National Film Registry adds 25 movies to list

Started by Myxo, December 28, 2004, 12:16:43 PM

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Myxo

WASHINGTON - Films teaching Cold War children to "duck and cover" and describing how Oskar Schindler saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust are being added to the National Film Registry. Also being preserved: Elvis Presley and Rin Tin Tin.

They are among 25 films selected by the Library of Congress (news - web sites) to the registry, which now holds 400 pictures.

Also on this year's list: movies starring Popeye the Sailor Man, Our Gang, Ginger Rodgers and Fred Astaire (news).

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington made the selections after evaluating nearly 1,000 titles nominated by the public and consulting staff and advisers, the library said.

"The films we choose are not necessarily the 'best' American films ever made or the most famous," Billington said in a statement. Rather, they are chosen because they have "cultural, historical or aesthetic significance."

A film's selection recognizes its place in American film and cultural history, he said.

"The registry stands among the finest summations of American cinema's wondrous first century."

This year's selections span a wide cinematic range and include both obscure and well-known movies. Among the better-known films:

"Ben Hur," the 1959 epic starring Charlton Heston (news), which tells the story of a Jewish prince who is betrayed and sent into slavery by a Roman friend, only to regain his freedom and come back for revenge. Its centerpiece: an action-packed chariot race.

"Duck and Cover," the 1951 landmark civil defense film seen by millions of schoolchildren in the 1950s. In the case of an atomic attack, children were advised to duck beneath a table or desk and cover their heads.

"Jailhouse Rock," which showcased Elvis Presley in ultimate rebel mode. The edginess in this 1957 film was toned down in later Presley pictures.

"The Nutty Professor," the 1963 film which some rank as comic Jerry Lewis' greatest.

"Schindler's List," the 1993 film based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a factory owner in Nazi-occupied Poland who employed thousands of Jewish workers and saved them from the Holocaust.

Lesser known films on this year's list include "Daughters of the Dust," the first feature-length film by an black woman to receive a wide theatrical release, and "Empire," Andy Warhol's eight-hour, one-shot stationary camera look at the Empire State Building.

The registry was established by Congress in the 1988 National Film Preservation Act, and each year, 25 movies are added. The Library of Congress works to ensure that each film in the registry is preserved for all time.

Slimepuppy

If anyone wants to see the Duck and Cover film (featuring Bert the Turtle), this is the place to go:
http://www.archive.org/movies/prelinger.php

There's loads and loads of old archived footage there to scrounge through.
The Prelinger archive is also gloriously copyright free. So go ahead and splice that atom bomb explosion into your home movies, completely legally... The rest of the archive isn't, so beware.

Sorry if this is slightly off-topic, just thought people might be interested.
Good way to kill time/bandwidth.
Hyvässä indie-elokuvassa tulee olla zombi, moottorisaha ja ninjoja.

cine

Quote from: SlimepuppyGood way to kill time/bandwidth.
I think Xixax fills that void for most people around here anyway..

Two Lane Blacktop

One of the films also added to the registry this year was "Eraserhead."  Go David!
Body by Guinness

life_boy

Quote from: Myxomatosis..."Empire," Andy Warhol's eight-hour, one-shot stationary camera look at the Empire State Building.

Boy, that one sounds exciting.

MacGuffin

'Hoop Dreams,' 24 Others Added to Registry

The documentary "Hoop Dreams" and footage of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake are among the 25 movies picked this year for the National Film Registry, a compilation of significant films being preserved by the Library of Congress.

Fictional films chosen by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington range from the Buster Keaton comedy, "The Cameraman" to the Christmas classic "Miracle on 34th Street" to the 1982 teen comedy "Fast Times at Ridgemont High."

The 2005 selections bring to 425 the total number of films being preserved by the Library of Congress or other institutions involved in the project.

"Sadly, our enthusiasm for watching films has proved far greater than our commitment to preserving them," Billington said.

Half the movies made before 1950 and 80 percent to 90 percent of those produced before 1920 have disappeared, he said. He added that more are lost each year, partly because of the recently discovered "vinegar syndrome" that attacks the safety film used to preserve most of them.

The most recent movie making the list is 1995's "Toy Story," the first full-length computer-animated feature.

The oldest film selected this year is a documentary from 1906 of the San Francisco earthquake and the fire that followed. The disaster, which destroyed much of the city, was one of the first recorded on film.

"Hoop Dreams," from 1994, follows the lives of two inner-city Chicago kids vying for college basketball scholarships, illustrating the limited opportunities for lower-class black families in America.

Another selection is a set of field recordings of music and services at the Commandment Keeper Church in Beaufort, S.C., in 1940. A team working under novelist Zora Neale Hurston recorded the songs and services of South Carolina's Gullah community. Recently rediscovered sound recordings are being reunited with the film.

Popular successes on the list include "The French Connection" an action-packed film in which Gene Hackman plays a cop tracking down international drug smugglers. The three-hour dramatization of Edna Ferber's novel "Giant" portrays life on the great Texas plains and stars Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean.

Also on the list is "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" a still popular "midnight movie" that changed Hollywood's ideas about audience participation.

Then there's "Baby Face," in which Barbara Stanwyck plays a siren seducing her way up the social ladder. The 1933 film was initially banned for its sexual content before Warner Bros. released an expurgated version. An uncensored version was discovered last year.

"The films we choose are not necessarily the 'best' American films ever made or the most famous, but they are films that continue to have cultural, historical or aesthetic significance," Billington said.

Billington made his selections from more than 1,000 titles nominated by the public. He held lengthy discussions with the library's motion picture division staff and members of the National Film Preservation Board.

The registry was created by Congress in 1989.


The 25 films selected for the 2005 National Film Registry:

_"Baby Face" (1933)
_"The Buffalo Creek Flood: An Act of Man" (1975)
_"The Cameraman" (1928)
_Commandment Keeper Church, Beaufort, S.C., May 1940 (1940)
_"Cool Hand Luke" (1967)
_"Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (1982)
_"The French Connection" (1971)
_"Giant" (1956)
_"H2O" (1929)
_"Hands Up" (1926)
_"Hoop Dreams" (1994)
_"House of Usher" (1960)
_"Imitation of Life" (1934)
_Jeffries-Johnson world championship fight (1910)
_"Making of an American" (1920)
_"Miracle on 34th Street" (1947)
_"Mom and Dad" (1944)
_"The Music Man" (1962)
_"Power of the Press" (1928)
_"A Raisin in the Sun" (1961)
_"The Rocky Horror Picture Show" (1975)
_San Francisco earthquake and fire, April 18, 1906 (1906)
_"The Sting" (1973)
_"A Time for Burning" (1966)
_"Toy Story" (1995)
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

soixante

I'm glad Empire made the cut.

Maybe next year Sleep, which shows a man sleeping for 8 hours, will get on the list.
Music is your best entertainment value.

MacGuffin

25 added to National Film Registry
Selections include 'Blazing Saddles,' 'Fargo,' 'Halloween'
Source: Variety

"Blazing Saddles," "Fargo," "Groundhog Day," "Halloween," "Notorious," "Rocky" and "sex, lies and videotape" are the highest profile features selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry.

