Miriam Krant, who for over three decades archived the modern Jewish experience through film, died of influenza Feb. 26 at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. She was 78.Mrs. Krant co-founded the National Center for Jewish Film in 1976 with Prof. Sharon Pucker Rivo (NEJS). At over 10,000 canisters, the center houses today the world's largest collection of Jewish film outside of Israel and hosts an annual Jewish film festival.

With Rivo, Mrs. Krant secured the center's first acquisition, a number of films belonging to Joseph Seiden, a New York filmmaker who made 16 Yiddish-language films in the 1930s and 1940s. Mrs. Krant helped restore and preserve these films, as well as many other features, documentaries and newsreels. She was responsible for distributing the center's films.

Mrs. Krant began working with cinema in 1970, when she organized a series of programs for geriatrics involving 16-millimeter films.

"Everything was personal for Mimi. She'd find people who might have films in their basements . and she'd find them and collect them," said Sylvia Fuks Fried, the executive director of Brandeis' Tauber Institute for European Jewry who also wrote subtitles for many of the center's Yiddish films. "Wherever she was, she would ask people, 'What do you got?' "

Mrs. Krant was "a born archivist" who hoped to trace "the history of the Jewish people through the moving image and through photography," Fried said.

"Her desire to preserve was driven by a desire to maintain history and historical perspective," said her son Jonathan Krant, adding that she could not tolerate historical revisionism.

Her colleagues recalled the intensely personal relationships Krant built at Brandeis.

"[She was] a real straight-shooter, a very vocal, direct individual," Rivo said. "If you were her friend, if you were one of her colleagues she'd do anything in the world for you. For example, one of the Fed Ex guys came to her shiva."

When Joe Green, a Jewish filmmaker who donated films to the center, became ill in the 1990s, Mrs. Krant continually visited him at a nursing home in Great Neck, N.Y, Fried said. "Films never came unattached. They were part of a person's life story, and by extension, the history of the Jews."

Born Miriam Saul, Mrs. Krant grew up in the Bronx and lived in Brookline for 50 years. In addition to her son, of Williamstown, she is survived by her husband, Melvin and her daughter, Jessica, both of Brookline, and three grandchildren.