Silent Cinema

A Guide to Study, Research and Curatorship

Paolo Cherchi Usai

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781911239130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

Paolo Cherchi Usai provides a comprehensive introduction to the study, research and preservation of silent cinema from its heyday in the early 20th century to its present day flourishing. He traces the history of the moving image in its formative years, from Edison's and Lumière's first experiments to the dawn of 'talkies'; provides a clear guide to the basics of silent film technology; introduces the technical and creative roles involved in its production, and presents silent cinema as a performance event, rather than a passive viewing experience. This new, greatly expanded edition takes the reader on a new journey, exploring silent cinema in the broader context of technology, culture, and society, from the invention of celluloid film and its related machinery to film studios, laboratories, theatres and audiences. Among the people involved in the creation of a new art form were filmmakers, actors and writers, but also engineers, entrepreneurs, and projectionists. Their collective efforts, and the struggle to preserve their creative work by archives and museums, are interwoven in a compelling story covering three centuries of media history, from the magic lantern to the reinvention of silent cinema in digital form. The new edition also includes comprehensive resource information for the study, research, preservation and exhibition of silent cinema.

Chapter 1

Pixels

Fig. 2 Enlarged view of 1,000 pixels in a frame of Le Voyage dans la lune (Georges Méliès, 1902) from a digital copy in 2K resolution. Source: Private collection.

Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902) is one of the most celebrated works produced in the silent film era. Its director, Georges Méliès, proudly considered it the crowning achievement of his career. The film was reproduced in all the major formats and media devised since the invention of cinema, so numerous that it is impossible to tell how many copies are in existence around the world. A large number of them were made with the same techniques used by Méliès in the early 1900s. Many were destroyed over the course of the years. The more we go back in time, the fewer extant copies we find of this cinematic milestone: at least twenty-five film archives, museums, and private collections have 35mm or 16mm duplicates of this title, but only one print created under the filmmaker’s direct supervision is known to survive. On the other hand, A Trip to the Moon is everywhere, readily accessible from as many pieces of digital equipment as those in use across the globe. The quantitative gap between the single remaining print manufactured in 1902 and the billions of virtual replicas available today is too wide to be ignored. This numerical curve can be turned into a story. It is the moral tale of why silent cinema is both ubiquitous and endangered, a commodity and a treasure, depending on how we look at it.

Most viewers of the twenty-first century have encountered A Trip to the Moon for the first time on a small digital screen. They are probably aware that it was originally shown on a much larger one, but generally assume that all the people who viewed it had the same kind of experience: the mad scientist, the rocket in the moon’s eye, the selenite monsters, the expedition’s triumph after a perilous adventure at the bottom of the sea. It is also taken for granted that moving images produced at the time of Méliès were of uneven quality because that is how cinema was back then, a technology so primitive that, for instance, human movement could only be reproduced at a faster speed than in reality. As we discover that more than one version of A Trip to the Moon can be seen in digital form, however, the notion that a silent film is always one and the same is brought into question.

Some reproductions of Méliès’ film are better than their siblings. One is in colour, another in black and white. This image was cropped, that one wasn’t. There are different title cards at the beginning of the film, depending on which version is being viewed. Images are sharper here than they are there. This version runs a bit slower than the other one. There are at least two possible explanations for such discrepancies: either the reproductions were made with different techniques, possibly at a higher or lower resolution, or we have been looking at different things, with no other connection to each other than a title, a storyline, and a sequence of events captured by one or more cameras. A single strip of negative was used for A Trip to the Moon, but there are other films by Méliès where the same shot appears to have been taken with two lenses at slightly different angles, depending on the copy we are looking at.

