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  • 1927, Year One of the French Film Heritage?
  • Christophe Gauthier (bio)
    Translated by Laure Brost

In November 1924 Jean Tedesco, managing director of the Vieux-Colombier movie theatre in Paris, assembled a list of classic film titles he considered representative of the brief history of the cinema to date. He called his list a Répertoire du film, or 'Film Repertory', alluding to the prestigious theatrical past of the Vieux-Colombier theatre, and published it in his journal Cinéa-Ciné pour tous. The publication of this Film Repertory was timed to coincide with the opening of the Vieux-Colombier movie theatre and was meant to attract cinephiles who had been clamoring for a place where film classics could be shown. The Film Repertory pointed to a new attitude toward film history, signaling the maturity of the cinephile movement that had emerged at the end of the 1910s.1 Though Tedesco did not have copies of the films he had promoted to the Repertory, this group of film titles nevertheless represents a reflection on the history of cinema long before the films were actually conserved in cinémathèques and it was also meant to shape young film spectators and filmmakers. In addition, it was a way of giving avant-garde films that had not had the success they deserved when first released a second chance. Tedesco's Film Repertory was brought up to date and published every two years while he was director of Cinéa-Ciné pour tous.

Twenty-nine films were selected in 1924, all of them produced after 1915, Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat (1915) being the earliest. 11 were French, including Robert Boudrioz's L'Âtre (1923), Abel Gance's La Roue (1923), Louis Delluc's Fièvre (1921), Marcel L'Herbier's Don Juan et Faust (1923) and Léon Poirier's Jocelyn (1922); nine were American, including D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919), Joseph de Grasse's The Girl I Loved (1923) with Charles Ray, Fred Niblo's The Mark of Zorro (1920) with Douglas Fairbanks, and Chaplin's Shoulder Arms (1918); five German, including Robert Wiene's Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (1920) and Karl Grüne's Die Strasse (1923), three Swedish and one Italian. Among the American films, Triangle (Griffith, William Hart) and United Artists (Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks) dominated with the same titles that had sparked the cinephile shockwaves which began in 1916-1918.

The very creation of this list raised the question of what counted as a film classic, and was thus the first step in what would later be termed a patrimoine cinématographique (a national film heritage or patri-mony).2 Tedesco's Film Repertory was based on the norms of cultural legitimization. It was meant to designate, as Tedesco stated, 'the progress of moving pictures toward art'; and it confirmed the taste of the cinephiles of his generation who had relegated prewar films to obscurity. As film history thus entered the era of film heritage, a hierarchy of directors and films was established, pantheons that sometimes crumbled a few years later, while a considerable number of others were simply ignored. In short, this first history of cinema, established by creating the Film Repertory, was the result of selective memory. In fact, toward the end of the 1920s, the history - or memories - of cinema would find different uses and modes of expression under the influence of groups and networks that were sometimes antagonistic but that shared a common interest in everything regarding the screen. How were these sometimes competitive selective memories of film history established? [End Page 289]

The French government and the City of Paris did not share the cinephiles' view. Interested only in film's scientific and pedagogical aspects, they delayed granting film a status that would have qualified it for financial support. However, the promoters of educational film persuaded members of parliament and other government officials to establish the use of film in French schools. Whether secular militants or Catholic workers, they instituted the first film archives known as cinémathèques and determined how they would be used for a long time. These cinémathèques were basically lending libraries rather...

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