II.

History

The distinction between the art film and the movie, although culturally determined, is a valuable one. The stimulus to its distinction was the Russian Revolution in 1917 when, because of the shortage of raw film stock, serious film study can be said to have begun. Prints of American films, such as The Birth of a Nation (1915), directed by D. W. Griffith, were dismantled to be reassembled in a different sequence, and film analysis took place with chalk and blackboard. The art house movement began soon after, in France. In Paris in the early 1920s clubs such as the short-lived Friends of the Seventh Art and the Ciné Club were formed, the latter by the film director Louis Delluc in 1924. In the same year, the first regular film society, The Free Tribune of Cinema, was launched, and the small Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, which soon developed an international reputation, was converted to a specialized cinema.

In the United Kingdom, a growing interest in the film as art encouraged even commercial cinemas to show foreign films and, for two years, one London cinema devoted itself to German films—Wachsfigurenkabinett (1924; Waxworks), directed by Paul Leni, Die Niebelungen (1924), directed by Fritz Lang, and Der Letzte Mann (1924; The Last Laugh), directed by F. W. Murnau, among them. Inspired by these developments, Ivor Montagu and Hugh Miller started the Film Society in London. Its influence was extensive, and its founder members included such figures as John Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Shaw, J. B. S. Haldane, and H. G. Wells. Apart from screening, for the first time in the country, now-obvious classics such as Bronenosets Potemkin (1925; The Battleship Potemkin), directed by Sergey Eisenstein, it showed two opposing versions of the Abyssinian campaign waged by Mussolini, one from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the other from Italy, alternating the films, reel by reel, so that the audience could make comparisons. Within a few years the first Scottish Film Society was started in Glasgow. Such beginnings are the foundations of film study throughout Europe. In the United States, Symon Gould, who founded the International Film Arts Cinema Guild in 1925, and Michel Midlin showed both Hollywood “oldies” and foreign films in the Guild’s cinema and elsewhere, but, as commercial enterprises, they only survived a few years. It was not until 1947, when the Austrian-born Amos Vogel started Cinema 16 in New York, that experimental and foreign films again had a public outlet. It led to the formation of a number of art houses and societies, among them the Berkeley Cinema Guild in California.

Out of these emerged film archives, funded not for commercial reasons, but to preserve the “art of the film”, the first of which was the National Film Library (later the National Film Archive) in the United Kingdom. Such bodies are now worldwide: George Eastman House, The Library of Congress, and the Museum of Modern Art, in the United States; Gosfilmofond in Russia; and the National Film Archive in Egypt are just a few examples. They make films, some of which are lost in their own countries, available to other archives and supply prints to television companies. Above all, they restore and maintain prints of films which, left to commercial interests alone, would disappear, and make them available for exhibition in specialized film theatres such as the National Film Theatre (London), the Cinématheque Française (Paris), and the Arsenal Kino (Berlin).