criterionforum.org

Stefan Andersson wrote: Sun Jul 04, 2021 7:15 pm Plain and Fancy Girls (Leo McCarey, 1925), starring Charley Chase, re-found:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T051vZBPUY

See also: https://twitter.com/dave_kehr/status/13 ... 1274094592

Stefan Andersson wrote: Thu Jun 03, 2021 7:38 pm Several reels of WB´s "The Gold Diggers" (1923) found in the UK. Info and link to YouTube upload:
https://www.nitrateville.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=31755

Note: YT upload features heavy image flutter. Upload seems to show a print being projected. A YT comment mentions an out-of-sync projector shutter.

Update -- relevant quote from the Nitrateville thread:
"the video I have uploaded was done by projecting the nitrate using my 1906 cinematograph onto a screen and positioning a camera to capture it, so apologies for the loss of quality. Similarly, there is a bit of shutter ghosting on some sections, which is due to the shutter on my projector. The jumpiness is also due to the nature of my machine's mechanism. To be clear, the film print itself is in near perfect condition, and any quality issues are on my end."

domino harvey wrote: Sun Oct 03, 2021 4:49 pm Fragments of Theda Bera’s Salome discovered by intern working at Filmoteca Espanola

THE “MISSING MOVIES” MANIFESTO
Movie audiences are being told that streaming has made the entire history of cinema available for a simple subscription fee — or at least a couple of dozen subscription fees.

This is not true.

As an ad hoc group of film lovers and professionals, we have come together to create Missing Movies to empower filmmakers, distributors, archivists, and others to locate lost materials, clear rights, and advocate for policies and laws to make the full range of our cinema history available to all.

There is an immediate need to address this issue. The truth is that movies are simply not as available today as they were during the heyday of VHS when some brick-and-mortar video stores carried tens of thousands of titles. Now, with a few giant companies controlling the most popular streaming services and trying to outdo one another with original content, many older movies are being left behind.

Thousands of movies are either completely lost or are deemed too small to warrant the expense, and thus are completely unavailable. This is especially true of work created by women and people of color. As a result, we end up with a skewed history of filmmaking and crucial gaps in our cultural knowledge and legacy.

Missing Movies will work to demystify and help decipher the economic, legal, and practical hurdles that filmmakers face when they want to make their older works available. Those challenges include:

● researching contractual rights that may have been agreed to decades ago (sometimes with companies that no longer exist),

● deciphering underlying rights,

● locating master film materials (which may have originally been stored in labs that have gone out of business),

● creating high-def digital transfers.

In addition, all filmmakers need to make sure that their work is properly archived and preserved for the future.

Missing Movies’ long-term goal is to preserve a critical and beloved art form — one that is vitally important to the history of our time. To that end, we plan to advocate for revisions in copyright law and for changes in some industry standards for working with filmmakers.

We seek to formally create a non-profit organization that can facilitate and fund these efforts. To start, Missing Movies will focus on American independent films — including features, documentaries, shorts, and experimental films — but we hope to broaden our scope as work progresses.

Missing Movies looks forward to working with like-minded organizations, including specialty streamers, archives, festivals, distributors, film labs, trade unions, foundations, and a wide range of filmmakers, to find effective solutions to this critical, often-ignored problem.

The immediate goals of Missing Movies are to:

● Bring this issue to the attention of the public, filmmakers, and other stakeholders.

● Identify films that fall into this category.

● Create a guide to help filmmakers research individual films.

● Create a set of FAQs to respond to common problems.

● Collect case studies of films that have recently successfully dealt with these issues.

● Create a website to publish the above information and to interact with filmmakers, cinephiles and the press.

Working Group
Mary Harron
Shola Lynch
Nancy Savoca
Ira Deutchman
Richard Guay
Amy Heller
Dennis Doros
Sue Bodine

Advisory Group
Mira Nair
Maggie Renzi
Allison Anders
Maggie Greenwald
Dolly Hall
Allyson Nadia Field
Ruby Lerner
Tanya De Angelis

Yakushima wrote: Sat Feb 05, 2022 5:02 pm This is a great initiative! I sent them a list of films by Kira Muratova. Her entire catalog is inexplicably "missing".

Calvin wrote: Mon Feb 07, 2022 7:32 am We could name any one of hundreds of non-English language films but, in reality, there are no 'issues' preventing their release other than a label needs to pony up the money and burden the financial risk of releasing them. Which is different from The Heartbreak Kid and, say, Robert Downey Sr.'s Pound which have willing parties but are for bureaucratic or legal reasons 'unreleasable'.

Calvin wrote: Mon Feb 07, 2022 7:32 am We could name any one of hundreds of non-English language films but, in reality, there are no 'issues' preventing their release other than a label needs to pony up the money and burden the financial risk of releasing them. Which is different from The Heartbreak Kid and, say, Robert Downey Sr.'s Pound which have willing parties but are for bureaucratic or legal reasons 'unreleasable'.

pistolwink wrote: Thu Feb 10, 2022 9:02 pmYeah, the "problem" in most cases is just ... capitalism.