Founded in 1935 as
the Film Library, this department's collection now includes more
than 22,000 films and four million film stills; the strongest international
film collection in the United States, it incorporates all periods
and genres. Among the holdings are original negatives of the Biograph
and Edison companies, and the world's largest collection of D. W.
Griffith films. The film collection is stored in the Museum's Celeste
Bartos Film Preservation Center, a state-of-the-art facility
that opened in June 1996. The Department's video collection, begun
in 1970, includes some 1,000 works dating from the 1960s to the
present, ranging from educational pieces and broadcast documentaries
to works by video artists.
