NFPF News

11 Films to be Preserved Through Avant-Garde Masters Grants

Stan VanDerBeek's Skullduggery (1960)

Seven Stan VanDerBeek films from the 1950s and ’60s, a trio of acclaimed experimental visions from Marjorie Keller, and an animated cut-out film from Flora Mock will be preserved through the 2018 Avant-Garde Masters Grants, awarded by The Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation. All told, 11 films will be preserved and made available through this year’s grants.

“Stan VanDerBeek is one of the major American Avant-Garde film artists,” writes P. Adams Sitney, Professor Emeritus of Visual Arts at Princeton University and one of the most prominent writers on American experimental cinema. “He was a prophet of the emerging multimedia and a proponent of the power of those media for political satire. As soon as he began to make and exhibit films, his originality and wit were manifest. In the period between 1957 and 1965 … Read more

Now Online: Treasures From American Film Archives

William S. Hart in Hell’s Hinges (1916), one of nearly four dozen films from Treasures from American Film Archives that are now online.

Today the NFPF makes freely available for online viewing 47 films from its first DVD set, Treasures from American Film Archives. Originally released in 2000 and hailed by Roger Ebert as “a treasure trove of old, obscure, forgotten, rediscovered, and fascinating footage from the first century of film,” Treasures marked the first time that America’s archives had joined forces to share their films with home video audiences and showcase the amazing range of American films. It received an award from the National Society of Film Critics and was called the “best set of the year” by The New York Times. Treasures eventually sold out, as did an Encore edition made possible through the support of the Cecil B. De Mille Foundation. We are committed to keeping the … Read more

When Buster Keaton Met Samuel Beckett: FILM and NOTFILM

Buster Keaton caught by the camera in FILM (1965).

Sometimes preservation can give a film a second life, or even inspire a movie about it. A case in point is FILM (1965), an avant-garde short that united two great 20th-century artists: Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton.

Producer Barney Rosset, founder of Grove Press and Beckett’s publisher, envisioned producing a trilogy of short films written by his most famous clients, but only Beckett’s script made it to the big screen. It remains the only movie written by the Nobel Prize–winning author/playwright, who closely supervised the Brooklyn-set production during his only trip to America. Director Alan Schneider was a longtime Beckett collaborator who had staged the first American production of Waiting for Godot, while the cinematographer was Oscar-winner Boris Kaufman (On the Waterfront).

The star, in one of his last major roles, was … Read more

Seven Films to be Preserved Through Avant-Garde Masters Grants

Gregory Markopoulos’ Twice a Man (1963)

Owen Land’s “structuralist” subversions, a Ken Jacobs reckoning with silent narrative, a mythic reverie from Gregory Markopoulos, an early work from Fred Camper, and a poetic nature study from montage maestro Slavko Vorkapich will all be saved through the 2015 Avant-Garde Masters Grants awarded by The Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation. All told, seven films will be preserved and made available through the 2015 grants.

Gregory Markopoulos’ Twice a Man, starring Olympia Dukakis and Paul Klib, will be saved through a grant to Temenos, an archive dedicated to the work of Markopoulos, which will partner with the Austrian Film Museum to complete preservation of this landmark film. Often cited as Markopoulos’ masterpiece, this modern take on the Hippolytus myth was a leap forward in the creation of what he … Read more