Wildlife filmmaking plus early Hawks blogathon

Film Studies For Free will return later today, hopefully, with some more substantial electronic enlightenment (and, indeed, campaigning!), but a couple of quick items first, just to get the blog-juice flowing nicely.

• FSFF just heard about WildFilmHistory, a very high quality online resource, indeed, which presents 'a unique multi-media guide to the history and heritage of [international, though mainly anglophone] wildlife filmmaking'.
• The Education Resources section of the WildFilmHistory website 'contains downloadable multi-media learning resources ideal for cross curricula use in Film & Media Studies, English and Citizenship'; the Oral Histories section presents 29 videoed interviews, to date, 'with wildlife filmmaking pioneers telling their own personal stories', including Sir David Attenborough, Hans and Lotte Hass, Desmond Morris, Heinz Sielmann, and Philippa Scott (there are also a further 91 online profiles of significant personnel in natural history filmmaking). The site also publishes a useful timeline of 'One hundred milestones defining the development of wildlife filmmaking'. And there's a truly magnificent online film archive with 186 wildlife films (so far) from Eadweard Muybridge's The Horse in Motion (1882) through to Springwatch: Episode 1 (2005). The project curator is Derek Kilkenny-Blake, and he and his team deserve our congratulations: they have done a magnificent job in creating this highly valuable resource.

• A warm reminder that the Early Howard Hawks Blog-a-Thon has begun over at Ed Howard's wonderful weblog Only The Cinema. Check it out. Ed writes:

Over the course of the next twelve days, from January 12 to January 23, I'll [...] be talking about Tiger Shark, along with all the other early Hawks films [1926-1936] I've been able to locate: the 1928 silent A Girl in Every Port plus the majority of his sound films made between 1930 and 1936. I hope that I'll have lots of company, too. I welcome contributions about specific films as well as more general posts discussing broader aspects of Hawks' early career. I especially hope, since I don't have access to most of Hawks' silents, that those who have seen them will take the opportunity to weigh in. Below is a full list of all the films that I consider eligible subjects for discussion, plus a compendium of various pre-existing posts on early Hawks. As new posts are submitted, I will add them to the master list below.If you have a post, simply comment here with a link or e-mail me, and I will add it to this post, which will serve as the central gathering place for the blog-a-thon. I really look forward to reading what everyone has to say, and hopefully participating in lots of lively discussions about these films.

DAY 1 (January 12): A Girl in Every Port at Only The Cinema; and Twentieth Century at Another Old Movie Blog

PRE-EVENT READING:Ceiling Zero & The Road To Glory at Greenbriar Picture Show; Come and Get It at DVD Talk; Come and Get It at Self-Styled Siren; The Criminal Code at Apocalypse Later; The Crowd Roars at Colet and Company; The Crowd Roars at Movie Classics; A Girl in Every Port at Senses of Cinema; A Girl in Every Port at Shadowplay; Scarface at Senses of Cinema; Scarface at Twenty Four Frames; Scarface at Only The Cinema; Tiger Shark & The Road To Glory at Auteurs Notebook; Today We Live at Apocalypse Later; Twentieth Century at Only The Cinema

THE FILMS: The Road To Glory (1926); Fig Leaves (1926); The Cradle Snatchers (1927); Paid To Love (1927); A Girl In Every Port (1928); Fazil (1928); The Air Circus (1928, w/ Lewis Seiler); Trent's Last Case (1929); The Dawn Patrol (1930); The Criminal Code (1931); Scarface (1932); The Crowd Roars (1932); Tiger Shark (1932); Today We Live (1933); The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933, w/ W.S. Van Dyke); Viva Villa! (1934, w/ Jack Conway, William Wellman); Twentieth Century (1934); Barbary Coast (1935, w/ William Wyler); Ceiling Zero (1936); The Road to Glory (1936); Come and Get It (1936, w/ Richard Rosson, William Wyler)