NFPF News

Spotlight on Home Movies

Slavko Vorkapich, 1940

Last Sunday, TV viewers were treated to a news segment on home movies, broadcast by CBS Sunday Morning. Now available online, "Bringing the importance of home movies into focus," showed the origins of small-gauge consumer filmmaking and emphasized the need for preservation by featuring archivists from George Eastman House and The Center for Home Movies.

Those organizations and many others have received funding from NFPF grants to preserve hundreds of home movies, many of which are now online. Here’s a brief but diverse sampler: From the Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum come the home movies of Marie Dickerson Coker, an African American jazz musician, dancer, and pilot who filmed in Honolulu during the second world war. From The Clyfford Still Museum comes a home movie of Clyfford Still in his studio, the only known moving images of the Abstract Expressionist … Read more

Orphan Film Spotlight—Blackie the Wonder Horse Swims the Golden Gate (1938)

Blackie arrives in San Francisco after a pleasant swim.

The mission of the NFPF is to save and make accessible “orphan films.” These are movies unprotected by commercial interests, including documentaries, silent films, newsreels, home movies, avant-garde works, industrial films, and independent productions. “Orphan Film Spotlight” is a new regular feature of our blog and will highlight orphans preserved through our grant programs that are viewable online. Our inaugural selection has an unusual premise and unforgettable title: Blackie the Wonder Horse Swims the Golden Gate.

The story behind the film begins and ends at Roberts-at-the-Beach, a San Francisco restaurant owned by Richard “Shorty” Roberts. One day Shorty was arguing with Bill Kyne, owner of the famed Bay Meadows Racetrack, about whether horses could swim. Shorty … Read more

"Movies of Local People"—the H. Lee Waters Collection goes online

Movies of Local People: Spindale (1937)

This week we’d like to direct your attention to a captivating set of movies: Duke University’s H. Lee Waters Film Collection, which consists of 92 town portraits available for online viewing.

Between 1936 and 1942 itinerant filmmaker H. Lee Waters (1902-97) filmed more than 118 small communities in the Carolinas, Virginia, and Tennessee for his series Movies of Local People. By collaborating with local movie theaters to screen his films, he allowed everyday people to see themselves on the big screen. One of the highlights of the 252-film series, Kannapolis (1940–41), was placed on the National Film Registry in 2004.

These invaluable documentaries sprang from a canny commercial sense. As Waters explained, “with the Depression and hard times, people couldn’t justify spending much money, but to be able to … Read more

Archive Spotlight: Chicago Film Archives

Lord Thing (1970) by DeWitt Beall, courtesy Chicago Film Archives.

One of the things we hope to do regularly on this blog is bring attention to some of the work being done by the organizations who participate in our preservation program.

The Chicago Film Archives is a great example of what a small-scale organization can accomplish through determination and ingenuity. Established in 2003 by Executive Director Nancy Watrous as a repository for the 5,000-item film collection that was being disposed of by the Chicago Public Library, the CFA has rapidly grown into an important regional archive holding more than 20,000 films, the earliest of which—A Pictorial Story of Hiawatha—dates back to 1903.

In 2005, the CFA was awarded its first grant from the NFPF to preserve Fairy Princess (1956), a short film by amateur moviemaker Margaret Conneely that was named one of the Photographic Society … Read more

Sponsored Films in Glorious Technicolor

The Story of Creative Capital (1957), courtesy the Hagley Museum & Library.

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Technicolor Motion Picture Company, the developers of the color process that vividly brought the palette of the world to movie screens, the NFPF is pleased to present two short sponsored films made using the innovative technique.

The Story of Creative Capital (1957) is an animated lark from John Sutherland Productions made in cooperation with E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company and the Chamber of Commerce. A paean to the importance of business in American life, the film stresses the vital role of the individual investor to the capitalist system. With its jazzy color scheme and Les Baxter soundtrack, The Story of Creative Capital exemplifies the pop culture tendencies that drive many sponsored films.

Mrs. Mortimer Jones Prepares “Dinner for Eight” (1934) … Read more