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From Nitrate to Digital Archive: The Davide Turconi Project

Alicia Fletcher, Joshua Yumibe

The Moving Image, Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2013, pp. 1-32 (Article)

Published by University of Minnesota Press

For additional information about this article


https://muse.jhu.edu/article/517540

Access provided by Ryerson University Library (28 Aug 2017 21:17 GMT)
from nitrate to
digital archive
alicia fletcher
and joshua yumibe

The Davide Turconi Project

The technical revolutions are the fracture points of artistic


development; it is there that the different political tendencies

may be said to come to the surface. In every new technical

revolution the political tendency is transformed, as if by its

own volition, from a concealed element of art into a manifest

one.

W a lt e r B e n j a m i n o n B at t l e s h i p P ot e m k i n
fletcher and yumibe 2

TECHNICAL REVOLUTIONS

Today we are confronting a technical revolution in film form, archiving, and historiog-
raphy brought about by digital media. Indeed, the seismic effects have been felt for
well over a decade, but now the casualties are apparent. With the expansion of digital
imaging, projection, and distribution, with the ensuing bankruptcy of Kodak, and with
the threatened demise of 35mm filmstock and of still and moving image equipment and
laboratories now before us, film as a celluloid medium may be in its last days, at least
at the industrial level. Celluloids future as an archival medium is at best uncertain. In
ideal circumstances, our film prints can last in cold-storage vaults for well over a cen-
turyunlike digital copies, whose codecs and hard drives are optimistically measured in
increments of three to five years and thus must be constantly migrated at great expense.
But without filmstock and laboratories, restorations future will be almost exclusively
digital within a few years, as celluloids ecosystem collapses.1
We raise these issues by no means as a polemic for or against digital cinema but
rather as a historiographic lens through which to consider one specific archival project,
the Davide Turconi Nitrate Frame Collection. The history of the collection usefully calls
attention to the transformation of archival practices over the past century. In many ways,
the work on the collection can also be construed as a research project within the domain
of the digital humanities, as it means to complement, supplement, and facilitate through
digital technology the traditional work of film history and archiving.
The Turconi Project centers on the work of Italian film historian Davide Turconi
(19112005). Born in Pavia, Italy, Turconi was a revered historian, credited with writing
seminal works of film history, with a particular devotion to silent Italian cinema. In 1982,
Turconi cofounded the Giornate del Cinema Muto, a silent film festival held annually in
Pordenone, and he served as director for over twenty years. In the 1970s, he culled a
massive collection of 23,491 frame clippings from the unique and influential Joye Collec-
tion of early cinema. The Joye material was assembled by the Swiss abb Josef Joye in the
early 1900s and originally comprised an estimated 1,540 international films produced
primarily between 1908 and 1912, many of which contained remarkable examples of
early film coloring, in particular, stenciling, hand coloring, tinting, and toning. Upon
inspecting the collection in the 1960s, Turconi found many of the prints to be in advanced
stages of deterioration. Finding no means of preserving the collection as a whole, he cut
clippings from the films (usually two to three frames each) and carefully organized them
to preserve in fragments what he feared would soon disappear. In the 1970s and 1980s,
the surviving and fragmented Joye prints were at last transferred for preservation to the
3 from nitrate to digital archive

Figure 1. Clipping 10286, Vues


dEspagne en cartes postales
(Path, 1907). The Davide
Turconi Collection, courtesy
George Eastman House.
fletcher and yumibe 4

National Film Archive (NFA; now the British Film Institute [BFI] National Archive), whereas
Turconis clippings took on a separate life of their own. Turconi donated the bulk of the
clippings to Paolo Cherchi Usai and to the Cineteca del Friuli, and this material is now
housed at George Eastman House (GEH) in Rochester, New York. Since 2003, GEH has
preserved and digitized the collection in its entirety, and in October 2011, the Giornate
del Cinema Muto launched a publicly accessible website (http://www.progettoturconi.
it), which opens digital access to the collection for research.2
A timeline of the collections carefrom the early 1900s to present daylays
bare the history of film preservation and archival practices. From the storage of Joyes
decaying nitrate prints in a damp cellar to the housing of the clippings in a state-of-
the-art facility designed especially for nitrate conservation, followed by the production
of digital scans of the clippings for worldwide access, the collection has experienced a
remarkable series of changes. Our goals in outlining the history of the project in more
detail over the following pages are twofold. First, we examine what the compilation,
circulation, and transformation of these film artifacts reveal about the development of
moving image archives over the past century, and second, we pay particular attention
to the issues that digital preservation and access now raise.
Today, when we are confronted with the likely end of film as a celluloid-based
medium, the Turconi Project calls attention to films materiality, for preserved in the
clippings are liminal elements too often lost in the preservation process (e.g., the
frame, with its sprockets and valuable edge codes, and the rich, applied colors of early
cinema). Yet, the physical fragmentation of the collectionboth at its creation and in its
transformation from nitrate to digital imagecontrasts with the projects emphasis on
preservation and access to the material totality of these frames. Within our contemporary
digital environment, there is an irrational desire to preserve, store, and provide access
to history in its totalitywhat Lev Manovich has described as the database complex.3
We are interested in how this impulse toward totality in the face of the fragmentation
of Turconis collection offers insight into the historical, aesthetic, and economic issues
raised by a medium marked by technological transformation and decay.

THE HISTORY OF THE JOYE AND TURCONI COLLECTIONS

Abb Josef Joye (18521919), a Swiss Jesuit practicing at the end of the nineteenth century
and into the first decade of the twentieth, was responsible for the formation of the film
collection from which Turconi cut almost all his clippings. The survival of the collection,
compiled mainly by Joye, is a remarkable feat given its impressive size and scope. The
5 from nitrate to digital archive

Joye Collection has a unique history that spans over a century, as has been discussed
extensively by the Swiss cinema historian Roland Cosandey. Cosandey thoroughly mined
Joyes collection and, in the early 1990s, cataloged a portion of it in Welcome Home Joye!
Film um 1910.4 Since then, early cinema scholars have recognized the collection as a
valuable resource and access it on a regular basis at the BFI National Archive, where it
has resided since the 1970s, after Turconis work with the collection.
Between 1900 and his retirement in 1911, Joye accumulated an estimated 1,540
35mm films to illustrate the educational and religious lectures he gave in his parish.
His involvement with education in Basel, Switzerland, was the stimulus for his avid col-
lecting habits, which centered around the Borromum, a community-based institution
founded by Joye in 1898 and still in existence today. Even prior to cinema, Joye incorpo-
rated visual media into his teachings. His use of hand-painted lantern slides, which he
began to produce in the 1890s, persisted into the 1900s, and during this period, Joye
created some sixteen thousand of these slides himself, using a homemade apparatus
and darkroom.5 The lantern slides were designed as illustrations for his lectures, which
included biblical stories, historical topics, current events, and popular science. 6 Around
1900, he began collecting films as an intermedial complement to his use of lantern slides.
As a Jesuit priest, Joyes financial resources were likely modest, but without
precise historical records, accounting for how he could have amassed such a large collec-
tion is speculative.7 What is clear, however, is that nearly all the prints in the collection
contain German intertitles, regardless of the productions national origins, suggesting
that they originated on the German market and/or the German-speaking market of
Switzerland. It is possible that Joye purchased some of his collection from production
companies themselves: after a print had outlived its potential to turn a profita period
that could be as short as a few weeksthe studios often made them available to schools,
churches, and other nontheatrical venues of exhibition for a nominal price.8 Alternatively,
studios often junked their own films, as the fear of nitrate fire outweighed any desire
to keep them, and it is possible that Joye located a source for these disposed-of films
on the secondhand market.9 Regardless of how the films were obtained, Joye built a
remarkably varied and diverse collection of early films, one that reveals the intricacies
of the international film market of the early 1900s.
The earliest title in the Joye Collection dates from 1896 (Lumire footage of the
Geneva Exposition), but the peak of Joyes collecting activity fell between the years 1908
and 1912. This is reflected in the Turconi Collection, which contains more clippingsfrom
films released in 1911 than any other year, representing over 20 percent of the collection
(see Table 1). Approximately sixty-five identified studios are present in the collection, and
fletcher and yumibe 6

