Film historian and preservationist Joseph Yranski, 72, died on Oct. 31; he had recently been in and out of the hospital with post-Covid complications and injuries from being hit by an electric scooter. Yranski—an old friend of Your Faithful Correspondent—was Senior Film and Video Historian at the New York Public Library, ran the film library at the Donnell Media Center, and worked on film preservation with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Library of Congress, the Mary Pickford Foundation, and Warner Bros. He was adviser to the Film Forum and was on the executive boards of Cinecon, Syracuse Society of Cinephiles, the New York Film & Video Council, and the Theater Library Association. He told interviewer Megan Heatherly that “I was always interested in film, and I had a grandfather who was particularly nice to me, and he would say ‘Do you want to see a film on Saturday?’ I was seeing films at MoMA in the fifties, going to Woolsey Hall up at Yale and seeing a lot of nitrate prints that were subsequently destroyed in the late eighties, early nineties.” Joe was always friendly, funny, and opinionated—I had been nagging him for years to write a book on the Talmadge Sisters. Ironically, he recently told me how much he enjoyed reading these obits . . .
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