The National Screening Room is a massive online repository that puts cinema’s most influential films at the tips of your fingers. And to watch them, all you have to do is click “play.”
In Tuesday’s episode of “Matt About Town,” WTOP explored the collection of nearly 1,300 works that have helped shape the art form we know as movies today.
The National Screening Room is an online project of the Library of Congress, spearheaded by the audiovisual conservation operation happening at the library’s Packard Campus in Culpeper, Virginia.
If you click around the website, you’ll find it has a little bit of everything.
You might find classic cartoons like a 1936 short of “Popeye” next to a cut of the Claymation movie “Peter Cottontail” from 1971. Or you’ll stumble upon color footage of World War II from 1945, next to a tape of a Rolling Stones performance from the 1960s. Then, one more scroll of your mouse leads you to an episode of “The Danny Kaye Show” from 1965.
The National Screening Room has tons of classic films that have been selected as part of the National Film Registry as well, including pictures that revolutionized cinema like “The Great Train Robbery (1903), to “St. Louis Blues” (1928), to “Modesta” (1956), to Oscar winners like “The House I Live In,” starring Frank Sinatra, also from 1945.
The library said they try to make the widest selection of films available to the widest audience through its collection, and constantly add more as part of their ongoing mission to digitize all their physical media assets stored on the 45-acre Packard Campus.
Tuesday’s episode includes excerpts from several recognizable films, including recent selections to the National Film Registry that haven’t been added yet. But it could be available for free online one day.
These movies, and their importance to history and culture, cannot be overstated. The fact that the Library of Congress has made them all available to anyone with access to the internet is a national treasure!
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