New Hibernia Review

The extraordinary critical and commercial success of Michel Hazanavicius's contemporary silent film The Artist (2011), and the high-profile release of Martin Scorsese's Hugo (2011) about the silent film pioneer Georges Méliès, have directed popular attention backward in time to the silent era. Both films are works of nostalgia by cineaste filmmakers, homages to a time imagined in both cases as marked by a conceptualization of cinema as art, and a moment that was transitional and fleeting. Concurrently, silent film studies are increasing in uptake in [End Page 137] academia, both in the classroom and on the conference circuit, with each new year. Although I have a feeling that the general film-going public's interest in silent cinema may be a passing phase, I believe the interest from academia is very likely to continue to develop. One place to begin a consideration of The O'Kalem Collection in a readily available format is within the wider public and scholarly interest in early and silent cinema, sometimes called "primitive cinema"; no term is ever quite satisfactory. The work carried out by Peter Flynn and Tony Tracy in making this documentary and collecting these prints on DVD is part of a broader trend in preservation and scholarship.

The growth in "silent era" studies has arisen from the coming together of a number of circumstances. Up until recently, the area has been the preserve of a small coterie of researchers with an annual gathering at the Pordenone film festival in Italy, where new works are unveiled to some remarkable anticipation. Many of these works have been lying unnoticed in archives around the world; others turn up in dusty attics and second-hand shops. A flood of such films has appeared since the opening up of the old archives of the former Eastern bloc, where many went untouched for decades. These discoveries have allowed historians to fill in many of the gaps in various disciplines, one of them national cinema history. And the rediscovery process has been matched by a commitment to repatriating these films to their countries of origin.⁵ Advances in technology have allowed for the digitization of these films and their widespread dissemination on DVD, the web, and equivalent media.

This process in itself has not been without controversy. Digitization does not necessarily produce an accurate reconstruction of the film as it was originally made. Digital films can look flat and plastic; they can be created to run at an incorrect speed or in an incorrect format. However, once a film has been digitized, that format tends to replace the original and to stand in for the original for all future uses. But the digital versions belong to a technology that is almost by definition marked by swift obsolescence. Can we be certain that, within a century, any DVD we produce will still be playable? Who makes the decisions as to what is digitized? What is the fate of films that are not digitized, particularly for future scholarship? Where are the original digital files to be stored: in an expensive Los Angeles archive, or in a cheap warehouse in an economically disadvantaged region?

Early film lines up well with several current academic trends. Scholars have been attracted to early cinema as a space where women played an influential part, occupying key positions in filmmaking as well as appearing in front of the camera as stars. For a brief period, from around 1908 to the early [End Page 138] 1920s, women filled numerous positions as scenarists, scriptwriters, editors, and directors; prominent among these were Alice Guy Blaché in France, Nell Shipman in Canada, and in the United States, Lois Weber, June Mathis, and of course, Gene Gauntier, one of the principals in the O'Kalem films. An accompanying scholarly movement has considered the representations of race and ethnicity in early film, where productions often drew liberally from stereotypes inherited from vaudeville and live performance. Many of those performances were addressed to the American immigrant audience, and by working backward, historians can retrospectively construct the tastes and expectations of that audience.

For scholars of Irish film...