in terms of national origins, the films represented in the Joye Collection are remarkably
diverse (see Table 2). French, German, American, and British films are well represented,
as are titles produced in Italy, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, and Austria. As a result of
Joyes voracious collecting, the films mirror the variety of the international market of
the early 1900s, not just in the specific countries represented but also in the numbers
reflecting which of these countries were more dominant. For instance, 37 percent of the
clippings were cut from French titles, mostly produced by Path Frres (over 20 percent
of the collection) and Gaumont (nearly 10 percent of the collection). It is not that Joye
specifically sought out French titles, but rather the prevalence of French films in the col-
lection is commensurate with what was available on the film market at the time of his
collecting. As Thomas Elsaesser points out, for the year 1911, French films made up one
quarter of the films shown in Germany, and Path in particular dominated the market
more than any other studio.10 Further mimicking the international film market, nearly
20 percent of the collection is from American productions as well as smaller pockets
of clippings (approximately 5 percent in total) from Germany, Great Britain, Sweden,
Denmark, Russia, and Austria.
Following Joyes retirement in 1911, the Borromum continued to add films to
the collection, though not with the same vigor or consistency as under Joyes leadership.
By 1913, the titles added lessened drastically, but collecting continued periodically,
and the institution added films from the 1920s and 1930s as supplements to Joyes
collection.11 After Joyes death in 1919, the films resided for nearly forty years at the Bor-
romum. Although the institution did not have adequate facilities by todays standards,
nevertheless it preserved the film collection well after the institutions programming had
largely, though never entirely, moved away from using motion pictures for educational
purposes. The Borromum completed a first inventory of the collection in 1942, and from
its estimate, the collection contained 1,540 films. The growing concern for the collec-
tions well-being led Stefan Bamberger (192397), a Jesuit priest and the collections
final Swiss curator, to transfer the films from Basel to Zurich in 1958.
The storage conditions in Zurich were superior to what the Borromum of-
fered, yet they were by no means able to prevent further deterioration. The principles
of film preservation operating at the time dictated the prints transfer to safety stock,
which was thought to be a stable successor to nitrates inherent instability. However,
the Zurich archive, like many others, lacked funding to carry out this work, for with such
a sizable collection, the cost of transferring some fifteen hundred films to safety stock
was prohibitive. In the end, Bamberger could only store the nitrate prints in more stable
conditions and reinventory the collection.
7 from nitrate to digital archive

Table 1. Proportions of clippings and titles by year of film release


Percentage of
collection (based on
Year of release No. of clippings No. of titles clippings)

1903 161 3 <1


1904 140 4 <1
1905 293 12 1
1906 454 8 2
1907 987 36 4
1908 1,153 34 5
1909 3,394 96 14
1910 3,640 106 15
1911 4,744 71 20
1912 1,167 30 5
1913 662 16 3
1914 167 6 <1
1915 305 2 1
1916 567 3 3
1919 49 1 <1
1921 80 1 <1
1923 71 2 <1
1925 15 1 <1
1926 72 1 <1
1927 141 2 <1
1944 16 1 <1

TURCONI DISCOVERS THE JOYE COLLECTION

It was in the early 1960s that Bamberger invited Italian film historian Davide Turconi to
Zurich to view the Joye Collection and help reassess it. Instantly recognizing the unique-
ness and rarity of such a vast trove of early cinema titles, Turconi was shocked by the
collections state of decay. As a result, he sought to move the prints to an archive with
better resources to care for the collection.12 However, Turconi was unable to secure the
transfer of the collection as a whole. Although he could not interest any archive in taking
on and preserving the entire Joye Collection, Turconi was able to send approximately
two hundred, mostly Italian-produced films to his native Italy for preservation, which
fletcher and yumibe 8

Table 2. List of studios by nationality


Studio No. of clippings No. of titles Percentage of collection
French 8, 804 326 37
Path Frres 5,069 172 23
Gaumont 2,119 90 9
Eclair 331 12 1
Eclipse 269 10 1
Lux 223 12 1
Star Film 208 3 <1
Le Lion 94 3 <1
Radios 60 5 <1
Film le Papillion 38 1 <1
Raleigh & Robert 33 4 <1
Italian 5,376 114 23
Cines 2,394 42 10
Itala 903 17 4
Ambrosio 607 20 3
Milano Film 352 4 1
Savoia 200 2 <1
Pasquali 169 6 <1
SAFFI-Comerio 153 2 <1
Aquila Film 156 7 <1
Rossi & C. 114 3 <1
Helios 110 1 <1
Unitas 83 1 <1
Vesuvio-Films 78 2 <1
Societ Italiana Pineschi 59 1 <1
Adolfe Croce 21 2 <1
Path Nizza 6 1 <1
American 4,308 95 18
Vitagraph 784 18 3
Edison 659 18 3
IMP 483 12 2
Biograph 458 10 2
Selig 369 10 1
Kalem 230 6 1
NYMP Co. Kay Bee 175 1 <1
American Kinema 175 3 <1
9 from nitrate to digital archive

Studio No. of clippings No. of titles Percentage of collection


Universal 169 4 <1
American Eclair 168 1 <1
Lubin 123 5 <1
Solax 120 1 <1
American Film Co. 102 1 <1
Essanay 46 1 <1
Vitascope 41 1 <1
101 Bison 83 1 <1
Catholic Art Association 80 1 <1
Yankee Studios 7 1 <1
German 1,197 38 5
Messter 286 11 1
Duskes 211 5 <1
Karl Werner 194 1 <1
Deutsche Mutoskop und Biograph 124 2 <1
Neue Film Gesellschaft 104 1 <1
Fita Film 83 1 <1
Plastrick-Film-Gesellschaft 20 1 <1
Westfalia Film 15 1 <1
Unidentified German Studio 11 1 <1
Bavaria Film 6 1 <1
Eiko Film 5 1 <1
Welt-Kinematograph, Freiburg 5 1 <1
British 650 29 3
Charles Urban 187 11 <1
Clarendon 143 3 <1
Hepworth 121 3 <1
British & Colonial 67 1 <1
Warwick 61 4 <1
Williamson Kinematograph 19 1 <1
London Cinematograph Co. 18 1 <1
Rosie Films 6 1 <1
Kineto Ltd. 4 1 <1
Swedish 507 3 2
Svenska Biografteatern 497 2 2
Svea Film 10 1 <1

