Library of Congress closes its Mary Pickford Theater for equipment updates, pausing 35mm screenings

The Library of Congress has closed the Mary Pickford Theater, its film venue in Washington, D.C., while it installs updates to the room’s audiovisual equipment. The Library’s Daniel Mauro said in a post on Wednesday, November 4, that regular film screenings are off during the work. The post gives no reopening date. It says the Library’s Now See Hear! blog will announce when the theater returns with its “program of 35 mm film screenings.”

What the closure stops

The Pickford is in the Library’s James Madison Building, at 101 Independence Avenue SE. A program shown with the closure notice dates from a retrospective series that followed the theater’s dedication in 1983.

This year’s posts on the Library’s blog show a 7:00 p.m. Thursday series. The most recent one in the blog’s Pickford category was Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain (1971) on August 20, in a 35mm print from the Library’s Copyright Collection, with seating on a first-come, first-served basis. Earlier programs this year included The Petrified Forest (1936) on April 23 and The Swimmer (1968) on July 9. The category’s summary of the closure notice says the pause covers updates being installed “this fall.”

The Library’s other theater

The notice is about the Pickford only. The Library’s Packard Campus Theater, at its National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, published a separate schedule on October 29 that runs from November 5 to November 21. Our guide to that program has the full list.

Where the Library’s films are playing in November

The Library also lends films to other theaters. In a post on November 1, Cary O’Dell listed titles from its motion picture collections that are on loan this month, many of them preserved by its own film laboratory. The Library cautions that it cannot guarantee schedules will not change. These are the U.S. dates on its list that were still ahead when we checked on November 5.

Several of these sit inside larger events. The Ambler Theater’s two films are part of NOIR CITY: Philadelphia 2026, which runs November 13 to 15, with Eddie Muller as host. AFI Silver’s fall within its Classic Film Weekend, November 12 to 15, and SIFF lists Wild Boys of the Road in a series called The Open Road. Metrograph credits its print of The Woman on the Beach to the Library and says the Library and The Film Foundation restored it.

Most of the listed U.S. showings are on 35mm, two are DCP, and the Dryden’s two are nitrate prints. The list also had one U.S. date already past when we checked: Interior NY Subway, 14th Street to 42nd Street (1905), at Metrograph on November 1. Outside the U.S., the Library’s list also shows loans this month to the Barbican in London, TIFF Lightbox in Toronto, the Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé Foundation in Paris and the Cinemateca Portuguesa in Lisbon.