It is perfectly normal not to pay any attention to these incongruities, because we don’t have to. When searching for A Trip to the Moon on the Internet in our leisure time, it is enough to choose one of the colour versions, obeying a natural impulse towards chromatic realism, but for all we know the film may have been originally shown only in black and white, then somehow colourized at a later time. It is only when we start formulating such conjectures that the small rectangle in front of us becomes a window to another era, to a visual culture that existed not so long ago and yet seems so incredibly remote. We are looking at the facsimile of a silent film. We may decide to find out more about it, in which case the replica suddenly becomes a potential vestige of something else. A Trip to the Moon had been shown in many projection rooms, to many collective audiences around the world. The screenings may have been accompanied by music. The images may have looked sharper. The film may have made a different, maybe stronger, impression on its public in 1902; that may still be the case today, if some of these conditions could be met or at least approximated. This intellectual leap of faith is very easy to achieve with other forms of artistic expression; less so with silent cinema.

Facsimiles

The vast majority of us have seen a famous painting for the first time in the form of a photograph, then maybe in its original incarnation on a visit to a museum. We may have listened to the recording of a great symphony, and liked it so much that we couldn’t wait to hear it again in a live concert, if at all possible. A documentary on the Alhambra palace in Granada may have been so intriguing that we decided to make Spain our next holiday destination. This kind of impulse is rarely felt with cinema, for two good reasons: first, because it is commonly believed that – contrary to the above examples – a film has no ‘original’ to speak of, therefore there is no intrinsic difference between our digital Méliès and its theatrical avatar, other than the size or the sharpness of the picture, with the possible extra gratification of watching it in the company of a large crowd. The other reason is that most people feel no particular need to see A Trip to the Moon – or, for that matter, any film – on the big screen in order to fully appreciate it. In addition to this, digital reproductions enable us to study the film in much greater detail by stopping, slowing down, and enlarging portions of the image at will; we can select, reassemble, and replay individual shots or entire sequences in order to better examine their structure; we can readjust the chromatic balance, or even see the film in black and white if we so prefer.

The second part of this line of argument is not only perfectly valid, but also entirely consistent with how people have studied painting, music, and architecture since reproduction techniques were employed in their respective areas of interest. For many generations, photographs and sound recordings have enriched the lives of millions of women, men, and children who would otherwise never have been able to visit a museum or a concert hall. Art history and music are taught and learned at the highest academic levels in the most remote areas of the planet, and no one would question the revolutionary effect of new technologies in the education sector. These tools have also been very beneficial to the study of cinema; this is especially true in the case of silent films, because of their negligible value as commercial products (except for a small minority of ‘greatest hits’).

Had it not been for digital resources, the first three decades of film history would have remained the playground for a tiny minority of scholars and hardcore cinephiles. Access to archival collections in digital formats has been no less important for film archives and museums, whose preservation work had previously received scant attention outside specialized festivals and academic conferences. Last but not least, films of the early period are now inspiring or being recycled for the creation of entirely new works. Silent cinema is reconnected with the present, bridging what once looked like an insurmountable gap between the spectators and their own visual history.

The main motivation for not venturing beyond the digital experience of silent cinema – the alleged lack of a theatrical ‘aura’ in motion pictures – is more problematic. Much as it is hailed as a powerful form of aesthetic expression, cinema has always been perceived as an art of reproduction; its legitimacy as a cultural phenomenon was therefore hampered by the very nature of the technology that made it possible in the first place. The fact that cinema is also an industry further reinforced the prejudice that accompanied its irresistible growth over much of the twentieth century. The importance of this variable, however, should not be overestimated. Music, architecture, theatre, and all the other fine arts, not to mention literature, are industries as well; their productions are normally the results of projects that are commissioned, marketed, and paid for by their respective clients. There may be a difference in the size of the financial investments required for their creation, but no art form is qualitatively ranked in quantitative terms: great novels and great songs can be distributed in huge numbers, and make large amounts of money. Attending a concert, a stage play, an opera, or a gallery exhibition is one thing; a film is apparently something else. The ‘aura’ just isn’t there.

