Each year the US Library of Congress adds a selection of films to its national register deeming them to be of “cultural, historic or aesthetic importance”.
This year 25 films have been added to the register including Gus Van Sant’s iconic My Own Private Idaho, and the documentary Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt and Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls.
The full list of films for 2024 includes notable titles including Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Beverly Hills Cop, Dirty Dancing, The Social Network and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
The Academy Award-winning documentary selected this year tells the story of the National AIDS Memorial Quilt, Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, and an important period in LGBTQ history. The library also holds the newly digitized archival records of the National AIDS Memorial Quilt, representing the lives of those who died of AIDS since 1981.
Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, the library said Common Threads stands both as a heart-breaking record of the USA’s greatest catastrophe of the 1980s and an extraordinary monument to the power of grief and activism to effect change.
Directed by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey and described as “a double-projection experimental soap opera,” Chelsea Girls encapsulates everything that makes a Warhol a “Warhol” — playing with form and content, assembling complete reels of unedited film in various ways.
The reels are projected side by side, accompanied by alternating soundtracks, thus lending itself to almost infinite audience interpretations. The over three-hour film chronicles characters both real and imagined that could have been hanging out at New York City’s Chelsea Hotel.
The 1966 film includes such Warhol “superstars” and friends as Nico, Ondine, Ingrid Superstar, Brigid Polk, Ed Hood, Patrick Flemming, Mary Woronov, International Velvet, Mario Montez, Marie Menken, Gerard Malanga, Eric Emerson, and more.
It is described as a time capsule of a downtown New York art scene that is long gone but not forgotten. Preserved by the Museum of Modern Art: 16mm reversal camera original copied photochemically in 1989.
My Own Private Idaho is a wildly re-envisioned retelling of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV.” River Phoenix, in an iconic performance of poignant vulnerability, and Keanu Reeves play Northwest street hustlers — one (Phoenix) doing it to survive, the other (Reeves) to humiliate his politician father — who embark on a multi-state and then international search for Phoenix wayward mother but also for meaning and identity.
The journey, as created by director Van Sant, is a haunted and emotionally fraught one, depicted with equal measures of dream-like vision and hardcore reality.
The 1991 film had been recognised as one of the greatest performances of River Phoenix and came just two years before his untimely death at age 23.
