UGA Libraries have received a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation. Given to 22 archives, libraries, historical societies and museums across the U.S., the grants are being used to save historically significant American films that are unlikely to survive without public support.
“A growing area of scholarship in the film studies field in the past few years is research into itinerant filmmakers and the ‘hometown movies’ they made,” said Margie Compton, a film archivist with the Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection at the UGA Libraries.
The $14,780 NFPF grant will be used at UGA to preserve a 1947 Fitzgerald hometown movie, a 1936 Cordele hometown movie’s outtakes and a home movie of itinerant filmmaker Don O. Newland making the Americus’ Hero melodrama in November 1928.
Films saved through the NFPF programs are made available for on-site research and are seen widely through screenings, exhibits, DVDs, television broadcasts and the Internet. The grants fund the creation of a preservation master and two public viewing copies of each film.
The awards are made possible through federal funds authorized by The Library of Congress Sound Recording and Film Preservation Programs Reauthorization Act of 2008 and secured through the Library of Congress.
