eReviews

CINEMA IMAGE GALLERY

Wilson. www.hwwilson.com/Databases/artcinema.html

Cinema Image Gallery (CIG) consists of more than 152,000 high-quality images from the Kobal Collection, a film and television image archive spanning over 100 years, from the 19th to the 21st centuries (for a taste of the archive, go to www.picture-desk.com/timeline/timek.html). It includes stills, posters, lobby cards, portraits, animations, and candid photos and is searchable by Subject, Title, Credits, Director, Document Type, Photographer, Physical Description, Studio, Update Code, Genre, Film Year, Image Type, Award Name, Award Category, and Winner (All, Nominees, Winner). There are internal links in the file to biographies of individuals featured in films/shows, as well as links to reviews about productions and related articles about each project.

The system offers the familiar Wilson interface, with options for Basic Search (a single Find box), Advanced Search (offering all the searches named above, explicitly), and Browse (to review the terms contained in a field or group of fields). The Advanced Search certainly seems like the optimal choice for this file, as it offers three search boxes augmented by Advanced Options that include Genre, Film Year, Image Type, and the Award choices.

The Genre option offers nearly 40 different types of film from which to choose, ranging from Action to Crime Thriller to Film Noir, Modern Noir, and Propaganda. Image types include On/Off Set and On/Off Set Candid, as well as Film Portrait, Scene Still, and Red Carpet. Awards covered include the Academy Award, Cannes Film Festival, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild Award. The screen is clearly and cleanly laid out.

I started with an Advanced Search for "chien andalou." I immediately pulled up 19 records for Un Chien Andalou, and when I clicked on one of the records (which include the images) I got a larger image in the main portion of the screen, with its film credit (Un Chien Andalou, 1928, Directed by: Buñuel, Luis), along with a set of links in a column at screen left, including a physical description of the image (Scene Still; Photograph; B&W), type of production (Film), credits (Buñuel, Luis, director and Buñuel-Dali [they co-wrote the screenplay]), a biography link for Luis Buñuel (his obituary from Current Biography), and a link to the film's entry in the Internet Movie Database (IMDB).

When I pulled up the biography entry, I got links to Most Recent Articles about Buñuel (19), Books About Buñuel (65 books and essays in books), and even Books By Buñuel (three entries, including his 1983 biography, My Last Sigh).

But that's not all: in each of the books by entries there were hyperlinks to reviews of the books, from such august sources as Sight and Sound, Cineaste, the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the Nation, Art in America, the New Republic, and, of course, LJ. Heady stuff, indeed.

My next search was for "chicago," limiting the Image Type to Lobby Card/Poster. I got five records: two for the 2007 movie Chicago 10; one for the 2002 film Chicago, with Richard Gere, Renée Zellweger, and Catherine Zeta-Jones; one for the 1938 Tyrone Power epic In Old Chicago; and one for 1964's Robin and the 7 Hoods (which certainly was about Chicago, but I couldn't find the word anywhere in the record. Now that's thoroughness!).

At about this point I realized I could be in serious trouble with this file—as in wanting to spend several days, even weeks, searching it.

A search for "man" and "moon" brought up 33 entries, for movies including 1999's Man on the Moon, 1991's The Man in the Moon, 1987's Amazon Women on the Moon, 1972's The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, 1960's Man in the Moon (starring Michael Hordern and Kenneth More), 1898's The Man in the Moon (aka La Lune à une mètre), and, finally, 1988's Illegally Yours (I think it shows up because it was produced by Crescent Moon/De Laurentiis Pictures). That search certainly illustrates the breadth and diversity of the file.

I also tried a search for Academy Award, Best Actress, Winner, from 1939 to 1945, and got more than I bargained for: 247 records, starting with Joan Crawford's Mildred Pierce and ending with Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind. And then quite a lot of time went by, as I clicked my way through the 100-plus images from Gone with the Wind, many of which I've never seen before.

My last search was for the winner of the Screen Actors Guild award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture for 2000—a search that would have taken a lot more time and effort than the three or four seconds it took to click a few options on the search screen here and that yielded 22 images from Traffic.

It's easy to Print, Save, E-Mail, and Export within the system; there are omnipresent prompts and easy instructions to follow. Citing is somewhat spotty; cites are provided for textual material, but one usually has to click through to a weighty "How To Cite Articles" section, and search through it for how to cite "a work of art" from an image database.

A bit trickier than it should be, given that Wilson notes that "all of the images in the database are rights cleared for educational use."

The price is quite reasonable, given the scope of the file: for public libraries it begins at $1340 for an annual subscription, while for academic librarians it starts at $2060.

A special rate is available for K-12 media centers: 26 cents per student (with a $360 minimum per school; $1340 minimum per school district).

This has to be a rating within context, and for a fairly narrowly focused area of research, this file rates a perfect ten. Users will see for themselves that the content is superlative and that the access transcends what is normally expected of an online file—even when one has high expectations.

This file is enthusiastically recommended for academic and special libraries supporting film studies programs and researchers, as well as for medium to large public libraries. (And I'd give it that recommendation even if they didn't showcase actor Johnny Depp on the file's description page!)