Jurassic Park, Brokeback Mountain, and The Shining join the National Film Registry

By Sam Barsanti | December 12, 2018 | 7:12pm

Aux Features Film

Here’s some good news that should brighten this dreary December day: In the event that mankind is wiped out and everyone you know and love is both completely eradicated and utterly forgotten, Jurassic Park will still exist in some form—as will Brokeback Mountain, The Shining, Cinderella, Broadcast News, and 20 other historically significant films. This is courtesy of the Library Of Congress’ National Film Registry, which gathers up a new batch of films every year that have been deemed worthy of preservation. This new class is joining last year’s excellent collection of picks, which included Die Hard, Titanic, and Memento.

Going back to this year’s selections, Brokeback Mountain is now the most recent film of the 750 on the registry and Jurassic Park is one of the most commercially successful. Variety dug through the rest of the list to highlight the significance of some of the other selections, like 1998's Smoke Signals (the first feature film written, directed, and produced by Native Americans), the 1984 animated short Hair Piece: A Film For Nappy-Headed People (created by one of the first black female animators in the industry), and 1898's Something Good—Negro Kiss (a 29-second recording that is “the earliest known footage of black intimacy on screen.”