The 25 features, announced Wednesday, includes one of the last silent film classics "Flesh and the Devil" (1927), the first on-screen pairing of silent stars John Gilbert and Great Garbo, and 1914's "Tess of the Storm Country," which made Mary Pickford a star.

It also features a quintet from the early days of sound -- Rouben Mamoullian's first film "Applause" (1929); Raoul Walsh's "The Big Trail" (1930), starring a then-unknown John Wayne; Josef von Sternberg's "The Last Command" (1928), starring Emil Jannings; and "Red Dust," a steamy 1932 pre-Production Code melodrama starring Clark Gable and Jean Harlow.

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington made the announcement, which brings the total number of films on the registry to 450.

"The annual selection of films to the National Film Registry involves far more than the simple naming of cherished and important films to a prestigious list," he said. "The Registry should not be seen as 'The Kennedy Center Honors,' 'The Academy Awards,' or even 'America's Most Beloved Films.' Rather, it is an invaluable means to advance public awareness of the richness, creativity and variety of American film heritage, and to dramatize the need for its preservation."

Billington noted that an increasing number of films are lost each year to nitrate deterioration, color fading and the recently discovered "vinegar syndrome," which threatens the acetate-based "safety film" stock on which the vast majority of motion pictures have been reproduced.

The earliest film on the list is the 1913 selection -- "Traffic in Souls," an expose of white slavery -- and the most recent is 1996's "Fargo."

A pair of music performance films were tapped -- 1929's "St. Louis Blues," the only film recording of Bessie Smith," and 1964's "The T.A.M.I. Show," which featured the Rolling Stones and James Brown.

Other films named include a pair that herald early Asian-American cinematic achievements -- "The Curse of Quon Gwon" (1916-17), the earliest know Chinese-American feature; and "Daughter of Shanghai" (1937), a thriller starring Anna May Wong, the first Asian-American movie star.

Other selections a quintet of docus -- 1988's "Drums of the Winter," set among the Eskimos; seven of Henry Smith's "Early Abstractions" (1939-56); "In the Street," a 1948 project set in East Harlem; "Siege," a 1940 project by Julian Bryan chronicling the German bombardment of Warsaw; "Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania" (1971-72) by Jonas Mekas; and "Think of Me in the First Person," a portrait shot by a father of a son with Down's Syndrome between 1960 and 1975.

Student film "A Time Out of War," which won the Oscar for short film in 1954, also made the list.

Billington selected the 25 films after evaluating nearly 1,000 titles nominated by the public.

The process included discussions with the Library's Motion Picture division staff and the National Film Preservation Board.

Congress established the National Film Registry in 1989 and reauthorized the program in April 2005. For each title named to the registry, the Library of Congress works to ensure that the film is preserved.

Films Selected to the 2006 National Film Registry:

"Applause" (1929)
"The Big Trail" (1930)
"Blazing Saddles" (1974)
"The Curse of Quon Gwon" (1916-17)
"Daughter of Shanghai" (1937)
"Drums of Winter" (1988)
"Early Abstractions #1-5,7,10" (1939-56)
"Fargo" (1996)
"Flesh and the Devil" (1927)
"Groundhog Day" (1993)
"Halloween" (1978)
"In the Street" (1948/52)
"The Last Command" (1928)
"Notorious" (1946)
"Red Dust" (1932)
"Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania" (1971-72)
"Rocky" (1976)
"Sex, Lies and Videotape" (1989)
"Siege" (1940)
"St. Louis Blues" (1929)
"The T.A.M.I. Show" (1964)
"Tess of the Storm Country" (1914)
"Think of Me First as a Person" (1960-75)
"A Time Out of War" (1954)
"Traffic in Souls" (1913)
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

`Wuthering Heights' Among 25 Top Films

From "The Naked City" to "In a Lonely Place" and "Oklahoma!" the Library of Congress is adding 25 more classic American films to its national registry.

There are "12 Angry Men" to be heard, "The Strong Man" to be viewed and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" to be dealt with.

"Even as Americans fill the movie theaters to see the latest releases, few are aware that up to half the films produced in this country before 1950 and as much as 90 percent of those made before 1920 are lost forever," said Librarian of Congress James H. Billington in announcing the selections.

"The National Film Registry seeks not only to honor these films, but to ensure that they are preserved for future generations to enjoy," he said in a statement.

The 25 chosen this year bring the registry total to 475.

Both recent and early films are eligible for inclusion, and hundreds are nominated by the public each year.

The films are chosen because they are "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant.

Among those selected this year:

_ "The Naked City," 1948, filmed on actual locations in New York; this movie won Oscars for best photography and editing. It was a gritty crime film combining slices of several stories.

_ "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," 1977, an intelligent sci-fi film in which the climactic scene is set at Devil's Tower National Monument in Wyoming.

_ "In a Lonely Place," 1950, a scathing Hollywood satire with Humphrey Bogart playing a screenwriter, brilliant at his craft yet prone to living with his fists.

_ "Oklahoma!" 1955, brought the fun and famous musical to the screen.

_ "Back to the Future," 1985, explored the possibilities of special effects when a man stranded in 1955 by a time machine must not only find a way home, but also teach his father how to become a man, repair the space/time continuum and save his family from being erased from existence. All while fighting off the advances of his then-teenage mother.

_ "12 Angry Men," 1957, a classic filmed in a spare, claustrophobic style largely set in one jury room relating a single juror's refusal to conform to peer pressure in a murder trial.

_ "The Strong Man," 1926, features Harry Langdon, widely considered one of the great silent comedians, as a meek man in love with a blind woman.

_ "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," 1962, director John Ford's last great Western. The film shows that the conquest of the West meant the triumph of civilization, embodied in Jimmy Stewart, over wild innocence John Wayne and evil Lee Marvin.

Also being added to the registry:

_ "Bullitt" (1968)

_ "Dance, Girl, Dance" (1940)

_ "Dances With Wolves" (1990)

_ "Days of Heaven" (1978)

_ "Glimpse of the Garden" (1957)

_ "Grand Hotel" (1932)

_ "The House I Live In" (1945)

_ "Mighty Like a Moose" (1926)

_ "Now, Voyager" (1942)

_ "Our Day" (1938)

_ "Peege" (1972)

_ "The Sex Life of the Polyp" (1928)

_ "Three Little Pigs" (1933)

_ "Tol'able David" (1921)

_ "Tom, Tom the Piper's Son" (1969-71)

_ "The Women" (1939)

_ "Wuthering Heights" (1939)
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

'Terminator' joins Film Registry
'In Cold Blood,' 'Deliverance' also included
Source: Variety

"The Asphalt Jungle," "Sergeant York," "In Cold Blood," "The Pawnbroker," "Deliverance" and "The Terminator" are among the 25 films selected this year by the Library of Congress for inclusion in its National Film Registry.

The Registry is designed to ensure that pics that are "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant will be preserved for all time.

