A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound. Though silent films convey narrative and emotion visually, various plot elements or key lines of dialogue may, when necessary, be conveyed by the use of inter-title cards.
Intolerance is a 1916 epic silent film directed by D. W. Griffith. Subtitles include Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages and A Sun-Play of the Ages.
Film preservation, or film restoration, describes a series of ongoing efforts among film historians, archivists, museums, cinematheques, and non-profit organizations to rescue decaying film stock and preserve the images they contain. In the widest sense, preservation assures that a movie will continue to exist in as close to its original form as possible.
The National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF) is an independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America's film heritage. Growing from a national planning effort led by the Library of Congress, the NFPF began operations in 1997. It supports activities nationwide that preserve American films and improve film access for study, education, and exhibition. The NFPF's top priority is saving orphan films, so called because are not protected by commercial interests and are unlikely to survive without public support. Through its grant programs, the NFPF has helped archives, historical societies, libraries, museums, and universities from all 50 states preserve American films and make them available to the public.
A lost film is a feature or short film that no longer exists in any studio archive, private collection, or public archive.
The Academy Film Archive is part of the Academy Foundation, established in 1944 with the purpose of organizing and overseeing the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ educational and cultural activities, including the preservation of motion picture history. Although the current incarnation of the Academy Film Archive began in 1991, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences acquired its first film in 1929.
A film base is a transparent substrate which acts as a support medium for the photosensitive emulsion that lies atop it. Despite the numerous layers and coatings associated with the emulsion layer, the base generally accounts for the vast majority of the thickness of any given film stock. Since the late 19th century, there have been three major types of film base in use: nitrate, acetate, and polyester.
The UCLA Film & Television Archive is a visual arts organization focused on the preservation, study and appreciation of film and television, based at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Moods of the Sea (1941) is a non-narrative experimental film by Slavko Vorkapich and John Hoffman, set to the music of Felix Mendelssohn known as the Hebrides Overture.
An orphan film is a motion picture work that has been abandoned by its owner or copyright holder. The term can also sometimes refer to any film that has suffered neglect.
Cinephilia is the term used to refer to a passionate interest in films, film theory, and film criticism. The term is a portmanteau of the words cinema and philia, one of the four ancient Greek words for love. A person with a passionate interest in cinema is called a cinephile, cinemaphile, filmophile, or, informally, a film buff. To a cinephile, a film is often not just a source of entertainment as they see films from a more critical point of view.
Upstream is a 1927 American comedy film directed by John Ford. A "backstage drama", the film is about a Shakespearean actor and a woman from a knife-throwing act. The film was considered to be a lost film, but in 2009 a print was discovered in the New Zealand Film Archive.
Paper prints of films were an early mechanism to establish the copyright of motion pictures by depositing them with the Library of Congress. Thomas Alva Edison’s company was first to register each frame of motion-picture film onto a positive paper print, in 1893. The Library of Congress processed and cataloged each of the films as one photograph, accepting thousands of paper prints of films over a twenty-year period.
Northeast Historic Film (NHF) is a regional moving image archive located at 85 Main Street in Bucksport, Maine. It is a tax-exempt nonprofit organization dedicated to collecting, preserving and sharing film and video related to the people of Northern New England.
The Film Foundation is a US-based non-profit organization dedicated to film preservation and the exhibition of restored and classic cinema. It was founded by director Martin Scorsese and several other leading filmmakers in 1990. The foundation raises funds and awareness for film preservation projects and creates educational programs about film. The foundation and its partners have restored more than 900 films.
Scratch and Crow (1995) is a four-minute, 16mm, animated film made by Helen Hill as her MFA thesis at the California Institute of the Arts. On January 1, 2017, an authorized Helen Hill Vimeo account launched and includes a high-resolution streaming version of the film, with this annotation: "This hand drawn animated film reveals the secret life cycle of chickens, from their hatching by mother cats to their noisy ascent into Heaven. Filmed in 16 mm."
The China Film Archive (CFA) is a Chinese film archive located in Beijing that is owned and operated by the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It was founded to preserve existing Chinese films and restore ‘lost’ films. In recent years it has collaborated with international film bodies to assist in film preservation and has organised numerous events, most notably the Beijing International Film Festival.
The Yale Film Archive is a film archive located in Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, and is part of the Yale University Library. The film collection consists of more than 7,000 35mm, 16mm, 8mm, and Super 8mm prints and the video collection includes more than 50,000 items on DVD, Blu-ray, LaserDisc, and VHS. The Film Archive engages in the conservation, preservation, presentation, and circulation of moving image materials. The Yale Film Archive is an Associate of the International Federation of Film Archives.
Vladimir "Vlada" Petrić was an eminent theoretician, historian and aesthetician of cinema, a professor at Harvard University and co-founder of the Harvard Film Archive. Professor Petrić was the first scholar to receive a doctoral degree in film studies in the United States at New York University in the Department of Cinema Studies.
A Sound Sleeper is a 1909 American comedy film directed by D. W. Griffith and produced by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. The short was filmed in one day in the Coytesville borough of Fort Lee, New Jersey, which at the time was a popular filming location for many early motion-picture studios in the northeastern United States. Due to the brief running time of this comedy, it was originally distributed in April 1909 on a split reel with another Biograph release, a longer dramatic film titled The Winning Coat.
