portal of the European Digital Library, branded Europeana, will break new ground by bringing together millions of digitised resources from Europe’s archives, museums, libraries and audio visual collections through a single access point. The European Commission, a strong advocate of a European digital library, expressed its support for Europeana. The demo version of the Europeana is now online. The interested public can complete a reaction survey and win an iPhone.

The demo of Europeana and the video can be seen at www.europeana.eu
The official press release can be found here.

filmarchives online at the Berlin International Film Festival

2008-02-05 | filmarchives online will be present at this year's Berlin International Film Festival (07-17 Feb). The project will be represented on the European Film Market under the Umbrella of the MEDIA Programme. The stand is located in the Central Hall of the Martin-Gropius-Baus (Niederkirchnerstr. 7). We are pleased to welcome you within the framework of one of the world's biggest and most important film festivals in the world!

Berlinale 2008

European Digital Library Foundation welcomed by the Commissioner

2007-11-28 | Yesterday, the European Commission endorsed the work of the European Digital Library Foundation when high level EC officials met members for the formal handover of their statutes. "Europe's citizens should all be able to enjoy our rich cultural heritage. This Foundation is a significant step towards making that ambition come true," Commissioner Viviane Reding, responsible for Information Society and Media commented. "It shows the commitment of Europe's cultural institutions to work together to make their collections available and searchable by the public through a common and multilingual access point online."

Foundation members include the key European heritage and information associations. Their statutes commit members to work in partnership to:

• Provide access to Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage though a cross-domain portal
• Co-operate in the delivery and sustainability of the joint portal
• Stimulate initiatives to bring together existing digital content
• Support digitisation of Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage

The European digital library is developing its prototype site for launch next year. To coincide with the formal handover to the Commissioner, the Foundation announced the CITY as the first of the site’s themes.

The CITY is a broad theme that will enable the prototype site to show the European urban experience from several perspectives. Emerging ideas include:

• cities of the future/cities of the past
• migration and diaspora
• trade and industry
• design, shopping and urban cool
• pox, cholera and the plague: the route to urban health
• archaeology and architecture
• utopias and cities of the imagination
• riot and disorder
• palaces and politics

The digital library project is gathering digitised content from European archives, museums, audio-visual collections and libraries. It will use maps, artefacts, photos, sound, film material, books, archival records and artworks to explore two millennia of connectivity between Europe’s cities.

Dr Wim van Drimmelen, foundation member and Director of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the Netherlands, which hosts the European digital library initiative, said, "archives, museums, audio-visual collections and libraries are collaborating in order to guarantee that their resources can be brought together in a virtual world, regardless of where the original is held. It’s what users expect. However, the benefits are not just for the users. The development work is providing an excellent forum for knowledge transfer between the domains, which increases our collective ability to respond to changing user needs and remain relevant in the fast-moving digital environment."

Search Plugin Available

2007-10-26 | There is a search plugin available now, enabling direct access to the filmarchives online search engine quickly from the search bar in web browsers like Firefox or Opera. You can install this useful tool here:

install search plugin

World Day for Audiovisual Heritage

2007-10-26 | The UNESCO Recommendation for Safeguarding and Preservation of Moving Image has been adopted on 27 October 1980 in Belgrade. To celebrate this occasion, the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage is held annually and draws attention to the importance of film as cultural heritage. It gives film archives the opportunity to present the different aspects of their work to a broader public.

The list of the activities of the participating ACE members is published here:

www.ace-film.eu

filmarchives online at the Venice International Film Festival

2007-08-01 | filmarchives online will be present at the 64. Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica di Venezia with a promotion stand in the "Movie Village" (Lido di Venezia, August 29 – September 08, 2007). Right in front of the Palazzo del Cinema, the "Movie Village" offers information, relaxation and catering to all festival visitors. Founded in 1932, the Venice Film Festival is the oldest and one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world. It is part of the Venice Biennale, a major exhibition and festival for contemporary art. We are looking forward to meeting you!

La Biennale di Venezia