Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum

Films are a communal viewing experience grew from the nickelodeons, not movie palaces. These storefronts and simple structures, theaters for the common man, were 200 seat playhouses where fantastic dreams were spun out for a nickel.

Once there were 15,000 of them. Now there are very few. There is one in Niles, California (by San Jose) that is carrying on just as it did when it opened 98 years ago in 1913. The Niles Edison theater is the only venue in the country that still regularly shows early movies with live musical accompaniment every week. With over 8,000 titles in its vault and with loans from all over this country and abroad, the Edison is keeping the roots of this influential heritage alive. The theater is also home to the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum (NESFM), a 501(c)3 organization dedicated to keeping early films alive through preservation, restoration, exhibition and education.

This Place Matters because the Edison theater and the NESFM give everyone from school children to great grandparents a chance to experience the motion picture art form and see how it was created by the pioneers.
 
This Place Matters because movies are meant to be seen, just as books are meant to be read. Great movies, like great books, are timeless. They are just as entertaining to us today as they were to our predecessors. They inform us what the world was like in past times--how people dressed, how they behaved, what machinery looked like and how it operated. But the presentation of century-old cinema requires finesse and expertise; we have the experts, the staff and the equipment to show these films correctly and without destroying them.

This Place Matters because it is also a research center where exciting discoveries are being made. We have hundreds of the rarest early film books and periodicals, telling us everything from how to fix our hand-cranked Powers projector to whether we should sell candy in the aisles (a heavy debate in 1911). Our camera display includes the most popular cameras of the period (see photo). They work, and we use them to make films the old way.
We have some of the most knowledgeable historians, archivists, and restorers on our team, familiar with every aspect of the early film making process.

If the joyous medium of film matters, if the wonderful tale of film's invention matters, if the root of our crazy fascination with images and visual tale-telling matters, and if the evocation of spirits past matters, then This Place Matters.

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