By Library of Congress, 15 March, 2023, Posted by: Matthew Barton
Every month, films from the Library of Congress’s collection are shown at the Mary Pickford Theater in the Library’s James Madison Building in Washington, DC. They range from titles newly preserved by the National Audio Visual Conservation Center film lab to classics from the National Film Registry to lesser known titles worthy of discovery.
Sure, we’re a website about books, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get in on the Oscars fun, too. (Exhibit A: If they gave Oscars to books, our 2022 nominees.) And while there are few adaptations in this year’s lineup, we’ll still be tuning in on Sunday to celebrate storytelling, judge the Academy’s taste, and perhaps witness some live drama. In the meantime, we’re recommending the books and films you should read and watch next for each Best Picture contender. Follow along with us on Twitter on Sunday at 8 pm ET!
The Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center announced today the inaugural Library of Congress Festival of Film and Sound, a new four-day film event celebrating the Library’s rich moving image and recorded sound collections.
The festival will be held in association with AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center and will take place June 15 to 18 at the American Film Institute’s historic theater in Silver Spring, Maryland. Festival passes are now available at AFI.com/Silver.
The Library of Congress Festival of Film and Sound will bring together film lovers with authors, historians, Library of Congress archivists, curators and staff in a fun-filled weekend set to give attendees the opportunity to enjoy recently restored and rediscovered rare silent and sound films from the 1920s through the early 1950s in AFI Silver’s beautifully restored 1938 art deco theater. Featuring many titles currently unavailable on home media or streaming services, the festival will showcase restored archival 35mm prints from the collections of the Library of Congress and other preeminent archives, as well 4K digital presentations of new restorations and rarities. All silent films will feature live musical accompaniment. This will be the first film festival devoted to showcasing the national library’s film collections.
It has long been fashionable to hate baby boomers, “America’s noisiest if no longer largest living generation,” as the Times critic Alexandra Jacobs wrote recently. But I remain on the fence.
I believe that you can appreciate the late David Crosby’s music, for instance, while not endorsing buckskin jackets, walrus mustaches, and lyrics that address women as “milady.”
What I most resent about baby boomers is that, technically, I am one. The baby boom is most often defined as encompassing everyone born from 1946 to 1964, but those nineteen years make for an awfully wide and experientially diverse cohort. I was born in 1958, three years past the generational midpoint of 1955. I graduated from high school in 1976, which means I came of age in a very different world from the earliest boomers, most of whom graduated in 1964.
When the first boomers were toddlers, TV was a novelty. We, the late boomers, were weaned on “Captain Kangaroo” and “Romper Room.” They were old enough to freak out over the Sputnik; we were young enough to grow bored by moon landings. The soundtrack of their senior year in high school was the early Beatles and Motown; ours was “Frampton Comes Alive!” Rather than Freedom Summer, peace marches, and Woodstock, we second-half baby boomers enjoyed an adolescence of inflation, gas lines, and Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech. We grew up to the background noise of the previous decade, when being young was allegedly more thrilling in every way: the music, the drugs, the clothes, the sense of discovery and the possibility of change, the sense that being young mattered.
This year, Disney is celebrating its 100th anniversary of storytelling and entertainment. See the company’s most iconic moments in history in preparation for the company’s centennial celebration.
By Staff Author, Published on February 16, 2023 01:06 PM
Photo: Everett Collection
Walt Disney and his brother Roy Disney pen a deal with Margaret Winkler, one of the leading distributors in animation at the time, to fund 12 episodes of the Alice Comedies. Known at the time as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, this contract is viewed as the start of the Walt Disney Company, as it’s known today. Walt went on to write and produce all 57 episodes of the series that launched his career.
Editor’s Note: Read more, see link below for original item… see video at link…
The Patrick Stewart-led Paramount Plus series finally finds its stride in its last go-round
By Lauren Coates, Published Friday, February 10, 2023
Editor’s Note: Star Trek: Picard will return for its third and final season with the first new episode being released on Paramount+ on February 16th, 2023, with new episodes weekly.
Jonathan Frakes as Riker and Patrick Stewart as Picard Photo: Trae Patton/Paramount+
But the classic franchise is on a pretty short list. Some 35 years after the premiere of that show, audiences are apparently no less thirsty for Picard, Riker, and the rest of the Enterprise-D crew, as seen in Paramount Plus’ ambitious legacy series Star Trek: Picard, which reunites those heroes for a third and final season.
Though early episodes may struggle to shake the writing and tonal tendencies that bogged the first two batches, Picard season three is, without question, the show’s strongest yet, recapturing a bit of that magic of The Next Generation and nicely utilizing its talented cast.