NATIONAL FILM PRESERVATION FOUNDATION AWARDS GRANTS TO 22 ARCHIVES
Contact: Jeff Lambert (415-392-7291, lambert@filmpreservation.org)
San Francisco, CA (August 24, 2000)—The National Film Preservation Foundation today announced film preservation grants to 22 archives across the United States. These awards of cash or laboratory services will save 45 films and collections not preserved by commercial interests.
Among the winning projects are the cinéma vérité documentary The Hunters (1957), shot in southern Africa by John Marshall; films of Ojibwe wild rice harvesting in the 1930s; a newsreel outtake of the young Charles Lindbergh as a U.S. mail pilot; an Italian-language sound short made for immigrant audiences; avant-garde works by Jim Davis, Stan Vanderbeek, and James Sibley Watson, Jr.; and footage of Batman illustrator Dick Sprang's explorations of Utah's canyon country in the early 1950s.
"The sheer diversity of these works is most impressive and suggests the vast wealth of films requiring preservation to survive," said Allen Daviau, the American Society of Cinematographers' representative to the National Film Preservation Board, who served on the review panel.
The summer awards also include three pilot projects to bring preserved films to a wider audience. The Minnesota Historical Society will distribute historical footage of native peoples through the state's tribal education system; George Eastman House will present jazz accompaniment for its 2001 Black History Month silent film series; the Museum of Modern Art will translate back into English the intertitles of The Life of Moses (1909), a "lost" American five-reeler found in Czech Republic.
Fourteen of the awards are made possible through federal support. The others distribute preservation services donated by U.S. film laboratories and post-production houses. With these latest grants, the NFPF has advanced film preservation in 22 states and the District of Columbia and helped save more than 275 American films and collections. More grant opportunities will be announced on the NFPF web site in October 2000.
The grant recipients are:
- Alaska Moving Image Preservation Association
- Anthology Film Archives (New York)
- Bishop Museum Archives (Hawaii)
- Brandeis University (Massachusetts)
- Documentary Educational Resources (Massachusetts)
- Emory University (Georgia)
- Film/Video Arts (New York)
- George Eastman House (New York)
- Louis Wolfson II Media History Center (Florida)
- Maryland Historical Society
- Minnesota Historical Society
- Museum of Modern Art (New York)
- National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution (District of Columbia)
- Nebraska State Historical Society
- Northeast Historic Film (Maine)
- Peabody Essex Museum (Massachusetts)
- San Diego Historical Society (California)
- Smithsonian Institution Archives, Smithsonian Institution (District of Columbia)
- Utah State Historical Society
- UCLA Film and Television Archive (California)
- University of South Carolina Newsfilm Archive
- Wallowa County Museum (Oregon)
The National Film Preservation Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to saving America's film heritage. Created by the U.S. Congress in 1996, the NFPF is the charitable affiliate of the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress. For more information on NFPF programs and a complete list of grant recipients, please visit the NFPF web site: www.filmpreservation.org.
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