There was muted praise for Jack Nicholson’s performance as a caretaker gone mad at a wintry resort, while Variety wrote that director Stanley Kubrick destroyed “all that was so terrifying about Stephen King’s best-seller.” The movie was not nominated for an Academy Award that year. Instead, Kubrick earned the first Golden Raspberry for worst director.
Despite that, the film’s blood-drenched imagery and taut editing inspired future generations of directors, including Joel and Ethan Coen and Tim Burton. It is why, too, the movie is one of the films added this month to the National Film Registry for having cultural, historical and aesthetic significance in American film history.
Oscar season is around the corner. But while the Oscars reflect what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences believes is important to culture now, the registry celebrates movies that make a lasting impression. Films have to be 10 years old to be nominated by the public or recommended by members of the National Film Preservation Board. Only 25 films are added each year. Some date back to the 1800s, are experimental or only seconds long.
“I don’t think the box office or the Oscars can tell what films will survive the test of time,” said Dave Kehr, curator of the film department at the Museum of Modern Art and a former writer for The New York Times. Award ceremonies, he added, “are not infallible.”
A case in point: 1998 romantic movie “Shakespeare in Love” is not in the registry. It won the Oscar for best motion picture after now-disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein campaigned heavily for Academy votes. Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” had been widely expected to win. The movie about the sacrifice soldiers made during World War II was nominated for 11 Oscars and hailed by The Washington Post as “the greatest war movie ever made.” It was added to the registry in 2014.
The registry was formed in 1988 as part of the Library of Congress to preserve cultural artifacts and protect black-and-white masterpieces from wanton colorization. (The registry does not own the films and has no effect on distribution.) The list is very male dominated: Only 52 of the 725 films inducted are directed by women. And there is little representation of films made by people of color.
At its start, a board of film historians and experts suggested the films to be included. “It’s a subjective decision,” said Steve Leggett, program coordinator for the board who oversees the submission process. The Preservation Board now has 44 members, including Kehr, who not only make yearly recommendations, but also review public requests.
This year, film enthusiasts submitted 6,300 online recommendations — three times more than usual — which were winnowed down to about 350 movies that were reviewed by board members. The list was further cut, Leggett said, and given to Carla Hayden, the librarian of Congress, who made the final picks.
Among those chosen this year were “Jurassic Park,” the 1993 dinosaur blockbuster directed by Spielberg, which has earned more than $1 billion, according to Box Office Mojo. Another pick, Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain,” the 2005 tale of two cowboys who have a love affair, earned $178 million worldwide. Lee’s portrayal of longing and love between two men was groundbreaking at the time.
Kehr, a longtime member of the board, said of Hayden’s choices: “The new librarian is listening more to populist voices.”
This year, he said he sponsored 1917 film “Girl Without a Soul” by John H. Collins, a little-known director who died during the flu epidemic in 1918. The Museum of Modern Art has preserved a number of the director’s films. “He showed great promise,” Kehr said, mostly because of his cinematic style.
The choice of movies is designed to illuminate America’s cultural history, even its most unsavory and odious past. The 1915 silent film “The Birth of a Nation,” which was directed by D.W. Griffith and glamorized the Ku Klux Klan, was added to the registry in 1992. The movie was a blockbuster in its day, a racist ode that was screened at the White House for President Woodrow Wilson and his Cabinet and which spurred a resurgence of the KKK.
Leggett said the movie was included because its cinematic technique influenced later generations of filmmakers. At the time, the movie was a cinematic marvel, with its use of close-ups, dramatic fight sequences and a score written for an orchestra.
Another one of the board members, Jacqueline Stewart, is heading up a diversity initiative to ensure that the registry includes a wider swath of filmmakers. She and other film historians and board members attribute the dominance of white, male filmmakers to bias in the film industry. They have a point. The Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California released a study this year that looked at 1,100 top films from 2007 to 2017. Of those, only 43 were directed by women.
This year, the board included 1984’s “Hair Piece: A Film for Nappy Headed People,” the animated satire directed by an independent filmmaker, Ayoka Chenzira. The movie unpacks stereotypes about black women’s hair. Stewart said it is significant because Chenzira is considered to be one of the first black female animators. “I don’t think people think about black women as artists,” said Stewart, who is also a professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Chicago.
One seminal film that Kehr said has been discussed among board members but has not been inducted is 1971’s “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” one of the first Blaxploitation films made. The film, directed by auteur writer and director Melvin Van Peebles, is credited with starting the Blaxploitation genre, controversial at the time because some viewers thought it embraced African-American stereotypes. It was rated X.
Film reviewers noted its political theme. It also popularized funk and soul music. But its explicit sexuality — a teenager is sexually assaulted by a prostitute and grows up to become a gigolo — caused an uproar. The boy was played by Peebles’ teenage son, Mario.
Kehr said the movie is important to the genre, but takes on a different meaning in the modern era.
Some films on the list are barely seconds long, including “Something Good Negro Kiss,” a snippet of a black man and woman kissing on-screen from 1898. The short was based on “The Kiss,” an 18-second short filmed in 1896 that depicted the re-enactment of the final scene of the musical “The Widow Jones” with actors May Irwin and John Rice.
“That film is incredibly important because of age,” Stewart said. It is rare, too, to see two black actors in an intimate embrace from that era, she said, especially given the brutal racism in the decades after the Civil War’s end.
“This deviates from that,” she said. “It’s a demonstration of love and closeness at a time of violence and pervasive racism. It is good it is preserved.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.