As always, this year's selections range from classics to obscure gems. "Disneyland Dream" is a Connecticut family's 1956 home movie of their trip to Disneyland and other L.A.-area spots after winning a contest sponsored by Scotch Brand Cellophane Tape. (It's become a cult fave on the Web among Disney buffs.) "No Lies" is a 16-minute 1973 film by then-NYU film student Mitchell Block about the treatment of a rape victim by investigators.

The annual registry selections are chosen by Librarian of Congress James Billington from nominations made by the public via the website of the library's National Film Preservation Board and by board members, who include Martin Scorsese, Caleb Deschanel, Gregory Nava and Leonard Maltin.

Other famed pics on this year's list include "A Face in the Crowd" (1957); "Flower Drum Song" (1961); "Foolish Wives" (1922); "The Invisible Man" (1933); "Johnny Guitar" (1954); "The Killers" (1946); "The Perils of Pauline" (1914); and "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad" (1958).

Also making the cut is a collection of rare color WWII European battle footage shot by helmer George Stevens; MGM's 1929 musical "Hallelujah," directed by King Vidor with an all-black cast; and "Free Radicals," a 1979 four-minute experimental short in which New Zealand filmmaker Len Lye made scratches directly on the film stock and then set the stick-like images dancing to field recordings of the music of an African tribe.

Buster Keaton's first two-reeler, 1920's "One Week," is on the list, as is W.C. Fields' 1926 pic "So's Your Old Man" and 1989's "Water and Power," filmmaker Pat O'Neill's Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner that blends images of downtown L.A. with scenes of water flowing to the city from the Owens Valley.

Docs getting the preservation nod include the landmark 1910 study of Native Americans, "White Fawn's Devotion"; "On the Bowery," Lionel Rogosin's 1957 docu-drama depiction of the lives of three denizens of Gotham's skid row; and 1964's "The March," a docu on the 1963 March on Washington produced through the United States Information Agency.

The National Film Registry was established in 1989. This year's 25 selections bring the number of titles in the collection to 500.

"Both as a public-awareness tool and as an educational learning aid for students, the registry helps this nation understand the diversity of America's film heritage and, just as importantly, the need for its preservation," Billington said in announcing this year's selections.

"The nation has lost about half of the films produced before 1950 and as much as 90% of those made before 1920. In addition, more and more nitrate-based and acetate-based films are deteriorating with the passage of time," he added.


The selections:

"The Asphalt Jungle" (1950)

John Huston's brilliant crime drama contains the recipe for a meticulously planned robbery, but the cast of criminal characters features one too many bad apples. Sam Jaffe, as the twisted mastermind, uses cash from corrupt attorney Emmerich (Louis Calhern) to assemble a group of skilled thugs to pull off a jewel heist. All goes as planned — until an alert night watchman and a corrupt cop enter the picture. Marilyn Monroe has a memorable bit part as Emmerich's "niece."

"Deliverance" (1972)

Four Atlanta professionals (Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, Ronnie Cox and Jon Voight) head for a weekend canoe trip — and instead meet up with two of the more memorable villains in film history (Billy McKinney and Herbert Coward) in this gripping Appalachian "Heart of Darkness." With dazzling visual flair, director John Boorman and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond infuse James Dickey's novel with scenes of genuine terror and frantic struggles for survival battling river rapids — and in the process create a work rich with fascinating ambiguities about "civilized" values, urban-versus-backwoods culture, nature, and man's supposed taming of the environment.

"Disneyland Dream" (1956)

The Barstow family films a memorable home movie of their trip to Disneyland. Robbins and Meg Barstow, along with their children Mary, David and Daniel were among 25 families who won a free trip to the newly opened Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., as part of a "Scotch Brand Cellophane Tape" contest sponsored by 3M. Through vivid color and droll narration ("The landscape was very different from back home in Connecticut"), we see a fantastic historical snapshot of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Catalina Island, Knott's Berry Farm, Universal Studios and Disneyland in mid-1956. Home movies have assumed a rapidly increasing importance in American cultural studies as they provide a priceless and authentic record of time and place.

"A Face in the Crowd" (1957)

Before Andy Griffith became a television legend playing a likable small-town sheriff, he portrayed a completely different type of celebrity in this dark look at the way sudden fame and power can corrupt. In his film debut, Griffith plays a rural drunk, drifter and country singer who becomes an overnight success when a radio station employee (Patricia Neal) puts him on the air. Behind the scenes, he turns into a power-hungry monster who must be exposed. This film is based on the short story "The Arkansas Traveler" by Budd Schulberg, who also wrote the script for director Elia Kazan.

"Flower Drum Song" (1961)

This film version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical marked the first Hollywood studio film featuring performances by a mostly Asian cast, a break from past practice of casting white actors made up to appear Asian. Starring prominent Asian-American actors Nancy Kwan and James Shigeta, this milestone film presented an enduring three-dimensional portrait of Asian America as well as a welcomed, non-cliched portrait of Chinatown beyond the usual exotic tourist facades.

"Foolish Wives" (1922)

Director Erich von Stroheim's third feature, staged with costly and elaborate sets of Monte Carlo, tells the story of a criminal who passes himself off as a Russian count in order to seduce women of society and steal their money. This brilliant and, at the time, controversial film fully established von Stroheim's reputation within the industry as a challenging and difficult-to-manage creative genius.

"Free Radicals" (1979)

Born in New Zealand, avant-garde filmmaker Len Lye moved to the United States and became a naturalized citizen in 1950. For his four-minute work "Free Radicals" (begun in 1958 and completed in 1979), Lye made scratches directly into the film stock. These scratches became "figures of motion" that appear in the finished film as horizontal and vertical lines and shapes dancing to the music of the Bagirmi tribe in Africa.

"Hallelujah" (1929)

The all-black-cast film "Hallelujah" was a surprising gamble by normally conservative MGM, allowed chiefly because director King Vidor deferred his salary and MGM had proved slow to convert from silent to sound films. Vidor had to shoot silent film of the mass-river-baptism and swamp-murder Tennessee location scenes. He then painstakingly synchronized the dialogue and music. Around themes of religion, sensuality and family stability, Vidor molded a tale of a cotton sharecropper that begins with him losing his year's earnings, his brother and his freedom and follows him through the temptations of a dancehall girl (Nina Mae McKinney). The passionate conviction of the melodrama and the resourceful technical experiments make "Hallelujah" among the very first indisputable masterpieces of the sound era.

"In Cold Blood" (1967)

In 1959 two men brutally murdered four members of a Holcomb, Kan., family. Truman Capote reported on the infamous incident, first in a series of New Yorker articles and later in his non-fiction novel, "In Cold Blood." With an unsparing neo-realism, director Richard Brooks adapted Capote's novel, focusing on the motivations, backgrounds, and relationship of the killers, society's failure to spot potential murderers, and their eventual execution on death row. Filmed in striking black-and-white documentary style by cinematographer Conrad Hall, the film starred then-unknown actors Robert Blake and Scott Wilson, both of whom bore a close physical resemblance to the real-life murderers. Blake, in particular, provides a sensational, multi-layered portrayal. The chilling ending depicts Blake climbing to the gallows to be hanged as we hear his heartbeat slowly come to a stop as the screen fades to black.

