Introduzione di/Introduction by
David Francis
Schede film a cura di / Programme Notes by
John Barnes, Eileen Bowser, Michael Chanan,
Tjitte de Vries, Jon Gartenberg, André Gaudreault,
Tom Gunning, David Levy, Charles Musser,
Barry Salt, Martin Sopocy, Paul Spehr
Introduction
I was very excited when Paolo Cherchi Usai suggested the idea of celebrating the 30th anniversary of “Cinema 1900-1906”, the main symposium at the 34th Congress of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) held in Brighton in 1978, at this year’s Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone. To a certain extent the Giornate was a child of Brighton, and so a celebration in Pordenone will also be a celebration of an annual event that has done more to encourage the appreciation of the silent cinema than any other.
After some discussion we decided that the celebration would take the form of a 90-minute programme of films originally shown in Brighton chosen by attendees who either participated formally in the Symposium or submitted relevant papers for consideration. Thirty years is a long time, and I wondered how many of them would still be interested in the early history of the cinema. Film historians are clearly a hardy and committed bunch. In the end, 12 of the original group of 20 agreed to select 2 titles each from the 548 films shown at the UK pre-screenings or during the Symposium. I am extremely grateful to all of them for responding so positively to this idea. I asked for 2 titles to ensure that we would be able to borrow a 35mm print of at least one of them to screen in the official anniversary programme. I hope it will also be possible during the week of the Giornate to find a way of screening any other selected titles we manage to borrow.
So how was the subject of the Brighton Symposium selected? Except during the war years, FIAF has held an annual Congress since it was founded in 1938. The prime purpose of the Congress was to enable film archivists from all over the world to meet their colleagues and have formal and informal discussions about film archiving issues. There had been Symposia before 1978, but the subjects had been selected by the Executive Committee and planned by a special group, appointed by the Executive Committee, rather than by the host archive. I felt if the National Film Archive (NFA) was going to take on the burden of organizing a Congress and acquiring funding for events, it should have a greater say in the choice of subject for the Symposium and in the format of the event.
In 1977, one year before the Congress, I approached Eileen Bowser of the Museum of Modern Art, who had much more experience of Federation affairs than I did, and asked her for advice. I knew she was concerned that film archivists travelled to Congresses from all over the world at great expense but did nothing at the events to increase knowledge about the collections they were responsible for safeguarding. My first idea was to devote the Symposium to the Brighton School of early filmmakers, as we were holding the Congress in Brighton. French film historian Georges Sadoul had coined the phrase “L’École de Brighton”, which had been translated as the “Brighton School” when the British Film Institute published his essay as a pamphlet in 1948.
But I digress. Eileen liked the idea, but reminded me that this was an international Congress and that if I wanted to control the event I would have to come up with a subject that included something of interest to all the Federation members. It was a good idea therefore to include films from as many countries as possible. I purposely did not start the time period in 1895 because members would have then spent all their time arguing about who invented the cinema. Also, I wanted to include as many film-producing countries as possible so that a reasonable number of archives would be represented. The end-date of 1906 was chosen because there was a feeling among historians that when films moved from the music hall (or vaudeville) programme into purpose-built cinemas this had a significant impact on production and distribution as well as the development of the form and language of the films themselves.
The problem was that there were not enough films from the period available for historians to develop these lines of thought. A number of films from the Brighton School were available, and their study had led to a perhaps exaggerated view of their importance in the development of film language. The other, much larger, group of films from this period was in the Paper Print Collection at the Library of Congress. In order to protect the copyright in their films American producers, and indeed American distributors of imported films, had to deposit a copy of the images that appeared in their films with the Library of Congress, the nation’s copyright library. I say images because the actual copyright legislation in force at the time was designed for still photographs, not films. That is the reason that the producers made copies on paper of all the individual shots in a film. Unfortunately only some producers made a paper copy of the whole film; others simply registered a few frames of each distinct shot.
Eileen Bowser assembled a group of young scholars at the Museum of Modern Art, and together they looked at some 690 films, mainly from the Edison and Biograph studios, and selected 189 for inclusion in the pre-screening session in Brighton, which would be attended by film scholars of the early period from all over the world. The group’s task was helped by the fact that Paul Spehr, of the Library of Congress, had assembled all the paper prints on rolls in the order they were registered for copyright or produced. It was thus easy to see the gradual development of form and language. The 6 featured speakers at the Symposium, who all attended the pre-screening session, chose the films that were screened during the Symposium.
Another factor in the choice of subject and period was my observation as a film archivist that although there were only a few scholars interested in the early development of the cinema, they were committed and used to make an almost-annual pilgrimage to the National Film Archive to see if we had copied any more relevant films. At that time the NFA was one of the few archives duplicating films in any number, so it may be that we saw more of the scholars than other archives. Generally, at the time, film archives were not interested in preserving and making accessible silent shorts.
In retrospect, it was a grandiose and expensive idea. First of all I had to persuade my fellow archivists to let me know what films from the period 1900 to 1906 they had in their collections, and then, as virtually none of the films had been preserved, I had to find the resources for our laboratory to make 2 negatives and 2 prints from every title – 2 because archives wanted to have a duplicate negative and print for their own collections if they were prepared to let us keep the same in our collection. Luckily the cinema was universal in the silent era, and European and American films were distributed throughout the world. This allowed archives in countries that did not produce films before 1906 to contribute to the Symposium. We found, for instance, Pathé films from the period in virtually every film archive in the world. This is why the Congress proved so important in defining the role the Pathé Company started to play between 1905 and 1906.
The pre-screenings at the Brighton Film Theatre, appropriately a former music hall, allowed scholars to view 1900-1906 films from all over the world together. For the first time they could see enough films to identify changes in form and language, and feel confident that the conclusions they reached were based on a big-enough sample to have universal validity. Harold Brown, the Archive’s Preservation Officer, personally supervised the projection of all 548 titles.
The Brighton Symposium did have an influence on future FIAF Symposia, and Eileen herself undertook a similar exercise when she presented the Slapstick Symposium at the 1985 New York Congress, but generally the cost and complexity of mounting Brighton discouraged archives from examining large sections of their collections in this way. However, the Brighton Symposium itself did have a long-term impact on the study and interpretation of early cinema. André Gaudreault, whose analysis of the films shown in Brighton, published by FIAF with other papers by the original attendees under the title Cinema 1900-1906 – An Analytical Study in 1982, and who did so much to provide a structural basis for the study of early cinema, went on to found Domitor, an international organization for film historians interested in the cinema before 1915. Although its biannual conferences appeal to a smaller group than the annual Giornate del Cinema Muto, they have also had a considerable influence on silent film scholarship. Eileen Bowser reassembled her original group of scholars to look at the fictional films of 1907 in the Paper Print Collection, but alas could not continue the exercise for future years.
My regret is that we only had time to consider fiction films. When the period started there were more factual titles, and even in 1906 the numbers were roughly equal. Also, it was difficult to separate factual and fictional subjects, particularly during the early part of the period. I hope that this anniversary celebration will encourage FIAF or some other relevant organization to consider a year-by-year study of extant factual and fictional films from the beginning of the cinema to the coming of the silent feature. In the last 30 years archives have acquired and made available many more films from this period, and even today there is the occasional discovery, for instance the Mitchell and Kenyon films, which causes historians to reconsider earlier assessments. A systematic examination of all extant films produced in this period may be the last major study necessary before scholars are in a position to prepare the definitive history of these formative years.—DAVID FRANCIS
