Movies are more than just cans of film. They are also posters and photographs, props and costumes, screenplays and set designs, fan magazines and financial records, countless millions of objects and sheets of paper.
If we have only the cans of film, our understanding of what they contain is incomplete. We need to know where they came from–how they came to be made and by whom. And we need to know how they were seen when they were first released–what part they played in a country`s culture at a particular moment, and how they entered that culture through the complex machinery of marketing, publicity and press coverage.
To see a silent masterpiece such as D.W Griffith`s 1916 ”Intolerance”
today is to see an object out of its context. But to see the film`s original poster, to read its original outline or examine one of its original sets, is to situate the film in time and place–to give a physical, historical dimension to what is otherwise an ephemeral, intangible experience.
Or would be, had any of the original materials of ”Intolerance”
survived, which apparently they have not. From their beginnings, the world`s film archives have concentrated on the immense labor of restoring and preserving the films themselves, and clearly that work must remain the first priority. In the meantime, though, the great majority of film-related items has been allowed to disappear: props are sold off at auction, files are thrown away by studios strapped for storage space, posters are routinely pitched into the garbage at the end of a film`s theatrical run.
But recently, the importance of these items has begun to be recognized, and many archives are opening ”nonfilm” divisions dedicated to the preservation and cataloguing of this fragile heritage. Though there are important collections at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the UCLA Film Archives in Los Angeles and at various university libraries across the country, some of the most interesting and eclectic work is being done in Europe.
At the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, the very first Best Actor Oscar (won by German performer Emil Jannings for his work in ”The Last Command” and ”The Way of All Flesh”) shares a shelf with the tiny golden idol stolen by Indiana Jones in the first reel of ”Raiders of the Lost Ark.” The caretaker of these sacred relics, as well as many, many others, is Werner Sudendorf, the young, bespectacled chief of the nonfilm archives of the German cinematheque.
For Sudendorf, the duty of preserving nonfilm items is perhaps more pressing than for any other national film archivist. Given the destruction wrought by two world wars and the country`s division into east and west, only two to four percent of German silent film production is known to survive (the U.S. percentage is closer to 20).The remaining 98 per cent of this period–by far the richest in the German cinema–exists only as it is documented in the photographs, press clippings, posters and props that the Deutsche Kinemathek has been able to assemble.
The Kinemathek possesses, for example, the copy of Rubens` painting ”The Boy in Blue” that was a central prop in F.W. Murnau`s first feature, the 1919 ”Der Knabe in Blau,” although no print of the film is known to exist. Information on other lost Murnau films–as well as vanished works by Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and the other German silent masters–can be found only in the Kinemathek`s files, which include complete sets of the trade newspapers of the period and the extensively detailed censorship cards, describing the films scene by scene, that were issued for each German feature between 1919 and 1944.
One of the Kinemathek`s most intriguing holdings is a complete run of the ”Illustrierter Film-Kurier,” a Sunday supplement carried by German newspapers from the early `20s to the end of the war. Each weekly issue focused on a new release, giving cast, credits, a synopsis, and often, once sound came in, the lyrics to the featured songs–the whole surrounded by carefully reproduced, sepia-toned photographs of key scenes. Leafing through the yellowing pages provides a panoramic view of a lost world that will most likely never be reclaimed.
But the Kinemathek`s collection has also served to restore existing films. Sudendorf reaches into a filing cabinet and produces the orchestral score, written in the composer`s own hand, for Fritz Lang`s science-fiction classic of 1926, ”Metropolis.” The score contains penciled notations tying each passage of music to the screen action it was meant to accompany, a feature that proved extremely useful during the arduous process of returning
”Metropolis,” which exists only in incomplete and dubious versions, to its original form. Here is the only full record of the film as it was first shown to German audiences.
Other documents lend valuable insights into working methods. A set of production sketches for Lang`s 1924 mythological epic ”Die Nibelungen”
reveals how carefully Lang planned his elaborate expressionistic lighting effects–every shadow is laid in place–and also reveals, surprisingly, that he planned them in color. A design for a tapestry to be hung behind a king`s throne is rendered in every available hue, though the film itself would of course capture it only in black-and-white.
Nothing is quite as evocative of a classic film`s initial release as its original poster–it is here, in these colorful advertising images, that a movie meets its public for the first time. Yet German film posters, destroyed by the millions during wartime paper drives, remain the world`s most rare. In 1944, the German state film industry deposited its poster archive, along with many other materials, in an abandoned salt mine near Hannover for safekeeping. When the mine was recently reopened, workers found that a fire had destroyed virtually the entire collection; Sudendorf hopes to reclaim at most 60 or 70 pieces from the charred, moldering remains.
