Cinemarchives
Search a collection of cinema magazines transcribed with OCR, and run full-text search across them.
An active part of cinephilia is built on seeking out old and important texts — sharing them, translating them, making them available. The classic is modern, as Godard put it quoting Eliot.
These texts usually live in PDF files, some scanned, others photographed by hand, page by page. Some magazines are available on archive.org, others can only be found in private forums, or are shared through Google Drive, transfer services, and so on…
The fact is that access to them is limited. Sometimes the PDF is very heavy, zooming into the pages while reading is tiring, the OCR they ship with isn’t always the best quality, and searching across multiple files is simply not viable.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on cinemarchives. The site’s main goal is to take old cinema magazines — previously available only as photographed or scanned PDFs — run OCR on them, and make them available for reading and searching.
At launch, the site features 4 magazines in 4 different languages:
- Cinema & Film — Italian (complete)
- Présence du Cinéma — French (complete)
- Movie — English (first 10 issues)
- Revista de Cinema — Portuguese (first 9 issues)
In total, that’s 46 issues and 3,449 pages.
The idea behind the site is quite simple: make this material easier to read and search, encourage looking up texts about particular films, authors, and themes, and make it easier to triangulate information (who said what, and when).
Translation is a hugely important activity for the cinephile community. I could easily have run AI translations over the archive, but I chose not to. There is an enormous difference between a machine translation and a specialized, literary translation — one that cares about the original context of the text and can bring in a wide range of references that an AI will never manage. That said, I hope the transcriptions make future community translations easier.
I hope the site is useful to everyone interested in researching films — both those who already know this material and those who are about to discover it.
In the coming days I plan to keep uploading more magazines and improving the site.
The site is live at cinemarchives.com.br.