Editors’ Foreword

As we write, the big silent film festival in Pordenone, Italy, has reached its midpoint. As it has for thirty-three years, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto is projecting a couple hundred films from the world’s archives and private collections, with presentations ranging from thirty seconds (Paul Nadar Practicing Fencing, 1896, from La Cinémathèque Française) to four hours and thirty-five minutes (the Murnau Stiftung’s 2010 restoration of Die Nibelungen from 1924). The latter, mercifully, had a buffet served between the two parts (for one should not watch “Kriemhild’s Revenge” on an empty stomach). The foci this year are on color processes in the first thirty years of cinema (leading up to next year’s Technicolor centennial), the beginnings of Chaplin’s film career and the Great War a hundred years ago, the cinematic careers of the Barrymores, Russian comedies (yes), early cinema, and a taste of brilliant Ukrainian animation from the late 1920s (which looks like constructivist poster art in motion).

This kaleidoscope of visual delights reminds us of the pleasures of The Moving Image, which, like the Giornate, illuminates the world of film with lights from many sources. This issue, like the ones before it, expands and challenges our notion of cinema through the set of ideas and the practice that is a film archive. It’s a little like Bazin’s as-yet-unanswered question “what is cinema?” What is an archive? Its identity is more than the artifacts within. It’s the history of how and why those items were made, the decision-making criteria that caused them to be collected, the policies that dictate how they are preserved, managed, and given access to. Increasingly, fast-moving technological forces play a major role in developing and sustaining the archive. It’s also clear that, like a film festival, the meanings of the items exhibited and preserved are out of the organizers’ control. The aficionados, scholars, historians, technicians, and commercial users define the archive in their own personal, sometimes incompatible ways. The festival, the film and media archive, and The Moving Image all share, however, a similar function of generating knowledge through tangible experience.

Another similarity between the Giornate and the journal is that things evolve. There was a time, for instance, when the programmers of the festival refused to play anything that emitted recorded sound. Of course, this has created a new generation of film musicians who have developed a highly distinctive, idiosyncratic music that someday might be called the “Pordenone school.” There have been wonderful evenings of music from symphony orchestras, one-person bands, singers and musicians of every national and ethnic stripe. Fabulous. But no sound tracks. This led, to give one example, to a policy of not playing the Movietone sound tracks on Fox films that were intended to be heard with their specially arranged scores. The live improvised piano behind Sunrise was wonderful, of course, but the audiences of 1927 would have been thrilled to hear the full orchestra playing from the screen, an experience that Pordenone could have re-created with the flick of a projector switch. In a somewhat shocking contrast, the season opened this year with the John Barrymore vehicle When a Man Loves. Not only was this gorgeous 35mm print from the UCLA Film & Television Archive presented with its complete Vitaphone sound-on-disc track but the three sound shorts that made up the original program in February 1927 also preceded it. The effect was a time capsule giving us a hint at what those sitting in the Selwyn Theatre on Broadway saw and heard that night. The feature score by Henry Hadley, as Philip Carli observes in his notes, was pioneering and integral to the film. Thank you, Giornate, for letting us hear it.

The Moving Image also will continue to expand. The basic policy is to present research, factual case studies, and, yes, opinions that relate to the material culture of film and media collections, archives, and associated practices, broadly considered. This issue, then, adds new pieces to this quilt in progress.

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