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Posted by: Mike Mashon
You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen. But do you recall that the most famous reindeer of all was the creation of a Montgomery Ward copywriter? And did you know we have that celebrity reindeer’s first appearance on film, in a version rarely seen before? In …
Posted in: Christmas, Film/Video, Motion Pictures, National Film Registry
Posted by: Mike Mashon
The following is guest post by Jenny Paxson, Administrative Assistant at the Packard Campus and the Packard Campus Theater programmer for December. We finish 2014 with a quartet of wonderful holiday films, and as a special added attraction, here’s the trailer for Remember the Night, which will close out the calendar Saturday at 7:30 pm. …
Posted in: Film/Video, Motion Pictures, Packard Campus Theater
Posted by: Bryan Cornell
At some point time around the year 2008 the last physical audio format, the cd, seems to have nearly winked out of existence. Its replacement? An army of wispy, intangible files including mp3, .aiff, wave, ogg vorbis, flac and many others. Of course, many of these formats produce very high-quality audio, and I can now pack a collection of …
Posted in: Early Recording Industry, Recorded Sound
Posted by: Mike Mashon
The following is a guest post by Kelly Chisholm, a Processing Technician in the Moving Image Section. Yesterday I mentioned the J. Fred MacDonald Collection; it is a collection of 40,000+ reels that many of my colleagues in the Moving Image Section have spent a good percentage of our time working on over the last …
Posted in: Film/Video, Motion Pictures
Posted by: Mike Mashon
The following is a guest post by Kelly Chisholm. Hello! When I tell people I work with the Library’s film and video collections, they’re often curious about what my job as a Processing Technician entails and how I trained for it, so I thought I would try to answer both those questions here. I discovered …
Posted in: Staff Profile
Posted by: Mike Mashon
The following is guest post by Jenny Paxson, Administrative Assistant at the Packard Campus and the Packard Campus Theater programmer for December. Thursday, December 11 (7:30 p.m.) The Castle (Miramax, 1997) This charming Australian comedy was the biggest cinematic hit in 1997 in its native land. After it played at the Sundance Film Festival, Roger …
Posted in: Motion Pictures, Packard Campus Theater
Posted by: Mike Mashon
The following is guest post by Jenny Paxson, Administrative Assistant at the Packard Campus and the Packard Campus Theater programmer for December. We’re all film buffs of some kind or another, having our favorite genres, stars, decades and movies. I am one of the lucky ones, a professional film buff who gets to combine my …
Posted in: Motion Pictures, Packard Campus Theater
Posted by: Karen Fishman
This blog post was co-written with Jan McKee, Reference Librarian, Recorded Sound Section, Library of Congress. This year, after Thanksgiving dinner with friends and family, why not burn off some of those calories and thwart those tryptophans by dancing the Turkey Trot instead of sleeping on the living room sofa? This vigorous dance was developed …
Posted in: Early Recording Industry, Jukebox, Recorded Sound, Thanksgiving, Uncategorized
Posted by: Bryan Cornell
Last night the Library of Congress honored veteran songwriter and performer Billy Joel with its coveted Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. The Library of Congress awards the prize annually to a composer or performer whose lifetime contributions exemplify the standard of excellence associated with George and Ira Gershwin. It’s not entirely coincidental that the Library has also just uploaded a revealing interview with Joel …
Posted in: Recorded Sound