Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity and pleasure of teaching college film courses and organizing film programs at several public libraries. This article shares lessons learned from those experiences and provides tips for public libraries on selecting program content, choosing equipment, handling copyright issues, and marketing, to ensure the success of your library’s film programming.
Establishing Your Own Criteria
Why should you choose a particular film for your library’s film program? You could establish criteria for making film evaluations. Some relevant standards, criteria, or questions you might ask yourself include the following:1
- Are you able to identify the purpose or aim of the film (i.e., to inform, educate, entertain, persuade)?
- Who is the film’s intended audience?
- Does the film have a storyline/plot?
- How are the characters developed/portrayed in the film?
- Does the motion picture have dramatic appeal?
- Does it contain a point of view, logic, closure, metaphysical statements/arguments, ambiguity, etc.?
- What is the central theme, message, or concern of the film?
- Is the film persuasive? How does the film persuade you of its message (e.g., by emotional appeal, factual evidence, estrangement/detachment, symbolism, an overtly manipulated point of view tantamount to propaganda, etc.)?
- What do you see as the film’s importance or relevance?
- What do we learn or fail to learn from the film?
- What, if any, are the values/ideology expressed?
- In terms of the film’s technical qualities and aesthetics, how would you rate the overall direction, the acting, the visual elements (e.g., cinematography, special effects, sets, lighting costumes, color, and use of space), the aural elements (e.g., dialogue, music, sound effects, silence) in addition to the editing (e.g., cutting, the film’s rhythm, continuity, disjunction, or effective use of montage sequences)?
Other Routes to Follow
If you are not interested or confident in developing your own film evaluation criteria, you can always depend on the judgment or critical opinions of others
whether it takes the form of reading professional movie reviews, examining the selections of experienced film programmers, or placing reliance on the winners of film awards and festivals, or notable “best film” lists prepared by various cinephiles.
Newspapers, magazines, broadcast, and online outlets are all pertinent sources for current and retrospective movie criticism. Some notable sources on the Internet include:
Movie Review Query Engine
Established in 1993, Movie Review Query Engine (MRQE) claims it is the Internet’s largest database for movie reviews. It contains a searchable index of published and available movie reviews, news, interviews, and other material associated with films.
Provides reviews from critics of accredited media outlets (i.e., print and broadcast) and online film societies in the form of Tomatometer ratings. “A Tomatometer measures the percentage of ‘Approved Tomatometer Critics’ who recommend a certain movie—or the number of good reviews divided by the total number of reviews.”2 Tomatometer criteria are described in detail on the website.
Metacritic compiles reviews from respected critics and publications for movies, DVDs, music, television, and games. Contains Metascores showing the critical consensus at a glance by taking a weighted average of critics’ grades.
This website contains 20,000 capsule reviews of movies and DVD releases prepared by critics at TimeOut magazine including lists of the fifty greatest sports movies, top twenty vampire movies, and so on.
Not Coming to a Theater Near You
This film review site assumes a bias towards older, often unpopular, and sometimes unknown films that warrant a second examination.
Video Librarian and Video Librarian Plus!
Video Librarian is a video review magazine for public, school, academic, and special libraries, as well as video fans who are interested in a wider variety of titles than what’s found in the average video store. Written by staff, librarians, teachers, and film critics, Video Librarian offers more than 225 critical reviews per issue, alerting readers to upcoming new releases of special interest, documentary, and feature films. Video Librarian Plus! offers subscribers both the print magazine and online access to a searchable database of more than 22,000 full-text video reviews.
Film & History Guide to Documentary Films
This website, from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, reviews significant documentaries and provides useful commentary for scholars, educators, and students.
Box Office Statistics
If you are interested in tracking the financial earnings of domestic films, then you should investigate the following online sources reporting theatrical box office revenues. They provide economic indicators of the public’s acceptance or rejection of specific motion picture fare.
Box Office Guru
This website contains box office data on motion pictures released between 1989 and the present. The statistics are manually updated on a weekly basis and more than 3,600 films are contained in the database.
