http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/04/arts/artsspecial/mary-lea-bandy-film-preservationist-for-moma-dies-at-71.html 2014-10-04 08:09:10 Mary Lea Bandy, Film Preservationist for MoMA, Dies at 71 Ms. Bandy, a film curator, raced to find and restore early prints and vastly expanded the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. === Mary Lea Bandy, who played a major role in the recovery and preservation of thousands of important films as director of the film department at the The cause was pulmonary and cardiac arrest, her husband, Gary, said, adding that she had never fully recovered from viral encephalitis contracted in 2005 and was in a nursing home. She retired in 2006. Ms. Bandy, who became director of One hurdle she faced in saving older films, beyond the technical issues of restoration, was an early Hollywood convention of discarding a movie if there was no further profit to be made from it. Only about 10 percent of the films made from 1910 to 1920 and only 20 percent of the feature films made in the 1920s have survived intact, a 1993 “They thought of them as products like shoes,” Ms. Bandy said in 1997 in “ Ms. Bandy secured rare prints and negatives of films by silent-era directors like D. W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin and early avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and the artist Man Ray. She persuaded Jean-Luc Godard, Martin Scorsese and other contemporary directors to contribute prints of their films to MoMA. She also held screenings of many films from the archive and oversaw In 1996 Ms. Bandy presided over the opening of the The two-building, 36,000-square-foot complex has 56 climate-controlled vaults to keep the films in stable condition until they can undergo preservation. When it opened, The New York Times called it “a cross between a library and a hospital.” Mary Lea Gibson was born in Evanston, Ill., on June 16, 1943. She graduated from New Trier High School, north of Chicago, before studying art history at Stanford University. She went to New York in 1965 to pursue graduate studies at Columbia University, where she met Gary Bandy, an artist. They married in 1967. Besides her husband, she is survived by a brother, DeWitt Clinton Gibson III, and a sister, Barbara Peters. Ms. Bandy went to work in publishing rather than complete her graduate work. She joined MoMA’s publications department in 1973. In 2012 she and the film scholar Kevin Stoehr collaborated on “