NFPF News

Seven Experimental Classics To Be Preserved Through Avant-Garde Masters Grants

Cathy Cook’s The Match That Started My Fire (1992) will be preserved by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative.

A poetic montage by Ron Rice, a diary film by Ken Jacobs, a feminist exploration of sexual awakenings by Cathy Cook, and four works by  rediscovered filmmaker Roger Jacoby will be preserved and made available through the 2021 Avant-Garde Masters Grants, awarded by The Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation.

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

Oath of the Sword (1914) will be preserved by the Japanese American National Museum with NFPF support. (Courtesy of George Eastman Museum)

The National Film Preservation Foundation has the pleasure of announcing the winners of its 2021 federally funded grants, which will allow 29 institutions across 15 states and the District of Columbia to preserve 64 films from their collections.

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

Take a Hike—for the Environment

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas leads the Beach Hike.

In honor of Earth Day we turn the Orphan Film spotlight on Beach Hike (1958), a conservation film about a three-day hike protesting a proposed coastal highway along the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.

Leading the seventy-two person hike was Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (who served from 1939–75), a passionate environmentalist who grew up in Yakima. In 1954 he had led a hike that protested (and defeated) a proposed parkway along the C & O Canal on the Potomac River.

Also participating in the Washington hike were Wilderness Society president Harvey Broome, National Parks Association president Sigurd F. Olsen, Olympic National Park superintendent Daniel B. Beard, and Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs president Polly Dyer, who organized the entire endeavor.

Beach Hike shows Douglas and company starting at Lake Ozette and … Read more

Scott Stuber Joins the NFPF Board of Directors

Scott Stuber, Head of Global Film at Netflix, joins the NFPF Board of Directors.

The National Film Preservation Foundation is excited to announce that Scott Stuber, Head of Global Film at Netflix, has been appointed to the NFPF Board of Directors.

“We are extremely pleased to welcome Scott Stuber to the Board of Directors of the NFPF,” says Board Chair Grover Crisp. “With his support and advice, the Foundation will continue its core mission to preserve a wide diversity of American films from across the nation and make them available for study, research and exhibition. Without the commitment of individuals like Mr. Stuber, this would not be possible.”

As head of Netflix Films, Scott Stuber supervises the development, production and acquisition of the Netflix film slate, whose 2020-21 triumphs include Academy Award nominees Mank, The Trial of the Chicago 7, Da 5 Bloods, Ma Rainey’s Black … Read more

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