Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

what we’re doing, that we can have a multiplicity of goals in what our
particular archives are doing. I don’t expect every member of FIAF to be
devoted to films as art, even though that was and is the goal of the Museum
of Modern Art. I think there’s room for all; there is room for the DVD at
home, and for the big screen and the audience. What I’m rather worried
about, of course, is that the audiences are beginning to see only the DVD,
the digital version, and they don’t know what the original should look like,
so they don’t know what they’re missing. One of FIAF’s missions is to see
that this kind of experience stays alive.
There has been another important, not very well-known
phenomenon that has also affected the perception of movies in
earlier times: the light source is different. We passed from the voltaic
arc to Xenon lamps. The quality of light has also changed, in a very
precise aesthetic sense...
We don’t have nickelodeons anymore. No, of course, it is ridiculous to think
we can really recapture the past, but nevertheless there are parts of it we
can, and that are worthwhile, because the past is part of us. The more we
know and understand our past, the more we can understand ourselves.
In this sense, the ultimate aim for the archivists is to know their
collections, what they keep, and the history of their collections.
One important goal for film archives today is to complete their catalogues.
The lost films aren’t in the attics or in the basements anymore. They are on
the shelves in the archives, but nobody knows they’re there.
I often have to smile when I’m told: “We have discovered a fantastic
film.” “Where did you find it?” “In the archive…” And I remember
Gabrielle Claes 45 once mentioning that in every archive there is an
important part of the collections we are keeping, about which we
don’t have a clue. Gabrielle was pointing at the fact that a large part
of our collections are like an unknown continent.
I have had very pleasant experiences in recent years, since I have retired
(now almost 17 years ago). In my time I was active in collecting the
American silent slapstick films which were scattered all over the world.
I acquired many of these films in the last stages of the decomposing or
shrunken nitrate. We couldn’t project them on a screen, but in the years
since I retired the films have been copied and can be seen. Now there is a
small group of dedicated enthusiasts for the silent slapstick films, including
Steve Massa, who attended the Slapstick Symposium at MoMA as a young
man, now at the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, and Ben
Model, who has long been providing music for silent films at MoMA and a
lot of other places. They are both great experts, and MoMA arranged for
them to see every slapstick film, every possible comedy short film MoMA
has, and they have done an excellent job identifying the ones which only
had foreign titles or no titles. They made discoveries and they pushed
MoMA to show them. There were public showings this year, and they are
hoping to do more in the future. And to me it gives a justification for work I
45 Gabrielle Claes was born in Brussels. She works at the Cinémathèque Royale de
Belgique, where she succeeded Jacques Ledoux as Curator of the Film Archive and the
Museum in 1989. Elected FIAF EC Member (from 1995 to 1999), she served as Head
of the Programming and Access to Collections Commission. She was President of the
Association des Cinémathèques Européennes (1998-2004) and has been a member of its
Executive Committee since 2004.
45 Journal of Film Preservation / 81 / 2009