Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

Volkoff’s Casanova, 1927
En su recorrido exploratorio por la
historia del cine, los festivales de
Bologna y Sacile mantuvieron un nivel
muy alto en 2003.
Il Cinema Ritrovato estrenó nuevas
salas en o cerca de la Cineteca di
Bologna. El Arlecchino se demostró
perfecto para las proyecciones en
CinemaScope, la sala Lumière 1 acogió
las películas mudas y el Lumière 2
otras proyecciones especiales. Hubo, al
igual que el año anterior, tres
proyecciones simultáneas, que
requerían una difícil selección, todas
presentadas por expertos, lo que dio
un sello único a las proyecciones y
ayudó a la comprensión de los
fragmentos.
El cincuentenario del CinemaScope
incluyó presentaciones especiales a
cargo de Jean-Pierre Verscheure,
Shawn Bekston y Torkell Saetervadet.
Aparte del interés de las proyecciones,
quizás el descubrimiento más
importante fue que apenas quedan
buenas copias en este formato. La
were included. Of the 36 films directed by Griffith in 1913, 3 are lost, 4
are preserved but no viewing print is available, 2 are preserved but only
a fragment can be viewed, and 13 were screened in 16mm.
During the first seven years of the Griffith Project, circa 500 films have
been covered thanks to giant efforts from the Museum of Modern Art,
The Library of Congress, and the team supervised by Paolo Cherchi Usai.
One of the most ambitious film
retrospectives of all time, it has
been both an exciting journey and
an endurance test, because the
quality of the prints as a rule has
not done justice to the films,
although negatives exist. The
Griffith Project series of books
maintains its high standard: the
essays include some of the best
writing on the cinema today. Let’s
hope they’ll build the demand for
good prints. Cinema is more than
narrative and syntax... the visual
beauty of Griffith’s lyrical films is
lost if not seen in good 35mm.
The third edition of the American
Saving the Silents project again
included treats. George Eastman
House brought us the earliest surviving Raoul Walsh film, The Mystery
of the Hindu Image (1914), and a lost Douglas Fairbanks, American
Aristocracy (1916), both preserved from 28mm. MoMA presented
Lubitsch’s The Marriage Circle (1924): finally a better print of the classic
which I previously knew only in soft and low-contrast prints. UCLA’s My
Lady’s Lips (1925) starred William Powell, already charismatic, and Clara
Bow, already promising. The Library of Congress joined the project with
Clash of the Wolves (1925), the foundation film of the Rin-Tin-Tin saga.
Among the programme were several films important for the
cinéfantastique. The legendary Frankenstein (1910), directed by J. Searle
Dawley for Edison, has finally been made available by a collector, Alois F.
Dettlaff (whose performance was also memorable). The film itself was
worth waiting for: the acting is over the top, but there is a consistency
of style. Willis H. O’Brien’s Jurassic footage for the unfinished Creation
(1932) was included in the Cooper / Schoedsack programme. Otto
Rippert’s six-part serial Homunculus (1916), important for its sciencefiction
elements, is lost, but two hours of the Italian print have been
restored by George Eastman House. The cinematographer Carl
Hoffmann’s magnificent composition is in evidence, but the direction
of actors is wooden, the storytelling clumsy, the intertitles repetitive.
Thanks to the Haghefilm Award the Finnish Film Archive had restored
the Ufa Kulturfilm Wunder der Schöpfung (Wonders of Creation, 1925).
In its ambitious grandeur and its Weltuntergang theme it belongs to
the context of Faust and Metropolis; its space odyssey places it in the
Lang-Kubrick line of science-fiction; in its sense of wonder it is a
missing link in the Méliès-Spielberg tradition of cinéfantastique.
60 Journal of Film Preservation / 67 / 2004