“A barn. A warehouse. A closet at a mental institution. These locations have something in common: They all contained films or parts of films that were missing and presumed lost forever.” In the March/April issue of Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Marilyn Ferdinand, who blogs at Ferdy on Films (www.ferdyonfilms.com) and is the cofounder of the online fundraiser For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon, considers the possibilities for the future of film restoration and preservation.

She begins by describing three extraordinary rediscoveries: of Georges Méliès’s “Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902), Japanese director Teinosuke Kinugasa’s “A Page of Madness” (1926), and Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer’s iconic film, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).

In particular, Ferdinand discusses the Film Foundation, which Martin Scorsese established in 1990 to help to conserve motion picture history by supporting preservation and restoration projects at film archives.