Oliver Hanley introducing a screening at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna in June 2023. Photo courtesy of Valerio Greco.
A new Editor for the Journal of Film Preservation
We are very pleased to inform you that the recruiting panel mandated by the Executive Committee during its April 2024 meeting in Bangkok to recruit a new Editor for the Journal of Film Preservation following Elaine Burrows' retirement, has now completed its mission by appointing Oliver Hanley as the new Editor, following a rigorous selection process. The recruiting panel was composed of Peter Bagrov (FIAF President), Tiago Baptista (FIAF Secretary General), Heather Linville (Member of the Executive Committee), and Christophe Dupin (Executive Publisher of the JFP).
After a careful assessment of the nine high-quality applications received, the panel decided to invite four of the applicants for an interview and a copyediting test, which took place earlier this month. It was very important for the interviewing panel to treat all applicants absolutely equally, in particular by asking each of them exactly the same questions covering all aspects of the required profile for the post.
The final decision was not an easy one for us to make, as the four finalists were all outstanding, but ultimately the panel unanimously felt that Oliver Hanley's profile most closely matches the key requirements of this position.
Oliver will start working on the Journal of Film Preservation progressively over the next few months. The next issue (October 2024), which is still edited by Elaine Burrows in collaboration with Christophe Dupin, is already well under way – the table of contents is finalized and almost all texts have been received and are being copy-edited. Oliver is expected to help us finish this issue, and will take over as the sole Editor of the Journal from the following issue (April 2025).
Past FIAF Bulletin / Journal of Film Preservation editors were Jan de Vaal (1992-1987), Robert Daudelin (1988-1989 and 1996-2011), Eileen Bowser (1989-1990), Paolo Cherchi Usai (1990-1995), Catherine A. Surowiec (2011-2013), and Elaine Burrows (2014-2024).
Oliver Hanley's professional biography
Oliver Hanley, born in 1984 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, is a film preservationist, curator and researcher whose work focuses mainly on popular German silent (and early sound) cinema. A graduate of the University of Amsterdam's Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image professional M.A. programme, he has worked at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin (2008-2011), the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna (2011-2016) and the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF (2016-2021) in Potsdam, where he still currently resides. In Vienna, he supervised the Austrian Film Museum's DVD and online video publications as well as numerous preservation and restoration projects. At the Film University, his teaching mainly focused on research methods in film history and on the transition from analogue to digital technology in film-making, distribution, preservation and access practices. He became a member of FIAF's Programming and Access to Collections Commission (PACC) in 2018, having previously served as a corresponding member since 2016. He also serves on the board of the Berlin-based association of film historians CineGraph Babelsberg and was editor in charge of DVD and Blu-ray reviews for the association’s bi-annual German-language academic journal Filmblatt (www.filmblatt.de) until the Autumn 2022 issue. In April 2021, he was appointed co-artistic director of the Bonn International Silent Film Festival. Since 2023, he has curated the “One Hundred Years Ago” strand of the prestigious Il Cinema Ritrovato film festival in Bologna.
