The Fight for Rights on The Streets of Greenwood
posted July 11, 2016
In their 1963 documentary The Streets of Greenwood, a group of young film-makers provided a close-up view of a Mississippi voter-registration drive, of citizens claiming their basic rights, and of a rally that lifted the spirits of harassed activists.
Ruby Bridges, 6, Symbol of Desegregation
posted June 3, 2016
Thanks to a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation, Amistad Research Center will restore and make accessible rare footage of Ruby Bridges, a little girl who in 1960 found herself at the forefront of school desegregation in New Orleans.
Animating the Hangman
posted May 31, 2016
The Animation Show of Shows has received a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve "Hangman" (1964), a cautionary animated adaptation of Maurice Ogden’s poem about a town that allows its citizens be executed one by one. Finding the elements of the film has entailed a search that demonstrates the heartening results that film-restoration devotees can achieve when they go terrier-like after their quarry.
Yale to Preserve Documentarian Nick Doob
posted May 24, 2016
Nick Doob has been in the forefront of American documentary-film making for decades, and now the films he made while a college student are being preserved by his alma mater, thanks to a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
39 Institutions Receive Preservation Grants
posted May 18, 2016
In its 2016 round of preservation grants, the National Film Preservation Foundation has awarded grants to 39 institutions to ensure the survival of 64 films, among them "The Streets of Greenwood" (1963), a documentary about civil rights activists registering African American voters in Mississippi, and James Blue’s "The Olive Trees of Justice" (1962), about the torn loyalties of an Algerian/French man during the Algerian civil war, which won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Ken Jacobs’s Dissected Doctor’s Dream
posted December 22, 2015
Ken Jacobs's life in film making got a boost from junk in a surplus store. In the 1970s, he found some dumped 16mm TV films in a shopfront on a rundown Canal Street in Manhattan that were going for $5 per reel. He made one into "The Doctor's Dream," which he is now restoring with a 2015 Avant-Garde Masters Grant.
Owen Land’s Strange, Expansive Film World
posted November 15, 2015
By the time Owen Land died unexpectedly in 2011 at the age of 67, he had become a leading figure in American "structural film," film making whose films were about the nature of film making. Now Anthology Film Archives will preserve with an award from the recently announced round of Avant-Garde Masters Grants from The Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Films by Gregory J. Markopoulos and Four Other Avant-Gardists Win Preservation Grants
posted November 3, 2015
In this year's round of Avant-Garde Masters Grants from The Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation, Twice a Man, a 1963 film by Gregory J. Markopoulos, was among seven films granted preservation grants. In the mid-1960s, two decades into his highly idiosyncratic filmmaking career, Markopoulous, born in 1928 in Ohio of Greek immigrants, became so disgusted by American critics’ reception of American film avant-gardism that he told a New York Film Festival panel of critics that they were "soulless morons,” packed up, and moved to Greece.
T-Model Hank Rides and Tucson Boys Sing
posted July 28, 2015
Thanks to a grant from the federally backed National Film Preservation Foundation, two films from Arizona are assured preservation: one about a T-Model Ford tour guide, the other about a Tucson choir for boys. They join films the NFPF supported last year, about Yaqui ceremonies and a grand church mission complex from the 18th century.
At the Fair with Bob Hope; on the Hustings with Robert W. Scott
posted September 21, 2014
Thanks to a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation, State Archives of North Carolina will ensure the longevity of films of two far-away phenomena, drawn from a collection that Century Film Productions, a Raleigh-based company, donated to the Archives in 1986.