significant, but not available

In case you hadn’t heard, the U.S. National Film Preservation Board selected 25 films to add to the National Film Registry. You can read the full press release here, which includes a list of all the films chosen for 2004. This means there are now 400 films in the National Film Registry.
These films are chosen not because they’re the best films ever, but because they are “culturally, historically, or aesthetically” significant to Americans. That would explain why the list includes a variety of films that might not be top quality but include cinematic and cultural icons, such as Jailhouse Rock, Ben-Hur, Swing Time, Enter the Dragon, The Nutty Professor, Eraserhead, and Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor.
It was interesting to see Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers on the list since Alamo is showing the Les Blank documentary next week.
I told my boyfriend about the list and he asked me, “What happens to these films?”
The Library of Congress restores prints of these films to archival quality, so that they can be preserved in the best state possible. That’s very nice, isn’t it?
But he persisted. “Does this mean we get to see them?”

Um, I don’t know. The Library of Congress will keep a restored print of each of the films in the National Film Registry, but does that mean that you and I ever get to view the finished print? I mean, the Library of Congress has a print, the only print, of the 1930 version of Holiday but I don’t think they’ll let me walk in off the streets and watch it, nor allow a theater to rent it to show to an audience. (The Library of Congress does have the Mary Pickford Theater, where they show films in the registry as well as other obscure films, but that’s just one small theater.)
I told him that I felt a film selected by the National Film Registry would stand a better chance of touring theaters once it was restored, and the restored print might encourage a distributor to release or rerelease the film on DVD. But that’s just me babbling. Is this really true? I have no idea. I hope I’m right because I have been dying to see Swing Time on DVD, there were rumors of it being released as part of a George Stevens boxed set, but it’s still unavailable along with the rest of the Astaire-Rogers movies. (Apparently most RKO films are in rotten shape, and it’s taking a lot of work to get the Astaire-Rogers prints to a point where they can be transferred to DVD.)
I looked at the 2003 National Film Registry list to see if it included a number of films that weren’t available on DVD until 2004. I can’t check every single one of them, of course, but I don’t see a connection. For the most part, the films that were already out on DVD did not rerelease with restored editions (Young Frankenstein, Atlantic City, Patton), and some of the films still aren’t available on DVD (The Wedding March, Naughty Marietta, Gold Diggers of 1933).
(Aside: Someone on the board must have a sense of humor, since Naughty Marietta and Young Frankenstein were picked in the same year. Naughty Marietta is an operetta that contains the song “Oh, Sweet Mystery of Life.”)
However, film preservation and restoration can take a very long time, so perhaps 2003 isn’t a good year to examine. I could wade through the entire list of National Film Registry films and tell you how many of them are on DVD, but I honestly don’t have the time or the inclination. (I am not being paid enough for this writing to do that level of research.) Some have been restored and rereleased—I noticed new prints or special-edition DVDs of Chinatown, Dr. Strangelove, On the Waterfront, Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, The Manchurian Candidate, and Meet Me in St. Louis in 2004. (And also Star Wars, but I wonder if the version that the Library of Congress possesses is the same version that was released on DVD this year. Heh.)
Bringing Up Baby has been in the National Film Registry since 1990, but it has taken 15 years to be released on DVD, mainly because the master prints that were available were of such poor quality. (RKO again.) Ninotchka was also added that year and is still not available on DVD.
I don’t think that the National Film Registry’s preservation efforts affect us in terms of what we will see in revival theaters or on DVD, but if someone has evidence that it does affect us, let me know.
So why does it matter? Why should we care what the National Film Registry contains? The registry of films is meant to be like anything else in the Library of Congress … of archival value for research purposes. These movies have been important to Americans, for one reason or another, and we don’t want them to vanish into thin air. We’ve lost so many films already that cannot be recovered, particularly films from the silent era.
And while we may not get to see Gold Diggers of 1933 or El Norte whenever we want, it’s good to know that the prints are there, that if a film distributor decides in 20 years that releasing these movies could bring in some cash, that they have decent materials to work with. It’s a small hope, but one I’ll cherish.