Still, Sudendorf has been able to amass a dazzling collection of posters by Joseph Fenneker, whose swirling, abstract designs revolutionized commercial art in the 1920s. As the house artist for Berlin`s Mamorhaus theater, Fenneker turned out his film posters at the rate of one or two a week, producing images for both German and imported American films that, with their twisted figures and startling colors, still seem to breathe the atmosphere of the Weimar Republic. In Fenneker`s work, film history merges with social history to yield a vibrant portrait of an era.
The Deutsche Kinemathek, unfortunately, has no permanent exhibition space –its ”museum” is only a series of storerooms and closets in a gray government building closed to the general public–but it does frequently mount traveling shows. An exhibit of Fenneker posters is expected at Chicago`s Goethe Institute sometime in 1988.
The Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, established in 1963, is one of the world`s younger film archives; the Cinematheque Francaise, which dates from 1936, is one of the world`s oldest. Henri Langlois, the iematheque`s brilliant and madly eccentric founder, resolved from the start to save everything he could lay his hands on–films, of course (the Cinematheque currently has some 120,000 cans of celluloid under its care), but also any and all film-related materials.
Langlois`s genius was for collecting–not for organization. The only inventory of the Cinematheque`s holdings existed in Langlois`s prodigious memory, and at the time of his death in 1977, he left behind 23,000 posters, 13,000 sketches, 400 costumes, 2,000 antique projectors and cameras, 6,000 magic lantern slides, 2 million photographs, 5,000 screenplays and 425,000
”miscellaneous” documents, none of them catalogued.
The monumental task of sorting through and preserving Langlois`s legacy has fallen to Noelle Giret, the energetic young woman who was named to head the Cinematheque`s ”nonfilm” division when it was finally officially established in 1982. Giret, who had worked with Langlois as an intern in the
`70s, is also an officially trained and officially licensed ”conservateur de l`etat” (”government archivist”), and she remembers the ribbings she took from her classmates: ”Here were people trained to work with great paintings, great literature, and historical documents. No one could understand why I wanted to work with old posters–they weren`t considered `noble`
enough.”
In 1970, Langlois took a small portion of his collection to create a
”Musee du Cinema” in Paris`s Palais de Chaillot, located just across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. It was the world`s first, and remains the world`s largest. Designed by Langlois himself as a series of flowing, intimate spaces, the museum presents a time-line of the art, beginning with its prehistory
(magic lantern slides, the hand-drawn films of Emile Reynaud) and culminating with the high Hollywood of the 1960s (sitting in a glass case is Mrs. Bates–or at least, the papier-mache skull Alfred Hitchcock used to represent her in ”Psycho”). Along the way can be seen the towering ”Snow Monster” Georges Melies built for his 1912 ”Conquest of the Pole,” a distorted Expressionist set from ”The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” as recreated by the film`s art director and, a long way from Berlin, the robot of Fritz Lang`s ”Metropolis.”
The installation reflects Langlois`s great talent for synthesis and provocative juxtaposition, but it also reflects his horror of order–there are no labels on any of the exhibits, nothing to identify this camera as the one Roberto Rossellini used to shoot ”Open City” or that cowboy hat as the one John Wayne wore in ”Stagecoach.” The museum has become as much a monument to Langlois as to the art form he loved, and to alter his installation would seem almost sacrilegious.
But it has also come to seem woefully small, unable to accommodate more than a fraction of the Cinematheque`s holdings, and unable to suggest the full range of its subject–there is, for example, no exhibit devoted to the filmmakers of the French New Wave, most of whom learned their craft by attending Langlois`s screenings. And too, the collection could tolerate what Giret terms a ”coup de fraicheur”–a general housecleaning. Vivian Leigh`s dress no longer flows as it did in ”Gone with the Wind,” and even Mrs. Bates is looking a little peaked.
Unfortunately, there is little money available for such things, and no space at all. Under Giret`s guidance, the collection has grown even larger in recent years: She estimates that there are now 200,000 posters stored in the basement of the museum, which will require 15 years to catalogue and restore. For 20 years, the bulk of the Cinematheque`s holdings was kept in an unheated farmhouse 25 miles from Paris, inaccessible to scholars and subject to the ravages of the weather. Giret`s first budgetary priority is to evaluate and secure the collection, and then to make it available to the public–reproduced on slides or videodiscs.
The general administration of the Cinematheque will be moving to new quarters in the nearby Palais de Tokyo next year, although the museum will remain where it is. Giret hopes to find room for the Cinematheque`s photo archives in the new facility (at the moment, two thirds of the 3-million-piece collection is kept in an inaccessible storage room); there is also a possibility for a bit more exhibition space. Recently, the Cinematheque was finally able to find a place for its 70,000 volume library: It is now housed in a two-tiered ”performance space” designed for–and ultimately refused by –Maurice Bejart`s dance troupe.
Although the Musee du Cinema has no money to pay for full time guards–it can be visited now only by guided tour, of which there are five daily–it still manages to attract more than 35,000 visitors a year. Its collection may not be ”noble” enough to lure the major governmental and foundation support it merits, but it clearly continues to exert an irresistible fascination.
