The Library of Congress has announced its annual list of new additions to the National Film Registry.. Every year since 1989, the Registry has named 25 films--everything from Casablanca to the Zapruder home movie of President Kennedy's assassination--to be permanently preserved owing to their being deemed to possess cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance. Among the inclusions this time: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Grand Hotel, Days of Heaven, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 12 Angry Men, In a Lonely Place, Wuthering Heights, Bullitt the Disney cartoon Three Little Pigs, the Robert Benchley comic short The Sex Life of the Polyp, the Oscar-winning Sinatra-does-tolerance short The House I Live In, and Dances with Wolves. (We have no idea whether that last one is supposed to be culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, but maybe somebody at the Registry just doesn't think that Native Americans have suffered enough.) The most recent of the new additions to the Registry, which now tops out at a total of 525 titles, are the Kevin Costner thing and Back to the Future (1985), which has the enduring distinction of being the only time-travel teen comedy ever directly referenced by name in a presidential State of the Union address. (Ah, the eighties!) For the record, the newest movie listed in the Registry overall is still 1996's Fargo, the subject of a recent "Face/Off" column at this site by the Corsican brothers of on-line film writing, Leonard Pierce and myself. The Registry declined comment on rumors that plans are underway to commemorate this event by constructing a life-size bronze statue in front of the building showing a couple of geeks having a shovel fight.
