French Festival Takes Aim at Film Preservation Efforts

Some of the resurrected films at “Cine Memoire: The First International Festival of Rediscovered and Restored Films,” held here this week, were so bad that only the most ardent film buffs could love them.

Fortunately, Paris may be the world capital of ardent film buffs.

Who else would sit in rapt attention through 124 minutes of Cecil B. DeMille’s ghastly “The Sign of the Cross,” a Christian-Roman epic that features a naked-women-in-donkey-milk-bath scene and pygmies being impaled on the swords of Amazons?

“ ‘The Sign of the Cross’ dangerously pushes the limits of what were believed to be the unbridgeable boundaries of bad taste,” French critic Francois Vinneuil wrote after the film was released in 1932.

But the majority of the 150 formerly endangered films--mostly celluloid works recently restored for posterity on more stable “safety” film bases (such as triacetate or polyester)--were considered valuable enough to bring American director Martin Scorsese and other film notables to Paris for the weeklong festival that concludes Friday after screenings in 11 Paris museums and theaters as well as in 35 other French cities.

Scorsese, in fact, was even credited by French Culture Minister Jack Lang with inspiring the event during a car ride last fall when the two men were on their way to inspect the French National Film Archives outside Paris in Bois-d’Arcy. Next year’s festival will be based in Los Angeles, where Scorsese has agreed to act as chairman.

“We thought that organizing parallel demonstrations in the only two countries that still have a true film industry could stimulate interest and emulation in other countries for their film heritage,” Lang said in an interview this week with the newspaper Liberation.

When the French festival opened last Friday, Lang decorated Scorsese as commandeur des arts et des lettres for the American director’s worldwide efforts to save and restore deteriorating films.

Most of the films in question were made before 1950 with the highly flammable cellulose nitrate, or celluloid. Nitrate films have a life span of about 50 years before they begin to self-destruct. It is estimated that more than half of all nitrate films made have already been lost. The remaining films will all be gone by 2005 unless they are converted to another film base--a delicate process, not unlike surgery, that costs approximately $2 per foot of film.

According to Robert Rosen, director of the extensive Film and Television Archive at UCLA, at least 100 million feet of unrestored nitrate film are stored in American archives alone. To restore it all could cost as much as $200 million.

“That’s the scale of the challenge that faces us,” Rosen said this week as he joined film archivists from 20 countries at the Paris festival. “It may seem like a terrible lot of money. But just think, for the price of only one or two blockbuster movie flops like ‘Hudson Hawk,’ we could restore all the remaining nitrate film in existence.”

American film archives played a starring role in the festival. UCLA brought “The Sign of the Cross” and a dozen other works.

In one of the featured events, the Library of Congress brought the 1928 William A. Wellman silent classic “Wings.” The screening of the World War I fighter pilot movie was chosen to close the festival on Friday. For the first time in at least 60 years, the screening was to be accompanied by full orchestration, composed for the film by J. S. Zamecnik and directed before an 18-piece orchestra by Library of Congress film music specialist Gillian B. Anderson.

But from a film archivist’s perspective, the big winner of the festival was France, which used the occasion to unveil a $160-million, 15-year plan to restore all the country’s existing nitrate films with government funds.

Scorsese and the other Americans quickly noted that the United States has no equivalent comprehensive program. Last year, the National Endowment for the Arts offered $350,000 for film restoration, while the Library of Congress committed $500,000.