NFPF News

NFPF Preserved Films at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto

Anna May Wong in Drifting (1923).

Held annually in Pordenone, northern Italy, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto is the biggest and most prestigious silent film festival in the world. The 34th edition, beginning October 3, will showcase five films preserved through the NFPF’s grant programs.

From George Eastman House come two premieres of recently completed restorations. Thirty Years of Motion Pictures (1927) is a film adaptation of pioneering producer and publicist Terry Ramsaye's history book on the early movie industry, A Million and One Nights (1926). The documentary includes scenes from lost films such as D.W. Griffith’s 1914 version of The Battle of the Sexes.

Drifting (1923) is Todd Browning’s underworld saga about opium smuggling in China, starring Priscilla Dean, Wallace Beery, and Anna May Wong. GEH has restored the film by drawing on a nitrate print from the Nardoni Film … 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

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