The National Air and Space Museum Film Archives, part of the Archives Division at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, holds over 20,000 films documenting the history of aviation and space flight.
The Film Archives is located at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, where it moved in 2011 from its previous location in the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) building on the National Mall. The collections are available for research, though requests must be made in advance.
NASM Film Archives' collections range from the early days of flight to space exploration. Totaling more than 700,000 feet of motion picture film as well as videotape, the collections include edited documentaries, instructional films, promotional films, home movies, interviews and outtakes. The earliest item in the collection is a 1909 test flight of the Wright Military Flyers at Ft. Myer, Virginia.
The collections include:
- Keystone Aircraft Corporation Collection (1926–34)
- Seymour Collection (1926–34)
- Lewis E. Reisner Collection (1929–38)
- World Trip Collection (1935–36)
- We Saw It Happen (1953)
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—Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978)
“People fall out of windows, trees tumble down,
Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old
The air is full of children, statues, roofs
And snow. The theatre is spinning round,
Colliding with deaf-mute churches and optical trains.
The most massive sopranos are singing songs of scales.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Play is a major avenue for learning to manage anxiety. It gives the child a safe space where she can experiment at will, suspending the rules and constraints of physical and social reality. In play, the child becomes master rather than subject.... Play allows the child to transcend passivity and to become the active doer of what happens around her.”
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“To look at and properly appreciate the British Museum is the work of a lifetime.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”
—Ingmar Bergman (b. 1918)
“To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.”
—Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989)