Box Office Mojo
In addition to being a movie publication, this website publishes several sections reporting box office receipts by time period, including daily, weekend, weekly, monthly, quarterly, seasonal, yearly, and all time.
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)
MPAA is a film industry association and a source of movie ratings providing parents with advance information about the content of films. Parents can then determine what movies are appropriate for their young children to view. The ratings are assigned by an independent board of parents.
The list of film awards issued by organizations from around the world is lengthy. Some of the more longstanding prizes, both prestigious and notorious in nature, include:
- Oscars, awarded annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (www.oscar.com and www.oscars.org)
- National Board of Review of Motion Pictures Awards
- Golden Globes, awarded by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association
- National Society of Film Critics annual film awards (no official website)
- New York Film Critics Circle awards
- Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards
- Women Film Critics Circle Awards
- Golden Raspberry (RAZZIE) Awards (annually presenting dis-honors for worst achievements in film since 1980)
- BAFTA Awards, issued by the British Academy of Film and Television
- César Awards are the main national film awards in France
- Deutscher Filmpreis, the German film award colloquially known as the Lola, is the highest German movie award given by the German Film Academy
- Goya Awards are Spain’s equivalent of the Oscars
- Japan Academy Prize, often called the Japan Academy Awards
- Ariel Award is the Mexican Academy of Film Award
- Golden Eagle Award is a Russian national award for motion pictures and TV series (issued since 2002)
- Nika Award is the major national film award issued by the Russian Academy of Cinema Arts and Sciences modeled on the Oscars
- Genie Awards are the equivalent to the Oscars in Canada
- Golden Rooster Awards are the most prestigious awards for motion pictures in mainland China (no official website)
- Golden Horse Awards, Taiwan’s Chinese-language equivalent of the Oscars )
- Grand Bell (“Daejong”) Awards are the most prestigious South Korean film awards
- David di Donatello Awards are the Italian equivalent of the Oscars
- National Film Awards are the most prominent film awards in India
- Czech Lion is the equivalent of the Oscar in the Czech Republic (www.ceskylev.cz and )
- World’s largest film festival list
- Movie festivals and events worldwide at the Internet Movie Database
- International Film Festival Database
- Directory of International Film Festivals
- Venice Film Festival
- Cannes Film Festival
- Berlin International Film Festival
- Toronto International Film Festival
- New York Film Festival presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center
- Sundance Film Festival
- Tribeca Film Festival produced by the Tribeca Film Institute
- Locarno International Film Festival
- International Film Festival Rotterdam
- Lübeck Nordic Film Days
- Pusan International Film Festival
Film festivals devoted to specific film genres and audience interests:
- International Animation Film Festival in Annecy, France
- New York International Children’s Film Festival
- The International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival
- Fantasia Film Festival
- Lone Pine Film Festival, celebrating westerns
Prominent Art-House Movie Theaters
The exhibitors of classic, foreign, independent, and documentary films at prominent art-house theaters might stimulate your thoughts when formulating solid programming. I suggest you investigate the following venues for possible ideas:
- Pickford Film Center, Bellingham, Washington
- Michigan Theater, Ann Arbor, Michigan
- Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, Massachusetts
- Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago
- Music Box Theatre, Chicago
- American Cinematheque, Los Angeles
- Avalon Theatre, Washington, D.C.
- Castro Theatre, San Francisco
- Film Forum, New York City
- Walter Reade Theater (Film Society of Lincoln Center), New York City
- Anthology Film Archives, New York City
- Maysles Cinema, New York City
- IFC Center, New York City
- BAM Rose Cinemas, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Preeminent Museums and Film Archives
Leading educational institutions with small cinemas screening classic and art-house films include:
International Museum of Photography and Film at George Eastman House
The Dryden Theatre, Rochester, N.Y.
