25 more films selected for preservation
The documentary “Hoop Dreams” and footage of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake are among the 25 movies picked this year for the National Film Registry, a compilation of significant films being preserved by the Library of Congress.
Fictional films chosen by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington range from Buster Keaton’s last comedy, “The Cameraman,” to the Christmas classic “Miracle on 34th Street” to the 1982 teen comedy “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”
The 2005 selections bring to 425 the total number of films being preserved by the Library of Congress or other institutions involved in the project. The registry was created by Congress in 1989.
Half the movies made before 1950 and 80 percent to 90 percent of those produced before 1920 have disappeared, Billington said. He added that more are lost each year, partly because of the recently discovered “vinegar syndrome” that attacks the safety film used to preserve most of them.
“The films we choose are not necessarily the ‘best’ American films ever made or the most famous, but they are films that continue to have cultural, historical or aesthetic significance,” said Billington, who made his selections from more than 1,000 titles nominated by the public.
The most recent movie making the list is 1995’s “Toy Story,” the first full-length computer-animated feature.
“Hoop Dreams,” from 1994, follows the lives of two inner-city Chicago kids vying for college basketball scholarships.
The oldest film selected this year is a documentary from 1906 of the San Francisco earthquake and the fire that followed. The disaster, which destroyed much of the city, was one of the first recorded on film.
Another nonfiction selection is a set of field recordings of music and services at Commandment Keeper Church in Beaufort, S.C., in 1940. A team working under novelist Zora Neale Hurston recorded the songs and services of South Carolina’s Gullah community.
The complete list:
•”Baby Face” (1933)
•”The Buffalo Creek Flood: An Act of Man” (1975)
•”The Cameraman” (1928)
•Commandment Keeper Church, Beaufort, S.C., May 1940
•”Cool Hand Luke” (1967)
•”Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982)
•”The French Connection” (1971)
•”Giant” (1956)
•”H2O” (1929)
•”Hands Up” (1926)
•”Hoop Dreams” (1994)
•”House of Usher” (1960)
•”Imitation of Life” (1934)
•Jeffries-Johnson world championship fight (1910)
•”Making of an American” (1920)
•”Miracle on 34th Street” (1947)
•”Mom and Dad” (1944)
•”The Music Man” (1962)
•”Power of the Press” (1928)
•”A Raisin in the Sun” (1961)
•”The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (1975)
•San Francisco earthquake and fire, April 18, 1906
•”The Sting” (1973)
•”A Time for Burning” (1966)
•”Toy Story” (1995)