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 painter. And from … Read more

NFPF Preserved Films at Cinecon

Douglas Fairbanks in Wild and Woolly (1917).

From September 3-7 an eclectic roster of classic films will be screened at Grauman’s Egyptian Theater, thanks to the Cinecon Classic Film Festival, a Labor Day-weekend tradition that turns 51 years old this year. Cinecon’s mission is to showcase movies that have been rarely given public screenings, and we’re happy to report that seven of this year’s films were preserved through NFPF programs.

Three will grace the big screen for the first time in over nine decades. These shorts are recent highlights of our ongoing repatriation project with EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam and the American archival community. The titles are: The Darling of the CSA (1912), the tale of a daring crossdressing spy, played by Anna Q. Nilsson, who defies capture to secure explosives for the Confederate army; Red Saunders' Sacrifice (1912), a Western in which a bandit braves capture to … 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 claimed Blackie, his 12 year old … Read more

The Reel Thing Salutes The Film Foundation

From August 20 to 22, Los Angeles will host the Reel Thing Technical Symposium, an annual set of presentations about technological advances in film preservation. Organized by Grover Crisp and Michael Friend, this year’s edition features a 25th Anniversary tribute to The Film Foundation, which has helped restore nearly 700 films since its creation 1990, including classics such as Night of the Hunter, A Woman Under the Influence, Leave Her to Heaven, and Rebel Without a Cause. It also offers the free educational curriculum, The Story of Movies, which has taught over 10 million young people about film and its history.

TFF is one of the National Film Preservation Foundation’s staunchest supporters and makes possible our Avant-Garde Masters grant program, which turns 13 this year. We salute TFF’s quarter century mark and look forward to seeing what it will do in the decades ahead. The Reel Thing will … 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 see themselves on the same … Read more