tish Film Institute, 1989); and Paolo Cherchi Usai and Lorenzo Codelli, eds., Before Caligari: German Cinema, 1895–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
A retrospective can transform our view of film artists we think we know well. From 1997 to 2008, Le Giornate de Cinema Muto undertook the ambitious Griffith Project, showing all the available prints of films that he acted in, directed, or produced. Surprisingly, many of Griffith's short films were available only in poor copies, since restoration work had not yet been completed. Still, for the first time scholars could see the less familiar titles alongside the famous ones. The program notes, written by an international team of scholars, occupied ten volumes of The Griffith Project, a series published by the British Film Institute from 1999 to 2008. An eleventh volume contained two plays by Griffith, various other writings, and information on films possibly connected to the director in some way. A twelfth volume, containing a collection of general scholarly essays, completed the series.
A second Italian festival, Il Cinema Ritrovato is held in Bologna each summer, and it too screens many rediscovered and restored films from both the silent and sound eras. In recent years the Bologna festival has shown programs of films from the 1910s starring William S. Hart (2006) and Asta Nielsen (2007), as well as a rediscovered film by Stiller, the 1915 Madame de Thèbes (2007).
Events like Le Giornate del Cinema Muto and Il Cinema Ritrovato show how crucial the preservation and availability of early films are to our knowledge of cinema history. Early synoptic histories were based on the few masterpieces available in film archives. These films were often significant in themselves, but they seldom gave an accurate indication of national cinemas as wholes. Moreover, some important filmmakers have been virtually forgotten. Le Giornate has been crucial in bringing such directors as Georg af Klercker and Evgenii Bauer to historians' attention. Similarly, masterpieces like Die Landstrasse (p. 58) were all but forgotten until a discovery (in this case by the Filmmuseum of the Netherlands) of a single copy. Today, many national archives take the opportunity of Le Giornate to display prints of newly discoveries and restorations, which get circulated to other archives and museums around the world. Undoubtedly some unknown directors and lost films will continue to resurface and modify our view of film history.
Our website, "Observations on film art and Film Art" (davidbordwell.net/blog), contains several entries on the art and craft of 1910s films.