Hi Lynn,
About those AFI first ten years: are any available on vhs or dvd?
It would be a classic film fan's dream to find them in his stocking, wouldn't it?
On another topic about film preservation in the news today,
here's an article I came across in the NYTimes about Part Three of the
Treasures From American Film Archives that have just been issued by the National Film Preservation Foundation. Many of the 40 movies included are only minutes long, but this time they deal with social issues as addressed in early 20th century movies, from Edison's "Why Mr. Nation Wants a Divorce" about the temperance movement, (Love that title). Most intriguingly, this film was deposited at the Library of Congress in the form of a
paper print! I'd no idea that ephemeral product was ever used for film.
Other topics include women, immigration, workplace safety, homelessness, public education and predatory lending practices.
Tyrone Power, Sr. even comes along as a prosecuting attorney in one 1916 movie about a bunch of women who terminate their pregnancies because they are lazy and literally want to lie around eating chocolate bon-bons! Yikes, that was a hot potato even back then.
Other big budget productions include Victor Schertzinger’s 1929
Redskin with extended sequences photographed in two-color Technicolor, Cecil B. DeMille's
The Godless Girl (1929) and D.W. Griffith's 1910 version of
Ramona, a sympathetic story about an Indian couple facing discrimination. (This was also later filmed in a well-known version in Technicolor in the '30s at Fox with
Don Ameche &
Loretta Young.)
Some of it sounds as dramatically facile as films from the studio era and today, but, based on the earlier collections, this is well worth viewing. I can't wait for my library to get this one.