NFPF News

Preservation Projects: The L.A. Rebellion

Diary of an African Nun (1977), directed by Julie Dash.

Film preservation not only safeguards individual films, but can also preserve a film movement. An exciting example is UCLA Film & Television Archive’s preservation of films from the L.A. Rebellion.

Following the Watts Uprising of 1965 and ensuing racial tensions, UCLA met the demands of its students by instituting an Ethno-Communications initiative, which responded to the needs of communities of color and facilitated non-commercial filmmaking by artists such as Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Larry Clark, Haile Gerima, and Billy Woodberry.

Their shared goal was to create authentic narratives about the black experience that avoided the stereotypes of Hollywood or the Blaxploitation genre. The films were influenced by study of “third world” cinema from Latin America and Africa, the French nouvelle vague, and postwar neorealist cinema. The … Read more

Orphan Film Spotlight: Adaptive Behavior of Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrels

Working for peanuts in Adaptive Behavior of Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrels (1942).

Preserved by the University of Oregon, Adaptive Behavior of Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrels (1942) depicts members of the titular species (not to be confused with chipmunks) roaming around Crater Lake, Oregon, before moving indoors to show captive squirrels learning how to solve a series of increasingly challenging tasks. Tantalized by out-of-reach peanuts, the determined critters literally pull strings for food.

The man behind the squirrels was University of Oregon psychology professor and educational filmmaker Lester F. Beck (1909-77), whose love of animals stemmed from growing up on an Oregon ranch; he would later build a house that allowed wild rodents to crawl into a maze suspended from the living room ceiling. Beck called film “one of the greatest aids to learning since … Read more

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival Returns

Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema, from EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam.

This week is graced by the 26th annual San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the largest event in America dedicated to that long-vanished but much-beloved art form. On Friday the NFPF will join the festival in presenting “Amazing Tales from the Archives,” wherein archivists from various countries present field reports on new and exciting preservation projects.

This year there are three presentations: Georges Mourier from the Cinémathèque Française will give news on the archive’s six-and-a-half-hour restoration of Abel Gance’s Napoleon. From Universal Pictures, Peter Schade and Emily Wensel will report on the studio’s new silent film preservation project, which has made possible the festival screening of The Last Warning, a murder mystery from 1929. Bryony Dixon, senior curator of silent film for the British Film … Read more

64 Films To Be Saved Through the NFPF’s 2016 Preservation Grants

James Blue on the set of The Olive Trees of Justice (1989).

From The Streets of Greenwood (1963), a documentary about civil rights activists registering African American voters in Mississippi, to James Blue’s The Olive Trees of Justice (1962), a dramatic feature set during the Algerian war for independence, the NFPF is excited to announce the most recent group of films slated for preservation through its federally funded grant program. A grand total of 64 films will be preserved by 39 institutions across 24 states.

Scored by Maurice Jarre and based on a celebrated novel by Jean Pélégri (available in an English translation by Anthony Burgess), The Olive Trees of Justice (1962) was shot entirely in Algeria with nonprofessional actors; it tells the story of a Frenchman born and raised in Algeria, whose loyalties are torn between the two countries that shaped his identity. … Read more

When Buster Keaton Met Samuel Beckett: FILM and NOTFILM

Buster Keaton caught by the camera in FILM (1965).

Sometimes preservation can give a film a second life, or even inspire a movie about it. A case in point is FILM (1965), an avant-garde short that united two great 20th-century artists: Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton.

Producer Barney Rosset, founder of Grove Press and Beckett’s publisher, envisioned producing a trilogy of short films written by his most famous clients, but only Beckett’s script made it to the big screen. It remains the only movie written by the Nobel Prize–winning author/playwright, who closely supervised the Brooklyn-set production during his only trip to America. Director Alan Schneider was a longtime Beckett collaborator who had staged the first American production of Waiting for Godot, while the cinematographer was Oscar-winner Boris Kaufman (On the Waterfront).

The star, in one of his last major roles, was … Read more