50000 Films Found?

[Aaron Gerow]

On 2005.2.11, at 04:34 ??, tetsuwan at comcast.net wrote:

> Wonder how long before the public gets to view any of these?
>  
Knowing that the National Film Center is understaffed and underfunded, 
I would say it could take years, if not decades before many of these 
films can be seen. The NFC will probably try to show some of the more 
famous works as quickly as they can--perhaps in a year or so if the 
condition is not too bad--but if there are really several thousand 
titles here (I suspect the "50000" indicates more the number of reels, 
not titles), it will take them years just to catalog them and try to do 
preservation work. Also, we must remember that the NFC is still not a 
research-friendly institution, and thus it does not make these films 
easily available to individual scholars. You thus might have to wait 
decades before they decide to show one of the lesser films in one of 
their public screenings.

I might add that the Bunkacho currently has a committee investigating 
the future of the NFC, but as usual, there is not a single film scholar 
on the committee--it's all people from the industry.

Aaron Gerow
Assistant Professor
Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
Director of Undergraduate Studies, Film Studies Program
Yale University
53 Wall Street, Room 316
PO Box 208363
New Haven, CT 06520-8363
USA
Phone: 1-203-432-7082
Fax: 1-203-432-6764
e-mail: aaron.gerow at yale.edu