Now Streaming: “America at 250”
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Skip James performs in Festival in Washington (1968)
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The newest addition to the National Film Preservation Foundation's Online Screening Room is “America at 250,” a program that celebrates our country’s 250th anniversary by showcasing 12 films that trace the American spirit—and its contradictions—across more than a century of cinema. Drawn from archives across the country, these films—whether amateur or animated, documentary or travelogue, spoof or newsreel—demonstrate how moving pictures have served to inform, honor, document, and shape our nation.
Three of the films are new to our website, and all preserved through NFPF grants. Tellin’ the World (1972), preserved by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, is a public service announcement created to encourage working-class and minority youth voting after the passage of the 26th amendment, which had lowered the voting age to 18. Providing the narration and title song are jazz musician Grover Kemble and Grammy-award winner Melissa Manchester.
Festival in Washington (1968), preserved by the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, documents the second annual Festival of American Folklife, held on the National Mall, "the symbolic center of our country," on the Fourth of July in 1968. The film presents an array of craftsfolk demonstrating time-honored traditional techniques, along with a sterling group of musical performers: Doc Watson, Jean Ritchie, Mance Lipscomb, Skip James, Muddy Waters, and many others.
Obey Your Air-Raid Warden (1942), Chicago Film Archives), is a DIY exercise in sound-on-film filmmaking by three friends from the Kansas City film scene, who decided to create a parodic, unofficial “music video” for “Obey Your Air-Raid Warden” by Tony Pastor and his Orchestra. The dangerously catchy song instructed WWII audiences on eight rules to observe after an air raid warning. The film, which visualizes them with deadpan style, was preserved by Chicago Film Archives.
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These gentlemen will show you how to Obey Your Air-Raid Warden (1942).
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Additionally, two films in “America at 250” have received HD upgrades: an excerpt from Marian Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial Concert (1939, UCLA Film & Television Archive) and The Story of Creative Capital (1957, Hagley Museum and Library), an animated celebration of capitalism produced by Disney alum John Sutherland for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.