NFPF News

Happy Thanksgiving

His Mother's Thanksgiving (1910)

The NFPF would like to give thanks to all of our friends and supporters. To celebrate the holiday, we hope you will enjoy His Mother's Thanksgiving (1910), a melodrama from the Edison Studios about the importance of being with family at this time of year. A contemporary review from Variety reported that “A young man in one of the theatre boxes wept silently, which was the best testimonial imaginable for this picture.”

Preserved under the direction of The Museum of Modern Art, His Mother's Thanksgiving is one of the 176 films that were returned to the US as part of our successful collaboration with the New Zealand Film Archive.

Before you get ready for feasting, here are a few reminders and announcements:

• You probably know about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which follow on the heels of Thanksgiving. But do you know about Giving Tuesday? Held on December 1, it celebrates … Read more

Six “Lost” Films Premiering on the NFPF Website

An Iguanodon demonstrates what life was like Fifty Million Years Ago (1925).

Now available for viewing are the first fruits of the NFPF’s partnership with EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. Six newly preserved American silent films, almost all unseen since their original release more than 80 years ago, are now freely available to the public, complete with new music and program notes.

Chicago Rodeo (1920) depicts Tex Austin’s rodeo show, held in Chicago’s Grant Park in July 1920, and includes appearances by Ruth Roach, Foghorn Clancy, and “Yiddish Cowboy” Dizzy Izzy Broad. Clarence Cheats at Croquet (1915) is a comedy from the Thanhouser Film Corporation involving a jealous lover with no sense of fair play—its preservation was co-funded by Thanhouser Company Film Preservation, Inc. Both films were preserved through the Library of Congress.

The Darling of the C.S.A. (1912), … Read more

Happy Independence Day!

U.S. Navy of 1915 (1915).

We’re celebrating the Fourth of July by marking the centenary of an indubitably American film, U.S. Navy of 1915. Its close-hand observations of sailors training and working aboard vintage ships have only grown more captivating and unique with age, making it the most popular film on the NFPF website by far. Nearly 250,000 viewers have streamed this fascinating glimpse of our military heritage.

This 11-minute fragment represents all that survives from what was a three reel documentary by showman Lyman Howe, whose Famous Ride on a Runaway Train (1921) appears on our DVD Lost and Found: American Treasures from the New Zealand Film Archive. Few of his other films survive, and even U.S. Navy was considered lost until this portion of the film was discovered during the NFPF’s partnership with the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia in 2008. If you haven’t already watched it, please … Read more

The NFPF at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival

Koko's Queen (1926).

Cinephiles from around the globe will congregate this week at the beautiful Castro Theatre for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, which celebrates its 20th anniversary with four days of silent classics and rediscoveries. Thursday's opening night showcase is the silent version of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), introduced by our colleague Mike Mashon, Head of the Moving Image Collection at the Library of Congress. If you're wondering how this version came to exist, check out Mike’s excellent post on the Festival blog.

On Friday the NFPF joins the Pacific Film Archive in co-presenting "Amazing Tales from the Archives," a symposium from the front-line of film preservation. Among the participants will be Bryony Dixon, the British Film Institute’s Senior Curator of Silent Film, who’ll present footage concerning the RMS Lusitania, sunk 100 years ago during … Read more

Blogging for Cupid

Cullen Landis and Elinor Field in Cupid in Quarantine (1918).

The NFPF is thrilled to announce the 2015 “For the Love of Film”: The Film Preservation Blogathon, an annual fundraising event where bloggers and film lovers around the world show their support for preservation and access. This year’s edition starts today and continues through Sunday. And for the third time, the NFPF has been chosen as the charitable recipient.

In 2010, “For the Love of Film” helped the NFPF preserve three lost gems from the cache of American films found at the New Zealand Film Archive: Sunset Limited (1898), The Sergeant (1910) and The Better Man (1912)—all of which were subsequently included in the Treasures 5: The West DVD set.

In 2012, they raised money for the web premiere of the surviving reels of Alfred Hitchcock’s The White Shadow (1924)—another discovery from the New Zealand Film Archive. Thanks to the generosity of … Read more