"Paris Is Burning" and "The Breakfast Club" Among National Film Registry's Class of 2016
Wednesday, December 14, 2016 at 11:59PM By Daniel Crooke
Founded in 1988 as a way to protect and preserve the heritage of “culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant” American cinema, the Library of Congress has announced their annual list of films to be inducted into their National Film Registry – and it’s packed with inspired choices. While most of the internet is consumed with Top Ten fever as the year winds down, let's detour from the contemporary cinema and take a look at this list of twenty-five classics...
- Life of an American Fireman (1903)
- Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912)
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916)
- Solomon Sir Jones films (1924-28)
- Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)
- The Beau Brummels (1928)
- Lost Horizon (1937)
- Ball of Fire (1941)
- A Walk in the Sun (1945)
- Blackboard Jungle (1955)
- East of Eden (1955)
- The Birds (1963)
- Point Blank (1967)
- Funny Girl (1968)
- Putney Swope (1969)
- The Decline of Western Civilization (1981)
- The Atomic Cafe (1982)
- Suzanne, Suzanne (1982)
- The Breakfast Club (1985)
- The Princess Bride (1987)
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
- Paris Is Burning (1990) - see our Best Shot party if you missed it.
- Thelma & Louise (1991) -- be sure to read TFE's 5 Part Retrospective!
- The Lion King (1994)
- Rushmore (1998)
Off the bat, the most exciting presence on the list is Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning, a living, breathing document of the diverse drag ball culture in Harlem in the late 1980s, as well as a pop culture primer on the community that revolutionized expressive liberation and, in the process, created a scene that continues to influence the slang and society of modern queerdom. It feels especially historic for this film to land in our government’s personal video collection so many years after receiving a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, at a time when radical artists faced higher cultural blowback from pushing the boundaries of sexual orientation, gender, and identity in their work. Along with other entries this decade including Portrait of Jason and The Times of Harvey Milk, Paris Is Burning is one of the first classics of the queer canon to be recognized by the National Film Registry; interestingly, LGBT representation in the collection boils down mostly to documentaries.
Another inspired documentary pick that explores an artistically prescient, marginalized subculture would be Penelope Spheeris’ groundbreaking look at the Los Angeles punk scene of the late 1970s from within the mosh pit, The Decline of Western Civilization. Spheeris is in good company alongside The Breakfast Club and Putney Swope in comprising a stellar strand of era-specific classics on the genre-spanning list. Wes Anderson’s Rushmore marks the director’s first entry into the catalogue, while The Birds makes for a surprisingly overdue addition from Hitchcock’s filmography.
Did any of your favorites make this year’s selections for the National Film Registry?
Reader Comments (10)
Totally shocked that Lost Horizon (1937), Ball of Fire (1941), Blackboard Jungle (1955), East of Eden (1955), The Birds )1963), and The Princess Bride (1987) weren't already there. Especially Lost Horizon. Almost 80 years for it to be realised as the classic it is?
"East of Eden," is one of my favorites. Dean was only 24 when he died! Kazan did a brilliant job directing.
Atomic Cafe is another wonder of a documentary alongside PARIS IS BURNING and DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION. Co-directed by a woman, too.
Madonna and the Vogue video made me check this film out as an early 90's gay teen,had to go into the big city and buy the video,oh the good old days.
Good crop this year!
It's worth noting that one of the main reasons the LOC started the National Film Registry was to preserve films in their ORIGINAL form, not just to preserve them for posterity. In the 80s, colorization was a very big deal, and there was a real fear among film buffs that you wouldn't be able to see the original b/w prints someday. And George Lucas was already tinkering with the Star Wars films...
RJL, they only add 25 films a year, and many are shorts, silent, educational, cartoons, industrial, amateur - so it's not surprising that so many classic features aren't there yet.
They need to be adding more before some of these classics are lost forever. I bet we would be alarmed at how many films from the golden era are disintegrating even now.
The National Film Registry is all wrapped up in LaBeija.
brookesboy -- the real horror is that being added to their registry does nothing to prevent that distinegration. it's only an honorary thing as in "you deserve to be saved".
Brooksboy, not even just disintegrating, but studios actively junking film prints because, eh, they take up too much space and cost to much (even though digital constantly needs to be upgraded and they can cost even more to manage than prints can if you know what you're doing (proper temperatures and the like). The horror stories I could tell of film prints being treated terribly. I've heard so many horror stories. Of course, there is only so much money in preservation/restoration. We've already lost a massive chunk of films made across the 120 odd years of movie production.
The move away from any hard copy source is terrifying tbh.
Paris is Burning is a vital document and one of the best documentaries ever made. There is truth and love and passion and tragedy in that movie like I have seen nowhere else.