Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Treasures Captured and Restored


Film Preservation is to me one of the noblest of all enterprises. The specifics of the National Film Preservation Foundation were unknown to me until beginning to work my way through the first disk of the anthology they released in 2000, "Treasures from the American Film Archives." An impressive aspect of the first anthology is how much diversity of film, history, and culture it contains. It is a collaboration of 18 different film archives in the United States including the University of Fairbanks, the National Center for Jewish Film and some of the Smithsonian museums.

My eyes are opened. I always thought of most film preservation efforts in the U.S. as being a kind of limited top down effort from the AFI running those ads on Turner Classic Movies with some scattered efforts from probably the Library of Congress. The NPFP was commissioned by Congress and is impressively doing work all over the country with a variety of initiatives including focusing on silent film, federal and partnered grants, and a focus on preserving visionary avant garde works of independent filmmakers.

I don't think they could have found a better word than TREASURES to describe the contents of these anthologies. Discovering these anthologies is a lot like falling for a jazz artist you didn't know about earlier and finding a row and half of three decades of work in a record shop. I am only 2/3 the way through the first of disk and their are 11 more that have been released in NPFP anthologies, impressions of which will likely be recorded on this here (trying to be) well-executed buffet.

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posted by well-executed buffet at 6:26 AM
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