25 Films Chosen for National Film Registry
posted December 15, 2022
United States Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden has announced the annual selection of 25 motion pictures to be inducted into the National Film Registry. Inducted films are selected for their cultural, historic, or aesthetic importance. The 2022 selections date back 124 years in filmmaking to an 1898 film of the “Mardi Gras Carnival” parade in New Orleans. The film was long thought to be lost but was recently discovered in a museum in the Netherlands. The most recent film added to the registry is 2011’s Pariah, directed by Dee Rees.
NFPF Grants to Preserve 61 Films
posted August 24, 2022
The National Film Preservation Foundation has announced the winners of its 2022 federally funded grants. 28 institutions will use the awards to preserve 61 films or sets of films. They include the first true cowboy movie star, lecture reels of Dian Fossey’s mountain gorilla research, a short silent comedy, and much else. Also among the titles that organizations around the United States will preserve are narrative films, a silent melodrama, documentaries, home movies, and industrial and educational films.
NFPF Awards Grants to 35 Institutions
posted August 23, 2019
The National Film Preservation Foundation has announced grants to 35 institutions to save 74 films. Since Congress created the NFPF in 1996, the agency has provided preservation support through grants and collaborative projects to 304 institutions to preserve 2,478 films. The preservation grants target newsreels, silent-era films, home movies, avant-garde films, and endangered independent productions that are unlikely to be preserved by commercial programs.
Life in a Wisconsin Convent in 1958
posted June 19, 2017
With a 2017 grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation, the Congregation of Sisters of St. Agnes, in Wisconsin, will preserve a promotional film from the heyday of recruitment of nuns to Catholic convents. In the 1950s and 1960s, young women entered Catholic convents in cohorts large enough that their process of formation could be as richly social as it was spiritual.
Washington University Preserves Rare Civil Rights Documentary
posted June 15, 2017
The Washington University Libraries’ Film & Media Archive has completed the preservation and digitization of The Streets of Greenwood, a rare civil-rights documentary film from 1963, and has made it freely available, online. The Archive completed the work with a Basic Preservation Grant it received in last year’s round of funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation. One purpose of the grants is to allow archives to make noteworthy films publicly available.
National Film Preservation Foundation Awards 36 Preservation Grants
posted June 13, 2017
The National Film Preservation Foundation has announced (13 June 2017) grants to save 57 films, including Code Blue (1972), a recruitment film aimed at bringing minorities into the medical field made by Henry Hampton’s Blackside Inc., the Emmy-winning producer of Eyes on the Prize, and Broken Barriers (1919), the first motion-picture adaptation of the Sholem Aleichem story that inspired Fiddler on the Roof.
Online Field Guide to Sponsored Films launches
posted May 10, 2017
Few film fans would think to seek out films that corporations, schools, and religious and political organizations made to pitch their various causes and campaigns. And yet, as film collector and historian Rick Prelinger demonstrated in 2006 with his The Field Guide to Sponsored Films, such works can be of considerable historical, cultural, or artistic interest. Now an online companion to the Guide has been launched, the Online Field Guide to Sponsored Films.
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.