Go “Below the Surface” at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival!
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| Below the Surface (1920). |
After a two-year break the San Francisco Silent Film Festival roars back to life on May 5th. This 25th anniversary edition lasts until May 11 and is jam-packed with films. Among these treasures is Below the Surface (1920), preserved by the Festival through the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation. The premiere of the restoration occurs on Friday, May 6, at 2pm, and we hope you can make it.
Below the Surface was the follow-up to the notorious revenge melodrama Behind the Door (1919). It reunites producer Thomas Ince, director Irvin Willat, star Hobart Bosworth, and cinematographer J.O. Taylor (later to film King Kong). Both films have action aboard submarines and a macabre shipboard denouement. In Below the Surface Bosworth plays a diver in small-town Maine who’s assisted by his loyal son (Lloyd Hughes). Their relationship is … Read more
Treasures DVDs Available from the NFPF Website
We are happy to report that our Treasures from American Film Archives DVD sets can now be purchased from the NFPF's Shopify website.We are thrilled to directly distribute these acclaimed sets, which present long unseen American films with new musical accompaniment, onscreen program notes, and printed catalogs. Available are: Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934; Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947–1986; Treasures 5: The West, 1898–1938; and Lost and Found: American Treasures from the New Zealand Film Archive.
All orders will be fulfilled by the NFPF. We look forward to making these examples of superb archival preservation work easily available to students, academics, cinephiles, and anyone interested in America’s film heritage.
Register for a 2022 NFPF Grant by March 25th!
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Friday, March 25th marks the registration deadline for the National Film Preservation Foundation’s federally funded grant program, made possible by the Library of Congress Sound Recording and Film Preservation Programs Reauthorization Act of 2016.
The NFPF offers two types of federal cash grants that support the preservation of historically and culturally significant American films. Completed applications will be due Friday, April 29th.
Basic Preservation Grants fund laboratory work to create preservation masters and access copies, and are open to nonprofit and public institutions in the United States that provide public access to their film collections. The awards range from $1,000 to $20,000.
Matching Grants help experienced institutions undertake larger-scale projects; applicants may request cash stipends of between $20,001 and $75,000 to fund laboratory work. They must “match” the NFPF … Read more
Seven Experimental Classics To Be Preserved Through Avant-Garde Masters Grants
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| Cathy Cook’s The Match That Started My Fire (1992) will be preserved by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. |
During his short life Ron Rice (1935–64) completed only three films. Senseless (1962), his second and least seen work, arose from an attempt to film the counterculture in Venice, California, and a utopian commune in Mexico. Rice combined home movie–style footage, street photography, landscapes shot from moving vehicles, and images from a bullfight in Acapulco. The result, anti-narrative in structure but formalist in its … Read more
64 Orphan Films to be Preserved Through the NFPF’s 2021 Grants
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| Oath of the Sword (1914) will be preserved by the Japanese American National Museum with NFPF support. (Courtesy of George Eastman Museum) |
Two of the films are notable for illuminating the multicultural and transnational aspects of early American cinema. Santa (1932), to be preserved by the Paso del Norte Foundation, is a melodrama directed by Spanish American silent star Antonio Moreno and produced by Azteca Films, a company based in El Paso, Texas, that made some of the most acclaimed Mexican movies during the 1930s–50s. Santa was one of the first Mexican features with recorded dialogue, and its soundtrack survives in its most … Read more