Wednesday, September 14, 2011

I Love Film

More unrelenting stuff, 'ending'* with a wonderful hour spent at the British Film Institute on Stephen Street. The last time I was here was over 20 years ago when I was ransacking their Archives (stills & portraits) in the process of producing two exhibitions: one on British Filmmakers, one on British Film Stars. The Archives moved off-site many years ago, to be replaced by a very nice cinemateque where we sank into plush seats and listened to Robin Baker, Head Curator of the National Film Archive, talk about... their thousands & thousands of films (largest in the world), their new project of restoring all of Hitchcock's nine surviving silents with newly commissioned music, their collection of films about London, their 30,000 posters, their great unearthing & compilations of documentary shorts (which I'm slowly getting through - see this post), their huge & interesting collection of Chinese films (!) shot by colonial newsreel companies in the first half of the 20th century, and watching trailers & snippets of all this... It's at times like these that I realise how much I love film.

(* I say 'ending', because I ended up spending the evening in the office playing catch-up)

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