Niver vs Walls (2016)

Previously unheard interviews with Kemp Niver and Howard Walls from 1992, the two men who helped discover and restore the earliest film collection - the Paper Print Collection from the Library of Congress. The Paper Print Collection is oldest, and one of the most important film collections in the world. It contains 3000 films from the earliest days of cinema, all pre-dating motion picture copyright law, and thus printed on paper to be protected under the photographic copyright act. Howard Walls claims to have discovered and saved the paper rolls when employed as a clerk at the Library of Congress in the 1940s. Kemp Niver eventually designed a machine that would copy them, and won an Academy award for his efforts. In 1992, filmmaker Bill Morrison interviewed both men in their homes in Southern California. He found two irascible octogenarians, neither of whom could at first remember the other's name. Morrison creates a 17 minute portrait of both men using original interview footage and archival material that ponders the role of memory in the preservation of cinema history.