The Library of Congress just added 25 films to the National Film Registry—a collection meant to preserve movies of cultural, historic, or aesthetic importance for future generations. The list spans 118 years, from The Tramp and the Dog (1896), the first commercial film ever made in Chicago, to Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).
This year's honorees include crowd-pleasing hits like The Karate Kid (1984), The Truman Show (1998), and Inception (2010), alongside quieter classics like Philadelphia (1993) and the cult sci-fi horror film The Thing (1982)—which was actually the most-nominated film by the public this year. The registry now holds 925 titles total.
The preservation effort matters because films capture parts of American history that documents alone can't. "When we preserve films, we preserve American culture for generations to come," says Robert R. Newlen, the acting librarian of Congress. "Films are instrumental in capturing important parts of our nation's story."
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Start Your News DetoxAnderson's inclusion is particularly fitting given how deeply he relied on the Library of Congress' own archives while making The Grand Budapest Hotel. The film's Eastern European architecture and landscapes—many of which no longer exist—were reconstructed using the library's Photochrom collection, a trove of nearly 6,000 hand-tinted photographs of European and Middle Eastern landscapes from the late 1880s through World War I. "Much of what is in our film comes directly from that collection," Anderson explains.
The selection process is rigorous. The Library of Congress and National Film Preservation Board suggest candidates, then the acting librarian makes final picks from public nominations—this year, 7,559 people submitted suggestions, about 700 more than last year. Six silent films and four documentaries also made the cut, including Ken Burns' directorial debut Brooklyn Bridge (1981), a 60-minute documentary about the New York landmark that Burns says contains "all the impulses that guide my own work."
The registry has been adding roughly 25 films annually since 1989, when it began honoring classics like The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, and Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope. This year's class also brought double honors to Denzel Washington and Bing Crosby, each appearing in two films on the list.
As the collection grows, it becomes a living archive of how Americans have told their stories to themselves—and what we've chosen to remember.