"The Invisible Man" (1933)

Universal released many classic horror films during the 1930s and director James Whale crafted some of the greatest from that famous cycle: "Frankenstein," "Bride of Frankenstein," "The Old Dark House" and "The Invisible Man." Whale brought a dazzling stylishness to what were essentially low-budget horror films and, in the case of "The Invisible Man," produced sophisticated special effects, aided by John P. Fulton. As in his discovery of Boris Karloff to play "Frankenstein," Whale made another inspirational choice in picking British-born Claude Rains, in his American film debut, to portray H.G. Wells' tormented scientist Jack Griffin. In the film, after discovering a drug which provides the secret to invisibility, Rains becomes an insane maniac and goes on a power-hungry murder spree, but later makes a deathbed confession to his fiancee: "I meddled in things that man must leave alone."

"Johnny Guitar" (1954)

Often described as the one of the stranger, kinkier Westerns of all time, Nicholas Ray's film-noiresque "Johnny Guitar" possesses enough symbolism to keep a psychiatrist occupied for years and was a favorite film of French New Wave directors. "Johnny Guitar," filmed in the Trucolor process and CinemaScope, also rates significance as one of a few Westerns featuring women as the main stars (Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge). Crawford is the owner of a gambling saloon in an isolated town waiting for the train lines to arrive so she can get rich; McCambridge plays her nemesis. Upon its release, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter panned "Johnny Guitar," but the film's reputation has soared over time.

"The Killers" (1946)

Director Robert Siodmak took the original Ernest Hemingway short story as the film's opening point and developed it with an elaborate series of flashbacks, creating a classic example of film noir. Two killers shatter a small town's quiet before an insurance investigator (Edmond O'Brien) digs up crime, betrayal, and a glamorous woman (Ava Gardner) behind an ex-fighter's death (Burt Lancaster's electrifying film debut).

"The March" (1964)

George Stevens Jr., who headed the United States Information Agency (USIA) Motion Picture Service unit from 1962-67, brought in several young talented documentary filmmakers such as Charles Guggenheim, Carroll Ballard, Kent McKenzie, Leo Seltzer, Terry Sanders, Bruce Herschensohn, and James Blue, who directed "The March." This period ushered in the "Golden Era" of USIA films. Examining the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington from the ground-level and focusing on the idealistic passion, joy and synergy of the crowds, Blue's documentary lets us see the event take shape from the planning stage — with sound checks and worries about whether people will attend — to the arrival of enormous crowds on parades of trains and buses. It culminates in Martin Luther King's electrifying "I Have a Dream" speech. These USIA films were rarely seen in America because, fearing propaganda, the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act mandated that no USIA film could be shown domestically without a special act of Congress. These films are being rediscovered because a 1990 act of Congress (P.L. 101-246) authorized domestic screening 12 years after release.

"No Lies" (1973)

Done in faux cinema verite style, Mitchell Block's 16-minute New York University student film begins on a note of insouciant amateurism and then convincingly moves into darker, deeper waters. Opening with a scene of a girl getting ready for a date, the camera-wielding protagonist adroitly orchestrates a mood shift from goofiness to raw pain as an interviewer tears down the girl's emotional defenses after being raped. One of the first films to deal with the way rape victims are treated when they seek professional help for sexual assault, "No Lies" still possesses a searing resonance and has been widely viewed by nurses, therapists and police officers.

"On the Bowery" (1957)

"On the Bowery" is Lionel Rogosin's acclaimed, unrelenting docudrama about the infamous New York City zone known as the Bowery. The film focuses on three of its alcoholic skid row denizens and their marginal existence amid the gin mills, missions and flop houses. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times wrote that "this is a dismal exposition to be charging people money to see." Rogosin and his small crew spent months on the Bowery observing and talking with residents. They crafted the film as a "synthesis" of Bowery life, and it remains a wrenching portrait of hopelessness, despair and broken dreams. The film's writer, Mark Sufrin, wrote in an issue of Sight and Sound magazine: "Very few, once they hit the Bowery, ever leave, are reclaimed, or rehabilitated...I had escaped that frightening place. They still remain."

"One Week" (1920)

"One Week" is the first publicly released two-reel short film starring Buster Keaton. One of Keaton's finest films and one of the greatest short comedies produced during the 1920s, the film, as critic Walter Kerr noted, shows Keaton as "a garden at the moment of blooming." Considered astonishingly creative even by contemporary standards, "One Week" is rife with hilarious comic, often surrealist, sequences chronicling the ill-fated attempts of a newlywed couple to assemble their new home.

"The Pawnbroker" (1965)

"The Pawnbroker" was the first Hollywood film to depict in a realistic, psychologically probing manner the trauma of a Holocaust survivor, a subject previously taboo because of the fear of poor box office or offending delicate sensitivities. Rod Steiger's astounding performance — as he tries to repress his memories of the anguish, physical and emotional shame of being an internment-camp inmate — also serves a perfect allegory for American film's own struggles to represent this major tragedy of 20th century history.

"The Perils of Pauline" (1914)

"The Perils of Pauline" was the first American movie serial. Produced in 20 episodes, in a groundbreaking long-form motion-picture narrative structure, the series starred Pearl White as a young and wealthy heiress whose ingenuity, self-reliance and pluck enable her to regularly outwit a guardian intent on stealing her fortune. The film became an international hit and spawned a succession of elaborate American adventure serial productions that persisted until the advent of regularly scheduled television programs in the 1950s. Although now regarded as a satirical cliché of the movie industry, "Perils of Pauline" in its day inspired a generation of women on the verge of gaining the right to vote in America by showing actress Pearl White performing her own stunts and overcoming a persistent male enemy.

"Sergeant York" (1941)

Gary Cooper, in one of his favorite roles, won his first Oscar for his dead-on portrayal of Tennessee pacifist Sgt. Alvin York, who in an Argonne Forest World War I battle single-handedly captured over 130 German soldiers. A stirring film, which appeared six months before America entered World War II as a nation and inspired Americans through the later conflict, "Sergeant York" contains three main segments all masterfully directed by Howard Hawks: Cooper's life in Tennessee, the war scenes, and post-war scenes in New York City where his newfound fame briefly tempts Cooper not to return to his Tennessee home. This film is Americana at its finest.

"The 7th Voyage of Sinbad" (1958)

Special-effects master Ray Harryhausen provides the hero with fantastic antagonists, including a giant cyclops, fire-breathing dragons, and a sword-wielding animated skeleton, all in glorious Technicolor. His stunning Dynamation process, which blended stop-motion animation and live-actions sequences, and a fantastic score by Bernard Herrmann ("Psycho," "North by Northwest," "The Day the Earth Stood Still," "Citizen Kane," "Vertigo") makes this one of the finest fantasy films of all time.

