facility to learn about the print collection, films from the earliest euro of motion pictures, produced between 1894 and 1912. over 3000 prints were created for copyright purposes but cannot be protected.

they must be scanned one frame at a time in order to be copied. my name is mike mashon on. imageead of the moving section of the library of congress. we have film, video, we also have preservation laboratories that are dedicated to making sure that all of this material is available for future generations. packard campuse actually begins in the late 1990's. our benefactor, david packer, was interested in creating preservation laboratories. there was a facility here in culpeper that had gone up for sale. it used to be got -- belong to the federal reserve bank of richmond virginia, and during its height in the 1960's until it closed in 1993 is created to

billion dollars in coin and currency that was going to be used to pump up the u.s. economy east of the mississippi in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. andbuilding was for sale packard purchased in 1997 and controlled the construction for the next several years, the next 10 years, and over time we worked with the people from the packard humanities institute into what the facility is today. it expanded over time. we now have this facility that it was half a million square feet. not only half the collection and the preservation library -- laboratory, but it also houses our data infrastructure, catalyzing -- are cataloging teams are here. everything that we need to describe, preserve, and make available to the american public the video collection. collection previously was

held in four states plus the district of columbia. our film preservation laboratory is in dayton ohio. all of these laboratories were in the madison building up on capitol hill. we had storage in pennsylvania, maryland, virginia, district of columbia. it is nice to have it all in one place. our collection begins with the beginning of cinema. the earliest film that we have in our collection comes from 1891, this is a camera test that was produced by top -- by the thomas edison company. the film is called newark athletes. it is only a few frames long. it is part of a series of experiments that edison engineers and is engaged in the early 1890's.

where our collection really 1893 with the first cells that were registered for copyright. the fall of 1893 that thomas edison started registering films for copyright, but the earliest surviving registered film that we have came to the library in january of 1894. recordcalled an edison of a sneeze. colloquially, it is known as ott's sneeze.- it shows one of the edison engineers who was known for his comical sneezes. you see him put a little bit of stuff in his nose and then he has a very violent sneeze. this did not come to the library on film. there was no provision in the copyright law in 1894 to allow for celluloid film to be registered for copyright because were justluloid films

being in the presence of invented. what edison did is he exposed record ofve of the the sneeze on strips of paper,aphic contact affixed them to a cardboard backing, and sent it into the library to be registered as a photograph. you have to think about this for a moment. we do all the time. the paper print collection, as it came to be known, in that sense really was a historical accident. the name has been lost to the missed of time, but we are very grateful for whatever library bureaucrat decided that it would be ok to register this as a photograph. it is a one photograph, series of photographs, but yet they allowed it to be registered. once that happened the floodgates opened.

edison started registering more films on paper with the library. starting in 1894. he was a very prolific film producer. in 1900 he produced nearly 800 cells. there started to be more and more films coming in for copyright on paper. and then other producers started following along hide edison. the biographical but he was actually started by edison's dixon.engineer, and then many many others through the first decade of the 20th century. all of these people are registering their films with us as paper prints. that is continued up until 1912 when the copyright law changed to allow for the submission of

film. picture now people were registering celluloid film. the type of film we know today. but the library did not have any storage. the library did not keep any of the film that came registered as film. until the do that late 1940's when we acquired from storage -- some storage that allowed us to keep nitrate film. until 1912 we had this glorious collection of films on paper prints, roughly 3300 titles, all of which are available to view. crownper prints are the everything we have collected since then and we have put more effort into the paper prints than any other single collection and we continue to

work on them today. the very beginning of cinema, the vast majority of those that were produced were not what we would think of as fictional films. they were called actualities. they are little documentaries showing everyday life, people at work, people at leisure, encourage events. there was a tremendous amount of them. one of the examples i have here comes from 1904. this is a series of films that was shot by the american biograph company. it is part of a series called westinghouse works. 1904 world'sor the fair in st. louis. there were roughly 29 films that were produced for this series in which 21 survived in the paper plant -- -- print collection.

this chronicled several factories that were owned by westinghouse. this one is called at panorama, the machine company aisle. beautiful film. it was taken essentially from an overhead crane that was moving along a track there in the showing people below on the factory floor doing their work. , amazing record of what american industry looked like at this particular time. films were incredibly popular when they were shown in 1904 in st. louis, and special screens for the westinghouse employees. you will see these films used a lot in documentaries. these films were commissioned by westinghouse, they were paid for by american biograph.

