Provenance and Early Cinema

Joanne Bernardi, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Tami Williams, Joshua Yumibe

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253053022
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Remnants of early films often have a story to tell.

As material artifacts, these film fragments are central to cinema history, perhaps more than ever in our digital age of easy copying and sharing. If a digital copy is previewed before preservation or is shared with a researcher outside the purview of a film archive, knowledge about how the artifact was collected, circulated, and repurposed threatens to become obscured. When the question of origin is overlooked, the story can be lost. Concerned contributors in Provenance and Early Cinema challenge scholars digging through film archives to ask, "How did these moving images get here for me to see them?"

This volume, which features the conference proceedings from Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema, 2018, questions preservation, attribution, and patterns of reuse in order to explore singular artifacts with long and circuitous lives.

PART I

STUDYING PROVENANCE: FROM ANALOG TO DIGITAL

1

FILM PROVENANCE

A Framework for Analysis

Paolo Cherchi Usai

THE STORY OF WHERE FILMS COME FROM MAY be conceived as a triptych: the material life of cinematic objects (prints and negatives but also machines and tools), the migration of the images they contained and produced, and the cultural journey of artifacts and practices related to their production and exhibition. These three narrative strands describe the film artifacts’ itineraries in space and time and seek to interpret their meaning. In qualitative terms, the analysis of provenance in film relies on a clear understanding of both the profound connections and the equally significant differences between the image carrier and the work it represents. It should be stressed that research on film provenance is not concerned with the origin of the projected image in itself. From this viewpoint, provenance should not be equated with concepts such as influence (transforming borrowed ideas and actions), paraphrase (repeating them by other means), plagiarism (copying them), and information retrieval (identifying the source of written, acoustic, or visual data).

The issues and dilemmas of provenance have occupied scientists, art collectors, and historians since the beginnings of their endeavors. Scholars engaged in the study of paintings, sculptures, architectural remains, ceramics, music manuscripts, and other artifacts have always been keen to ascertain the movement of artifacts from one place to another. They did so mainly in order to establish, confirm, or disprove the identity and genuineness of whatever was entrusted to their expertise. Authentication, a cornerstone of archaeology and geology, also plays a key role in the collectors’ world by attributing a market value to an object or artwork for its sale, loan, or exchange.¹

It is perhaps an exaggeration to say that provenance has received no attention from film historians. It is a fact, however, that scholarship on this subject has been largely confined to collecting institutions, mostly with the objective of assessing the intrinsic relevance of the material to be acquired or “restored” by a film museum or archive, hence the popularity of terms like orphans in reference to films with allegedly no provenance at all, and repatriation, where provenance acquires a normative connotation. In the domain of film preservation, the words authoritative and original indicate what scholars and curators really care about: the provenance they pursue is the urtext, the unaltered camera negative, the matrix of all prints to come, the “big bang” of film distribution and the detritus of all projection copies that have survived in incomplete, mutilated, or fragmentary form.² Claiming that film provenance is irrelevant to film history because many identical prints were sold, rented, and circulated worldwide, and because it is assumed that it is virtually impossible to follow their itinerary from one projection booth to another, is not much different from arguing that what happened between the big bang and the current configuration of the universe is not as interesting as the big bang itself or the present position of the galaxies.

The lesson to be learned from this reductionist view of film history calls into question the semantics of a presumed difference between provenance and provenience, the subject of a lively debate among scholars in the fine arts and archaeology of the early twenty-first century. The terms of reference in this discussion have been summarized in an essay by Rosemary Joyce revolving around the concepts of birth, location, and itinerary.³ In this perspective, using the word provenance emphasizes the material trajectory of the object from the moment of its creation to its present status as a collection item; provenience mostly refers to the physical place where the object was found or to its last recorded location before the object was, so to speak, extrapolated from its native environment and redefined as part of another context—the museum or the archive—for the sake of conservation, study, and (where applicable) exhibition. Joyce cites the example of an ancient Roman coin. It might have been recovered from the site of a shipwreck more than two thousand years ago: this would be its provenience. What happened to it before (its minting in Italy and being passed from hand to hand) and after (its fortuitous retrieval by a diver, its trade with an antiques dealer, its sale from the dealer to a tourist, its bequest from the tourist to her son, and its donation from his estate to a museum), plus the recovery itself: this is the story of the coin’s provenance.

