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But the Library of Congress is the guardian of American memory. Its immense collection contains more than 178 million books, manuscripts, recordings, maps, photographs and moving images, including a two-minute clip from “The Callahans and the Murphys.”
I would like to see it?
I fell so deep, until I finally hit rock bottom in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, outside of Culpeper, Virginia.
Here, in the late 1960s, the federal government built an underground facility on the slopes of Mount Pony, about 120 miles southwest of Washington, as a safe depository for billions of dollars in cash in the event of a nuclear war. . Responsibility for the structure was eventually transferred to the Library of Congress, expanded and repurposed as National Center for Audiovisual Conservationr, with almost 90 miles of shelves.
Stored on the side of this mountain are four million scripts, posters, photographs and other ephemera; four million sound recordings; and two million moving image objects, including some 140,000 cans of nitrate film kept in specially designed vaults where the temperature is kept at exactly 39 degrees. The vaults are divided by studio and non-studio films: in one section, Columbia Pictures (say, “It Happened One Night”); in another, Universal Pictures (“Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein”).
“It’s not intended to be a comprehensive representation of American cinema,” said Pierce, deputy director of the center and traveling film encyclopedia. “It is not our goal, and we do not have the space or the personnel, to compile absolutely everything on film.”
Everywhere I looked, film was being manipulated, preserved, and curated by staff. A young woman sending a copy of the 1950 musical “Annie Get Your Gun” to a film festival. A laboratory specialist repairing tears in a fragile negative of “Seed,” a 1931 melodrama that featured a very young Bette Davis.