"So's Your Old Man" (1926)

While W.C. Fields' talents are better suited for sound films — where his verbal jabs and asides still delight and astound — Fields also starred in some memorable silent films. Fields began his career as a vaudevillian juggler and that humor and dexterity shines through in "So's Your Old Man." The craziness is aided immeasurably through the deft comic touches of director Gregory LaCava. In the film, Fields plays inventor Samuel Bisbee, who is considered a vulgarian by the town's elite. His road to financial success takes many hilarious detours including a disastrous demo for potential investors, a bungled suicide attempt, a foray into his classic "golf game" routine and an inspired pantomime to a Spanish princess.

George Stevens World War II Footage (1943-46)

Having already directed classics such as "Swing Time," "Gunga Din" and "Woman of the Year," director George Stevens joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps and headed a motion picture unit under Gen. Eisenhower from 1943-46. He shot many hours of footage chronicling D-Day, including a rare example of color film of the European war front; the liberation of Paris; American and Soviet forces meeting at the Elbe River; and horrific scenes from the Duben labor camp, thought to be a sub-camp of Buchenwald; and the Dachau concentration camp. The footage has become an essential visual record of World War II and a staple of documentary films.

"The Terminator" (1984)

In 1984, few expected much from the upcoming film "The Terminator." Director James Cameron, a protégé of legendary independent filmmaker Roger Corman, had made only two films previously: the modest sci-fi short "Xenogenesis" in 1978 and "Piranha Part Two: The Spawning" in 1981. However, "The Terminator" became one of the sleeper hits of 1984, blending an ingenious, thoughtful script — clearly influenced by the works of sci-fi legend Harlan Ellison — and relentless, non-stop action moved along by an outstanding synthesizer and early techno soundtrack. Most notable was Arnold Schwarzenegger's star-making performance as the mass-killing cyborg with a laconic sense of humor ("I'll be back"). Low-budget, but made with heart, verve, imagination, and superb Stan Winston special effects, "The Terminator" remains among the finest science-fiction films in many decades.

"Water and Power" (1989)

Winner of a Sundance Grand Jury prize, Pat O'Neill's influential experimental work is in his own words "a landscape film that became animated by the beginnings of human stories." In this "city symphony," O'Neill juxtaposes images of downtown Los Angeles with scenes from the Owens Valley, Los Angeles' source of water. This was a brilliant examination of water in all its forms and the one-sided sharing of energy between the two places, representing nature and civilization.

"White Fawn's Devotion" (1910)

James Young Deer is now recognized as the first documented movie director of Native American ancestry. Born in Dakota City, Neb., as a member of the Winnebago Indian tribe, James Young Deer (aka: J. Younger Johnston) began his show-business career in circus and Wild West shows in the 1890s. When Pathe Freres of France established its American studio in 1910, in part to produce more authentically American-style Western films, Young Deer was hired as a director and scenario writer. Frequently in collaboration with his wife, actress Princess Red Wing (aka: Lillian St. Cyr), also of Winnebago ancestry, Young Deer is believed to have written and directed more than 100 movies for Pathe from 1910-1913. Many details of Young Deer's life and movie career remain undocumented and fewer than 10 of his films have been discovered and preserved by U.S. film archives.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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MacGuffin

Star Wars. Alien. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Those are just three of the sci-fi films that the Library of Congress has added to its National Film Registry since 1989, meaning that they are "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant and must be be preserved for all time.

When Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced today 25 more motion pictures worthy of inclusion on the list, only one sci-fi flick made it—1957's The Incredible Shrinking Man, directed by Jack Arnold and scripted by Richard Matheson.

Also of interest to sci-fi fans—the 1911 short adapted from Windsor McKay's Little Nemo comic strip, 1979's The Muppet Movie, Sally Cruikshank's 1975 cartoon Quasi at the Quackadero, and Michael Jackson's 1983 music video Thriller.

Here's the complete list of this year's honorees:

1) Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
2) The Exiles (1961)
3) Heroes All (1920)
4) Hot Dogs for Gauguin (1972)
5) The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)
6) Jezebel (1938)
7) The Jungle (1967)
8 ) The Lead Shoes (1949)
9) Little Nemo (1911)
10) Mabel's Blunder (1914)
11) The Mark of Zorro (1940)
12) Mrs. Miniver (1942)
13) The Muppet Movie (1979)
14) Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
15) Pillow Talk (1959)
16) Precious Images (1986)
17) Quasi at the Quackadero (1975)
18) The Red Book (1994)
19) The Revenge of Pancho Villa (1930-36)
20) Scratch and Crow (1995)
21) Stark Love (1927)
22) The Story of G.I. Joe (1945)
23) A Study in Reds (1932)
24) Thriller (1983)
25) Under Western Stars (1938)
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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MacGuffin

National Film Registry names 25 films to preservation list

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A range of movies from comedy "Airplane!" to George Lucas' "The Empire Strikes Back" and 1906 short film "A Trip Down Market Street" were named to the National Film Registry on Tuesday, ensuring their preservation for future generations.

Among others are horror film "The Exorcist," political drama "All the President's Men," 1959 African-American cultural exploration "Cry of Jazz" and director John Huston's war documentary "Let There Be Light," which was banned in the U.S. for 35 years.

The Library of Congress picks 25 movies each year that are deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant to be preserved for all time due to their significance to American culture.

Movie preservation has grown increasingly important over the last decade or more because about half of the films produced before 1950 and as many as 90 percent before 1920 were made from film stock that is decaying or has already decayed.

"The National Film Registry is a reminder to the nation that the preservation of our cinematic creativity must be a priority," Librarian of Congress James Billington said in a statement.

Some 2,112 movies were nominated in 2010 by the public, then chosen by Billington after consultation with the National Film Preservation Board and the library's movie staff.

The full list of 25 films follows:

1. Airplane (1980)
2. All the President's Men (1976)
3. The Bargain (1914)
4. Cry of Jazz (1959)
5. Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB (1967)
6. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
7. The Exorcist (1973)
8. The Front Page (1931)
9. Grey Gardens (1976)
10. I Am Joaquin (1969)
11. It's a Gift (1934)
12. Let There Be Light (1946)
13. Lonesome (1928)
14. Make Way For Tomorrow (1937)
15. Malcolm X (1992)
16. McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971)
17. Newark Athlete (1891)
18. Our Lady of the Sphere (1969)
19. The Pink Panther (1964)
20. Preservation of the Sign Language (1913)
21. Saturday Night Fever (1977)
22. Study of a River (1996)
23. Tarantella (1940)
24. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945)
25. A Trip Down Market Street (1906)
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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Pas

Since the last couple years, Quebec most hated company, Quebecor, has been doing lost movies restoration and distributing them for a mere 0.99$ to rent and 11.99 to own.

I bought a crazy one where it's two actual twin brothers who years later became crooners. They are known in the province to really hate each other and have always been mostly known for being singers but they act in that film. It takes place in a one-company town. The company is being closed and the town is dead. The brothers decide to go to Toronto to kill the company's whole board of administrators. It's pretty weird because at no point in the film are they depicted as wrong or even ''good-cause-but-bad-way-to-go-at-it'' or whatever. The Toronto dudes are the pure villains and the terrorist killers the heroes. There are also boobs every 3 scenes and full-frontal nudity every 5. Cool movie, can't remember the title though.

