Today’s the first day of the For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon III, which’ll be running through Friday. As Marilyn Ferdinand, the host for the first couple of days, explains, the first Blogathon raised funds to help the National Film Preservation Foundation restore The Sergeant and The Better Man, “two of the more than 100 silent-era American films found in New Zealand Film Archive…. The second Blogathon raised funds to help the Film Noir Foundation restore blacklisted director Cy Endfield’s 1950 film The Sound of Fury…. This year’s event has us working with the good people at NFPF again, and the theme this year is ACCESS. Among the trove of films found in New Zealand were three reels of the 1923 melodrama The White Shadow. Directed by Graham Cutts, it was also the first film Alfred Hitchcock had a major role in creating (assistant director, screenwriter, film editor, production designer, art director, set decorator).”
What the NFPF wants to do is make The White Shadow freely viewable to one and all for four months. They’re estimating that streaming—plus the recording of a new score by Michael Mortilla—will run up a bill of around $15K. Marilyn’s already indexed a fine collection of entries from contributors: “Run around the Internet and read all the amazing posts from the knowledgable film blogathoners who will be participating and DONATE today!”
In other news. Jason Sperb previews (and reflects on) Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Volume 2: Film, Pleasure, and Digital Culture, which he’s co-edited with Scott Balcerzak.
“My Path Is… Film Criticism” is a paper Brian Welk‘s presented at the Indiana University School of Journalism: “There is no golden age. There was never a time when critics mattered more or less, were more or less successful or knew more or less. By revisiting all the think pieces that shaped me into the opinionated and cynical amateur critic I am today, its become obvious that the state of criticism is always on the decline and always on the fringe, but never truly meaningless, suffering or forgotten.”
On the occasion of a recent retrospective at the Cinemathèque française, Mohamed Bouaouina and Anel Dragic interview Kiyoshi Kurosawa for Eigagogo.
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