NFPF News

Artist’s Spotlight: Cornelia Chapin

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

NFPF in the News: Herbert Hoover Home Movies Preserved in Iowa

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

Now Online: Treasures From American Film Archives

William S. Hart in Hell’s Hinges (1916), one of nearly four dozen films from Treasures from American Film Archives that are now online.

Today the NFPF makes freely available for online viewing 47 films from its first DVD set, Treasures from American Film Archives. Originally released in 2000 and hailed by Roger Ebert as “a treasure trove of old, obscure, forgotten, rediscovered, and fascinating footage from the first century of film,” Treasures marked the first time that America’s archives had joined forces to share their films with home video audiences and showcase the amazing range of American films. It received an award from the National Society of Film Critics and was called the “best set of the year” by The New York Times. Treasures eventually sold out, as did an Encore edition made possible through the support of the Cecil B. De Mille Foundation. We are committed to keeping the … Read more

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 painter. And from … Read more