Gold Trumpet

Looking at the list above, Let There Be Light is an interesting film. Glad the National Film Registry is honoring it. A documentary made in 1945, it looked at returning soldiers and their psychological disabilities. The government commissioned John Huston to make documentary films about the war effort but when they saw this film and realized it was hitting on a controversial subject (it's considered one of the first efforts to chronicle Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), the government suppressed it from being shown anywhere for 35 years. Since the early 1980s, it's available almost everywhere. You can even find it online for free on Google video, but the video quality is still so-so. Until a full restoration is done, I'm glad the film will be adequately protected.

MacGuffin

'Bambi,' 'Forrest Gump' Added to National Film Registry
Source: THR

"The Lost Weekend," "The Silence of the Lambs," "The War of the Worlds" and "Stand and Deliver" are also among the latest 25 films to be preserved by the Library of Congress.

Landmark films from John Cassavetes, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder and George Pal join Bambi and Forrest Gump as the latest cinematic treasures to enter the National Film Registry, the Library of Congress announced Wednesday.

Also on the list of 25 films chosen to be preserved for future generations are The Kid (1921), Charlie Chaplin's first full-length feature; groundbreaking Latino film Stand and Deliver (1988); and student works from Pixar Animation co-founder Ed Catmull and director Robert Rodriguez.

Under the terms of the National Film Preservation Act, the Librarian of Congress each December names 25 films to the National Film Registry that are "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant.
"These films are selected because of their enduring significance to American culture," Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said. "Our film heritage must be protected because these cinematic treasures document our history and culture and reflect our hopes and dreams."  

This year's batch spans the period from 1912 to 1994 and brings the number of films in the registry to 575.
Making the list this year are Faces (1968), Cassavetes' intense look at a crumbling suburban marriage; Hawks' screwball comedy Twentieth Century (1934), starring Carole Lombard and John Barrymore; The Lost Weekend (1945), Wilder's gut-wrenching examination of alcoholism starring Ray Milland; and producer Pal's Cold War sci-fi classic The War of the Worlds (1953).

In addition to six-time Academy Award winner Forrest Gump (1994), prominent Oscar champions on the list include The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which won five trophies; Sally Field starrer Norma Rae (1979); and George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1959).

The selections also include 1930-40s home movies of the famed Nicholas Brothers dancing team, George Kuchar's comic avant-garde short I, An Actress and a documentary about the drama over desegregation at the University of Alabama in the '60s.  

Annual selections to the registry are finalized by the Librarian after reviewing hundreds of titles nominated by the public (this year 2,228 films were nominated) and conferring with Library film curators and the members of the National Film Preservation Board.

For each title named to the registry, the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation works to ensure that the film is preserved for generations.

Here's a list of the films named to the 2011 National Film Registry, with descriptions supplied by the Library of Congress:

Allures (1961)
Called the master of "cosmic cinema," Jordan Belson excelled in creating abstract imagery with a spiritual dimension that featured dazzling displays of color, light and ever-moving patterns and objects. Trained as a painter and profoundly influenced by Russian artist and theorist Wassily Kandinsky, Belson collaborated in the late 1950s with electronic music composer Henry Jacobs to create elaborate sound and light shows in the San Francisco Morrison Planetarium, an experience that informed his subsequent films. Allures, Belson has stated, "was probably the space-iest film that had been done until then. It creates a feeling of moving into the void." Inspired by Eastern spiritual thought, the five-minute film (which took a year and a half to make) is, Belson suggests, a "mathematically precise" work intended to express the process of becoming that the philosopher Teilhard de Chardin has named "cosmogenesis."

Bambi (1942)
One of Walt Disney's timeless classics (and his own personal favorite), this animated coming-of-age tale of a wide-eyed deer's life in the forest has enchanted generations since its debut nearly 70 years ago. Filled with iconic characters and moments, the film is filled with beautiful images, the result of extensive nature studies by Disney's animators. Its realistic characters merged human and animal qualities in the time-honored tradition of folklore and fable, enhancing the movie's resonating, emotional power. Treasured as one of film's most heart-rending stories of parental love, Bambi also has come to be recognized for its eloquent message of nature conservation.

The Big Heat (1953)
One of the great postwar noir films, The Big Heat stars Glenn Ford, Lee Marvin and Gloria Graham. Set in a fictional American town, it tells the story of a tough cop (Ford) who takes on a local crime syndicate, exposing tensions within his own corrupt police department as well as insecurities and hypocrisies of domestic life in the 1950s. Filled with atmosphere, fascinating female characters and a jolting — yet not gratuitous — degree of violence, The Big Heat, through its subtly expressive technique and resistance to formulaic denouement, manages to be both stylized and brutally realistic, a signature of its director, Fritz Lang.

A Computer Animated Hand (1972)
Catmull created a program for digitally animating a human hand in 1972 as a graduate student project, one of the earliest examples of 3D computer animation. The one-minute film displays a hand turning, opening and closing, pointing at the viewer and flexing its fingers, ending with a shot that seemingly travels up inside the hand. In creating the film, which was incorporated into the 1976 film Futureworld, Catmull worked out concepts that have become foundational for the computer graphics that followed.        
                               
Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963)
American cinema-verite pioneer Robert Drew gathered together a stellar group of filmmakers, including D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, Gregory Shuker, James Lipscomb and Patricia Powell, to capture on film the dramatic unfolding of an ideological crisis, one that revealed political decision-making at the highest levels. The result, Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment, focuses on Gov. George Wallace's attempt to prevent two African-American students from enrolling in the University of Alabama — his infamous "stand in the schoolhouse door" confrontation — and the response of President John F. Kennedy. The film shows deliberations between the president and his staff that led to a peaceful resolution, a decision by the president to deliver a major address on civil rights, and a commitment by Wallace to continue his battle in subsequent national election campaigns. The film premiered at the first New York Film Festival and was then shown on ABC. It has proved to be a revealing complement to written histories of the period, providing viewers the rare opportunity to witness historical events from an insider's perspective.

The Cry of the Children (1912)
Recognized as a key work that both reflected and contributed to the pre-World War I child labor reform movement, the two-reel silent melodrama The Cry of the Children takes its title and fatalistic, uncompromising tone of hopelessness from the 1842 poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The Cry of the Children was part of a wave of "social problem" films released during the 1910s on such subjects as drugs and alcohol, white slavery, immigrants and women's suffrage. Some were sensationalist attempts to exploit lurid topics, while others, like Children, were realistic exposes that championed social reform and demanded change. Shot partially in a working textile factory, Children was recognized by an influential critic of the time as "the boldest, most timely and most effective appeal for the stamping out of the cruelest of all social abuses."

