As part of the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival, Christophe Dupin (FIAF) and André Gaudreault (Université de Montréal) are pleased to announce the publication of the book Tales from the Vaults: Film Technology over the Years and across Continents, a joint venture of FIAF and TECHNÈS, edited by Louis Pelletier (Université de Montréal) and Rachael Stoeltje (Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive), with a foreword by Christopher Nolan.

Cinema’s multiple lives as an art, a form of entertainment, an industry, and a tool for education and propaganda all share one thing: they rely on machines and technical objects. For more than a century, this essential fact has shaped the life cycle of moving images, from their production and exhibition to their eventual preservation.

Tales from the Vaults: Film Technology over the Years and across Continents collects 100 stories of boundless creativity and ingenuity. Submitted by the archives and film preservationists who now care for this long-neglected heritage alongside historians, these tales cover a wide range of pre-cinema, cinema, video and digital devices developed since the eighteenth century, and used all around the world by filmmakers, exhibitors, hobbyists and archivists. Yet, these tales also frequently enable us to conceive film histories that go beyond individual inventors and film auteurs, or the specificities of national cinemas, by making visible the international networks through which film technology was conceived, circulated, used and constantly adapted to emerging practices.

Panellists:

Tiago Baptista (Secretary-general, FIAF)

Christophe Dupin (FIAF)

André Gaudreault (Université de Montréal)

Santiago Hidalgo (Université de Montréal)

Louis Pelletier (Université de Montréal)

Donata Pesenti Campagnoni (Università di Torino)

Rachael Stoeltje (Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive)

The book launch will be followed by a presentation by Rémy Besson and Claudia Polledri (Université de Montréal) of the Encyclopaedia of Techniques and Technologies and of electronic books published in partnership with Érudit.