TREASURES FROM AMERICAN FILM ARCHIVES (2000) B/W & C - shown in 4 parts running 240m each

From Now Playing, a Viewer's Guide to Turner Classic Movies: "TCM is proud to present the world television premiere of a socially and historically important group of films from a groundbreaking collaboration called Treasures from American Film Archives. It marks the first time that the nation's archives have joined forces to make their film holdings available. The resulting anthology focuses on 'orphan' films --- silents, documentaries and newsreels, avant-garde and independent works, amateur and home movies, animated and industrial films that have been abandoned by a marketplace that sees little commercial value in them.

"With funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pew Charitable Trusts, a group of nonprofit archives joined with the National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve and present these films. Among the 19 contributing archives, ranging from Alaska to West Virginia, are the Academy Film Archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The George Eastman House, The Library of Congress, The Museum of Modern Art, The National Archives and Records Administration, The Smithsonian Institution and UCLA. Treasures from American Film Archives (2000), also available on a boxed-set DVD through Image Entertainment, represents an astonishing variety of almost-lost films made from coast to coast over the last 100 years.

"Part 1 ... of the anthology includes The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903), an early three-shot Edison film by Edwin S. Porter in which a woman gets a clerk in hot water by exposing a lovely ankle; excerpts from Groucho Marx's Home Movies (1933); Tevye (1939), an example of U.S. Yiddish-language cinema and a forerunner of 1971's Fiddler on the Roof; and Chuck Jones' Private Snafu: 'Spies' (1943), a zany entry from a U.S. government series of cartoons. Part 2 ... includes Her Crowning Glory (1911), a a comedy short with the movies' first comic star, John Bunny; and The Battle of San Pietro (1945), John Huston's much-praised 33-minute documentary about a World War II battle pitting German forces against the Allies. Part 3 ... includes The Thieving Hand (1908), an impressionistic five-minute study of a man whose replaced arm has a mind of its own; and We Work Again (1937), a Depression-era documentary about African-American reemployment that includes footage of Orson Welles' 1936 Harlem stage production Voodoo Macbeth. Part 4 ... includes Interior New York Subway (1905), a five-minute look at New York's subway system, less than seven months after its opening; Snow White (1916), an early, hour-long version of the fairy tale that inspired a young Walt Disney to remake it two decades later; and The Autobiography of a Jeep (1943), a witty, 10-minute U.S. government documentary in which the jeep itself celebrates its history and the American 'can-do' spirit."