For the fourth time, Spike Lee has had a film inducted into the National Film Registry, earning a permanent place in the Library of Congress for making a film that is “historically, culturally, or aesthetically significant.” But when the call came that 1986’s She’s Gotta Have It would join Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, and 4 Little Girls in the registry, “it comes out of nowhere,” Lee told Vanity Fair. “I’m honored.”

She’s Gotta Have It joins 24 titles among this year’s inductees (see the full list here), bringing the registry to 775 films. This year’s roster is the most diverse yet, with several films directed by women and several more about them. Claudia Weill’s 1978 independent film, Girlfriends, is both. Shot piecemeal for $130,000 as cash and grant money came in, the film is now included “in the cultural legacy of this country,” Weill said in a phone interview. “You’re just trying to tell your story when you’re starting out and trying to figure out your path as an artist.”

The National Film Registry was born out of the National Film Preservation Act, which passed in 1988 mostly in response to philistines looking to get more bang out of their archival buck by colorizing black-and-white films. Ted Turner, who owned the MGM film library, became the public face of the controversy, especially when he jokingly(?) threatened to colorize Casablanca (“They won’t bother with the original,” he proclaimed in a 1986 CNN interview).

But in addition to recognizing a film’s importance, the registry is mostly about raising public awareness about the need for film preservation, which can be prohibitively expensive. High-profile titles that have been inducted into the registry, including this year’s inductees Old Yeller and Sleeping Beauty, are generally preserved by their studios. But the registry provides an incentive to protect much smaller works like Girlfriends or a 1903 reel called Emigrants Landing at Ellis Island.

“Film preservation and restoration are expensive undertakings, and they are seriously underfunded in this country,” noted Dave Kehr, a Museum of Modern Art film curator and former film critic, who is one of the registry advisers as a member of the Film Preservation Board. “Anything people can do to support them would be much appreciated. Film is a very important part of our history; we owe it to ourselves to take better care.”

American film preservation was not a high priority at the time the registry was created, noted Stephen Leggett, program coordinator for the National Film Preservation Board. “In the early 1980s, studios really had no incentive to preserve their titles,” he said. “Once a film was done with its theatrical release, there wasn’t a large market. Starting in the early ’80s, you had cable and home video, which meant studios had to go back to their libraries and preserve their films to have a good product.”

But it’s not just older black-and-white films that need help. In the early 1980s, Martin Scorsese went public about how color films from the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s were starting to fade. “And that still left out the massive problems with independent films and noncommercial films,” Leggett said, “but at least studios started having more of a financial incentive to preserve their titles.”

All this was a revelation to actor Alfre Woodard, one of the 44 members of the National Film Preservation Board who advise the librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden. “We grew up with the notion that once it’s on celluloid, it lasts forever,” she said. “Then they talked about opening the film canisters and it’s just dust. Even more alarming was some of the films that had been in the can only 10 years were decomposing. Talk about burning your bridge. So the race is on to preserve as much as possible. Then, of course, it’s like the lifeboat on the Titanic. Who do we put on that lifeboat?”

The registry’s mandate for films that are culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant is “nice and vague,” Kehr said with a laugh. “You can find justification for pretty much anything you want, which I think is good. Different people advocate passionately for different things, and we make our pitches to the librarian, who ultimately makes up her own mind. Every year, somehow, this list appears.”

“You look at the no-brainers and also at diversity,” said Hayden. “You consider independent films, the first appearances by certain artists, films that reflect stages in the development of filmmaking, films directed and/or written by women and people of color, native filmmaking, even home movies.”

The public is also encouraged to vote; Clerks was the top vote-getter, Hayden said.

“The registry is as important as the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., as a testament to who we are,” Woodard said. “You really know a people by their art and the stories they tell. Whether it is established filmmakers, young filmmakers, orphaned films we’re finding, student films; they tell us who we are. It is our history of using film to express ourselves, define ourselves, and represent ourselves. You have to include all of that.”

That includes films far out of step with modern values, such as D.W. Griffith’s silent epic, The Birth of a Nation, a hugely influential film that also depicts the Ku Klux Klan as heroes. It was inducted into the registry in 1992, and there it will stay.

“We haven’t received any requests to remove any titles,” Hayden said, “and if we do, we won’t. We’re showing the history and the culture, the good and the bad.”

The stories preserved in this year’s class range from the intimate lives of Girlfriends to the historical analysis of Errol Morris’s The Fog of War, comprised of a series of interviews with Robert McNamara. It is the second of Morris’s films to join the registry, after The Thin Blue Line. “I’m proud of both of these films,” Morris said. “However you regard them, I believe they did something film doesn’t always do: change how people look at the world.”

For Lee, the induction of She’s Gotta Have It was not just a reflection of his own work, but the army of people he made it with. In a phone call Lee thanked his ensemble, cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, and production designer Wynn Thomas. “It’s not just the director,” he said. “It’s a whole gang of folks who came together way back in 1985 and shot She’s Gotta Have It in 12 days. We all had a dream. Sometimes dreams come true, but you gotta make it happen. That’s what I tell my students. They get that from me full blast day one.”

Still, he does not intend to rest on his laurels. “I’m happy I got the four [on the registry],” he said. “I got more to come; I’m not done.”

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