The Fuentes Family: Pioneer Home-Film Makers
posted December 22, 2017
Fluid migration has long shaped the Southwest of the United States — certainly since well before the U.S. fashioned the region from large tracts of Mexico during a military invasion in the 1840s, and certainly ever since. Unfortunately, even after the invention of moving film, audiovisual records of Mexican-American life were rare; but the Library of Congress has just designated a collection of home movies from border life during the 1920s as worthy of permanent preservation.
Hollywood’s Confrontations with Nazism
posted December 16, 2017
What did Hollywood do, when Nazis came calling? Efforts by Nazis to influence Hollywood during the decade before World War II have long occupied historians of the period, resulting in numerous studies. Two new books have in recent months joined that parade, and have cast fresh light on an enormous controversy that arose in 2013 when two other books appeared that dealt with Hollywood’s confrontation with Nazism.
2017 Additions to the National Film Registry Announced
posted December 13, 2017
Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden today (13 December) announced the 2017 selections to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Each year, films are selected for their cultural, historic and/or aesthetic importance. Films in the National Film Registry are selected not as the “best” American films, but as works of enduring importance to American culture. The Librarian of Congress makes the annual selections to the Registry after reviewing hundreds of titles nominated by the public and conferring with Library film curators and members of the National Film Preservation Board.
Films from the National Film Registry Go Online, Free
posted December 12, 2017
To mark the holiday season, the U.S. Library of Congress has made 64 motion pictures that are on its National Film Registry freely available. The films in "Selections from the National Film Registry,” which are available online on the Library’s website, as well as on YouTube, are among hundreds that the Library has designated as worthy of permanent preservation due to their cultural, historical and aesthetic significance.