Close Encounters and Bullitt preserved for future generations
Story by Jack Foley
STEVEN Spielberg’s sci-fi classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Robert Zemeckis’ time-travelling adventure Back To The Future and Steve McQueen’s iconic role as Bullitt are among the 25 films to have been selected for preservation by the US Library of Congress in 2007.
The National Film Registry is charged with preserving the cultural heritage of the US and selects 25 films each year that have demonstrated a lasting cultural significance.
A total of 475 films have now been preserved as part of the scheme, which began in 1989.
Other selections made this year include jury drama 12 Angry Men, starring Henry Fonda, Dances With Wolves, Kevin Costner’s Oscar-winning Western, and cowboy musical Oklahoma!.
Dances With Wolves, from 1990, is the most recent inclusion, while the earliest is Tol’able David, a 1921 coming-of-age film by Henry King, one of the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
According to The Library of Congress, the latter film is a “powerful drama” that became “tremendously influential on subsequent film-making”.
Back To The Future, which starred Michael J Fox and Christopher Lloyd, was described as “The Twilight Zone meets Preston Sturges”, while Close Encounters… was chosen for its “five-tone musical motif” which, according to the Library of Congress, has “become as quotable as any line of movie dialogue”.
Other gems to make the archive include Wuthering Heights, featuring Sir Laurence Olivier’s portrayal of Heathcliffe, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the last Western from John Ford. An early Walt Disney short, Three Little Pigs, was also among those selected for preservation.
Commenting on the scheme, Congress librarian James H Billington said that half of all the movies produced in the US before 1950 and up to 90% of those made before 1920 had disappeared, partly because of “vinegar syndrome”, a chemical reaction that attacks the acetates in old film stock.
“The National Film Registry seeks not only to honour these films, but to ensure that they are preserved for future generations to enjoy,” he explained.
The complete list of films entering the National Film Registry in 2007 are:
Back to the Future (1985)
Bullitt (1968)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)
Dances With Wolves (1990)
Days of Heaven (1978)
Glimpse of the Garden (1957)
Grand Hotel (1932)
The House I Live In (1945)
In a Lonely Place (1950)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
Mighty Like a Moose (1926)
The Naked City (1948)
Now, Voyager (1942)
Oklahoma! (1955)
Our Day (1938)
Peege (1972)
The Sex Life of the Polyp (1928)
The Strong Man (1926)
Three Little Pigs (1933)
Tol’able David (1921)
Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (1969-71)
12 Angry Men (1957)
The Women (1939)
Wuthering Heights (1939)