2024 Additions to the National Film Registry
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The twenty-five films added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry on Tuesday bring the total number of titles selected for “their cultural, historic, or aesthetic importance” to nine hundred. Chronologically, this year’s additions range from Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895)—an Edison Manufacturing Co. silent short featuring Annabelle Moore, who went on to become the original Gibson Girl in the 1907 Ziegfeld Follies—to David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010), starring Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Quentin Tarantino has called The Social Network “hands down” the best film of the 2010s and its screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, “the greatest active dialogist.”
Two other films released after the turn of the millennium have made the cut. With Spy Kids (2001), Robert Rodriguez launched a lucrative franchise, and with their 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, Joel and Ethan Coen “created a unicorn,” writes Francine Prose, “a film that actually improves upon a beautifully written book.”
Depending on how you define Hollywood’s golden age—do you include Max and Dave Fleischer’s eight-minute silent cartoon KoKo’s Earth Control (1928)?—it’s somewhat surprising how sparsely it’s represented this year. In 2005, Slant’s Jeremiah Kipp called Michael Curtiz’s Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), starring James Cagney, Pat O’Brien, and Humphrey Bogart, “the best of the Warner Bros. gangster films.” When Sam Woods’s The Pride of the Yankees, starring Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig, was released in 1942, Manny Farber had just begun writing reviews for the New Republic. He had his problems with the movie overall, but Rudolph Maté’s cinematography was “the finest I’ve seen this year.”
Invaders from Mars (1953)—directed by William Cameron Menzies, “the man who more or less invented the idea of production design in movies,” as Martin Scorsese has put it, “a genius, pure and simple”—stands in for an entire decade. From the 1960s comes a study in contrasts, The Miracle Worker (1962), directed by Arthur Penn and starring Patty Duke as Helen Keller and Anne Bancroft as her teacher, and Chelsea Girls (1966), directed by Andy Warhol and the late Paul Morrissey. The Museum of Modern Art has called Chelsea Girls a “double-projection experimental soap opera,” and Brian Darr suggests that it may be “the first expanded cinema piece in the Registry.”
On January 20 and 22, MoMA will present a new restoration of Jessie Maple’s Will (1981), an “intimate portrait of a former college basketball star’s struggle with addiction and redemption in Harlem,” as part To Save and Project, the Museum’s annual festival of film preservation. The twenty-first edition runs from January 9 through 30.
Fifteen films of this year’s twenty-five, including Will, were made in the three-decade stretch from Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess (1973) to Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation (1999). Gunn had been commissioned to direct “a ‘Black vampire’ movie à la Blacula,” noted April Wolfe in the Village Voice in 2018, but he instead made “a fever dream of monologues, African song and mythology, American anxiety, and meandering uncut scenes about personal pain and suicide.”
When the new restoration of Compensation screened in the Revivals program at this year’s New York Film Festival, Imogen Sara Smith, writing for Film Comment, noted that Davis’s film “moves back and forth between 1911 and the turn of the millennium to tell two stories of relationships between Deaf women and hearing men, played by the same actors and set in the same locations. The film starts as a charmingly handcrafted miniature, then unfolds in a vaulting emotional and stylistic arc, building a detailed, expansive portrait of Black and Deaf cultures and communities in America across time.”
Besides Ganja, this year’s entrants from the 1970s are Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), the subject of many, many fiftieth-anniversary appreciations this year; a collection of student films Adaora “Zora” Lathan made while studying at the University of Illinois in Chicago; and two comedies that practically scream, “It was the ’70s!” Sidney Poitier’s Uptown Saturday Night (1974) stars Poitier himself along with Bill Cosby, Harry Belafonte, Richard Pryor, and Flip Wilson, and Lou Adler’s Up in Smoke (1978) is a stoner road movie stringing together Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong’s most popular bits.
Movies from the 1980s include Nicholas Meyer’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Martin Brest’s (and Eddie Murphy’s) Beverly Hills Cop (1984), and Emile Ardolino’s Dirty Dancing (1987) but also two from 1989 that you can watch now on the Criterion Channel. Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt tells the story of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. And Angelica Jade Bastién recently found Jonathan Wacks’s Powwow Highway to be “biting” in its commentary on and “understanding of what it means to be Native American in modern times; an identity defined by complexity and the contradiction of being treated with indignity on land that is truly yours.”
My Own Private Idaho (1991), Gus Van Sant’s third feature, “remains his most anarchic and, in many ways, ambitious,” writes Amy Taubin. Drawing on his own short story and two of his screenplays, Van Sant “mixes and matches scenes of documentary-style realism with campy musical set pieces, improvised dialogue with bowdlerized Shakespeare, dream sequences shot in grainy Super 8 with 35 mm vistas of the Pacific Northwest, and, on the soundtrack, Rudy Vallee with the Pogues.”
Edward James Olmos stars in the other two films from the 1990s, his directorial debut, American Me (1992), a decades-spanning story of the rise of the Mexican mafia within the California prison system, and Gregory Nava’s My Family (1995), “an epic told through the eyes of one family, the Sanchez family, whose father walked north to Los Angeles from Mexico in the 1920s,” as Roger Ebert described it. “This is the great American story, told again and again, of how our families came to this land and tried to make it better for their children.”
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