(continued on next page)


f l e t c h e r a n d y u m i b e 10

Studio No. of clippings No. of titles Percentage of collection


Danish
Nordisk 403 14 1
Russian 313 5 1
Path Rus 249 3 1
Timan Rejngardt 48 1 <1
Mosfilm 16 1 <1
Austrian <1
Jupiter Film-GmbH 27 1 <1
Unidentified 2,834 196 12

underscores the heritage politics surrounding an international collection of prints such


as Joyes. Without a clear sense of the national character of the collection based on
production, it may very well have been difficult to interest national archives in taking on
the collection as a whole. Taken piecemeal, however, duplicates of Joyes Italian prints
became the core collection of Romes LAssociazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia
del Cinema (AIRSC), an archive Turconi founded in 1964.13 Turconi is often cited as a
leading figure in bringing the history of early Italian silent film to the forefront in Italy,
and indeed, the importance of the Joye Collection and specifically of Turconis work with
it must be recognized as a crucial part of his achievement.
Turconis difficulty in securing the transfer of the entire collection may seem
surprising given its unprecedented scope, yet this was also in many ways a result of the
perceived threat that such a sizable collection of early films posed to archives. Their own
worst enemy, the flammable nitrate base of the some fifteen hundred prints endangered
not only the collections survival but also the survival of other prints stored in proximity.
Nitrate motion picture film had ceased production almost entirely by 1951, but archives
and studios still felt the ramifications of nitrate well beyond this date. At the time Turconi
was seeking a better home for the Joye Collection, cold storage for nitrate was not yet a
film preservation strategy. Rather, archives often destroyed original nitrate prints after
they were transferred to safety stock to counteract the risk of fire.14 A series of notable
nitrate fires that occurred in the 1960s may very well have been in the minds of the
archives where Turconi sought refuge for the collection.15
Knowing that the Joye prints would only continue to deteriorate further, Turconi
devised a desperate solution. Armed with a pair of shears, he began cutting clippings
from the Joye prints, freeing them from the presumed fate of the reels remainder.
11 f r o m n i t r a t e t o d i g i t a l a r c h i v e

Turconi later described to his friend and protg Paolo Cherchi Usai how he would string
up the reels of nitrate film along makeshift clotheslines, some one thousand feet in
length and both sticky and wet as a result of advanced nitrate decomposition, allowing
the prints to dry.16 When the films had dried, Turconi made his clippings with the help
of a rewind bench, usually two or three frames in length at a time. For the most part,
he spaced these cuts across the entirety of the reels length so that he captured shots
and scenes from throughout the film rather than in a localized area. It is difficult to de-
termine how systematic Turconis cutting was, but the clippings in general do seem to
recapitulate in fragments the narrative and expositional structures of the films (using
parts to represent the whole). This process of selecting single frames out of potentially
thousands is not far removed from todays standards of creating and managing digital
moving image records. Whether born digital or digitized from celluloid, motion pictures
stored within digital asset management software require catalogers to select a single
key frame to serve as a thumbnail for browsing and searching collections. This is also
true of video uploading services, such as YouTube and Vimeo, which allow uploaders to
choose these key frames rather than defaulting to the files first frame, which is usually
black. In this way, key frames are selected either to summarize the assets visual content
or communicate something distinguishing about the asset, such as its color scheme, title
designs, or a resonant narrative moment, similar to Turconis aims with his collection.17
One might assume that Turconi would have cut one clipping per scene to docu-
ment the length of a film, yet, as we will discuss in more detail, there are often multiple
clippings per scene. In the end, there is no way to be certain of his strategies, for even
with 23,491 of Turconis clippings accounted for, more are likely yet to be found. What
is clear, though, is that Turconi certainly used a magnifying lens to aid him in selecting
the frames, for his clippings were remarkably well chosen, both visually and technically.
In total, Turconi cut clippings from approximately 799 of Joyes films.18 After cutting the
clippings, he carefully packaged them within paper envelopes, labeling these with the
corresponding title of the film and, when known, the production company, national
origin, and year.
It is important to note that Turconi did not cut clippings from all the Joye prints
made available to him. It appears that he was more interested in preserving the fiction
rather than nonfiction material, such as the science films, industrial films, and actualities
that Joye collected. Whereas over half of Joyes films can be characterized as nonfiction,
with the exception of some notable travelogues, most of which feature stencil-color,
Turconi focused more on the fiction in the collection. Approximately 85 percent of the
titles appearing in the Turconi Collection are fiction films, which deviates significantly
f l e t c h e r a n d y u m i b e 12

from Joyes collection, and also from what was exhibited at the time, when one out every
two films screened between 1900 and 1910 was nonfiction.
Moreover, because of Turconis interest in preserving Italys cinema heritage,
nearly 25 percent of the clippings in the collection originate from films made by Italian
studios, such as Cines, Itala, and Ambrosio. However, according to Cosandeys inven-
tory of the Joye Collection, only 5 percent of the films were Italian produced.19 For the
purposes of comparison, German-produced films also make up 5 percent of the Joye
Collection, yet Turconi cut only 1,197 German clippings, a mere one-fifth the number of
the collections Italian clippings. Both discrepancies demonstrate ways in which the
Turconi and Joye collections, though intimately related, are in crucial respects different.

THE JOYE COLLECTION FINDS ITS NEW HOME

The Joye Collection, minus Turconis clippings, continued to be cared for in Zurich until
1976, when it was at last transferred to the more stable storage facilities of the NFA. Brit-
ish filmmaker David Mingay instigated this move after discovering the collection while
researching a television documentary on early cinema, The Amazing Years of Cinema.20
Mingay alerted David Francis, then curator of the NFA, of the singular, unique character
of the collection as well as its vulnerable condition, and Francis acted quickly to arrange
the transfer of the films to the archive. When the surviving prints arrived, the archive
began the expensive and time-consuming process of repairing the nitrate splices and
duplicating the collection onto safety film, while also preserving the nitrate originalsa
process completed in the mid-1990s. However, the inevitably splicey dupe prints born
out of the project are mostly black and white, a result of financial as well as technologi-
cal constraints. A portion of the Joye stencil-color films were transferred to color stock;
however, the number was relatively small, and unfortunately, very few of the reproduced
prints contain the variety of color effects (the hand colors, tints, tones, and stencil work)
found in the originals.21 Currently, 1,158 original Joye nitrate prints still exist, and the
BFI National Archives curator of silent films, Bryony Dixon, is working alongside curator
Sonia Genaitay to restore more Joye titles to reflect their original colorssomething with
which the Turconi Project is collaborating.
Like Joyes prints, the clippings that Turconi cut also have traveled widely owing
to his life-long dedication to promoting the study of film history. Turconi did not hoard
his material but rather distributed the clippings throughout Italy in the mid-1960s and
into the 1980s. He sent material primarily to Italian cinetecas and archives and also to
fellow film historians. Turconi gave nearly 40 percent of the total clippings to La Cineteca
13 f r o m n i t r a t e t o d i g i t a l a r c h i v e

