National Film RegistryLibrary of Congress · Inducted 2019
“A hilarious, in-your-face, bawdy-yet-provocative look at two sardonic young slackers (Dante and Randal). One toils as a New Jersey convenience store clerk while his alter-ego video store friend works when the mood strikes him.”
Selected for preservation as culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.
Directed by
Kevin Smith
Studio
Miramax · View Askew Productions · 92 min
Box office
$3.2M worldwide on a $28K budget
Honors
Sundance Filmmaker Trophy Dramatic — 1 winAll 1 wins · 0 nominations on record
Sources: Wikidata · Library of Congress · OpenAlex. The record of the motion picture, not an assessment of this cell.
FILM NOTES
Clerks arrived in 1994 as the ultimate proof of concept for microbudget filmmaking, shot in grainy black and white inside the very Quick Stop and RST Video where Kevin Smith worked his day job. Miramax picked it up after its Sundance premiere, and it became a founding text of the 1990s indie boom, launching the View Askewniverse and establishing Smith's voice: profane, talky, obsessed with the minutiae of retail purgatory. Its low-fi look and Gen X ennui made it a touchstone for a generation of filmmakers working outside the studio system.
Julie Dwyer exists only as an offscreen catalyst, a former classmate of Dante and Randal whose funeral becomes an excuse for the two clerks to abandon the counter and wander into one of the film's stranger detours. She's never seen alive or dead onscreen, which makes any surviving frame tied to her name a curiosity for Clerks completists chasing the film's more obscure narrative threads. This cell marks that sequence, a fragment of the day's chaos rather than a marquee moment, appealing to collectors who value the film's shaggy, tangential structure as much as its famous lines.
Authentication Findings8 checks
Consistent with a 35mm black-and-white optical-track release print of Clerks (1994).
Gauge
35mm, four perforations per frame on both edges; the strip holds three frames.
Perforations
Four per frame on each edge, evenly spaced; punched holes appear clean and regular with no visible tearing.
Soundtrack
A variable-area optical track is visible running along one edge beside the picture area, consistent with a single bilateral or variable-area mono/stereo track.
Base appears neutral to very slightly warm; the silver dye image reads as a black-and-white print with no visible colour shift or fading.
Projection history
Light vertical scratching is visible across the frame area, consistent with a print that has passed through a projector gate.
Picture
Positive black-and-white image; all three frames appear to be consecutive frames from a single continuous shot, consistent with a release print of Clerks (1994).
Era check
Eastman 2244 is a black-and-white print stock used in the early-to-mid 1990s, and a single variable-area optical track is consistent with a 35mm release print of a 1994 low-budget black-and-white film.
Read from the original intake capture shown below. Observations only — film is authenticated, not graded.
This original motion picture film element has been examined and authenticated by Crown Grading in partnership with National Film Vault, and encapsulated for archival preservation.
Why so little survivesRelease prints were leased to theaters, not sold. When the run ended they went back to the distributor to be destroyed, and most were. What collectors hold today came from the prints that escaped that order, and no new 35mm prints of these films are being struck.
CROWN SERIAL 000063064
Original Film CaptureAs received
Photographed on the light panel at intake, before encapsulation — tap to open full size
Tap to enlarge