Marketplace

Production companies and exhibitors have relentlessly tried to make cinema more ‘special’ than before through novel attractions for their audiences, from giant screens to three-dimensional pictures. Film archives and museums had to take a different route, eventually securing a profitable niche in the ‘digital restoration’ business. Private collectors were quick to follow suit. A new version of A Trip to the Moon (Lobster Films, 2011) was premiered at the Festival de Cannes, with all the hype and controversy surrounding the exorbitant price tag (estimated at 450,000 euros or half a million US dollars – about 30 euros or 33 US dollars for each of the film’s 13,375 frames) attached to the digital remake of Méliès’ fourteen-minute blockbuster; with much less fanfare, the alleged first ‘colour film’ created by British pioneer Edward Raymond Turner in 1902 through an additive tri-chrome system found its way to the front webpage of BBC News on 12 September 2012. By then, silent cinema had fully entered the realm of mainstream media. The ripple effect of film history’s migration to digital would soon be felt around ‘canonical’ films, the Promised Land where collecting institutions, funding agencies, and commercial entities sealed an ambiguous and yet compelling alliance.

Film archives and museums had fought for many decades to save and project their priceless and endangered collections, mostly with chronically limited resources. They were also racing against time because of the gradual decay of chemically unstable prints, but everyone knew all too well that they couldn’t possibly preserve everything. Then, in the midst of the so-called ‘digital revolution’ (2000–10) and the concurrent decline of film as the preferred medium for public exhibition, these institutions began to translate films into pixels. For a brief period of time, they continued to use motion picture stock for long-term conservation (film negatives) and presentation (film positives) while taking full advantage of the manifold possibilities offered by the new technology: removing scratches and dust from the images, making them steadier, compensating for colour fading or partial loss of the film’s photographic emulsion. As soon as it became clear that the very survival of film stock manufacturing was under threat, digital took the lead in archival work once and for all. Consciously or not, museums and archives made a virtue out of necessity by slowing down – or discontinuing altogether – their plans for film preservation on film, and by embracing digital, with the blessing of the industry, the acquiescence of curators, and the enthusiasm of public opinion. Film reels belonged to ‘dusty shelves’, a debasing figure of speech about all things antiquarian; digital was slick, spotlessly clean, and did not occupy so much space.

What ‘digital’ means here is of little consequence: the magic letter referring to pixel resolution, ‘K’, became a benchmark of quality and, indirectly, of cultural clout. The measuring sticks of a high-quality ‘restoration’ were designated 2K, 4K, 6K, and so on, the numbers being often used with a certain degree of liberality: a film may have been announced as a ‘4K transfer’, but then screened at a lower resolution. The adoption of digital was accompanied by an implicit but unequivocal partition of archival film collections into two broad categories: on the one hand, the films already preserved in analogue form, but of very limited public appeal; on the other, popular films that may or may not have been fully ‘restored’, but were ripe for digital treatment. The selection process that derived from this hierarchy of commercial and promotional values is dictating which silent films we are allowed to see in digital formats on the big screen, and which ones must be confined to low-resolution replicas, or to those museums, archives, and festivals where silent films can still be exhibited in their original media. There are still a number of important titles that have not been preserved at all; they are more at risk than the others, because collecting institutions may decide not to go beyond a digital transfer from the original film elements.

The short-term financial advantages of this approach come at a heavy price to the public, and to the ethics of film preservation. Silent films that had been previously restored by photochemical means are repackaged as ‘digital restoration’ projects, thus bending terminology to marketplace-driven rhetoric. There is, in some cases, a compelling argument for resuming work on a title that has been restored before, as occurred when an almost complete 16mm print of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) held by a film archive in Argentina revealed over twenty minutes of footage never found on other copies. Once completed, the new version was deservedly greeted by applause from the public and media commentators. Praising the achievement in reconstructing the film’s original narrative structure would have been enough. The language used to do so, unfortunately, took its toll on film preservation’s customary lexicon.

