The University Archive: Early Motion Picture Collecting in the United States and the Efforts to Develop the National Film Negative Library

Well before the National Archives or Library of Congress began collecting motion pictures, a December 1910 article in the Olean [N.Y.]

Evening Times proposed that famed itinerant lecturer and exhibitor Lyman H. Howe establish a National Film Library. The author was impressed by the positive press and enthusiastic public reception to Howe’s moving pictures of the funeral of England’s King Edward. The Evening Times’s suggestion to create a film library was also an attempt to legitimate Howe’s pictures as important historical documents worthy of long-term safekeeping. The author proclaimed, “Think of what it would be if we could see the funeral of Julius Caesar, a gladiatorial contest, the maneuvers of the Spanish Armada, the street life of ancient Athens or even a simple Babylonian or Egyptian walking to his business.”¹

Howe never established a motion picture library. However, throughout the 1910s, the idea of forming a collection of significant American films was still frequently raised. Perhaps recognizing the magnitude of this mission, film industry leaders often sought to involve the federal government in the efforts to save early movies. In a widely reprinted interview in 1919, Thomas Edison suggested that the government build a library of educational and industrial motion pictures in Washington, D.C., to provide access to “all institutions in the United States, even to the most rural schoolhouses.”²

Industry support for a film library continued with Will Hays, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA). Shortly after he was hired in 1922, Hays began lobbying for a government-funded archive of motion pictures produced by Hollywood studios. Hays discussed with Presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover plans to construct a nitrate vault in the basement of the White House to preserve historically important movies of “national cultural value.”³ Will Hays’s lobbying efforts have been singled out by historians of the film preservation movement in the United States as illustrative of the first wave of efforts to create a federal motion picture collection through an appeal to nationalistic discourse.

Individuals outside the film industry were likewise interested in forming a national collection of American motion pictures. Scholars interested in the early history of film preservation have particularly focused on the efforts of the federal government. As a result, Janna Jones explains, the history of archiving has been primarily defined by the efforts of the National Archives and the Library of Congress to build a national film library for the purpose of enhancing the reputation of the United States at home and abroad.⁴

This focus on the federal government’s role in film preservation has meant that the history and importance of university collections of educational, industrial, and sponsored motion pictures have been largely overlooked. Film collections in universities preceded these other archives by decades, as numerous colleges started acquiring motion pictures in the 1910s. The largest collections, both in terms of number of reels of film and audience size, were operated by university extension divisions that established visual instruction programs to distribute educational films and media to schools and off-campus groups. The circulating libraries at institutions including the Universities of Indiana, Wisconsin, California, and Texas were headed by largely unknown administrators who were not archivists or cinephiles but rather valued cinema for its utility as an educational tool. Although contemporary scholars, particularly ones interested in the history of educational and nontheatrical cinema, have explored cinema’s incorporation in university curricula beginning in the mid-1910s, the importance of these early collections to the history of motion picture preservation in the United States requires further exploration.

University film collections offer an alternative site from which to consider the origins of motion picture preservation. In 1920, two years before Hays was hired by the MPPDA, administrators of visual instruction programs proposed the establishment of a National Film Negative Library (NFNL) in Washington, D.C. They sought to connect the goals of long-term film preservation to the more established project of visual education. The library...