Greek Film Centre and the Digital Archive of Greek Cinema

Similarly, the cinema defined and marked the twentieth century's history and culture. The recording and transmission of moving images in every available way generated a new art, enhanced spectacularly the potential of communications, and created a vast pool of invaluable, archived visual information.

Cinema is an art as much as a form of memory, imprinted on a sensitive material medium which is exposed to the inevitable wear and tear of time. Nowadays, however, this memory can be preserved in a lossless format, provided that the delicate light-sensitive particles -the negative stock's frames- are maintained and permanently recorded as digital data. Now, this memory can generate fresh combinations of information and ideas, if the content of film images is studied, documented, correlated, and becomes accessible via the Internet - this astounding modern version of the ancient Greek 'Agora', or the Forum.

The Greek Film Centre welcomes you to the Internet portal of the Digital Archive of Greek Cinema, a project through which it contributes to the now global effort to preserve, salvage, and study cinema?s legacy. This multifaceted project has been made reality as part of the European Operational Programme Information Society, which we hope will expand the potential for showcasing Greek cinema, while at the same time offering every Internet user the chance to get to know Greek cinema better through the webpages of this portal, to explore its images, and to embrace it.

The Digital Archive of Greek Cinema is a multifaceted project that aims at preserving, digitalising, documenting, and disseminating through the Internet a significant number of Greek films made between 1950 and 2000. The project is an initiative of the Greek Film Centre, which undertook to design and realise it, and is entirely in tune with the widely established practices of preserving digitally audiovisual material that is vulnerable to wear and tear over time. Its realisation was made possible thanks to the project's inclusion in Measure 1.3 of the Operational Programme Information Society (OPIS), which is implemented by the Special Secretariat for Digital Planning of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, and thanks to its being funded with € 1,150,000. The completion of the project - which involves archiving, documenting, and digitalising 400 hours' worth of film material - will preserve, promote, and make available to everyone worldwide a significant part of the Greek cultural heritage.

Source: http://www.gfcdigital.gr/gfc/index.html?locale=en#