Ruin, Archive and the Time of Cinema: Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate

Cinema, since the early 1930s, has become part of “our archive.” If the classical archive’s principal task was to group and classify for an ulterior use documents which, together, represent a site of authority and a locus of origin, early film archives emerge as a rescue operation. Iris Barry, Henri Langlois, Georges Franju, and Lotte Eisner all attempted, by their own means and channels, to save the memory of cinema, and in particular the masterpieces of early cinema, chopped up by theatre owners, decimated by studios and production societies in order to make way for the new “talk of the town” (the talkies) that was very swiftly to impose itself as the norm for the film-going public in the late 1920s. When silent cinema lost its commercial vocation, it was taken in charge by newly created institutions in London, Paris, Berlin, and New York (all between 1934-1936), thereby displacing cinema from its site of origin (the commercial theatre) towards the vaults of film libraries and museums.2 The nitrate film stock proved highly inflammable and prone to decay, threatening the survival of film. In 1951 the FIAF (Fédération intermationale des archives du film, founded in 1938) forbade its production and unauthorized storage, leading to the adoption of a series of measures of preservation throughout the world, and the transfer from nitrate celluloid to safety acetate (and more recently, polyester) prints.3 These events—to which we could add the losses of film following bombardments and fires during WWI and WWII and the discovery in the early 1980s of the so-called vinegar syndrome that attacks acetate prints—are pivotal in understanding the paradoxical process of “patrimonialization” of cinema.