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"It is extraordinary that men have entrusted so many images, so many affects, so many constructions, such beauty to a medium so close, ontologically, to its own ruin."1 —Georges Didi-Huberman (Montage, 13) 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. This process, via a series of shifts and mutations in the cultural significance of cinema, was to lead in the 1980s and 1990s to legal [End Page 120] measures, institutional recognition (copyrights, legal deposits, increased (though still insufficient) state funding for archives, etc.) and a burgeoning of discourses in different fields that all presented cinema as the art and memory of the twentieth century. Coincidentally, but not innocently, the celebration of cinema's 100th birthday was the same year (1995) as the 50th anniversary of the end of WWII (with the "representation" of the Holocaust being at the intersection of the two). This "upgrading" of cinema from a popular entertainment scorned by the elite to a highly honored member of human "patrimony"—cherished memory and witness of our times—has complex ramifications. It can be explained in part by our obsession with (or "hypertrophy of," as Andreas Huyssens would say) memory, and the extension of the category of "patrimony" in the last quarter of the twentieth century. This notion now includes anything that has been able to last—that has survived the dictatorship of the present (technologization, progress, urbanization, modernization), and includes natural sites, "old" industrial plants, and 40-year-old diners (that proudly announce "ever since 1965"). Cinema has also gained higher institutional legitimacy since becoming an object of academic scrutiny, which coincided with a renewed interest in the study of early cinema, following the decisive 1978 Congress in Brighton. This "early cinema" branch has reshaped both the discipline of film studies and our vision of that period of cinema. Festivals celebrating "rediscovered films" during the 1990s (In Italy at Pordenone, Sacilia, and Bologna; in New York state at Rochester and Syracuse), along with the distribution of early films on VHS and DVD (most of them released around the time of cinema's centenary), have accompanied this new area of study. Film preservation and restoration (now enhanced by digital technology) has also been the focus of intense discussion, and has developed as a full-fledged...
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