NATIONAL FILM PRESERVATION FOUNDATION AWARDS FILM PRESERVATION GRANTS TO 18 ARCHIVES
Contact: Jeff Lambert (415-392-7291, lambert@filmpreservation.org)
San Francisco, CA (September 28, 2005)—The National Film Preservation Foundation announced today grants to 18 archives, museums, and universities to save historically and culturally significant American films not preserved by commercial interests. Among the grant-winning projects are the only known film of George Balanchine's Don Quixote (1965), with the choreographer himself in the title role and Suzanne Farrell as Dulcinea; a nitrate short documenting Illinois Day at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair; home movies of the 1959 and 1960 Jubilees for Tupperware regional distributors; Trip to New Orleans (1936) filmed by a steamboat captain as he traveled down the Mississippi; and avant-garde works by Red Grooms, Dorothy Wiley, Ken Jacobs, and Jack Smith.
"Critics have said Don Quixote is a 'missing link' in Balanchine's choreography. Thanks to this NFPF grant, we will be able to preserve the only known moving image record of the original production," said Jan Schmidt of The New York Public Library's Jerome Robbins Dance Division. "We will work from source material shot by Bert Stern and provided by the New York City Ballet."
Among the other motion pictures slated for preservation are home movies of the 1953 Soap Box Derby in Augusta, Georgia; aviation films (1929-38) by aircraft innovator Lewis Reisner; Black Moderates and Black Militants (1969), Cicero March (1966), and The People's Right to Know: Police Versus Reporters (1969) by the Film Group of Chicago; test footage of Arthur Piver's pioneering multi-hull sailboats (early 1960s), two Appalachia documentaries from the early 1970s by Appalshop, and two silent-era shorts The Professor's Painless Cure (1915) and The Chalk Line (1916).
The grants distribute federal funds authorized by The National Film Preservation Foundation Act of 1996 and secured through the Library of Congress as well as preservation services contributed by public-spirited laboratories and postproduction houses. The firms donating services are: Audio Mechanics, BluWave Audio, Chace Productions, CinemaLab, Cineric, Inc., Cinetech, Colorlab Corp., DJ Audio, Film Technology, Inc., Fotokem Film and Video, Monaco Digital Film Labs, and Triage Motion Picture Services.
The grant recipients are:
- Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (Illinois)
- Anthology Film Archives (New York)
- Appalshop (Kentucky)
- Barrington Area Historical Society (Illinois)
- Chicago Film Archives (Illinois)
- East Tennessee State University (Tennessee)
- Film-Makers' Cooperative (New York)
- George Eastman House (New York)
- Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley (California)
- Mariners Museum (Virginia)
- Naropa University (Colorado)
- National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C.)
- National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C.)
- New York Public Library, Jerome Robbins Dance Division (New York)
- Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley (California)
- University of Georgia (Georgia)
- University of Missouri—Columbia (Missouri)
- West Virginia State Archives (West Virginia)
The National Film Preservation Foundation is the nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America's film heritage. Since starting operations in 1997, the NFPF has assisted institutions in 37 states and helped preserve more than 830 films and collections. The NFPF is the charitable affiliate of the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress. For the complete list of projects supported by the NFPF, visit the NFPF Web site: www.filmpreservation.org.
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