DVD Project Funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities

American silent film was the world's first shared entertainment. It was exciting, it was fun, and EVERYONE watched it, from South Africa to the Soviet Union. With the spread of talking pictures in the late 1920s, the "silent" films that created this global community were put aside and forgotten. Today fewer than 20% of America's silent-era films survive in complete form in the United States. Only a small number have been reissued on commercial DVD or video. Thus students and film enthusiasts unable to travel to film archives face huge obstacles in seeing works from the first decades of American film.

With the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the NFPF launched a project in 2002 to present, for the first time on good-quality video, examples showcasing the full panorama of American filmmaking before the widespread adoption of sound. Joining forces with the NFPF were the nation's foremost silent-film archives: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the George Eastman House, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, and the UCLA Film & Television Archive. The content for our 3-DVD, 9-1/2 hour anthology is drawn entirely from the preservation work of these institutions.

MORE TREASURES celebrates both the range in film types invented in cinema's formative years as well as the period's technical explorations in color, sound, special effects, and exhibition formats. The set includes many features to make the works accessible for audiences at home or in the classroom and includes more than 500 interactive screens about the films and a 200-page illustrated catalog with essays and film credits. For more on the set, click here.

Many contributed to make this project possible. Leading the effort with the NFPF were curator Scott Simmon (University of California at Davis), music curator Martin Marks (MIT), and designer Jennifer Grey (GREYMatter Design). More than 30 musicians and composers created new music for the films without original sound tracks. Seventeen historians, preservationists, and critics contributed commentary. Several technical facilities generously donated services: Film Technology Inc., Chace Productions, and Crest National. The set was authored and replicated by Sony Pictures Entertainment and the book was printed by San Francisco's Watermark Graphics.

MORE TREASURES is distributed by Image Entertainment. As with previous NFPF publications, free copies of the box set were given to all state libraries.