The Right Footage

The Right Footage

70th Anniversary: The Cannes Film Festival Celebrates its History

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70th Anniversary: The Cannes Film Festival Celebrates its History

Restored Masterworks at Cannes Classics 2017

For its 70th anniversary, the Cannes Film Festival takes a look back at its history with a series of screenings of classic films and documentaries. The Cannes Classics selection aims to highlight the work of production companies, right-holders, cinematheques, and national archives around the world by projecting restored versions of sixteen films that both marked the history of cinema and of the festival. In total, twenty-four sessions will be scheduled, each featuring one short film and five documentaries from countries related to the festival’s history. Among those films, the iconic 1953 drama film The Earrings of Madame de … by Max Ophüls will be in the limelight. The chef d’oeuvre is highly anticipated as one of its lead figures, singer and actress Danielle Darrieux, turned one-hundred years-old on May 1st this year. The film’s restoration was ordered by the film studio Gaumont Pathé as a tribute to the eternal Danielle Darrieux. Its remastered version will be introduced by Dominique Besnehard, Pierre Murat, and Henri-Jean Servat. In addition, Servat will offer commentary on the latest filmed interview of the now one century-old French actress.  (more…)

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‘I Am Not Your Negro,’ Archive Footage and Race in America

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‘I Am Not Your Negro,’ Archive Footage and Race in America

A historical documentary with contemporary echoes

I Am Not Your Negro was conceived after Gloria Karefa-Smart (born Gloria Esther Baldwin) had handed a letter over to Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck. The letter from her brother, famous African-American writer James Baldwin, to his literary agent spoke of the manuscript he was working on entitled Remember This House. The text aimed to shed light on the Civil Rights era, one of the greatest struggles in American history and focused on three of its leaders and friends of Baldwin: Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. The thirty-page memoir remained unfinished as Baldwin passed away on December 1987.  (more…)

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De-classified: Nuclear Test Footage and Our Dangerous Past

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De-classified: Nuclear Test Footage and Our Dangerous Past

From 1945 to 1962 the American government detonated more than 210 nuclear bombs while cameras captured each test explosion at nearly 2,400 frames per second.

Since the legislative halt of atmospheric testing in 1963, 6,500 out of an estimated 10,000 films have been located with 4,200 scanned and now 750 declassified.  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California set the project in motion in hopes of extracting all lost data that nuclear weapons physicists will use to analyze the magnitude of past and possible future atomic damage.  The project launched out of necessity, has led to the best possible restoration of Cold War bomb footage that the Livermore National Laboratory has now made public on YouTube.  (more…)

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Tribeca Film Festival Announces 2017 Documentary Lineup

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Tribeca Film Festival Announces 2017 Documentary Lineup

Tribeca debuts unseen footage of the 1992 L.A. riots

Twenty-five years after the Rodney King verdict, Tribeca 2017 kicks off this weekend with searing archival news images and unseen footage of the 1992 LA riots with the world premiere of LA 92.  Academy Award co-directors and co-cinematographers Dan Lindsay and T.J. Martin of Undefeated are back again to narrate the unforgettable beating of Rodney King and the riots that ensued costing more than $1 billion dollars in damage and fifty lives.  Opting against voiceovers, the film seamlessly strings together archive footage, sound bites from politicians, and unseen on-the-ground videos from 1992 that make for a staggering account of the riots.  As a National Geographic world release, LA 92 is just one of the big name films that Tribeca enthusiasts have been anticipating.  (more…)

The Right Footage

Eight Days a Week: An Interview with Matt White

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Eight Days a Week: An Interview with Matt White

Matt White is the Managing Partner of Sutton Hoo Studios, a production company specializing in the development of historical documentaries from distressed analog archival artifacts.  He founded the WPA Film Library in 1986, and has held senior management positions at National Geographic TV & Film and The Corporation of Public Broadcasting, where he was responsible for The American Archive initiative. He was a founder and the first President of ACSIL, a global association of leading film & video archives, and also a founding committee member of the United Nation’s initiative “Archives at Risk”, which advocates for the preservation of distressed audio-visual archives throughout the world. A prolific archive producer himself, White recently led the massive 10-year-long, worldwide archive research effort for the 2016 documentary “The Beatles: Eight Days a Week” directed by Ron Howard – an innovative project driven by rare footage sourced from all over the world.  (more…)