The Reel Thing: New Online Film Archive Launches in Israel
Source: Haaretz
The Israel Film Archive on Monday launched a new website, incorporating thousands of hours of local movies as well as historic film clips, some of them quite rare. The website was built as part of a digitization project the archive began five years ago, in an attempt to create digital copies of the films in its possession and to save the material from being lost.
The new website has two sections. One is the historical part, which contains filed footage of pre-state and post-1948 periods, from the earliest days of settlement up to the 1960s.
The second part is the artistic section, containing hundreds of fiction and documentary films, both feature-length and shorts.
The historical section boasts a wide range of old newsreels, such as the Carmel newsreels that were produced by Nathan Axelrod and Geva Studios.
The collection also includes films that were deposited in the archive by various institutions, such as the Israel Film Service and Yad Vashem - The World Holocaust Remembrance Center.
The website lets you conduct searches based on themes, decades and people.
For example, when you type in Moshe Dayan, you can view the former chief of staff and defense minister visiting a Gadna military base in 1954, or see him at the sixth Independence Day celebrations in Ramle the same year, as well as during the establishment of Kibbutz Hanita in 1938.
The artistic section contains 250 movies so far, including “They Were Ten” by Baruch Dienar, “El Dorado” by Menahem Golan, “Gay Days” by Yair Qedar, “Afula Express” by Julie Shles and “This is Sodom” by Muli Segev and Adam Sanderson. The list also includes rare films such as works by Raquel Chalfi.
Read more at Haaretz.