The example of Roman coins is pertinent to the analysis of provenance and provenience in early cinema (and, for that matter, of all cinema produced via photochemical negatives and prints), as it provides a good counterargument to the belief that the subject does not warrant any particular notice in film studies, given that projection prints were circulated from one venue to another through sale or rental and treated as fundamentally equal and interchangeable. Geologists tend to associate the concept of “where the object comes from” precisely with the opposite end of the chronological spectrum—the material and geographic origin of the item: the “big bang” as “provenience” itself. Transferred to the cinema realm, the science of film provenance would then be defined as a discipline whose goal is to figure out which cotton plantations were harvested for the manufacture of nitrate cellulose, the whereabouts of the silver mines exploited for the creation of a given film stock, and the type of cattle breeds selected for extracting the purest gelatin from their crushed bones to make the best photographic emulsion.⁴

What emerges from the survey in Joyce’s article is that provenance and provenience mean different things to scholars and researchers in different fields and that there are always compelling reasons supporting their opinions. “This is a beautiful Roman coin,” an art historian may argue, “why should I care where it comes from?”⁵ An archaeologist might reply, “Because it is evidence of the shipping trade in the Mediterranean.” In their respective domains, both statements are valid. A noteworthy aspect of Joyce’s article is its extensive coverage of exchanges about this subject on the internet. In a startling omission, however, she fails to mention a noteworthy comment posted on this very subject, arguing that “the original OED [Oxford English Dictionary] specifically says that ‘provenience’ came into being as an objection to the French ending form in ‘provenance.’ . . . So, from the start, ‘provenience’ was nothing more than a conscious attempt to make a French word look and sound English.”⁶

The same correspondent provides further evidence, but his earlier warning is enough to prompt a comparison of the English words provenience and provenance with their equivalents in other languages.⁷ There is only one term in French, provenance, Spanish, procedencia, and Italian, provenienza; German has three, Erkunft (lineage, derivation), Ursprung (what is initial, the “beginning”), and Provenienz (commonly used in the arts and collectors’ circles); Russian has “происхождение” (proiskhozhdenie: genesis, origin) and “источник” (istochnik: source), but in recent years museum curators have introduced another, borrowed from the French, “провенанс” (provenáns). Swedish uses ursprung but also fyndplats (place of retrieval), while proveniens often indicates the last station before the entering of an item in a collection but could also include the entire “ownership” chain of an item since its manufacturing or creation before it enters a museum collection. The Japanese word for provenance is 出所 (shussho), which is the fixed translation in archival science; there is no specific word for provenience. According to film curator Kae Ishihara, provenance and provenience are treated as the same thing, and there is no need to define the difference.⁸

Such an array of variations on the theme begs the question of which languages should take precedence in setting the standard for a distinction (provenance as opposed to provenience) that is otherwise ignored or underplayed by others. A useful alternative to the verbal quagmire is to examine what provenance has meant in the minds of those who have studied, restored, and looked at photochemical film elements to date. To the extent that they cared, their intended target has largely been limited to knowing the whereabouts of film prints—simply ascertaining where a print is located and available now. In many instances, collecting institutions have satisfied the curiosity of their interlocutors by placing a logo or a title card at the beginning of projection copies, thereby turning the information on the object’s provenance into part of the object itself. These logos and title cards are sometimes followed by cumbersome explanations of how these versions were put together: the longer the text, the more the print being exhibited is imbued with an aura of cultural respectability in the belief that presenting the same information on paper would not suffice. Over time, older title cards and logos have been replaced by new ones.

An example of this modus operandi comes from the British Film Institute. At its inception, its collecting body was called the National Film Library (1935–1955). This became in turn the National Film Archive (1955–1992), National Film and Television Archive (1993–2006), and finally BFI National Archive, its current denomination. For a committed film scholar, the above chronology helps determine that an uncut 35 mm print bearing the logo “National Film and Television Archive” was struck in a film laboratory sometime between the mid-1990s and the late 2000s (see fig. 1.1). Whether archival logos ought to be treated as proofs of the print’s provenance or provenience is another matter, but it should be acknowledged that—from the perspective of a nonspecialized viewer or a curator responsible for organizing a film exhibition—their presence is an indirect validation of the cultural legitimacy of the sou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Domitor Series – Précis
• Introduction: Provenance and Early Cinema: From Preservation and Collection to Circulation and Repurposing / Joanne Bernardi, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe
• Part I. Studying Provenance: From Analog to Digital
• Part II. Preservation and Collection
• Part III. Circulation
• Part IV. Repurposing
• Appendix: French Language Essay
• Appendix: French Language Essay
• Appendix: Dryden Theatre Screening Program
• Index