A Thousand Cuts by Dennis Bartok

Author:Dennis Bartok
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2016-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

12.

Restoring the Audience

“The collector scene is vanishing everywhere,” replies Serge Bromberg when I ask him about the state of film collecting in France. “We are less and less. A few dozens. We used to be very young, we are not as young as we were,” he admits in his clear but heavily accented English. “The film collectors are moving to digital or dying, and their widows are trying to get rid of the film.” Although most of this book is focused on film collectors in the United States, there were—and continue to be—collectors in every part of the globe. In fact, the greatest film collector in history was quite likely a Frenchman, Henri Langlois, who, together with the marvelous, still-underrated director Georges Franju (Eyes Without a Face, Judex) and critic Jean Mitry, started the Cinémathèque Française in the 1930s. Langlois’s private collection morphed into the great-granddaddy of film archives, and his overwhelming passion for cinema has made him something of a patron saint for film lovers.48 By the time of his death in 1977, he’d acquired, scavenged, and rescued by some estimates over sixty thousand films for the Cinémathèque.

In the tradition of Langlois, Serge Bromberg has turned his passion for film collecting into a career as a world-renowned film preservationist, director, distributor, promoter, and tireless champion for cinema. Dark-haired, with a bit of a John Garfield quality, he speaks about cinema with an almost irresistible enthusiasm and a showman’s sense of how to sell a good story. Through his company Lobster Films in Paris, he’s been involved in the restoration of all surviving Charlie Chaplin films made between 1914 and 1917 and dozens of previously lost Georges Méliès films, including the recent painstaking restoration of A Trip to the Moon (1902) from the only known hand-tinted color print of the film, discovered in Spain. In France he’s a household name as host of the much-loved TV programs on film history Cartoon Factory (1993), Cellulo (1995–2001), and Ça tourne Bromby (1997–1999), and from 1999 through 2012 he was artistic director of the Annecy International Animated Film Festival. In 2010 he won a French César award for his superb documentary L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot (codirected with Ruxandra Medrea), a thrilling cinema detective story reconstructing a never-finished project by Clouzot, famed director of The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques. “If I had remained a simple collector, I’d be totally nuts today,” Serge confesses. “But turning the passion of film into the profession of saving and showing films kind of saved my life, because my job is my passion.”

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of his collecting is how he’s managed to popularize long-forgotten films of the silent era, making them seem fresh and important. Nowhere is this more visible than in his live presentations called “Retour de Flamme,” literally “Back from the Flames,” which always include Serge igniting a piece of old nitrate film in front of a startled audience. Retour de Flamme began in 1992 when he was asked by a small theater

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.