Table 3. Proportions of clippings by original stewards after Turconi


Stewards No. of clippings Percentage of collection

Paolo Cherchi Usai 10,730 46


Cineteca del Friuli 8,975 38
Cineteca di Bologna 2,285 10
Assessorato alla Cultura della Provincia di Pavia 680 3
Riccardo Redi 499 2
Alberto Bernardini 322 1

del Friuli in Gemona, while entrusting 45 percent of the collection to Paolo Cherchi Usai,
then assistant curator at GEH, in the 1980s. The remaining clippings made their way in
smaller batches to other historians and archives, such as Alberto Bernardini and Riccardo
Redi as well as La Cineteca di Bologna and the Assessorato alla Cultura of the Province
of Pavia (see Table 3). GEH stored the clippings belonging to Cherchi Usai, and in 2004,
he officially donated his material to GEH. La Cineteca del Friuli in 2006 and Bernardini
and Redi in 2009 all followed suit by donating their material to GEH, while Bologna and
Udine have maintained control of their clippings but have collaboratively made scans
of their material available to the Turconi Project.
As the clippings spread, the films and knowledge of the Joye Collection grew
as the material circulated throughout Europe and eventually the United States.22 During
a period when early cinemas history and significance were being reevaluated, these
films played an important role, as they are one of the most substantial and diverse col-
lections of early film. Turconi and lAssociazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del
Cinema, for instance, first screened copies of Joye dupe prints in Italy in 1970 at the
retrospective Il primo cinema Italiano. Five years later, David Mingay began work on
the aforementioned television series, The Amazing Years of Cinema, which relied heavily
on footage from the Joye Collection. In 1978, two years after David Francis brought the
collection to the NFA, Francis went on to organize the landmark International Federa-
tion of Film Archives Brighton conference, which was one of the first joint academic and
archival considerations of early cinema. No films from the Joye Collection were ready to
screen in Brighton, but in correspondence, Francis has suggested that the Joye material
probably influenced his idea for the conference.23 After Brighton, the NFA ramped up
preservation of the Joye Collection, reel by reel, onto safety and, later, polyester, and
with this work, Joye prints screened throughout Europe and North America. The archive
debuted material in 1981 at the London Film Festival in a restoration series, under the
f l e t c h e r a n d y u m i b e 14

title Josef Joye: A Rediscovery of Early Cinema. Also of note, the Giornate del Cinema
Muto in Pordenone, Italy, has frequently programmed titles from the collection, adding
to the dissemination of its singular character. More recently, the conference held in 2006
by Domitor, the international society for the study of film cinema, at the University of
Michigan featured the BFIs Bryony Dixon presenting thirteen French travelogues, each
preserved in color, from the Joye Collection, and she screened a similar set of films at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2006.24 Today the collection continues to
be utilized for a variety of scholarly and archival projects.
Establishing and preserving a collection the size of Joyes was and continues
to be a monumental project at the BFI National Archive; however, in a way, Turconis
dispersing of the clippings has given the collection a more mobile and interactive exis-
tence, one that began well before the days of video and digital distribution. In contrast
to Joyes reels, the circulation of the clippings has allowed historians to examine them
more easily for research. Richard Abels influential The Cin Goes to Town: French Cinema
18961914 not only draws on films contained within the Joye Collection but also frequently
reproduces Turconi clippings to illustrate his discussion of the films.25 As well, Cherchi
Usai used numerous clippings to illustrate portions of his seminal Silent Cinema: An
Introduction.26 Indeed, one could argue that the frames are more accessible than their
parent films precisely because they are fragments, even as one loses the moving im-
age with these photograms. Viewing them does not require the same types of archival
apparatus (e.g., viewing and rewind tables with skilled technicians to operate them),
and access to nitrate vaults for inspection has been less of an issue for the clippings,
especially now that they have been digitized and made available online.
To expand this type of circulation and mobility, digital access has been a cen-
tral goal of the Turconi Project, which began as a hybrid, analogdigital preservation
project in 2000. Patricia De Filippi (then a student at the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of
Film Preservation from the Cinemateca Brasileira in So Paulo) established the initial
parameters of the project to preserve and make digitally accessible the entirety of Tur-
conis clippings.27 Between 2000 and 2011, a number of GEH staff members, researchers,
and students assisted in the processing of the massive collection, and over the decade,
it would grow as the various cinetecas, universities, and historians mentioned earlier
brought forth their Turconi clippings to collaborate with the project.
From the inception of the project to its recent launch online, the growth of digital
initiatives on the part of motion picture archives and museums has been pronounced.
Digital technology has developed rapidly, yet the workflow on the Turconi Collection
has remained remarkably consistent, despite the large number of people involved. To
15 f r o m n i t r a t e t o d i g i t a l a r c h i v e

preserve and process the collection digitally, the clippings were first removed from the
housings in which they arrived.28 The individual clippings were then scanned on a flat-
bed, high-resolution scanner and cataloged in a Filemaker database, which serves as
the background database for the collection online. Each database entry includes a low-
resolution jpeg file of the scan, and information on edge codes, splices, decomposition,
fading, or anomalies is noted in the database, as are color details for the clippings. Last,
to expand on the existing metadata, archivists, researchers, and scholars from various
institutions collaborated online to identify clippings and the films from which they were
cut, as detailed in each records notes field.
Once all the information was recorded and the images were uploaded to the
database, the clippings were then individually housed in customized paper envelopes.
The envelopes, constructed from microchamber paper, importantly allow the clippings to
breathe, prolonging their life span. To add further longevity, the clippings are now stored
at GEHs Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center, which houses the museums substantial
collection of nitrate material in climate-controlled vaults at a fixed temperature of 40
degrees Fahrenheit and 30 percent relative humidity. While the BFI National Archive
houses the surviving nitrates of the Joye Collection under the most advanced preserva-
tion conditions, the Turconi clippings housed in breathable paper envelopes ironically
stand a better chance at a longer life span as fragments than the totality of Joyes nitrate
reels.29 By severing the healthy parts from the decomposing reels, Turconi allowed the
vast majority of the clippings to endure for much longer, unhindered by contagion. It is
yet to be seen how long the digital artifacts produced from these fragments will last.
Certainly the hard drives on which they now reside will wear out decades before the
nitrate originals fade, meaning that the data will have to be migrated routinely, which
is the archival future of the digital image.