A Cure for Pokeritis (1912)
Largely forgotten today, actor John Bunny merits significant historical importance as the American film industry's earliest comic superstar. A stage actor before the start of his film career in 1910, Bunny starred in more than 150 Vitagraph Studios productions until his death in 1915. Many of his films (affectionately known as "Bunnygraphs") were gentle "domestic" comedies in which he portrayed a henpecked husband alongside co-star Flora Finch. A Cure for Pokeritis exemplifies the genre, as Finch conspires with similarly displeased wives to break up their husbands' weekly poker game. When Bunny died in 1915, a New York Times editorial noted that "Thousands who had never heard him speak ... recognized him as the living symbol of wholesome merriment." The paper presciently commented on the importance of preserving motion pictures and sound recordings for future generations: "His loss will be felt all over the country, and the films which preserve his humorous personality in action may in time have a new value. It is a subject worthy of reflection, the value of a perfect record of a departed singer's voice, of the photographic films perpetuating the drolleries of a comedian who developed such extraordinary capacity for acting before the camera."

El Mariachi (1992)
Directed, edited, co-produced and written in two weeks by Rodriguez for $7,000 while a student at the University of Texas, El Mariachi proved a favorite on the film festival circuit. After Columbia Pictures picked it up for distribution, the film helped usher in the independent movie boom of the early 1990s. El Mariachi is an energetic, highly entertaining tale of an itinerant musician, portrayed by co-producer and Rodriguez crony Carlos Gallardo, who arrives at a Mexican border town during a drug war and is mistaken for a hit man who recently escaped from prison. The story, as film historian Charles Ramirez Berg has suggested, plays with expectations common to two popular exploitation genres — the narcotraficante film, a Mexican police genre, and the transnational warrior-action film, itself rooted in Hollywood Westerns. Rodriguez's success derived from invigorating these genres with creative variants despite the constraints of a shoestring budget. Rodriguez has gone on to become, in Berg's estimation, "arguably the most successful Latino director ever to work in Hollywood."

Faces (1968)
Writer-director Cassavetes described Faces, considered by many to be his first mature work, as "a barrage of attack on contemporary middle-class America." The film depicts a married couple, "safe in their suburban home, narrow in their thinking," he wrote, who experience a breakup that "releases them from the conformity of their existence and forces them into a different context, when all barriers are down." An example of cinematic excess, Faces places its viewers inside intense lengthy scenes to allow them to discover within its relentless confrontations emotions and relations of power between men and women that rarely emerge in more conventionally structured films. In provoking remarkable performances by Lynn Carlin, John Marley and wife Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes created a style of independent filmmaking that has inspired filmmakers around the world.

Fake Fruit Factory (1986)
An expressive, sympathetic look at the everyday lives of young Mexican women who create ornamental papier-mache fruits and vegetables, Fruit Factory exemplifies filmmaker Chick Strand's unique style that deftly blends documentary, avant-garde and ethnographic techniques. After studying anthropology and ethnographic film at the University of California, Strand, who helped noted independent filmmaker Bruce Baillie create the independent film distribution cooperative Canyon Cinema, taught filmmaking for 24 years at Occidental College. She developed a collagist process to create her films, shooting footage of people she encountered over several decades of annual summer stays in Mexico and then editing together individual films. In Fruit Factory, Strand employs a moving camera at close range to create colorfully vivid images often verging on abstraction, while her soundtrack picks up snatches of conversation to evoke, in her words, "the spirit of the people." "I want to know," Strand wrote, "really what it is like to be a breathing, talking, moving, emotional, relating individual in the society."

Forrest Gump (1994)
As the title character, Tom Hanks portrays an earnest, guileless "everyman" whose open-heartedness and sense of the unexpected unwittingly draws him into some of the most iconic events of the 1960s and '70s. A smash hit and the winner of the best picture Oscar, Robert Zemeckis' "Gump" has been honored for its technological innovations (the digital insertion of Gump into vintage archival footage), its resonance within the culture that has elevated Gump (and what he represents in terms of American innocence) to the status of folk hero, and its attempt to engage both playfully and seriously with contentious aspects of the era's traumatic history.

Growing Up Female (1971)
Among the first films to emerge from the women's liberation movement, Growing Up Female is a documentary portrait of America on the brink of profound change in its attitudes toward women. Filmed in spring 1970 by Ohio college students Julia Reichert and Jim Klein, Female focuses on six girls and women ages 4 to 34 and the home, school, work and advertising environments that have impacted their identities. Through open-ended interviews and lyrical documentation of their surroundings, the film strived, in Reichert's words, to "give women a new lens through which to see their own lives." Widely distributed to libraries, universities, churches and youth groups, the film launched a cooperative of female filmmakers that bypassed traditional distribution mechanisms to get its message communicated.

Hester Street (1975)
Joan Micklin Silver's first feature-length film, Hester Street was an adaption of preeminent Yiddish author Abraham Cahan's 1896 well-received first novel Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. In the 1975 film, the writer-director brought to the screen a portrait of Eastern European Jewish life in America that historians have praised for its accuracy of detail and sensitivity to the challenges immigrants faced during their acculturation process. Shot in black-and-white and partly in Yiddish with English subtitles, the independent production, financed with money raised by the filmmaker's husband, was shunned by Hollywood until it established a reputation at the Cannes Film Festival and in European markets. Hester Street focuses on stresses that occur when a "greenhorn" wife, played by Carol Kane (nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal), and her young son arrive in New York to join her Americanized husband. Silver, one of the first female directors of American features to emerge during the women's liberation movement, shifted the story's emphasis from the husband, as in the novel, to the wife. Historian Joyce Antler has written admiringly, "In indicating the hardships experienced by women and their resiliency, as well as the deep strains assimilation posed to masculinity, Hester Street touches on a fundamental cultural challenge confronting immigrants."

I, An Actress (1977)
Underground filmmaker Kuchar and his twin brother, Mike, began making 8mm films as 12-year-old kids in the Bronx, often on their family's apartment rooftop. Before his death in September, Kuchar created more than 200 outlandish low-budget films filled with absurdist melodrama, crazed dialogue and plots and affection for Hollywood film conventions and genres. A professor at the San Francisco Art Institute, Kuchar documented his directing techniques in the hilarious I, An Actress as he encourages an acting student to embellish a melodramatic monologue with increasingly excessive gestures and emotions. Like most of Kuchar's films, Actress embodies a "camp" sensibility, defined by the cultural critic Susan Sontag as deriving from an aesthetic that valorizes not beauty but "love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration." John Waters has cited the Kuchars as his "first inspiration" and credited them with giving him "the self-confidence to believe in my own tawdry vision."

The Iron Horse (1924)
John Ford's epic Western established his reputation as one of Hollywood's most accomplished directors. Intended by Fox studios to rival Paramount's 1923 epic The Covered Wagon, Ford's silent film employed more than 5,000 extras, advertised authenticity in its attention to realistic detail and provided him with the opportunity to create iconic visual images of the Old West, inspired by such master painters as Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. A tale of national unity achieved after the Civil War through the construction of the transcontinental railroad, Iron Horse celebrated the contributions of Irish, Italian and Chinese immigrants, though the number of immigrants allowed to enter the country legally was severely restricted at the time of its production. Iron Horse introduced to American and world audiences a reverential, elegiac mythology that has influenced many subsequent Westerns.

