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

12 Films to be Preserved through Avant-Garde Masters Grants

Named to the National Film Registry in 2019, Gunvor Nelson’s My Name is Oona (1969) will be preserved by the Pacific Film Archive.

Two films from the avant-garde film renaissance of the late ’90s, Peggy Ahwesh’s Nocturne (1998) and Jesse Lerner’s Ruins (1999), join ten shorts made by Bay Area women artists to be preserved through the 2020 Avant-Garde Masters Grants, awarded by The Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation.

UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will preserve ten films that were distributed by the Bay Area–based Serious Business Company (SBC), an independent film distribution company founded by Freude (1942–2009), operating from 1972 to 1984. Among them is Gunvor Nelson’s masterpiece My Name is Oona (1969). Named to the National Film Registry in 2019, this portrait of the artist’s daughter uses a repetitive soundtrack and … Read more

Register for a 2021 NFPF Grant by February 26th!

Friday, February 26th 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, March 26th.

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. Please note the awards have increased this year and now 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 … Read more

47 Orphan Films Saved Through the 2020 NFPF Grants

Black Chariot (1971) will be preserved by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution with NFPF support. (Courtesy Robert F. Goodwin Estate; photo by Rhea Combs)

The National Film Preservation Foundation is proud to announce the films selected for preservation in 2020 through its federally funded grant program. These grants will allow 34 institutions across 19 states and the District of Columbia to preserve 47 films from their collections.

Two of the grant-winners were once thought lost. Black Chariot (1971), a grassroots-financed feature about the Black liberation struggle, was directed by Robert L. Goodwin—one of the few Black screenwriters working in Hollywood at the time—and stars Bernie Casey. “For nearly fifty years Black Chariot has been considered ‘lost,’ and as a result, relegated to a footnote in film scholarship,” writes Jacqueline … Read more