Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

The first thing you do when you get to Pordenone, Italy, a provincial capital northeast of Venice, is walk a lot. The town is small enough to promenade around in half an hour. Invariably you meet colleagues on the street, because everyone is walking to and from various hotels. I first started going to the Giornate del cinema muto in 1988, when I was curator at George Eastman House. I mention this because I realized, how many people I know at the Festival. There are the many archivists, who show their latest preservation work or　come to look at other restorations; there are the American and European academics, who specialize in silent film historiography; and there are the cinephiles, who come faithfully every year at their own expense, just to see rare silent films. This year’s program is focused on canonical films, the French company Albatross, divas, and Sherlock Holmes. 　

The Albatross films turned out to be somewhat of a mixed bag. Albatross was founded in Paris by a bunch of Russian exiles in the very early 1920s. Unfortunately, previous festivals have shown some of the best films from the company, films by Rene Clair, L’Herbier, and the actor Moujoukine. By the mid 1920, Albatross was supporting a lot of experimental work, but the films shown so far are from the early 1920s by people like the second-tiered Viktor Tourjansky, who had an incredibly long and undistinguished career in pre-revolutionary Russia, France, Nazi Germany, and word and sandal epics in Italy in the 1950s.

In the divas program, we saw some previously lost film fragments from Asta Nielsen (Europe’s greatest film star in 1914) and Francesca Bertini, and Italian diva who started making films around 1912 and was as popular in Italy as Pickford was in America. I’ve really liked the Bertini films, especially one we saw tonight where she kills her rival in her dressing room, then proceeds on stage to die (as a title tells us, blood gushing from her mouth, due to consumption).

So far the only real masterpiece was a Soviet film from 1928, Boris Barnet’s THE HOUSE IN TRUBNOI STREET, a slapstick comedy that was a scream. I was also impressed with a German comedy from 1926, THE LITTLE GIRL FROM THE VARIETY SHOW by Hanns Schwarz, starring Ossi Oswalda, who became famous as Lubitsch’s star in a series of comedies in the late teens.

Finally, I discovered ROTAIE (RAILS) (1929), a film by Mario Camerini. The film begins with an abborted double suicide of a young couple, who then find a wallet filled with money and head by train to Monaco. Despite this seeming fantasy narrative, the film has many realistic scenes, and only a few sparse intertitles, the rest of the narrative conveyed solely in images. 　　　　

Another great feature of the Giornate is a the Collegium, which brings graduate film studies students to discuss films and discuss other issues with prominent scholars in the field. I attended a session dedicated to canon formation. Ian Christie, formerly of the BFI and Paolo Cherchi Usai, now at the Haghefilm Foundation, lead the very interesting discussion about how film canons developed, why they have changed so little over the years, and how they do change. The consensus was that even when films are rediscovered though new restorations, - as happens so often at the Giornate - it still takes a very long time for those discoveries to filter into the canon.

A second Collegium session featured a lecture by Giovanna Fosetti, the preservationist at the Amsterdam Nederlands Filmmuseum, who has just published a book on film preservation: From Grain to Pixel. The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam University Press). As mentio0ned in previous posts, the digital is completely changing the paradigm of film restoration and archiving and this book is a first attempt to get a handle on those changes.

Finally, I attended a lecture by former Eastman House students, Daniela Currò & Uli Ruedel, who discussed scientific studies they have been doing at Haghefilm on color restoration. Taking the same piece of film, a 1912 Alfred Machin film that was tinted and toned, they copied onto Kodak b& w stock, Kodak color negative, Fuji color negative, using the Desmet method of flashing, and doing what they called a digital Desmet restoration. The digital looked the absolute worst, the Desmet was the best, but not really great.

Again, we see there are limits to digital restoration technologies.

Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, UCLA Film & Television Archive

While the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival has only shown a few documentaries that one could characterize as "wildlife films,"this genre certainly speaks to the environmental concerns of the festival.

We are now observing a paradigm shift in the functionality of wildlife documentary films and television. For nearly eighty years, filmed images of the natural world conformed to the classic documentary aesthetic: Moving images were perceived to be

1.) an expansion of human vision

2.) a means of entering into a world that was invisible to the human eye,

3.) an extension of the physical body of the subject

4.) the creation of visual pleasure by bringing animals in their natural habitat closer to humans.

And while it is true that such visual documentation of animal life entailed narrative conventions that communicated overt and covert ideologies, these images referred to a real, physical world in which animals existed along side humans.

But we know than thousands of species are near extinction and many more are threatened. And how does our culture confront the extinction of animals, such as the polar bear?

One can legitimately ask, whether the growing obsession to document visually the animal world isn’t at least partially a desperate act "to save" wildlife for a virtual world? Today, the goal of wildlife filmmakers has become "preserving" animal life in a virtual world, so that society and science have a record of what might be lost.

Indeed. the urgency with which "the end of nature" is present in the master narratives of many recent wildlife documentaries, indicates that the worst fears of humanity are no longer unthinkable and may even become a reality.

Every moving image can potentially be the last "living" image of a species, in the truest sense of the word. In the not so distant future, then, our culture will possibly only see wild animals virtually.

Yet, rather than calling for collective action, for social protest, most wildlife films focus on individual naturalists, working in the wild. On television channels such as "Animal Planet," the trope of animal rescue is obsessively played out in the sphere of the private, allowing audiences to feel as if progress is actually being made, while the more difficult larger questions go unanswered.

In the digital world of animals, viewers glimpse the exotic and the familiar, the dangerous and the uncanny, the sweet and the cute, while anthropomorphism allows viewers to consume both the cute and the threatening without discomfort.

In the archive, animals continue to "live" in images.