book review of: Grazia Ingravalle, Archival film curatorship: early and silent cinema from analog to digital

In Archival Film Curatorship: Early and Silent Cinema from Analog to Digital film historian Grazia Ingravalle, of London’s Queen Mary University, presents a mix of fieldwork, film archival history, and philosophy to discuss recent, quite distinct curatorial formats in three heritage institutes vis-à-vis collections of early and silent cinema ‘within the context of the digital turn’ (p. 13). The focus on the oldest film materials, albeit not entirely consistent, is a pedagogical decision, I assume, to create maximal distance with today’s digital practices in film production, exhibition, access, preservation, and restoration. This distance is phrased in philosophical terms taken from Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concept of the hermeneutical circle: Starting from an object, that is an historical artefact or event, film archivists and historians heuristically situate it in wider contexts, which are then proposed as the object’s interpretive frames, or in Gadamer’s terms, parts are taken out, examined, and restored again to the whole (or not). Besides a diversified process, as subjects differ in their interpretations – hence the book’s three contrastive case studies – the hermeneutical circle spirals in an unending process, as explanatory work differs over time, too, dependent on archivists and historians’ varying temporal (and cultural) separation from a historical phenomenon and, of course, from preceding approaches and interpretations – a double object, one might say.
A second consideration, apparently, for focusing on early and silent cinema is the working assumption that such collections lend themselves easier to alternative, perhaps more productive ways of presentation and audience engagement, particularly because general knowledge of this era is low. And as the films are often short and/or incomplete, they, or the programmes in which they were included, do not always easily fit the usual two-hour slots in which cinematheques, like commercial cinemas, commonly arrange their screenings. For these ‘inconvenient’ materials (not to mention live acts and musical accompaniment), the digital turn may seem precisely what the doctor ordered.