National Film Registry 2011
"Forrest Gump" (1994), in which Tom Hanks' character takes a picaresque journey through recent American history, is among the most recent additions to the Library of Congress' National Film Registry, a repository of motion pictures judged to be culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.
By CBSNews.com producer David Morgan
Fragile Film
This is crucial because more than half of motion pictures produced before 1950, including as much as 90 percent of films from the silent era, are lost - their negatives discarded, destroyed by fire, or deteriorated into dust.
Left: Deborah Stoiber brushes off a reel of decomposing film at the George Eastman House Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center in Chili, N.Y., in this April 2008 file photo.
"Norman Rae" (1979)
"A Computer Animated Hand" (1972)
The footage wound up in the 1976 sci-fi flick "Futureworld," while Catmull went on to found the animation company Pixar. He is currently the president of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios.
"The Silence of the Lambs" (1991)
This masterfully acted and directed (and gory) thriller became only the second film to win Oscars in the five top categories - Best Picture, Director (Jonathan Demme), Actor (Hopkins), Actress (Foster) and screenplay (Ted Tally, adapting Thomas Harris' novel). But it was also a rarity in being a horror movie that won an Oscar for Best Picture. A horror movie!
"The Kid" (1921)
"Twentieth Century" (1934)
"Bambi" (1942)
"Allures" (1961)
"The Iron Horse" (1924)
"Stand and Deliver" (1988)
"War of the Worlds" (1953)
As vivid as the film's visual effects were - hovering Martian space craft decimating Los Angeles, an alien with a tri-colored eyeball - the most memorable were the audio effects of the Martians' death rays, still chilling to this day.
"The Lost Weekend" (1945)
"Faces" (1968)
"Porgy and Bess" (1959)
"Growing Up Female" (1971)
"The Big Heat" (1953)
"I, an Actress" (1977)
In the comical "I, an Actress," Kuchar - a San Francisco Art Institute professor - directs an acting student (played by Barbara Lapsley) to perform an ever-more melodramatic monologue.
"Hester Street" (1975)
"The Cry of the Children" (1912)
"A Cure for Pokeritis" (1912)
The New York Times noted at Bunny's death that "His loss will be felt all over the country, and the films which preserve his humorous personality in action may in time have a new value. It is a subject worthy of reflection, the value of a perfect record of a departed singer's voice, of the photographic films perpetuating the drolleries of a comedian who developed such extraordinary capacity for acting before the camera."
"Fake Fruit Factory" (1986)
Nicholas Brothers Family Home Movies (1930s-40s)
The Nicholas Brothers' 16mm home movies show not only their artistic prowess but also a bygone entertainment era - including the only footage shot inside the Cotton Club. The reels also capture their routines in Broadway shows (such as "Babes in Arms"), as well as street life in Harlem, footage of an all-African-American regiment during World War II, and the family's 1934 cross-country tour.
It's an invaluable collection of images preserving middle class Black America during and after the Great Depression, but one desperately in need of preservation - film programmer Bruce Goldstein, who knew the duo, said the footage had been transferred to tape but the films themselves are missing.
"The Negro Soldier" (1944)
It has been hailed as a "watershed in the use of film to promote racial tolerance," and in that cause it was required viewing for Army soldiers from early 1944 to the end of the war.