In mid-2011, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival announced the American premiere of the expanded Metropolis under the heading ‘restored digital print’, a manifest contradiction in terms. There is no such thing as a ‘digital print’ of a film, and the digital file in itself certainly wasn’t ‘restored’, but this was not the point. What mattered was the juxtaposition of concepts: it is a ‘restored’ film, not one of the many other versions already in circulation; it is ‘digital’ – that is, a state-of-the-art presentation; it is also a ‘print’, meaning that it comes from an artefact, the kind of objects museums and archives are meant to collect. Combined in this and other ways, the three words – a hybrid of technical jargon and corporate hype – are believed to validate what would otherwise be ignored. ‘Film preservation’ is in itself insufficient: the process must be given a distinctive brand in order to be taken seriously.

Aura

The roots of this semantic battle have obvious psychological connotations. From the point of view of their users, motion pictures had no particular value as artworks; but the same could be said of countless objects (pottery, tapestries, devotional paintings) now on display in public and private collections worldwide. The presumed difference between cinema and other types of aesthetic expression relied upon two basic assumptions: first, that film was progressively altered by the very act of its presentation by means of a machine; second, that the creative work it embodied was the serial product of a matrix, and that additional copies could therefore be created upon demand, thus making it unnecessary to take special precautions about any individual print.

The intrinsic flaw in these seemingly plain statements lies not in the inferences they were drawn upon, but in their steadfast reliance on technological variables. All human-made objects deteriorate in time, whether by prolonged usage – a book, a wooden table, a piece of jewelry – or through exposure to their environment. The only difference is in the rate of decay: millennia for ceramics (if they are not broken), centuries for paintings and frescoes, decades for an unprotected daguerreotype. Etchings, albumen photographic prints, and Babylonian seals were also struck from matrices; their survival or disappearance does not affect the value attributed to copies before their acquisition by a collecting institution.

The closest equivalents to motion picture film in this respect are magic lantern slides and phonograph discs. Like film, they were produced in multiple copies; like film, every viewing experience or listening event involved a degradation of the carrier; like film, they cannot be experienced without an apparatus – which is where any useful comparison between moving images and most of the other arts is bound to fall apart. Magic lantern specialists have debated whether or not it is preferable or even advisable to show original glass slides as opposed to their digital reproductions. The option of playing (on special occasions) original phonograph discs instead of replicas of their sound recordings is occasionally debated in institutions where these materials are collected and preserved, but no technology for analogue preservation on a mass scale is currently available. The field of moving image conservation is taking yet another approach, influenced by at least two important factors. The first view – by far the most common – is that cinema in general is regarded primarily as a form of mass entertainment, the product of an industry providing audiovisual ‘content’ to consumers worldwide. This leads to the opinion that those who look at moving images are fundamentally indifferent to – or unaware of – the technology adopted for their exhibition, thus providing a rationale for preserving films on whatever media are available at the lowest possible cost.

The second presumption – encouraged in the academic world by reductive interpretations of Walter Benjamin’s often-quoted essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936) – is that the lack of an ‘aura’ of uniqueness in projection prints determines their inferior value as artefacts, thereby justifying the replacement of a damaged print with an allegedly identical replica as a normal occurrence in the life of a motion picture work (an excellent analysis of the issue is contained in Miriam Bratu Hansen’s last book, Cinema and Experience [2012]). The consequences of this attitude to the conservation of cinema as an integral part of the cultural heritage have been profound. The physical deterioration of film was a given not only in the commercial circui...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Note
• Introduction
• 1. Pixels
• 2. Celluloid
• 3. Chroma
• 4. Machines
• 5. People
• 6. Buildings
• 7. Works
• 8. Show
• 9. Acoustics
• 10. Collections
• 11. Evidence
• 12. Duplicates
• 13. Lacunae
• 14. Traces
• 15. Curatorship
• Bibliographic Resources and Research Tools
• Appendix 1 Film Measurement Tables
• Appendix 2 Eastman Kodak Edge Codes on Motion Picture Film Stock, 1913–28
• Appendix 3 Identification of Pathé Films by Their Edge Inscriptions
• Index
• Imprint