The George Eastman House, an independent nonprofit museum, collects and preserves objects that are of significance to photography, motion pictures, and the life of George Eastman. The motion picture department at the George Eastman House covers every fact of film history and houses an extensive film collection. The Dryden Theatre was constructed in 1951.
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
The Museum of Modern Art’s department of film, established in 1935, consists of a film study center, a film stills archive, and a circulating film and video library covering the history of film from the 1890s to the present.
Museum of the Moving Image
The museum’s film screenings are often presented with personal appearances by directors, actors, critics, and scholars. With live music for silent films, restored prints from the world’s leading archives, and outstanding new films from the international festival circuit. The museum’s rich collection is an invaluable resource.
Pacific Film Archive
One of the largest university art museums in the United States, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) opened its doors on the south side of the UC Berkeley campus in 1970. There are more than 14,000 films and videos in the PFA collection. With daily screenings—more than six hundred different programs are offered each year— PFA presents rare and rediscovered prints of movie classics, new and historic works by the world’s great film directors, restored silent films with live musical accompaniment, thematic retrospectives, and exciting experiments by today’s film and video artists, including provocative, independently made fiction and documentary films.
Library of Congress Film Programs
Movies are shown at:
Mary Pickford Theater, Washington, D.C.
Packard Campus Theater at the National Audio-Visual Center, Culpeper, Va.
American Film Institute
AFI provides year-round programming at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center in Silver Spring, Md. Since 1967, AFI has devoted its efforts in preserving and conserving our American film heritage.
British Film Institute
London, United Kingdom
BFI Southbank screens more than one thousand films a year, from rare silent comedies to cult movies and archive television screenings. The venue hosts previews and gala screenings as well as events and on-stage interviews with filmmakers, actors, producers, critics and writers.
The Cinémathèque Française is one of the largest archives of films, movie documents, and film-related objects in the world. It continues to fulfill its original mission of preserving and restoring films and archives within its collections, and programming major classics as well as complete retrospectives and tributes to filmmakers, actors, producers, and film technicians.
Best Films Ever Made
Periodically, a number of organizations, publications, and critics devoted to film prepare so-called “best” movie lists or rankings. Several notable lists include:
The British Film Institute (BFI) 100
Early in 1999, the BFI surveyed one thousand people embracing all segments of the film, cinema, and television industries throughout the United Kingdom:
producers, directors, writers, actors, technicians, academics, exhibitors, distributors, executives, and critics. They were asked to consider (and vote for up to one hundred) “culturally British” feature films, released in cinemas during the twentieth century, which they felt had made a strong and lasting impression. Altogether, more than 25,700 votes were cast, covering 820 different films. The final selection spans seven decades, from 1935 to 1998, and includes the work of seventy film directors and much international talent.
American Film Institute’s 100 Years . . . The Complete Lists
Similar to BFI efforts, the American Film Institute (AFI) has produced a series of lists including AFI’s 100 Years of 100 Winning Movies.
Films Selected to The National Film Registry, Library of Congress (1989-2009)
The U.S. Congress first established the National Film Registry with enactment of the 1988 National Film Preservation Act, and most recently extended the registry with passage of the Library of Congress Sound Recording and Film Preservation Programs Reauthorization Act of 2008 (PL 110-336). Along with mandating continuing implementation of a plan to save the American film heritage, this law authorizes the Librarian of Congress (after reviewing public suggestions and consulting extensively with film experts and the forty-four members and alternates of the National Film Preservation Board) to select up to twenty-five films each year for inclusion in the registry. The 525 films chosen during the first twentyone years illustrate the vibrant diversity of American filmmaking, and range from well-known Hollywood classics (Casablanca, The African Queen, and A Night at the Opera) to landmark independent, documentary, and avant-garde masterpieces.
Locating Existing Filmographies and Creating Your Own
Comprehensive lists of films in a particular category, such as those by a given director, performer, writer, or in a specific genre, are referred to as filmographies. They can be useful in creating your film program. Filmographies can be located by accessing the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) or examining the Bowker’s Complete Video Directory 2010 Edition.3
IMDB is one of the most popular online entertainment websites. It offers a searchable database of more than 1.3 million movies, television, and entertainment programs and more than 2.8 million cast and crew members, making it the web’s most comprehensive and authoritative source of information on motion pictures.
