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?