only recently been restored.

Film My Lovefilm BFI experiment is going well. I'm certainly watching films which I might otherwise have skipped over, not least Babylon, the hot 80s film about the black working class diaspora which has Aswad and Karl (Brush Strokes) Howman in key roles. Of course it's no substitute for actually being at the BFI - not least because even the dvd transfers of some of these films are in a fairly ropey condition because they're not intended for the mass market and haven't had the money spent on them they deserve.

It's certainly no substitute for being at a repertory festival like the one organised recently by TCM in LA which took pains to show films that weren't even available on dvd or had only recently been restored. Slant Magazine's Dennis Cozzalio's report of the event is a dense, anecdotal masterpiece, which speaks not just of the films and study, but the people he met and the nuts and bolts of simply getting through the door:

"Sunnyside Up concluded around 12:15 a.m., just early enough for me to catch the last train out of Hollywood. On the short journey back to Universal City where my car was parked I struck up a happy conversation with a festival worker who was headed home to North Hollywood. She told me how excited she was to be working the festival—unlike many other festivals for which she had volunteered, here she was actually getting paid. I told her a little about Esther Williams and my own sense of excitement, and after that brief train ride whenever we'd run into each other, as we did several times over the next few days, I noticed we both always seemed to be smiling. [...] I spent the rest of the journey home trying to convince myself that this festival wasn't just some giddy figment of my Technicolor-addled imagination, that it really was happening, and reminding myself just how lucky I was to get to be part of it."

In short, Cozzalio makes this sound like the Woodstock of classic film [via].