This will be the tenth year the National Registry, in the guise of Mr. James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, has selected titles of films designated as national treasures. In the first nine years from 1989 to 1996, our own national "movie buff", as Mr. Billington likes to call himself (according to *Our Movie Heritage*), selected: 178 Hollywood commercial films 22 documentaries (of which 14 avant-garde films 10 ethnic/ independents ================== 225 total Now, please don't quibble with the exact numbers, because classification is always tricky. My point is, that the view of film history previously taken by our Librarian of Congress is more than heavily weighted towards mainstream, feature filmmaking. Merely 21% of all the titles chosen are not products of the commercial film industry. Even more obvious, fully 102 titles (45 %) are fiction features, produced in Hollywood's "golden age", the three decades between 1930/1959. What is wrong with this picture? Not only are avant-garde, independent, and documentary films scandalously under-represented, given the proportional numbers of titles produced in these genres (in comparison to Hollywood) over the course of 100 years of filmmaking, other genres are completely missing: advertising films, industrial films, travelogues, medical films, amateur films (except Zapruder), educational films, etc. As a movie buff, Mr. Billington, of course, has a right to his personal opinions about what constitutes cinema. As a representative of the people, however, he should be making a much broader selection, worthy of the depth and breath of American filmmaking in toto. In fairness to Mr. Billington, his track record has been improving slightly. Of the 25 films chosen in 1997, only 16 (64%) were Hollywood features, five were documentaries, two were avant-garde films, and two were independent fiction features. I would therefore like to suggest that everyone in the film archive and film academic community contribute to the film historical education of Mr. Billington. Please help him make a respectable showing. Send your suggestions for National Registry titles to the Librarian of Congress. My own suggestions for 1998: FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (1928), directed by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber THE TELL-TALE HEART (1928), directed by Charles Klein. These two American avant-garde adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe stories utilize stylized sets in the manner of German expressionism, as well as extremely elliptical narratives, to create densely poetic images, thus translating Poe's claustrophobia into an immanently visual medium. Jan-Christopher Horak ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.tcf.ua.edu/screensite