the cameraman for the films is a man named billy bitzer. he becomes much more well-known in film history because he was the cameraman for w d griffith later on. these are very important, beautiful films that mr. bitzer shot for westinghouse. the intent of these films was to show the work as it was progressing, not to have anything set up, not being staged. certainly, when you look at the films, you are going to see people who are looking up at the camera. this is something that you are not going to see every day. farby and large there is too much activity going on on the floor for it to be staged. watch as anating to document of american history -- industry at the time.

in 19 oh four it would not really have been novel at all. there were a lot of films that were made like that, it's the way in which it was shot. it is sort of chronicling a lot of activity at a particular aspect of american industry. that was very unique. one,inly shot like this the panorama of the machine company aisle is very unique, just because of the camera angle that he was able to get and the vast expanse of his factory floor is, to this day, it remains and astonishing fell. some of the actuality films that we have in the collection are particularly fascinating. backe researchers coming to them again and again. ise that i think of -- one new york city ghetto fishmarket, there are a whole series of

films that are shot in new york because that is where the center of the film production was, a lot of it was in new york. this is an edison film which again, you are so seeing a camera placed above a street you are seeing a lot .f the vendors below faces,e costumes and people looking up at the camera, it is a fascinating film. a lot of people have gone back to it again and again. there were several films that were taken of immigrants arriving at ellis island, just shocks of people getting off the boat at ellis island, it is a wonderful film.

we have a whole series of films that were shot of before and after the san francisco earthquake. we have some that were made literally in the weeks before the san francisco earthquake. popof them is particularly -- popular, called a trip down market street, in which a camera was mounted down at the front of a streetcar and follows the streetcar all the way down market street in san francisco. that was taken in a few weeks, just before the san francisco earthquake in april, 1906. and then of course cameramen rushed out to chronicle a lot of the fires and the destruction that happened in san francisco.

we have other interesting oddities in the collection, for example the very earliest ad we ine in our collection is 1898, it is an ad called admiral cigarettes. another that is interesting, this is from 1903. this is for scouring powder. you will notice the unique format of this, this is from a biograph camera in 1903, the paper is wider. it has this big center corporate -- preparation, that is where the camera was manufactured. this is an ad for gold dust scouring powder featuring the gold dust twins, who were on the packaging for gold dust powder. there is so much

information that you can learn about american culture. the paper prints serve as an endless resource for the study of manufacturing and popular culture and lived experience at the beginning of the 20th century. there is really nothing else like it. actuality are these documentary films that are very popular, very popular cinema up until the turn-of-the-century. in 1902 things start to change. we know this because of the paper prints. fiction,to see more more films with actors who are acting out a scene. this is not real life. this is a constructed reality. director in 1902, , who named edwin s porter

becomes a very important for the history of film. he made a few early films for net -- edison, narrative films in which he is playing around with some of the editing techniques. it accommodates in 1903 with a film called the great train robbery. this is a very important film history.ision we think of this is the first feature-length narrative film. it tells the story of a train robbery. the action is intercut where you see the mail train being robbed. ecb outlaws, use the action taking place in different locations. it is cut together in such a way that you can easily understand the story. it is radical editing at the time. this is our original paper prints deposit of the great train robbery, including the very famous scene at the end of it in which the outlaw, george

barnes, fired his gun directly into the camera. thes a very iconic shot at end of our paper print. this is registered for copyright on december 1, 1903. we actually have two copies. this is copy one. that weteresting too also have some original prints and negatives from the paper print era, not a lot but we do have some. we also have in our collection the original camera negative for the great train robbery, in addition to having two copies of this paper prints. this is an important film in the history of cinema for sort of tracing the narrative evolution of what cinema would become. of course over more and more evolves cinema starts to at a faster pace there are new

with people starting to play with techniques of film. in the early 1900s we are also starting to see copyrighted frenchy the celebrated tricked filmmaker george million. occurs in 1907ap when a young man named to dw company is hired i the to both star in and later direct films for them. is considered he to be the father of narrative cinema. he is a giant who developed a lot of the narrative techniques that we take completely for granted today when we are watching a film. it has to start somewhere, by large we think it started with

griffith. i say we think it started with griffith. the reason why we know so much about him is because biograph, the company that he worked for, was really good about registering their films. the you think about hundreds of thousands of films that were not registered for , there were other filmmakers out there who may have been doing similarly interesting things, but because we have so much griffith material available to us we can study him. career follow griffith's literally on a weekly basis through the paper print collection. example, this is a griffith film registered for copyright 1909. this film is called the lonely villain. this is one of the very best examples of crosscutting against action. who are trapped

