The Library of Congress announced Wednesday the addition of 25 films to its National Film Registry,
a growing archive of American motion pictures earmarked for
preservation because of their cultural, historic or aesthetic
significance. According to Librarian of Congress James H. Billington,
who hand-picks the films each year from a shortlist winnowed from
thousands of online suggestions, the National Film Registry — which
includes everything from home movies to Hollywood blockbusters — is not
just a best-of list, or even a list of his favorite films, but a
“vehicle for understanding our culture and society more broadly.”
Simply put, Billington says, “our responsibility is to help define a national patrimony.”
To that end, the 2013 honorees include three early works from the
silent era: “A Virtuous Vamp” (1919), “Daughter of Dawn” (1920), and the
proto-feminist Cinderella tale “Ella Cinders” (1926). The inclusion of
these titles will come as particularly good news to fans of silent
cinema, many of whom were no doubt alarmed this month to learn, through a
report
issued by the Library of Congress, that as many as three-quarters of
all silent films made through the 1920s have been lost or utterly
damaged.
The most modern film yet accepted into the Registry, which is restricted to works at least 10 years old, is “Decasia,”
a 2002 experimental collage piece by New York artist Bill Morrison.
Ironically, it was assembled from deteriorating film footage, some of
which Morrison says he found at — wait for it — the Library of Congress.
According to the artist, “Decasia” is not a call to arms, but rather a
celebration — in such sequences as one in which a boxer appears to be
battling a blob of decaying film stock — of the beauty and
inevitability of decay.
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