Acafans, vidders, and fair use advocates might know film studies professor Eric Faden as the maker of A Fair-y Use Tale, a mashup of Disney films used to explain copyright law and fair use. We were often on the same panels on the fair use/ remix video circuit of about ten years ago, and I am a huge fan of his work. I’m currently writing something about his video essay Amuse-Oil, which speaks to me deeply as a vid-fan and vid-scholar: it’s an essay about looking where you’re not supposed to look in the frame. (We know a lot about that!)
But it’s Faden’s most recent work that I want to bring to fandom’s attention: he and his team have been working on preserving a number of Japanese films from the 1930s that were shot on paper–yes, paper!–instead of celluloid. And he’s just launched a website, The Japanese Paper Film Project, about these fascinating early movies. Fans of anime and/or Japanese cinema (or just animation more broadly! Or cinema made with strange materials!) might be interested in seeing these films, which are in the process of being scanned so they can be viewed.
Some of the films even have soundtracks on 78 records: you can see a sample here.
–Francesca Coppa, Fanhackers volunteer