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July 22, 2007
David Bordwell on "watching movies very, very slowly"
In an engaging entry, David Bordwell writes about about the history of how scholars view celluloid artifacts: "Before DVD and consumer videotape, how could you study films closely? If you had money, you could buy 8mm or 16mm prints of the few titles available in those formats. If you belonged to a library or ran a film club, you could book 16mm prints and screen them over and over. Or you could ask to view the films at a film archive. I started going to film archives in the late 1960s, when they were generally more concerned with preserving and showing films than with letting researchers have access. Over the 1970s and 1980s this situation changed, partly because several archivists grew hospitable to the growing field of academic film studies. At first archives found it easier to screen films for researchers in projection rooms, but eventually many let visitors watch the films on stand-alone viewers. That way the researcher could stop, go forward and back, and take notes." [More technical stuff with illustrations at the link; a good read, even if the image above (which is bookended in the entry with antoher shot) takes the day.]
Posted by Ray Pride at July 22, 2007 04:53 PM
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