Articles tagged grant film
Artist’s Spotlight: Cornelia Chapin
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| Cornelia Chapin at work on her prize-winning sculpture Young Elephant. |
For Women’s History Month the NFPF is calling attention to the home movies of Cornelia Van Auken Chapin (1893–1972), preserved through an NFPF grant by the Archives of American Art, a unit of the Smithsonian Institution
Cornelia Chapin was a sculptor who specialized in creating stone and wood sculptures of animals through the direct carving method, which favored sculpting directly from life, without the use of models or casts. Artists in this movement, which rose to prominence after 1915, believed in the “truth of materials”—that a finished work of art should display the inherent properties of the raw material it was sculpted from. Very little period footage of artists engaged in direct carving exists, and during this period there was more documentation of male than female sculptors—these factors make Chapin’s home movies even … Read more
Listening to Gordon Parks
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| Gordon Parks looks back on his life's journey in Listen to a Stranger (1973). |
During a month that celebrates the history and accomplishments of African Americans, it’s more than appropriate to highlight Listen to a Stranger: An Interview with Gordon Parks (1973). Preserved through a 2019 NFPF grant by Washington University in St. Louis, this once-rare documentary honors an artist whose work in photography and film were equally groundbreaking.
Gordon Parks (1912–2006) trailblazed with his camera; starting at the Farm Security Administration he became the first African American staff photographer at Life magazine, documenting myriad aspects of American life during the onset of the Civil Rights era. By 1969 he had moved into cinema with The Learning Tree, adapted from his own novel, becoming the first African American to direct a major Hollywood studio feature. His next film was the seminal Blaxploitation … Read more
Now Online: Harry Carey, Christopher Walken, and Code Blue
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| Christopher Walken knows many secrets as The Boy Who Saw Through (1958). |
The National Film Preservation Foundation wishes you a festive holiday season! Should you wish to celebrate with some eclectic home viewing, take a look at three additions to our Online Screening Room: the urban western Soft Shoes (1925), starring Harry Carey; The Boy Who Saw Through (1958), produced by the legendary animator Mary Ellen Bute and starring a 14-year-old Christopher Walken; and Code Blue (1972), an inspiring recruitment film for minorities in the medical profession, produced by Blackside Inc., the company behind Eyes on the Prize. Taken as a set, these titles testify to the variety of films preserved through our grant program.
Recently rediscovered at the Czech National Film Archive, Soft Shoes is a charming short feature starring Harry Carey as a small-town sheriff who visits San … Read more
The NFPF at the Reel Thing, plus Grants in the News
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| Professor E.B. Paine rings bells in Joseph T. Tykociner’s Sound Experiments (1922). Note the wide experimental sound band to the right. |
The 41st edition of the Reel Thing Technical Symposium will be held in Los Angeles from August 24-26. Organized by Michael Friend and NFPF Board Chair Grover Crisp, the Reel Thing comprises a set of presentations on technological advances in film preservation and addresses “current thinking and most advanced practical examples of progress in the field of preservation, restoration and media conservation.”
The NFPF features in two events at this year's edition. On Friday there will be a panel on "Recovering Early Optical Sound: Joseph Tykociner’s 1922 Composite Sound-on-Film System." This footage of early sound-on-film demonstrations was produced in 1922 by the first Research Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana— … Read more
NFPF in the News: Herbert Hoover Home Movies Preserved in Iowa
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| President Herbert Hoover playing Hooverball, from Hoover Kodacolor Home Movies (1928–30). |
In 2015 the NFPF awarded a grant to Iowa's Herbert Hoover Library-Presidential Museum to preserve a collection of 16mm home movies taken primarily by President Hoover’s wife, son, and daughter-in-law. Depicting family travels and various White House activities during the time of Hoover’s administration, the footage was shot in Kodacolor, a complicated early color process that required a special projector to show the films, which otherwise registered as black and white.
An NFPF grant allowed for the Hoover Library to send the films to Video & Film Solutions, which scanned and digitally decoded the films to restore their original color before preserving them on regular color filmstock, so they are now viewable in their original form. Acclaimed as perhaps the earliest color images of the White … Read more