NFPF News

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

The Orphan Film Symposium

This week the 10th Orphan Film Symposium kicks off at the Library of Congress’s Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation. Convened by New York University, this edition of the Symposium focuses on recorded sound and will be attended by archivists, preservationists, technicians, and scholars from around the world.

The symposium’s schedule includes a lecture from Rick Prelinger, author of the NFPF’s Field Guide to Sponsored Films, on film preservation issues of the 21st century and a presentation by film restorers Robert Gitt and Robert Heiber on “A Century of Sound.” There will also be screenings of films including Count Us In (1948), a presidential campaign short for the Progressive Party’s Henry Wallace, and Little Orphant Annie (1918), one of Collen Moore’s first starring roles, to be presented along with a 1912 audio recording of the eponymous James Whitcomb Riley poem it was based on.

National Film Preservation Foundation Has Moved

The National Film Preservation has relocated to the Ninth Street Independent Film Center just south of Market Street in San Francisco. Only a few blocks from our old home in the Flood Building, the new space offers us the opportunity to use the in-house screening room and allies us with many of our Bay Area film colleagues, such as the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, Frameline, and the Center for Asian America Media. Please send all future correspondence to:

National Film Preservation Foundation
145 9th Street, Suite 260
San Francisco, CA 94103

NFPF Preserved Film Screenings

The title card of Lyman H. Howe’s Famous Ride on a Runaway Train (1921).

The NFPF blog awakens from its winter hibernation to bring you news of two NFPF-related screenings. This Wednesday, February 24, Executive Director Jeff Lambert will present “NFPF Preservation Highlights,” consisting of films saved through our grant programs (or appearing on our Treasures DVDs) at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California. Jeff will provide an overview of the NFPF’s activities and will introduce eight movies representing the wide range of our projects, with highlights such as Notes on the Port of St. Francis (1951), Frank Stauffacher’s poetic portrait of San Francisco, narrated by Vincent Price, and Lyman H. Howe’s Famous Ride on a Runaway Train (1921), a thrill-packed novelty short filmed from the train that inspired America’s first roller coasters. The film, accompanied with its vintage sound-effects disc, … Read more

Happy Thanksgiving

His Mother's Thanksgiving (1910)

The NFPF would like to give thanks to all of our friends and supporters. To celebrate the holiday, we hope you will enjoy His Mother's Thanksgiving (1910), a melodrama from the Edison Studios about the importance of being with family at this time of year. A contemporary review from Variety reported that “A young man in one of the theatre boxes wept silently, which was the best testimonial imaginable for this picture.”

Preserved under the direction of The Museum of Modern Art, His Mother's Thanksgiving is one of the 176 films that were returned to the US as part of our successful collaboration with the New Zealand Film Archive.

Before you get ready for feasting, here are a few reminders and announcements:

• You probably know about Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which follow on the heels of Thanksgiving. But do you know about Giving Tuesday? Held on December 1, it celebrates … Read more