TOTALITY AND FRAGMENTATION

The intertwined timeline of the Joye and Turconi collections offers insight into film col-
lecting and archiving over the past century. This is a history marked by shifting politics,
standards, and ideals as much as by the changing technologies of preservation that
continue to expand and control our understanding of the historical nature of the mov-
ing image. In these movements, the film artifacts have been subjected to a variety of
archival procedures, some of which are far different from what we would necessarily,
or ideally, do today. Nonetheless, these frames represent but a tiny fraction of the Joye
Collection. If one could splice the clippings together23,491 clippings that contain a
f l e t c h e r a n d y u m i b e 16

total of 51,966 individual framesat 16 fps, they would amount to approximately fifty-four
minutes of film. Out of approximately two hundred hours of original footage in the Joye
collection, Turconis fifty-four minutes of clippings comprise perhaps less than half of 1
percent of Joyes original material. Still, just as ruins are traces of a greater whole, the
power of these frames is remarkable. They record a struggle to preserve and remember
in the face of decay.
From these fractions of a second of film, one can imagine both the films model
imagein Cherchi Usais sense of the ideal form of a film, neither fragmented nor de-
cayedand also its imperfect history that encompasses the various transformations and
circulations that the films have navigated over the past century.30 Through the archival
movements of Turconis clippings, these bits and pieces provide a remarkable cross
section of filmmaking and European distribution during the early 1900s, and given the
size, scope, and discrete nature of the material, they constitute one of the largest and
most varied visual collections of early film readily available for study.
Yet the digital access that we now have to artifacts such as Turconis collection
alters the parameters of the historical research we can do with film. As David Rodowick
points out, for decades, research into film history required a confrontation with the
material scarcity of its objects of inquiry.31 It was not so long ago that to study a film
meant tracking down rare prints held by institutions or private collectors. Today, with the
recent initiatives to make early films available online, we are inundated with a wealth of
footage and accompanying dataagain, indicative of Manovichs database complex.32
Early films can now be studied and enjoyed from the comforts of the home, via a variety
of digital devices. Indeed, with the Turconi database, end users need not even click play
to examine the collections films. Rather, browsing the database in its entirety provides
a unique sense of the material contours of early cinema, yet it is an experience that can
quickly be overwhelmed by the totality of the data presented. Knowledge does not arise
automatically from open access; rather, with the mass of information now available in
digital collections, it is more vital than ever for increased curatorial involvement and
guidance in shaping the pathways that lead to the production of knowledge within our
digital archives.

PATHWAYS 1: THE MATERIAL FRAME VERSUS MOVEMENT

Confronted by the scarcity of film artifacts, the approach to film history that emerged
after the Brighton conference was grounded in no small way on archival workgoing into
archives to look at films that had not before been viewed and handled by film scholars on
17 f r o m n i t r a t e t o d i g i t a l a r c h i v e

Figure 2. Clipping 11322,


Steenbecks and rewind tables. There is something physi- unidentified film with severe
sprocket damage; hand-
cal about this work, which brings one into close, tactile colored in original. The
Davide Turconi Collection,
proximity to the film itself. The material knowledge found
courtesy George Eastman
on the filmstrip is important to resuscitate today when House.

current approaches to digital imaging have shifted our


relationship to the medium. With celluloid films transfer to DVD, streaming video, and,
earlier, videotape, we lose films material frame of referencethe vertical edges and
horizontal frame lines that bind the image together. In this, we miss the splice marks
and edge codes and the ingenious sprockets that are one of the banes and blessings of
celluloid. They record the movement of time, not just in the fractions of a second that
f l e t c h e r a n d y u m i b e 18

Figure 3. Clipping 7850,


La campana (Cines, 1909);
each sprocket indexes as it ratchets forward, but also in tinted red in the original,
the wear of time as they break apart with use (see Figure with fingerprint embedded
across the frames. The Davide
2). The scratches, fading, and decomposition found in Turconi Collection, courtesy
George Eastman House.
Turconis fragmentsthe wounds of time cut across their
surfacehave also been paradoxically preserved by Turconis own act of destruction with
a pair of scissors, new incisions that eradicate the possibility of cinematic movement
in time. Preservation and destruction are thus cut into and across the collection. With
the digital life of film, we risk losing something tactile in the film medium to which the
scars of Turconis frames attest. The project has preserved the imperfect materiality of
these frames, tactile fingerprints and all (see Figure 3). From a curatorial perspective,
the parameters of filmic digitization for this particular project give the digital scans a
virtual weight of materiality.
19 f r o m n i t r a t e t o d i g i t a l a r c h i v e

Figure 4. Clipping 14541,


Les Tulipes (Path, 1907);
At the same time, the price of the digital mate- stenciled in the original, with
the bare legs and arms of the
riality of these frames has been the loss of the moving
women crudely hand-colored
image. Yet, according to recent theorists of digital media, red, probably by a censor. The
Davide Turconi Collection,
such as Laura Mulvey and David Rodowick, even with the courtesy George Eastman
digital moving image, our relationship to the temporality House.

of film is transformed when it is digitized.33 As Mulvey has argued, digital technologies


allow viewers to stop the flow of cinematic time more easily, to see the still image at
the push of the pause button, which reenlivens questions of stillness, movement, and
time at the heart of the cinematic apparatus.34 For whatever we gain in control and ac-
cess, there is something lost to historiography in the movement and freezing of digital
images. Analog and digital cinema process frames differently to create the illusion of
movement. With analog projection, still frames are exhibited at a fraction of a second,
f l e t c h e r a n d y u m i b e 20

alternating with the flickering darkness of the shutter, whereas digital projection removes
the need for a shutter, presenting instead a continuous beam of light in which a frame
is continually refreshed and blended with the contiguous ones around it. For Rodowick,
these technological differences complicate our understanding of duration in the cinema,
as traditionally understood as the experience of a sequence of successive still images
separated through the shutter interval.35
The Turconi clippings are immobilized and therefore return us digitally to the
still image. As a result, these images function individually like frame enlargements, sum-
marizing a films visual information. Collectively, they uncover the photographic base
of film, and digitizing and disseminating the Turconi clippings has brought the 51,966
frames found across these bits and pieces back into optical consciousness, albeit as
stilled artifacts. However, the trace of movement is still present across these frames,
as it is in any inspected film print. For instance, in the two-frame clipping 14541 from
Segundo de Chomns Les Tulipes (Path, 1907), movement is registered across these
imagesthey record a literal blink of an eye (see Figure 4).
For Rodowick, the succession of a sequence of still frames on a film strip is what
grounds analog cinemas temporal sense of duration: each frame indexes a fraction of
a second in time.36 In digitizing Turconis collection as a whole, one can begin to piece
together the frames temporal positionsafter Turconis fragmentation of analog time,
filmic duration can be in a sense resurrected digitally in the collection. From an analysis
of the titles and clippings that Turconi distributed to various archives and historians, it
becomes evident that he rarely sent clippings from a single film to only one recipient.
Instead, he spread specific titles out to a variety of people and institutions. For instance,
with Paths Mose sauv des eaux (The Infancy of Moses; 1911), there are ninety-eight
clippings in the collection, and of these, Turconi gave clippings to Paolo Cherchi Usai
(twenty-eight clippings), La Cineteca del Friuli (twenty-seven clippings), La Cineteca di
Bologna (eighteen clippings), and the Provincia di Pavia (twenty-five clippings, now
held at the University of Udine).37 All these clippings were from the same Joye print, and
although each frame found across the clippings is unique, many of the clippings are quite
similar, as they represent the same shots and scenes across the various holdings. In other
words, each recipient received a similar fragmented representation of the entire film.
With the collection digitized, the temporal and spatial relationships between
each of the clippings can be discerned, as evident in Figure 5 from Mose sauv des
eaux. Using the Path edge codes and sprocket holes, six clippings, which comprise
twenty-eight frames from different locations (Friuli, Udine, Bologna, and GEH), can be
pieced together to visualize where Turconi excised frames. This example also reveals
21 f r o m n i t r a t e t o d i g i t a l a r c h i v e