The Kid (1921)
Chaplin's first full-length feature, the silent classic is an artful melding of touching drama, social commentary and inventive comedy. The tale of a foundling (Jackie Coogan, soon to be a major child star) taken in by The Little Tramp, The Kid represents a high point in Chaplin's evolving cinematic style, proving he could sustain his artistry beyond the length of his usual short subjects and could deftly elicit a variety of emotions from his audiences by skillfully blending slapstick and pathos.

The Lost Weekend (1945)
A landmark social-problem film, The Lost Weekend provided audiences with an uncompromising look at the devastating effects of alcoholism. Directed by Wilder and co-written by Wilder and Charles Brackett, the film melded an expressionistic film-noir style with documentary realism to immerse viewers in the harrowing experiences of an aspiring New York writer willing to do almost anything for a drink. Despite opposition from his studio, the Hays Office and the liquor industry, Wilder created a film ranked as one of the best of the decade that won Academy Awards for best picture, direction, screenplay and actor (Milland) and established Wilder as one of America's leading filmmakers.

The Negro Soldier (1944)
Produced by Frank Capra's renowned World War II U.S. Army filming unit, The Negro Soldier showcased the contributions of blacks to American society and their heroism in the nation's wars, portraying them in a dignified, realistic and far less stereotypical manner than they had been depicted in previous Hollywood films. Considered by film historian Thomas Cripps as "a watershed in the use of film to promote racial tolerance," Negro Soldier was produced in reaction to instances of discrimination against African-Americans stationed in the South. Written by Carlton Moss, a young black writer for radio and the Federal Theatre Project, directed by Stuart Heisler and scored by Dmitri Tiomkin, the film highlights the role of the church in the black community and charts the progress of a black soldier through basic training and officer's candidate school before he enters into combat. It became mandatory viewing for all soldiers in American replacement centers from spring 1944 until the war's end.

Nicholas Brothers Family Home Movies (1930s-40s)
Fayard and Harold Nicholas, renowned for their innovative and exuberant dance routines, began in vaudeville in the late 1920s before headlining at the Cotton Club in Harlem, starring on Broadway and performing in Hollywood films. Fred Astaire is reported to have called their dance sequence in 1943's Stormy Weather the greatest movie musical number he had ever seen. Their home movies capture a golden age of show business — with extraordinary footage of Broadway, Harlem and Hollywood — and document the middle-class African-American life of that era, images made rare by the considerable cost of home-movie equipment during the Great Depression. Highlights include the only footage shot inside the Cotton Club, the only footage of famous Broadway shows like Babes in Arms, home movies of an all African-American regiment during World War II, films of street life in Harlem in the 1930s and the family's cross-country tour in 1934.

Norma Rae (1979)
Highlighted by Field's Oscar-winning performance, Norma Rae is the tale of an unlikely activist. A poorly educated single mother, Norma Rae Webster works at a Southern textile mill, where her attempt to better working conditions through unionization, though undermined by her factory bosses, ultimately succeeds after her courageous stand on the factory floor wins the support of her co-workers. The film is less a polemical pro-union statement than a treatise about maturation, personal willpower, fairness and the empowerment of women. Directed by Martin Ritt, Norma Rae was based on the real-life efforts of Crystal Lee Sutton to unionize the J.P. Stevens Mills in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., which finally agreed to allow union representation one year after the film's release.

Porgy and Bess (1959)
Composer Gershwin considered his masterpiece Porgy and Bess to be a "folk opera." Gershwin's score reflected traditional songs he encountered in visits to Charleston, S.C., and in Gullah revival meetings he attended on nearby James Island. Controversy has stalked the production history of the opera that Gershwin created with DuBose Heyward, who had written the original novel and play (with his wife, Dorothy) and penned lyrics with Gershwin's brother Ira. The lavish film version was produced in the late 1950s as the civil rights movement gained momentum, and a number of African-American actors turned down roles they considered demeaning. Harry Belafonte, who refused the part of Porgy, explained, "In this period of our social development, I doubt that it is healthy to expose certain images of the Negro. In a period of calm, perhaps this picture could be viewed historically." Dissension also resulted when producer Samuel Goldwyn dismissed Rouben Mamoulian, who had directed the play and musical on Broadway, and replaced him with Otto Preminger. Produced in Todd-AO, a state-of-the-art widescreen and stereophonic sound recording process, with an all-star cast that included Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis Jr., Pearl Bailey and Diahann Carroll, Porgy and Bess, now considered an "overlooked masterpiece" by one contemporary scholar, rarely has been screened in the ensuing years.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins and director Jonathan Demme won accolades for this chilling thriller based upon a book by Thomas Harris. Foster plays rookie FBI agent Clarice Starling, who must tap into the disturbed mind of imprisoned cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter in order to aid her search for a murderer and torturer at large. A film whose violence is as much psychological as graphic, Silence of the Lambs — winner of Academy Awards for best picture, director, actor, actress and adapted screenplay — has been celebrated for its superb lead performances, its blending of crime and horror genres and its taut direction that brought to the screen one of film's greatest villains and some of its most memorable imagery.

Stand and Deliver (1988)
Based on a true story, Stand and Deliver stars Edward James Olmos in an Oscar-nominated performance as crusading educator Jaime Escalante. A math teacher in East Los Angeles, Escalante inspired his underprivileged students to undertake an intensive program in calculus, achieve high test scores and improve their sense of self-worth. Co-produced by Olmos and directed by Cuban-born Ramon Menendez, Stand and Deliver became one of the most popular of a new wave of narrative feature films produced in the 1980s by Latino filmmakers. The film celebrates in a direct, approachable and impactful way values of self-betterment through hard work and power through knowledge.

Twentieth Century (1934)
A satire on the theatrical milieu and its oversized egos, Twentieth Century marked the first of director Hawks' frenetic comedies that had leading actors of the day "make damn fools of themselves," in Hawks' words, in a genre that became affectionately known as screwball comedy. Hawks had writers Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, who penned the original play, craft dialogue scenes in which lines overlapped as in ordinary conversations but still remained understandable, a style he continued in later films. This sophisticated farce about the tempestuous romance of an egocentric impresario and the star he creates did not fare well on its release but has come to be recognized as one of the era's finest comedies, one that gave Barrymore his last great film role and Lombard her first.

The War of the Worlds (1953)
Released at the height of Cold War hysteria, producer Pal's lavishly designed take on H.G. Wells' 1898 novel of alien invasion was provocatively transplanted from Victorian England to a mid-20th century Southern California small town in this film version. Capitalizing on the apocalyptic paranoia of the atomic age, Barre Lyndon's screenplay wryly replaces Wells' original commentary on the British class system with religious metaphor. Directed by Byron Haskin, formerly a special effects cameraman, the critically and commercially successful film chronicles an apparent meteor crash discovered by a local scientist (Gene Barry) that turns out to be a Martian spacecraft. Gordon Jennings, who died shortly before the film's release, avoided stereotypical flying saucer-style creations in his Academy Award-winning special effects described by reviewers as soul-chilling, hackle-raising and not for the faint of heart.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


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