Today the Librarian of Congress named the 25 films that will comprise the National Film Registry’s entries for the year 2010. These are films that have cultural, historical or aesthetic significance that warrants their preservation for posterity. All in all, there are 550 films in the registry. Although there is great variety in this year’s …
The following is a guest post by Mike Mashon, head of the Moving Image Section in the Motion Picture, Broadcast and Recorded Sound Division: When I was a kid, I associated organ music with three things: church, baseball games, and roller skating rinks. As a teenager I became interested in silent films, and most of …
The Librarian of Congress today named 25 new entries to the National Recording Registry, a designation given to recordings that are culturally, historically or aesthetically significant and at least 10 years old. This year’s entries bring the total to 300 and include recordings made famous by a range of artists from Tupac Shakur, Little Richard …
Beloved comedian Bob Hope’s legacy has gotten new legs with the opening of the Library of Congress exhibition “Hope for America: Performers, Politics & Pop Culture.” An online preview is available here. “Hope for America” explores the special relationship between comedians and politicians and the way it changed in the century that encompassed Hope’s life and …
A cartoon can be engaging and funny and tell a story without any audible sound at all; even newspaper cartoons of the 20th century featured characters such as Ferd’nand and The Little King, (external links) who went through their paces, frame-by-frame, with little or no dialogue to move the story along. But sometimes, more is more, as …
Well, this is a day that has been a long time in coming. The Library of Congress has been working for several months now so that we could “do YouTube right.” When you’re the stewards of the world’s largest collection of audiovisual materials (some 6 million films, broadcasts and sound recordings), nothing less would be …
Time was, the most common question we would get at the Library of Congress was, “Where are all the books?” (The answer is here.) But a new question has begun to rival that query in frequency: “Where is the ‘Book of Secrets’?” Well, for the next month, at least, you can find it at the …
There are almost as many different ways to watch movies today as there are movies themselves: on television (broadcast, cable, satellite, video on-demand, DVR), on disc (DVD or BluRay, at home or on the road), or in digital version on countless varieties of portable devices. But can anything truly top the experience of watching a …