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In 2009 over 850 cans of film were rescued from a discard pile at a defunct Russian Cultural Centre in Amman, Jordan. Eventually they came to the attention of Matthew Epler, an American who was then teaching in Jordan. This website was created by Epler with the aim of use crowdsourcing to identify and translate the labels on the cans, with a view to eventually digitising the films and creating an online resource for scholars and researchers, as well as recovering the history of what appears to be a culturally significant find. Epler and his colleagues photographed the label on each can and created an online database of images, with fields for researchers to comment. So far, with the assistance of interested researchers, nearly 600 labels have been translated. The material spans five decades from the 1930s to the 1980s and most of it comes from SovExportFilm, a Soviet film agency. A number of clips have been digitised and can be viewed here. Among the films identified so far are a documentary confirmed to be part of the PLO Film Archive, lost since 1985; footage of King Hussein in 1968 addressing the United Nations in the aftermath of the Six Day War and documentary footage of Jerusalem in 1968 and its aftermath. The site is currently (Nov. 2014) inactive but some of the footage can still be viewed on the Moving Image Archive News site.
ETV is a specialised film archive holding footage of the twentieth century. The archive specialises in left wing footage from around the world, with a particular emphasis on material from Russia and the Soviet Union. There is no searchable database, only sections from ETV subject catalogues, which do at least point out the range and strengths of the collection. This site is no longer active, but it can be traced by entering the address in the Wayback Machine. The ETV collection is now held by the National Film and Television Archive.
RUSCICO is a commercial association of Russian and foreign companies remastering and distributing classic Soviet and Russian films on DVD. The database of 120 titles includes full cast, credit and synopsis information and future release details if the DVDs are not already available. In Russian and English.
Part of the Internet Archive, which also covers archived moving images (The Internet Moving Images Archive), audio and software, the Wayback Machine holds cached versions of thousands of websites and billions of pages, allowing users to look at sites that are no longer available or at earlier versions of ones that are still around. An invaluable resource that, due to the gigantic nature of the holdings, is slightly hampered by the fact that no list of the holdings can be easily provided. This means inevitably that correct recall of the URL in question is necessary, or failing that, searching for it on the web first.
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