in their house. there are burglars trying to get at them, and there are people on the way to rescue them. griffith cuts back and forth between all of this competing action. you see the girl, you see the burglars, you see the people datingto the rescue all, and a wonderful rescue at the end. i'm sorry if i spoiled the ending for anybody. this is just one of the most prominent examples of dw griffith's films that we have in the collection. [video clip] mike: griffith actually started in the theater. he was, like a lot of people from the theater in those days,

reluctance to get into motion picture film because he thought it was beneath him, but he went to work for biograph, started as an actor, saw some promise in the films. he was also going to get paid a little bit of money for being a director and eventually discovered that he was quite good at it. he is responsible for bringing us mary pickford, another state work in theme to films. she worked for biograph several years. we have a lot of mary pickford films and our collection that come not only from the paper print, but also marries it -- mary pickford's versatile collection which was donated to the library in the 1940's. griffith was a true visionary. fortunate to have so many of his films represented in

our various collections. collection the original camera negative. this is, in 1915, this is the apex of cinema. everything that dw griffith has learned about cinematic grammar he throws into this film. it is an astonishing work. it is full of amazing storytelling techniques, terrific acting, beautiful editing. it is truly one of the most important films in the history of the evolution of narrative cinema. unfortunately it is also one of tracts in theial history of america. them, as was, god bless

reconstructive racist who had -- to be kind -- a very paternalistic attitude towards african americans. birth of a nation is the story of the civil war and reconstruction based on a novel by a man named thomas dixon called the klansmen. it tells the story of families torn asunder by the war. the portrayal of southerners in the film is very sympathetic, including the fact that the rescue at the end of the film is affected by the ku klux klan. this is a film that is very difficult to watch out of context. today, people it who come to it fresh without knowing the background, without knowing the era, find it a very difficult film to deal with.

job to provideur the context for the film. inherentxcusing the and grotesque racism of the film. . can look at it as a social historian you can look at it one way is very much as ace of its time, but cinema historian you can still admire the technique that dw griffith brought to this film. as a film it is astonishing. as a cultural document it is still astonishing just in a different way. after the library decided that paper prints were ok to register for film the next thing that we had to be grateful for is the fact that nobody threw them away. they were all stored in the basement of the library of the

jefferson building for many years. people knew that these artifacts were in the basement, that nobody really ever did anything with it until a man a powered 1940's, took it upon himself to create an inventory of this paper prints. they were just stacked all over the place. sometimes not a very good condition, but by and large they survived. and so the library began a process of trying to get some sort of intellectual control over the paper print. they were talking with other people about ways in which they could get film copies of the paper prints, because let's not forget, you could not project the paper. you could not view it on a flatbed viewer. they were just on paper. grants, theyr

worked with other organizations, the academy of motion picture arts and sciences for example in california, to talk about ways in which the paper prints could eventually be transferred. and then in the 1950's a man kippp nyberg was p niver wasm hired. he was taking a photograph of each frame and a printer that would keep moving the paper print. one frame at a time, you would take a photograph of it. he is creating a new film from it. he transferred all the paper print to 16mm film stock creating a negative and a positive that can be viewed. those film prints are still in

use in our reading room on capitol hill today. of the roughly 3300 paper prints that are extant, about 500 of them are available online on the website today, but all the others you actually have to come to washington dc to see them. we are going to be changing that very thin. of thes not the end paper print a story. kemp niver who is creating the 16mm elements. ucla got involved in reproducing some of the paper prints. they were creating 35mm elements. then later on when the library established its own film preservation laboratory, our lab went back to the original paper print and started transferring them.

titles, theor so once you can now see on american memory online. the paper prints are so important don't really have an accurate figure of how many films were produced between 1894 and 1912. certainly not every film from that era survives. the survival rate is quite low. the paper prints were the survivors. those were the ones where the producer took care to actually register for copyright. the first decade of the 21st 20th century with a time of great help for the industry. t- a time of great tumbled -- umult.

anything that could be patented, they were patenting it. that is why this became so important, because this studios and the film producers wanted legal standing for copyright violations. we are very fortunate that that was all happening at the same time. there is really no better insight, at least in terms of moving image, to what life was like at the beginning of the century. there is practically no documentary that you will watch today that has moving images from the turn of the 20th century that do not reference the paper prints, that don't thing from the paper print collection. you cannot write a meaningful history of film without referring to the films in the paper print collection, because it traces the evolution of cinema from the cinema of attraction and actuality throu