Figure 5. Diagram of
reconstructed clippings (5 of
28 consecutive frames) from
Mose sauv des eaux (Path,
1911): 393, the Davide Turconi
Collection, courtesy George
Eastman House, originally
Cherchi Usai; and 13675
(Udine).
f l e t c h e r a n d y u m i b e 22

a possible method for how Turconi made at least some of his cuts. Whereas Turconis
clippings are typically between two and three frames each, the clippings that reside
with the University of Udine generally feature more frames than average: clipping 13659
from Mose, for instance, has sixteen frames, and others from Udine have as many as
twenty. These Udine clippings were originally part of Turconis personal library of books
and film materials, which he donated to the Provence of Pavia, and Pavia entrusted the
clippings to the University of Udine. On the basis of the Udine clippings, it seems likely
that Turconi may have excised much longer clippings from the Joye prints than previously
believed, and then later, when he distributed material, he cut them into the smaller sizes
that compose the majority of the collection.

PATHWAYS 2: SPLICES, TITLES, AND TINTS

In addition to the clippings fragmented relationship to temporality, within the collection


are other pockets of material data that reveal significant aspects of early cinema history,
such as title design as well as editing and applied coloring techniques. To create pathways
across the collection, the online database is curated to reflect these data, highlighting
through notes fields and cataloging methods the collections splices, titles, and tints.
For instance, regarding early editing techniques, in Turconis process of col-
lecting, he cut many of the clippings across splices, indicating that even with the longer
clippings, he sought to reduce the relative gaps in the original print. In Mose, for
instance, 10 percent of the clippings contain splices. In cutting over splices, not only
did Turconi reduce the obtrusiveness of the excisions but he also preserved a variety of
useful, material data from the prints that the online database can highlight. For example,
there are indications of both positive cutting and also, importantly, negative cutting
in the material. All the splices in Mose are positive splices, in which the original tape
splices are apparent. However, in examples such as clipping 4657 from Kings of the For-
est (Selig, 1912), splice marks are printed into the positive image and are indicative of
negative cuttingas in the line across the mans face in the Kings of the Forest example
(see Figure 6). The kind of data that can be surveyed from these splices could develop
into a significant study of early cinema editing practices, for the laboratory history of
cutting practices has not yet been studied in detail.
In cases in which Turconi was not able to identify film titles in the collection,
his focus on splices in his clippings has now proven pivotal for identifying the films
from which the clippings were taken, for oftentimes, these splices entailed title cards
that preceded or followed shot sequences. Of the nine clippings with splices found in
23 f r o m n i t r a t e t o d i g i t a l a r c h i v e

Figure 6. Clipping 4657,


Kings of the Forest (Selig,
1912); tinted amber in the
original. The Davide Turconi
Collection, courtesy George
Eastman House.
f l e t c h e r a n d y u m i b e 24

Figure 7. Clipping 4175, Die


Mose, for example, seven contain title cards. The film Todesbraut (Jupiter-Film
was relatively easy to identify based on Turconis notes, GmbH, 1913); tinted blue
and green in the original. The
the subject matter, and clear Path edge codes, but Davide Turconi Collection,
courtesy George Eastman
for a film such as Die Todesbraut (The Bride of Death;
House.
Jupiter-Film GmbH, 1913), the title identification was
more difficult. However, clipping 4175 of the film includes a title card naming the film,
and after a splice, it also contains a title frame listing the films cast (see Figure 7). Title
cards such as this example cut from the first frames of the reel frequently appear in the
collection. Perhaps not surprisingly, Turconi appears to have divided title frames so
that they resided with multiple institutions and historians rather than just one, thereby
maximizing the potential to identify the films from which the clippings were cut.
These spliced clippings can also convey more complex information, such as
the function of the films tinting scheme. For example, in clipping 20941, from Duskess
25 f r o m n i t r a t e t o d i g i t a l a r c h i v e

Figure 8. Clipping 20941,


Wildschtzenrache (Poachers Revenge; 1910), with its Wildschtzenrache (Duskes,
one frame tinted dark blue and the frame beneath tinted 1910); tinted blue and yellow
in the original. The Davide
yellow, Turconi captures the transition from darkness to Turconi Collection, courtesy
George Eastman House.
light, as the man in the frame lights a candle, revealing
a woman collapsed on the floor (see Figure 8). This tint transition was made with a tape
splice, indicating that the positive print was assembled after coloring was completed in
the lab (a common practice in early cinema).38 Much rarer are examples in the collection
in which such tint transitions were carried out without splices, as in clipping 21510 from
Paths Martyrs chrtiens (Christian Martyrs; 1905), in which the tint shifts from blue to
red, indicating the precision of Paths lab work, probably carried out by manual brush
or sponge tinting.39
Indeed, the color metadata found across the clippings is one of the most use-
ful aspects of the collection, as titles such as Martyrs chrtiens offer insight into the
f l e t c h e r a n d y u m i b e 26

application and styles of color in early film. This is significant for the history of early
color cinema because, for most of the twentieth century, the preservation and restoration
of color film was technologically difficult. Aniline dyes, the primary colorants used on
early films, fade at unpredictable rates, and color safety stock until the 1980s was highly
unstable, which made archival restorations of color films near impossible. Preservation
technologies have recently improved for color, as in the Desmet method for re-creating
tints and tones on contemporary color stock, and also with digital grading, allowing for
more faithful restorations.40 There is more technical work to be done on color, but in the
face of glaring gaps in the historical record, the colors of Turconis clippings are extremely
useful for research on early color cinema. While these details are easily discerned on
close inspection of the celluloid clippings, the tactile qualities of the clippings, such as
the cement residue from century-old splices or the subtle brushstrokes, may not be as
evident in their digital surrogates. Consequently, this kind of data, incredibly important
to understanding early cinema, needs to be reflected in the metadata of digital records
and the curation of digital resources. Such early colors, tint transitions, and splices
contextualize the clippings, yet these images were never meant to be experienced in
this fashion. As photograms, the moving image disappears when two or more frames
are consumed simultaneously as material artifacts. Yet, the splices themselves, with
their tape or cement adhesive, and the saturated hues of their aniline dyes point to the
materiality of celluloid, even as digital surrogates.

