At a certain point in an already very busy travel year, when the opportunity came along to tack on another trip to Europe, it felt like one more trip didn’t make much difference. I was glad to be able to accept the invitation of the Budapest Classics Marathon, a festival of preserved and classic film, […]

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My first international trip in a year that promises to have more than a few brought me to Switzerland for the annual FIAF Congress. I landed in Zürich and then made my way down through Lucerne, where I’d never been before, and finally to Lausanne. Funiculars, cinemas, photobooths, and chocolate; not a bad way to […]

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In part as a matter of convenience for FIAF Congress attendees, the third Nitrate Picture Show was scheduled right on the heels of FIAF L.A., so after a very brief return to New Haven, allowing enough time to surprise the girls and take Lucy to school, I headed to Rochester. Nothing like a six hour […]

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It’s been five years since my last Movie Week, an annual event in Los Angeles when I’d take a survey of the moviegoing landscape by going to a movie in a different theater every night for a week. I did it for five years between 2008 and 2012. Many reasons contributed to the hiatus—two kids […]

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Much like my trip to Amsterdam last year, I had the chance to spend a week in Paris last week for work (thanks to an invitation to speak at a couple of film preservation events at the Cinémathèque française), which gave me the chance to revisit the city for the first time since our brief […]

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A work event brought me to Amsterdam this week, a lovely place to revisit after our family-of-three trip there a few years back. Movies, photobooths, good food, and I finally rented a bike and tried to keep up with the breakneck pace of the waves of cyclists who fly through the city. >

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“Bologna” has long been short-hand in my film archive experience for a far-off, unattainable, dream-like film festival experience, a week of screenings, inside and open-air, in a beautiful, and culinarily unbeatable, Italian city. I never thought I’d have the reason, or the chance, to attend, but the scheduling of the 2016 FIAF Congress alongside the […]

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The first Nitrate Picture Show was a good excuse to return to Rochester for the first time in seven years, now “only” a six-hour drive from New Haven. I drove with a couple of Film & Media Studies grad students also heading to the festival, and it wasn’t too bad. Rochester seemed the same as […]

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We’re nearly there… This photo was taken in May of last year, at the International Federation of Film Archives Congress in Skopje, Macedonia, as I presented the results of some voting during my first year at the Congress. It feels like yesterday that I was a student, reading about events like this, but there you […]

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2002 brought my first paid work in the field of film archives, a summer job working at the Harvard Depository in Southborough, Massachusetts, checking prints in the Harvard Film Archive collection for acetate deterioration. Here I am on May 8, documenting the fact that I was actually doing this (and that I had actually grown […]

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On exciting thing about working in a new film archive is that I get the opportunity to represent the institution at some national and international events, the most interesting of which is probably the International Federation of Film Archives annual Congress, or FIAF. This year, it was held in Skopje, Macedonia, an intriguing destination about […]

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Back in the fall of 2007, I attended my first Lebowski Fest in Los Angeles. This year, its fifteenth anniversary, I thought I’d go again, and see the film in 35mm for the first time since it came out. I’d never been to the Saban Theater before, so I was happy to be able to […]

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One week a year for the last five years, I’ve gone to a different theater in the L.A. area every day for seven days. Thirty-five sounds sort of like a lot of movie theaters, but there are still plenty more I haven’t been to, if I cast my net wide enough. Like I do every […]

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Laemmle Noho 7 The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel Tuesday, 6/5/12, 7:00 pm Price: $11.00 Concessions: Milk Duds. Audience: 8 people, in a theater that seats 225. Trailers/advertising: Trailers for Cartas a Elena, A Cat in Paris, and The Last Ride. Projection: Digital Searching for a movie I had any interest in seeing, among the glut […]

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Regency Bruin Snow White and the Huntsman Monday, 6/4/12, 7:30 pm Price: $11.50 Concessions: None. Audience: About 40 people, in a theater that seats nearly 700. Trailers/advertising: Trailers for The Amazing Spider-Man, That’s My Boy, Rock of Ages (enough already), Total Recall, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Bourne Legacy. Then an ad for THX, […]

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