Any archivists who have held a piece of fi lm in their hands, wondering how to go about identifying it, recognize the true value of fi lm preservationist Harold Brown's work. In 1967 Brown delivered a pioneering lecture on the identification of early films at the annual Congress of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) in East Berlin. Years of working with Britain's National Film Archive collections, and the close examination of thousands of nitrate prints of the silent period, made Brown a leading authority on early fi lm identification, and an unsurpassed model of methodological consciousness in the archival field. In 1990, FIAF published Brown's Physical Characteristics of Early Films as Aids to Identification, an updated version and a continuation of his 1967 lecture. This publication has long been archivists' trusted companion, constituting a concentrated encyclopedia on all the information that can be discovered or verified through aspects of the fi lm other than the actual projected image – such as perforation shapes; embossed and punched marks; stock manufacturers' and producers' edge marks; frame characteristics; title styles; and production serial numbers. It also included essays on key individual production companies of the silent era. Over the last 30 years, this manual – a basic typewritten 100-page volume (including 20 pages of black & white illustrations), with its easily recognizable red cover – has been an invaluable reference for fi lm archivists and scholars. However, as Brown himself acknowledged in the 1990 edition, the manual was far from definitive. Camille Blot-Wellens, the editor of this new, expanded edition of Brown's 1990 book, belongs to the new generation of researchers who have used Physical Characteristics extensively in their work and have gathered considerable new information on the subject. This new edition is the result of a project she initiated in 2014 with FIAF's support. Brown's original text is now augmented with new original research on key fi lm manufacturers and producers by Camille Bolt-Wellens and other leading archivists and researchers in the field. Richly illustrated (the book contains over 900 images, including 125 in full color), this new 336-page edition of Harold Brown's seminal manual will be welcomed by many, and will no doubt become a must-have working tool for many in the fi lm archiving and academic fields.

Tucked away in a garden on the edge of Paris is a multimedia archive like no other: Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planète (1908-1931). Kahn's vast photo-cinematographic experiment preserved world memory through the privileged lens of everyday life, and Counter-Archive situates this project in its biographic, intellectual, and cinematic contexts. Tracing the archive's key influences, such as the philosopher Henri Bergson, the geographer Jean Brunhes, and the biologist Jean Comandon, Paula Amad maps an alternative landscape of French cultural modernity in which vitalist philosophy cross-pollinated with early film theory, documentary film with the avant-garde, cinematic models of temporality with the early Annales school of history, and film's appropriation of the planet with human geography and colonial ideology. At the heart of the book is an insightful meditation upon the transformed concept of the archive in the age of cinema and an innovative argument about film's counter-archival challenge to history. The first comprehensive study of Kahn's films, Counter-Archive also offers a vital historical perspective on debates involving archives, media, and memory.

Illustrates the rich relationship between film history and feminist theory. Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History brings together a diverse group of international feminist scholars to examine the intersections of feminism, history, and feminist theory in film. Editor Vicki Callahan has assembled essays that reflect a range of methodological approaches--including archival work, visual culture, reception studies, biography, ethno-historical studies, historiography, and textual analysis--by a diverse group of film and media studies scholars to prove that feminist theory, film history, and social practice are inevitably and productively intertwined. Essays in Reclaiming the Archive investigate the different models available in feminist film history and how those feminist strategies might serve as paradigmatic for other sites of feminist intervention. Chapters have an international focus and range chronologically from early cinema to post-feminist texts, organized around the key areas of reception, stars, and authorship. A final section examines the very definitions of feminism (post-feminism), cinema (transmedia), and archives (virtual and online) in place today. The essays in Reclaiming the Archive prove that a significant heritage of film studies lies in the study of feminism in film and feminist film theory. Scholars of film history and feminist studies will appreciate the breadth of work in this volume.