For more than a century, motion pictures have documented American life and culture. The Library of Congress has been actively involved in preserving the history of cinema since October 6, 1893, when William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson, assistant to Thomas Edison and inventor of the Kinetoscope, recorded the first copyright registration for a commercially distributed movie. Dickson’s claim marked the beginning of the film industry in America and predated by more than two years the Lumière brothers’ projection of a film before a paying audience in Paris on December 24, 1895.
When Dickson filed his copyright claim, owners of motion pictures who wished to be protected from illegal duplication printed frames of their films onto paper stock and submitted the paper rolls as photographs to be copyrighted. Ever since, the Library has maintained records on every film copyrighted in America. Today, the Library of Congress makes accessible to scholars and researchers the largest collection of films in the world.
The Library of Congress leads the film archive movement in the United States and, since 1969, has undertaken more than half of all the 35mm film preservation completed in the United States. Still, there is much work to be done in the area of film preservation. In a 1993 report on the state of film preservation, I alerted the U.S. Congress that motion pictures were disintegrating faster than American archives could save them. Now, with the establishment by Congress of the National Film Preservation Foundation, the Library can continue its work to promote and ensure the preservation and public accessibility to the nation’s film heritage.
Visibility of the Library’s film collection goes hand in hand with our film preservation efforts. This book, Silent Movies: The Birth of Film and the Triumph of Movie Culture, is only one way the Library is working to increase the visibility of its film collections to the public. In addition to the film treasures introduced to you in the pages of this book, you can also visit our Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound reading room on Capitol Hill to explore them in greater depth or view some of our preserved film collections at http://www.loc.gov/rr/mopic. However you visit and explore our motion picture collections, I hope you will come to value this priceless legacy as much as I do.
James H. Billington
The Librarian of Congress