Joint European Filmography

Contents of the database


This database is a compilation of filmographic records submitted by partners of the former Projecto Lumière (1992-1995). All database records available in 2001 have been converted towards a common format, thereby preserving the original information as faithfully as possible. The following is a breakdown of film records by country:

 

AT

Austria

1907 to 1996

2,038

BE

Belgium

1897 to 1995

1,185

DK

Denmark

1913 to 1991

1,193

FI

Finland

1913 to 1994

1,032

FR

France

1919 to 1979

6,098

DE

Germany

1895 to 1997

*16,687

GR

Greece

1930 to 1952

**101

HU

Hungary

1901 to 1997

1,651

IE

Ireland

1916 to 1994

136

IT

Italy

1913 to 1990

9,241

NL

Netherlands

1912 to 1995

728

NO

Norway

1907 to 1994

540

PT

Portugal

1915 to 1996

604

ES

Spain

1910 to 1957

1,287

SE

Sweden

1913 to 1994

1,954

GB

United Kingdom

1913 to 1995

7,556

 
   

Total:

52,031


* The original contribution has been replaced by an updated selection from the German national filmography. This includes a large number of early one-reelers.
** From the Greek contribution, only a small test file (with original titles transliterated into Latin script) has been preserved.

 

Editing

Changes to the original data were strictly limited to formal and syntactic features. Country codes have been standardized to ISO 3166, language codes to ISO 639-2, and date formats to ISO 3901. Syntactic editing has been applied to sort marks and separators used for personal and corporate names, and film titles. Some normalization within other data categories such as gauge, length, colour, and sound has also been applied. All textual data have been converted to the Unicode character set. This server uses the UTF-8 coding scheme for presentation of all textual elements from the database.

Title categories

The original specification for the Joint European Filmography (issued in 1992) distinguishes between four title categories:

  • Original title (T) - Typically the first release title within the country of origin
  • Sort title (ST) - Lexical variant of a title, e.g. with numerals spelled out
  • Translation of title (TR) - For informational purposes only
  • Alternative titles (AT) - All other categories such as working title, re-issue titles, etc.

In addition, some contributors have supplied distribution titles (DT) as a fifth category, sometimes also indicating to which country or region a particular distribution title applies. Others have used suffixes giving additional information such as more specific categories (e.g. title from censorship record), geographic scope (e.g. film festival), etc.

In order to preserve this additional information, all titles were re-classified using the following matrix of categories and attributes:

Category

Country

Year

Language

AT

Alternative title

 

 

 

DT

Distribution title

 

 

 

PT

Production title

 

 

 

TR

Translation

 

 

 

WT

Working title

 

 

 

Film records can have any number of titles from any category. Distribution titles and working titles could only be classified as such where this distinction was made in the original record. A sort title category is not being provided, since all title entries are automatically supplemented with an alternative representation that can be used for sorting and searching independent of language and alphabet.

Attributes Country and Year are present in thoses cases where this information has been supplied. The Language attribute is currently unused. Its main purpose is to allow for an automatic selection of transliteration schemes, once data in non-latin alphabets become available.

Linking multinational duplicates

The original intention of the Joint European Filmography was to consolidate national records relating to the same film into a single, multinational entry. This work was beyond the scope of preparing the current database, since it would have required considerable assistance from film historians. However, a small sample (ca. 1000) of film records have been linked to entries from other national filmographies where the identity was obvious. These links appear as "See also" references at the end of a database record.

22 March 2002, Detlev Balzer