THE DIGITAL SHAPE OF HISTORY

Commenting on how digital technologies are shaking up the cinema industry, the archival
world, and, in particular, cinema studies, Miriam Hansen writes in the preface to her
posthumous and magisterial Cinema and Experience, Rather than a threat, I consider
this a productive, energizing push for opening ostensibly closed chapters of film theory,
just as I believe that digital cinema, especially in its independent versions, will change
the shape of past film history.41 Indeed, one of the provocations of the digital fracture
point that we face now is that it allows us to approach again the fundamental political,
aesthetic, and historical questions of the cinematic medium. The Turconi Collection
provides a useful case study through which to study this reshaping of past history in
terms of our rapidly expanding digital archives of moving and still images.
The digital data available to us now are remarkable for the type of virtual research
they allow one to carry out afar from the material archive. Yet, as Rodowick notes, it is
vital to recognize that digital technology inscribes its own will to power in the world.42
27 f r o m n i t r a t e t o d i g i t a l a r c h i v e

Much of the funding that supports digitization and research is now within the inchoate
field of digital humanities, which increasingly ties grant funding to digital research,
output, and industrial collaboration.43 These prerogatives are often carried out in tandem
with the utopian promise to open access for all to the totality of history via the digital
database. Yet this database complex fundamentally entails loss, as it transforms and
simulates material history through a paradigm that funds the digitization but rarely the
preservation of original elements. The present danger is the emergence of a digitize and
discard approach to material history, which would return us to the errors of the past: the
disregard of original nitrate after its transfer to safety stock. At least with celluloid film,
much of the preservation costs are up front with photochemical preservation, whereas
long-term storage is relatively affordable in comparison to the costs involved with digital
migration.44 Looking ahead to when filmstock will no longer be produced, these funding
imperatives will only grow more dire. Now, in the midst of the recent financial crisis and
ensuing cuts in archival funding and staffing, it is necessary more than ever to intervene
both theoretically and politically in digital funding initiatives to seek economic as well
as technological solutions for the secure, long-term preservation of original elements,
whether celluloid or digital.
The Turconi Projects preservation initiative offers some perspective for this.
Even though it is focused on a collection of fragments, the project aims to encompass
the broader total history of the films it documents. However, the parameters of such a
history are to an extent impossible in scope, like Jorge Luis Borgess allegorical map of
an empire that was the same size as the empire. Histories, like maps, must be hewed
down to size if they are to be functional, and such cuttings entail compromise and loss.
With Turconis collection, this fact is inescapable: with his clippings, we are left with
photograms rather than the moving image, and now primary access to them is through
digital files accessible on computer screens and smart phones rather than nitrate cel-
luloid. While moving forward technically and temporally, ethically, one must also look
back through the archive to trace what survives of the past in these fragmentary records.
The objective of the project, funded primarily by GEH and La Cineteca del Friuli, has
been to preserve as well as to digitize, so that the materiality that grounds the digital
records still survives and can be accessed in GEHs nitrate vaults. Now that this work
has been completed, an ensuing aim is to continue working with the BFI to find further
ways to integrate the material, thus reducing the fragmented nature of the surviving
Joye filmssomething largely contingent on external funding, technology, and control.
It is our hope that the kind of research that the collection supports will be a
lasting testament to Davide Turconi. He was dedicated to the study of silent cinema,
f l e t c h e r a n d y u m i b e 28

and he was also committed to teaching new generations about itto inviting and in-
culcating new perspectives, new ways of looking at the cinema and its material past.
The projects goal has been to further Turconis work through this preservation and
digitization effortto preserve the original material and also to use digital technologies
to provide access to film history, even as we are today facing the material end of the
celluloid-based medium as we have known it. In the face of these technological changes,
cinemas past can still move us even as its materiality dissipates into digital artifacts.
A historiographic lesson to take away from Turconis project is that preservation and
transformation are creatively and intricately linked through the shifting technological
horizon of the medium. With these changes, Turconis collection allows us to confront
why certain imagesthese frameshave had such unexpected, media-spanning af-
terlives. They have been recycled in creative and often unforeseeable ways, yet across
technical revolutions, these images still speak to us historically, politically, and aestheti-
cally. It is both the history and future of the moving image archive to encompass these
transformations.

Alicia Fletcher is digital coordinator at TIFF Bell Lightbox. She holds a mas-
ters degree in photographic preservation and collections management jointly
granted by Ryerson University and George Eastman House as well as a mas-
ters degree in cinema studies from the University of Toronto. While studying
at George Eastman House, she served as research assistant on the Turconi
Project and devoted her thesis, Framing Early Cinema, to examining the
collection.

Joshua Yumibe holds a joint appointment as director of film studies at Michi-


gan State University and as a lecturer in film studies at the University of St.
Andrews. He is the author of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Mod-
ernism and the codirector of the Davide Turconi Project.

NOTES
We would like to thank Paolo Cherchi Usai, George Eastman House, and the
Giornate del Cinema Muto for their partnership with the Turconi Project as
well as Christina Stewart, media archivist at Exhibition Place Records and
Archives (Toronto), for her valuable comments and suggestions on this ar-
ticle.

1. For useful reflections on these transformations, see Paolo Cherchi Usai,


The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age
29 f r o m n i t r a t e t o d i g i t a l a r c h i v e

(London: British Film Institute, 2001); Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel:
The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2009); and Tacita Dean and Nicholas Cullinan, Tacita Dean: Film,
Unilever Series (London: Tate, 2011). The epigraph comes from Walter Ben-
jamin, Reply to Oscar A.H. Schmitz [1927], trans. Rodney Livingstone, in
Selected Writings, vol. 2 (192734), ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland,
and Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999), 1617.
2. For specific Turconi clippings referenced here, see http://www.cinetecadel-
friuli.org/progettoturconi/clip.php?CLIP_NUMBER=10286 for Figure 1. For
other clippings, replace the number at the end of the hyperlink (10286) with
the specific clipping number being looked up.
3. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2001), 98.
4. Roland Cosandey, Welcome Home, Joye! Film um 1910. Aus der
Sammlung Joseph Joye (NFTVA, London), Kintop Schriften 1 (Basel, Switzer-
land: Stroemfeld, 1993). Also see Roland Cosandey, Labb Joye, une collec-
tion, une pratique: Premire approche, in Une Invention du Diable? Cinma
des Premiers Temps et Religion /An Invention of the Devil? Religion and
Early Cinema, ed. Roland Cosandey, Andr Gaudreault, and Tom Gunning,
6070 (Sainte-Foy, Qubec: Presses de lUniversit Laval, 1992).
5. David Robinson, Rediscovering the Abbs Treasures, Film Intelligence,
2005, http://www.filmintelligence.org/abbes-treasure.htm.
6. Joshua Yumibe, From Switzerland to Italy and All Around the World:
The Josef Joye and Davide Turconi Collections, in Early Cinema and the
National, ed. Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini, and Rob King (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2008), 322.
7. Indeed, David Robinson maintains that Joye smuggled his reels from
Germany into Switzerland under his cassocks, presumably to avoid import
duties. Robinson, Rediscovering the Abbs Treasures.
8. Stephen Bottomore, A Fallen Star: Problems and Practices in Early Film
Preservation, in This Film Is Dangerous: A Celebration of Nitrate Film, ed.
Roger Smither and Catherine Surowiec (Brussels: FIAF, 2002), 188.
9. Bottomore, A Fallen Star, 188.
10. Thomas Elsaesser, The Presence of Path in Germany, in La Firme
Pathe Frres, 18961914, ed. Michel Marie, Laurent Le Forestier, and Cath-
erine Schapira (Paris: AFRHC, 2004), 394. Also see Richard Abel, The Red
Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 19001910 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1999).
11. Notable films added after Joyes departure that are also represented in Tur-
conis clippings include Lois Webers A Chapter in Her Life (Universal, 1932)
and an early work of Victor Sjstrm, Havsgamar (Sea Vultures), produced by
Swedens Svenska Biografteatern AB in 1916. The collection of clippings also
includes sixteen fragments from Sergei Eisensteins Ivan Groznyy (Ivan the
Terrible, Part I; Mosfilm, 1944), each featuring an optical sound trackthe
only example in the collection. Italian titles featured in a single frame from
Ivan indicate that the print did not originate from the Joye Collection.
12. See Cosandey, Welcome Home Joye, 1314.
13. See Vittorio Martinelli and Riccardo Redi, Catalogo della Cineteca
f l e t c h e r a n d y u m i b e 30

