Abstract
On 2 December 2009, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)’s flagship drive-time radio news programme broadcast a report on the centenary celebrations of what is claimed on its website to be ‘the UK’s oldest working cinema’.1 The Electric Theatre in Birmingham was formerly a newsreel theatre, and a collection of prints of local topicals and other short films had survived in a rooftop film storage vault until their discovery by an archive film agency in the 1970s. Commenting on a screening of this material at the centenary event, the cinema’s owner, Tom Lawes, told the BBC’s interviewer: ‘We’ve got some amazing archive film … They’ve managed to put it back onto DVD, digitise it, and it’s pretty good, it’s amazing to see the cinema in 1937.’2
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Notes
Federico Vitella, ‘The Italian Widescreen Era: The Adoption of Widescreen Technology as Periodizing Element in the History of Italian Cinema’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 29, no. 1 (2012), p. 24.
Commission on Educational and Cultural Films, The Film in National Life, London (1932), para. 2, p. 1.
Laura Mulvey, ‘Now You Has Jazz’, Sight and Sound, vol. 9, no. 5 (May 1999), pp. 16–18.
The Phoebus Cartel was an alliance of European and American light bulb manufacturers that existed between 1924 and 1929. Its members agreed not to sell bulbs with a designed lifespan of over 1,000 hours, even though it was possible to produce bulbs that lasted much longer, and to inflate the retail price of their bulbs artificially. For more on Phoebus, see Wyatt C. Wells, Antitrust and the Formation of the Postwar World, New York, Columbia University Press (2002), passim.
Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, 2nd ed., London, Starword (1992), pp. 250–253. In 1967, Haskell Wexler won the final black-and-white cinematography Oscar for Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (USA, 1966, dir. Bill Nichols) before the category was abolished, in recognition of the fact that chromogenic colour stocks had rendered the medium obsolete in mainstream film production, except in a minority of cases where its use was an artistic decision.
Simon Brown and Sarah Street, ‘Introduction’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, no. 12 (2010), p. 2.
Ian Christie, ‘Seeing Red’, Sight and Sound, vol. 19, no. 8 (August 2009), p. 37.
Ross Lipman, ‘The Gray Zone: A Restorationist’s Travel Guide’, The Moving Image, vol. 9, no. 2 (Fall 2009), pp. 2–29.
Mark Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction Durham, NC, Duke University Press (2003), p. 332.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man New York, McGraw Hill (1964), p. 7.
Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film Typewriter trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wurz, Stanford, Stanford University Press (1999), p. 160.
Pam Cook and Mieke Bernink (eds.), The Cinema Book 2nd ed., London, British Film Institute (1999), p. 322.
Paul Rotha, The Film Till Now, London, Jonathan Cape (1930), p. 50.
Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, 2nd ed., London, Starword (1992), p. 30.
Sean Cubitt, ‘The Distinctiveness of Digital Criticism’, Screen, vol. 41, no. 1 (2000), p. 90.
Yvonne Spielmann, ‘Expanding Film into Digital Media’, Screen, vol. 41, no. 1 (2000), p. 133.
Stephen Masters, ‘DVD’d we stand’, Sight and Sound, vol. 8, no. 7 (July 1998), p. 64.
John A. Murray, ‘DVD’d we fall’, Sight and Sound, vol. 8, no. 8 (August 1998), p. 64.
Nicholas Rombes, Cinema in the Digital Age, London, Wallflower Press (2009), pp. 31–32.
‘Fourth Annual ANFA Conclave Stresses Importance of 16 mm Industry’s Role in War Effort’, The Billboard, 9 May 1942, p. 28. See also L. Paul Saettler, The Evolution of American Educational Technology, Denver, Libraries Unlimited (1990), pp.190–191.
William Lafferty, ‘Feature Films on Prime-Time Television’, in Tino Balio (ed.), Hollywood in the Age of Television, Boston, Unwin Hyman (1990).
For an analysis of the fake Titanic films, see Stephen Bottomore, The Titanic and Silent Cinema, Hastings, The Projection Box (2000), pp. 85–89.
For an account of the re-editing, see Richard Koszarski, The Man You Loved to Hate: Erich von Stroheim and Hollywood, Oxford, Oxford University Press (1983), pp. 140–149.
David Thomson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles, New York, Alfred E. Knopf (1996), pp. 216–223.
Penelope Houston, Keepers of the Frame: The Film Archives, London, British Film Institute (1994), p. 39.
Sam Kula, ‘President’s Foreword’, The Moving Image, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 2001), vi.
Ray Edmondson, A Philosophy of Audiovisual Archiving, Paris, UNESCO (1998); and Audiovisual Archiving: Philosophy and Principles, Paris, UNESCO (2004).
Arthur Asa Berger, ‘Film Technology’s Latest Frankenstein’, Society, vol. 24, no. 4 (May/June 1987), p. 13.
Peter Wollen, ‘Compulsion: Was Hitchcock a Closet Surrealist?’, Sight and Sound, vol. 7, no. 4 (April 1997), p. 14.
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© 2013 Leo Enticknap
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Enticknap, L. (2013). Introduction — Why Restoration Matters. In: Film Restoration. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137328724_1
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