For the Love of Film III: Onward and Upward, With the Help of Fandor

The Siren, Marilyn Ferdinand and Rod Heath have joyous news for all of us who labored on the For the Love of Film III blogathon to benefit the National Film Preservation Foundation: the good folks at Fandor have come through in the last reel.

For three months, from mid-November through mid-February, the three surviving reels of The White Shadow will be streamed on the NFPF website, free to all. The warmest of thanks and appreciation to the fine, dedicated folks at Fandor, for recognizing that access is a major part of film preservation, and stepping up to the challenge.

As you recall, our effort raised a total of $6,600 to create a digital copy of The White Shadow, a 1923 silent directed by Graham Cutts that is also the earliest surviving feature worked on by the great Alfred Hitchcock. It was also enough to record the score by Michael Mortilla. Fandor recently donated web hosting for the NFPF's streaming of Let There Be Light, a searing, long-unavailable John Huston documentary about post-traumatic stress suffered by World War II veterans. Fueled by the success of that endeavor, Fandor will be giving the NFPF the funds it needs to stream the presentation.

Fandor is an on-demand independent film service, long committed to providing access to the underseen and the artistically challenging. From the beginning, they've also been offering critical essays on their site; the Siren herself has written for them, as has Marilyn. Says founder Jonathan Marlow: “Fandor was created to enable audiences to experience important but difficult-to-find films. Not everyone has the ability to attend archival screenings of The White Shadow in Los Angeles, Washington or New York. We’re thrilled to collaborate with the NFPF, the Academy Film Archive, and the New Zealand Film Archive in making this fascinating discovery available to Hitchcock fans around the world.”

So, a round of applause for us all--the more than 100 bloggers who contributed their time and talent, the folks around the Web who worked hard to spread the word, and of course the wonderful, bighearted people who dug deep and gave. Once again, we did good.