AIRSC: Nuova edizione Reveduta e Aggiornata, ed. Federico Striuli (Rome:


Associazione Italiana per le Ricerche di Storia del Cinema, 2012).
14. Paul Spehr, The Library of Congress and Its Nitrate Problem; or, Was
It Necessary to Destroy the Nitrate in Order to Preserve It, in Smither and
Surowiec, This Film Is Dangerous, 232.
15. Severe fires broke out in Yokohama, Japan, at a developing laboratory
in 1960, at a federal archive in Munich, Germany, in 1961, at the National
Film Board Archives of Canada in Quebec in 1967, and at the Cinemateca
Brasileira in Sao Paulo in 1969. See A Calendar of Film Fires, in Smither
and Surowiec, This Film Is Dangerous, 42953.
16. For an example of advanced nitrate decomposition in the Turconi Col-
lection, see http://www.cinetecadelfriuli.org/progettoturconi/clip.php?CLIP_
NUMBER=11083.
17. Outside of the digitized films, archivists often create frame enlargements
(using digital camera stands or flatbed scanners) from reels of celluloid when
an image is needed (and a production still is unavailable or unsuitable) to
visually advertise a film for upcoming screenings, funding, or donor reports.
18. The current number of titles identified in the database is 799; however,
with nearly 6 percent (1,375 out of 23,491) of the clippings yet to be identi-
fied, some of these titles are certainly duplicates.
19. Cossandey, Labb Joye, 68n9. Also see Table A2.
20. The Amazing Years of Cinema aired in the United Kingdom in 1981.
21. It should be noted that, even though many of the colors of the Joye prints
were not duplicated in preservation copies, the archive did carefully annotate
the original colors in its paper accession records, which was not a common
archival practice of the time. For further discussion of the complications
involved in preserving stencil-color films, see Sonia Genaitay and Bryony
Dixon, Early Colour Restoration at the BFI National Archive, Journal of
British Cinema and Television 7, no. 1 (2010): 13346. The authors use the
Joye Collection, specifically Paths Fillettes de Bretagne (Little Girls in
Brittany; 1909), as part of their case study. Twenty frames from this film are
included in the Turconi Collection, which Genaitay and Dixon consulted in
preparation for the restoration work.
22. For further details of these circulations, see Cosandey, Welcome Home
Joye, 1415.
23. David Francis, e-mail message to the author, May 7, 2012. For more on
the symposium, see See Roger Holman, ed., Cinema 1900/1906 (Brussels:
FIAF, 1982).
24. For a list of the films presented at the conference, refer to Domitors web-
site: http://domitor.org/downloads/2006-program.pdf.
25. Richard Abel, The Cin Goes to Town: French Cinema, 18961914,
updated and expanded ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994),
Figures 17, 18, 30, 36ab, 37, 38, 43, 44, 54, 60, 61, 71, 73, 80, and 8387.
26. Paolo Cherchi Usai, Silent Cinema: An Introduction (London: British
Film Institute, 2000), Plates 18, 19, 46, 48, 51, and 52.
27. See Paolo Cherchi Usai and Joshua Yumibe, The Davide Turconi Col-
lection of Nitrate Film Frames (18971944), Journal of Film Preservation 85
(November 2011): 4649.
31 f r o m n i t r a t e t o d i g i t a l a r c h i v e

28. The clippings that originated from Cherchi Usai were for the most
part stored in paper envelopes originally devised by Turconi. The Cineteca
del Friuli clippings, however, arrived at the museum in slide mounts that
encased the frames in clear plastic. The mounts protected the clippings from
abrasions, but unfortunately, they also accelerated deterioration by locking in
the nitrate off-gases and inhibiting the clippings ability to breathe.
29. Existing areas of nitrate decomposition continue to spread to other por-
tions of a reela result of the autocatalytic nature of the chemical reaction
that causes nitrocellulose to oxidize. The clippings, conversely, are freed from
this scenario, and the autocatalytic nature of the reaction does not apply to
the same degree; there is less material to fuel the chemical reaction because
the clippings can be stored in smaller batches, separated from any existing
decomposition.
30. Cherchi Usai, Death of Cinema, 1011.
31. D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2007), 26.
32. Manovich, Language of New Media, 98.
33. Also see ibid., esp. 31522, and Garrett Stewart, Framed Time: Towards a
Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
34. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Lon-
don: Reaktion Books, 2006).
35. See Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film, 13738.
36. Ibid., 5254.
37. The titles from which Turconi cut large numbers of clippingssuch as
Une conspiration sous Henri III (A Conspiracy under Henry III; Path, 1911),
with 218 clippings, and Les Victimes de lalcool (The Victims of Alcohol;
Path, 1911), with 694are particularly exemplary of this method.
38. See http://www.cinetecadelfriuli.org/progettoturconi/clip.php?CLIP_
NUMBER=20941. For a discussion on early tinting methods, see Joshua
Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brun-
swick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 3, 1035.
39. See http://www.cinetecadelfriuli.org/progettoturconi/clip.php?CLIP_
NUMBER=21510.
40. See Fossati, From Grain to Pixel, 8992.
41. Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer,
Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2011), xvii.
42. Rodowick, Virtual Life of Film, 174.
43. Over the last five years, digital humanities funding has expanded rapidly,
even as humanities funding overall has diminished. Many of these new grants
that are open to digitization projects emphasize in their guidelines the impor-
tance of working with corporate partners. Such work should not be dismissed
out of handcollaborative research can be, as it always has been, highly
productive within and beyond academia. However, in terms of political
tendencies, such an increased funding emphasis on the collaboration between
humanities scholarship and the corporate sector is embroiled in neoliberal
policies that cut governmental funding for higher education, based on the
assumption that knowledge production must be profitable to be successful.
f l e t c h e r a n d y u m i b e 32

For a related discussion of the digital humanities, see Alan Liu, The State of
the Digital Humanities: A Report and a Critique, Arts and Humanities in
Higher Education 11, nos. 12 (2012): 841.
44. See Science and Technology Council, The Digital Dilemma: Strategic
Issues in Archiving and Accessing Digital Motion Picture Materials (Beverly
Hills, Calif.: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 2007), 12. Also
see the related discussions at the recent conferences Memory of the World in
the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation, UNESCO, Vancouver, Canada,
September 2628, 2012, and Economy of the Commons 3: Sustainable
Futures for Digital Archives, EYE Film Institute Netherlands, Amsterdam,
October 1112, 2012.

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