A good example of a filmography, pertaining to the literary works of Edith Wharton, has been prepared by The Edith Wharton Society.
After compiling a list of movies comprising your program, the following requirements should carefully be considered:
- Procuring the necessary equipment for screening the films.
- Getting permission or obtaining a motion picture performance license.
- Publicizing the film program in terms of attracting and building an audience.
Film Screening Equipment
For this article, I am limiting my discussion to DVDs as the medium of choice. This necessitates the use of DVD players, DVD projectors, projection screens, audio amplification, and speaker equipment. The basics consist of a screening room, comfortable seating, appropriate flooring, the proper acoustics, lighting, and a fully functional HVAC system.
Depending on the availability of a particular film title in standard or high-definition television (HDTV) disc format, you may need to obtain a standard DVD or Blu-ray HDTV player. Many Blu-ray machines can now play the new HD discs as well as standard DVDs and audio CDs. Please understand, DVDs, in today’s format, are still TV. That translates to 525 lines of resolution per picture. Even with HDTV, you are only getting approximately 1,100 lines and that’s still far less than the clarity of film or digital cinema, which is measured in pixels, not lines. Most Digital Cinema installations in commercial movie theatres are capable of a resolution of 2048 pixels by 1080 pixels (2K) or 4K Digital Cinema systems which are 4096 x 2160 pixels. By contrast, HDTVs are 1920 x 1080 pixels or 1280 x 720 pixels.
Furthermore, the majority of DVD players available in the United States play only Region 1 discs, which are produced for the U.S. and Canadian markets. DVD discs are encoded into six different regions. There are foreign DVD titles from Europe (Region 2), Australia (Region 4), or anywhere else which you wish to screen that can’t be played on Region 1 DVD players. In order to remedy this problem, you can purchase a region-free DVD player.
If the film title you are planning to screen is not represented by one of these firms, it’s still necessary to obtain a public performance license from the copyright owner. You can research motion picture and video copyrights using the database at the U.S. Copyright Office. This database lists claimants and copyright ownership to works registered after 1978. To search for works registered before 1978, one must search the Library of Congress online catalog, LOCIS, or in printed Copyright volumes.
Many DVDs or videocassettes, such as educational and special interest titles, are purchased with public performance rights. Certain videocassettes and film DVDs in the public domain do not require a license.
Getting the Word Out
Your film programs need to be publicized to your intended audience. This should consist of but is not limited to:
- Press releases prepared and submitted to local newspapers or broadcast media (e.g., public service announcements disseminated to local radio or cable TV stations). A release should include a description of the program’s content, venue information, date, time, etc.
- Lobby displays created for your organization (i.e., eye-catching posters).
- Printed materials announcing the screenings (e.g., flyers). The use of photos and color in the printed materials will aid your publicity campaign.
- Postings to your library’s website.
- Social media.
Whether your aim is to entertain or enlighten the viewing public, or a combination of both, there is no dearth of tools to assist you in the film selection and programming process.
Celebrating filmmakers (directors, performers, writers, and so on) or devoting an entire program to a specific genre requires due diligence and a little imagination. Diligence takes the form of reading critical reviews, studying “best” film lists, surveying selections made by other programmers at film festivals and art houses, scrutinizing existing filmographies, and appraising movies through the use of self-developed criteria.
Film presentations devoted to a specific theme — such as the most controversial movies of all time, the best high school movies, best romantic versus anti-romantic movies, or strangest holiday films — are pertinent examples of screenings devised by programmers. The only formula for success in this entire process is that of trial and error, which leads me to one final recommendation.
Please don’t ever forget or underestimate your audience! Your viewers are the essential source for feedback and their suggestions for specific program fare can be quite useful.