Mariann Lewinsky

The Best Years of Film History: A Hundred Years Ago

for Chiara Caranti

In the summer of 2003 the festival Il Cinema Ritrovato presented a series of five programmes of films from 1903, curated and introduced by Tom Gunning. I do not know how this came about. The section was called, in English, The First Great Year of Cinema: 1903 and, in Italian, Cento anni fa: I film del 1903.

My involvement dates from April 2004, when the director of the Cineteca di Bologna, standing beside me, was wondering to himself whether the Hundred Years Ago series should continue and, if so, who might curate it that year – and muttering that it was, in any case, now too late as the festival starts at the end of June. I muttered back to him that I could do it – a remark which has afforded me the happiest seven years of my career.

It is mostly thanks to the films. The body of work produced from 1904 to 1910 is the most interesting in the whole of cinema history, for it was then, as it would never be again, that a whole host of aesthetic and narrative possibilities of the medium were explored and tested. It is also the least known and most undervalued work. Moreover, films of this period have to be properly programmed, for screenings to be a success. All this makes the curator's job both challenging and rewarding. We are talking about films or fragments with running times of between one minute and fifteen (except for the exceptions, of course). Choosing between hundreds of short films, grouping the chosen titles into programmes and putting them into an effective running order, with films being dropped or exchanged the whole time, is a job which can be done well or badly. It is as important to the way the films are received as the staging of a play is to its success. I aim, via my programming, to make the selected films accessible and to provide a context for them by the way they are combined, so that each film's special qualities are shown to their best advantage and each film's position in the programme fulfils a dramatic function. A badly-constructed programme reduces or destroys the audience's ability to see, think and feel. But we have arrived far too quickly at these reflections on programming principles. So let us return to these rarely-seen films of before 1910.

Films before 1910 (or 1920) in non-specialist and in specialist circles

What is one dealing with? An amorphous, confusing mass of thousands of totally unknown film titles and as many names which also mean nothing to most people. Gaston Velle? Albert Capellani? Renée Carl? Raymond Frau? There are no landmarks. How to find a way through? What to look for? What might be interesting and what unimportant? And is there an audience for these stone age works, or will five people turn up for an evening which has cost enormous amounts of time, nervous wear and tear and money to organise?

It is understandable that people who might programme films from before 1910 (or 1914 or 1920), people managing film societies or festivals without this specialised focus, tend to steer clear. And so it is that the situation persists: in books, in the programmes of municipal cinemas and even (it does still happen) in university courses, the first 25 years of cinema history are no more than a curtain-raiser to the 'real thing'. Dealing with them seems a tiresome duty, with the obligatory 'Pioneers' chapter (Lumière-Méliès-Griffith) and at best one more specimen from the 1910s (either an Asta Nielsen film, an Italian historical spectacular or INTOLERANCE). Cinema history de facto is considered to start properly in 1920, when we get under way with the great comic actors and classics of the silent film: there are Flaherty and Dreyer, Murnau and Eisenstein, Lubitsch and Garbo, Metropolis and Napoleon. Whatever came before 1920 remains unknown and is not shown or talked about, even to audiences and readers who are, in principle, interested, cultured cinephiles. Only Verdi, never Handel, only steak, never oysters. To acquire an 'acquired taste' you need time and opportunity.

In the world of specialised research and film archives, on the other hand, the pre-1920 cinema has gained in stature over recent decades. It has grown into a respected area of research, is conserved and restored. This higher status also finds expression in a change in terminology: nobody these days talks about "primitive" film (which was once the standard term). At the Brighton conference of FIAF in 1978, which marked the beginning of this new interest on the part of archivists and film historians, films from the first decade of cinema (1900 to 1906) were shown, though at that stage non-fiction film was excluded. Our astonishment now at this idea – for how can you study Italian cookery if you exclude pasta? – is a measure of how much more knowledgeable we are these days. For this we have the many researchers to thank (and the creation in 1985 of Domitor, the society for the study of early cinema ), their publications (such as the KINtop yearbook for early film, 1992–2006), international archive projects (such as the Projeto Lumière and the Search for Lost Films, 1991–1996) as well as – and especially – the annual festivals Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone (since 1981) and Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna (since 1986).

Collecting experiences, taking a position

Two experiences which were particularly important to me were the first two workshops of the Nederlands Filmmuseum(NFM, now known as EYE – Film Institute Netherlands), Non-fiction from the 1910s (1994) and Disorderly Order – Colours in Silent Film (1995). For three days we viewed films and had open discussions in a group of about fifty specialists, archivists, film historians and filmmakers. The film programmes, devised by the curators of...