NFPF News

Three NFPF Films at the UCLA Festival of Preservation

The Bus (1965) by Haskell Wexler.

Taking place May 20–22, the UCLA Festival of Preservation showcases the variety of recent preservation work by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. The 20th edition of the Festival includes 10 features, seven shorts and four television programs. Among those shorts are three titles preserved through recent NFPF grants, all screening on Saturday, May 21.

Hey, Mama (1967) is a cinéma vérité documentary about African American life in the Oakwood neighborhood of Venice, California. It was directed and edited by Vaughn Obern, a white UCLA film student who spent six months in the neighborhood. Aware of his own status as an outsider, Obern immersed viewers in the daily lives of Oakwood’s working-class community and demonstrated the conditions created by structural racism. The film won second prize in the documentary category of the Fourth Annual … Read more

Go “Below the Surface” at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival!

Below the Surface (1920).

After a two-year break the San Francisco Silent Film Festival roars back to life on May 5th. This 25th anniversary edition lasts until May 11 and is jam-packed with films. Among these treasures is Below the Surface (1920), preserved by the Festival through the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation. The premiere of the restoration occurs on Friday, May 6, at 2pm, and we hope you can make it.

Below the Surface was the follow-up to the notorious revenge melodrama Behind the Door (1919). It reunites producer Thomas Ince, director Irvin Willat, star Hobart Bosworth, and cinematographer J.O. Taylor (later to film King Kong). Both films have action aboard submarines and a macabre shipboard denouement. In Below the Surface Bosworth plays a diver in small-town Maine who’s assisted by his loyal son (Lloyd Hughes). Their relationship is … Read more

Treasures DVDs Available from the NFPF Website

We are happy to report that our Treasures from American Film Archives DVD sets can now be purchased from the NFPF's Shopify website.We are thrilled to directly distribute these acclaimed sets, which present long unseen American films with new musical accompaniment, onscreen program notes, and printed catalogs. Available are: Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934; Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947–1986; Treasures 5: The West, 1898–1938; and Lost and Found: American Treasures from the New Zealand Film Archive.

 All orders will be fulfilled by the NFPF. We look forward to making these examples of superb archival preservation work easily available to students, academics, cinephiles, and anyone interested in America’s film heritage. 

Register for a 2022 NFPF Grant by March 25th!

Friday, March 25th 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, April 29th.

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. The awards 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 laboratory work. They must “match” the NFPF … Read more

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