Peter Bagrov's Talk at the Open Research Team Project Seminar
On March 15th an open research team project seminar took place. Peter Bagrov, film historian, archivist, vice-president of The International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) Peter Bagrov presented a talk on "How to Save Lost Films?"
Summary
Cinema is more than one hundred and twenty years old, but the first film archives appeared only forty years later, and not even in all the countries (even if we take only major centers of filmmaking). It took another half a century to decide upon the standards of storage, restoration, cataloguing. In the meantime much has perished. Celluloid film – and particularly nitrate film, which was used in the XIX and the first half of the XX centuries – is a cunning substance, and, if not handled correctly, an ephemeral one.
Hence much has been lost. Historians have estimated that if we take the entire silent film heritage, no more than 25% has survived. The numbers for Russia are even more dismaying. The survival status of Russian and Soviet silent cinema does not exceed 20%, and if we take just the pre-revolutionary period, this number would not even reach 15%. Among the losses are all the films made by Vsevolod Meyerhold and Aleksandr Tairov, the first works of Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, Abram Room, Fridrikh Ermler, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, the Vasiliev brothers, cinematic efforts of the great stage actors Michael Chekhov, Konstantin Varlamov, Varvara Strelskaia, Nikolai Monakhov, etc. In their time some of the lost films were considered important events of cultural, or even social, life, some even played a role in the development of film language.
The films are gone. But there are frames and production stills, handbills, trade press, reviews, memoirs, censorship records. Some of these require a long and extensive search in libraries and archives (both state and private ones). Others are laying right on the surface. To what extent could a film be reconstructed using these secondary sources? What are the methods of reconstruction? Could one trust such a reconstruction?