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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Inventing a Past, Imagining a Future. The Discovery and Institutionalisation of Film History in the 1930s
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Cinéma & Cie
Malte Hagener
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Inventing a Past, Imagining a Future. The Discovery and Institutionalisation of Film History in the 1930s
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INVENTING A PAST, IMAGINING A FUTURE.
THE DISCOVERY AND INSTITUTIONALISATION OF FILM HISTORY
IN THE 1930s
Malte Hagener, Philipps-Universität Marburg




   The cinematographic past has many places: archives and museums, documentaries and compi-
lation films, artworks and DVD editions and, more recently, on the Internet with platforms such
as YouTube, Hulu or Vimeo. These institutions, cultural forms, companies and platforms legit-
imise their historiographical endeavours by suggesting different prioritizations and justifications
as they develop their own perspective of the cinematographic past in order to be prepared (and to
prepare their users) for a possible future. It is this juncture between the past as something that,
time and again, has to be imagined, constructed and discursively shaped, and the future as an
equally imagined place where these constructs can be put to use that I wish to address in the fol-
lowing historiographical overview. This text takes as its object of scrutiny the development of
film archives and, more broadly speaking, film history in the 1930s, a decade in European cine-
ma somewhat uneasily sandwiched between the blossoms of the classic silent film in the 1920s
and the stirrings of neorealism in the 1940s.
   Rereading my title I realise that I have set myself a daunting task, if not succumbed to delu-
sions of grandeur. To bring it into perspective: what I can offer in this essay are some notes and
observations on the founding moments of film archives rather than a full-fledged argument about
the emergence of film history as a distinct body of knowledge. The larger context has to be
reserved for an on-going project, which is sketching the “emergence of film culture” in 1920s and
1930s Europe.1 In a nutshell, my thesis is that the intersection of the avant-garde, the industry
(both film-related and more general), and the nation state at a specific historical moment of crisis
(economic, political, film-institutional) set into motion discourses, political decisions and specif-
ic configurations that persist to this day and determine largely how we go about our daily busi-
ness as researchers, educators, historians and archivists.2 Film history and film archiving, film
schools and film theory, film festivals and documentary films all first emerged in embryonic form
at this confluence of different force fields under specific circumstances.
   In order to make my point I want to look once more at a key moment in the shaping of this con-
figuration, the near-simultaneous emergence in the mid-1930s of four different, yet related insti-
tutions for collecting, safeguarding and making films accessible. Curiously, they chose different
names which raises the question whether there are different functional ideas behind their institu-
tionalisation: an archive (Reichsfilmarchiv in Berlin, founded in 1935), a library within a modern
art museum (Film Library as part of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, founded in 1935), a
library within a film institute (National Film Library as part of the British Film Institute, London,
founded in 1935), and a cinémathèque (Cinémathèque française, 1936).3 Of course, the history of

CINÉMA & CIE, vol. XI, no. 16-17, Spring-Fall 2011                                                29
MALTE HAGENER

these institutions is not unknown, but these are usually framed nationally and they highlight their
respective divergences and idiosyncrasies; what I want to propose here instead is a comparative
look, which will tease out the similarities and shared ground. A nascent institution needs self-
legitimisation in order to rally public and private, political and social support, backing and financ-
ing. The organisations under discussion here therefore invented a past in dire need of retrieval,
safeguarding, and access to the public, so that a future wherein this material is kept might take
shape. As these institutions exist to this day and are among the most influential of their kind (not
the least because they came first and therefore provided models which later activists in the field
adopted, transformed or rejected, but could not ignore in any case), their discourses and strategies
still bear strongly on our current conception of history, memory and the (cinematographic) past.


Pre-history
   As is well documented, thoughts about film archiving emerged before the mid-1930s. Much has
been written about Bolesław Matuszewski’s early call for the archival safeguarding of images as
early as 1898, aptly titled “Une nouvelle source de l’histoire.”4 I do not want to discuss his pro-
posal at length here, but it appears as if this idea, no matter how visionary it might seem to us in
retrospect, was largely ignored in a time when cinema as an art form and as a cultural force lacked
support from those in a position to actively put such an effort into practice, both in politics and in
the industry. In fact, history as a discipline has been rather slow to seriously engage moving
images as a valuable source of knowledge about the past. World War I proved to be, as demon-
strated by film historians such as Steven Bottomore and Martin Loiperdinger, more pivotal in
interesting politics and the military in the cinema because it demonstrated the value of film for
the modern nation state, its army and the mobilisation of public support.5 It was at this time that
official agencies in the military apparatus and in government institutions started to systematical-
ly keep film (such as the collection that later became the archive of the Imperial War Museum),
but at this point in time they were neither comprehensive nor consistent. In the 1920s, calls for
film archives could be heard across Europe and often the state was addressed as the only agent
who could act as the instigator and sponsor of such an endeavour. Yet again, those efforts under-
taken were half-hearted, limited to specific uses or variations of film, so that the cinema in its
totality was not sufficiently addressed, something that the avant-garde did in the 1920s and that
would contribute to the emergence of archives in the following decade.6
   Seen from the vantage point of the 1920s, nothing less than an absolute miracle happened only
a few years later in four of the most important film producing countries (United States, France,
Germany, Great Britain), however the context had changed and what came about was not exact-
ly what was envisioned in the decade before. The time period from 1933 to 1938 (or rather 1935-
6) not only saw the foundation and establishment of four major institutions that provided models
for all later developments, but it also witnessed the establishment of the Fédération International
des Archives du Film (FIAF),7 proving that the archives saw themselves from the very start not
as a series of isolated entities, but as a transnational network of exchange and communication.
   The main question to be tackled in the remainder of this essay is why this boom in activity and
institution building happened at this particular moment in this particular form. The standard
answer to this question sees the introduction of sound film as the key trigger that spelt doom to
old film and thus alerted activists to the urgent task of saving film. Yet again, there are two facts
which have always made this explanation seem somewhat unconvincing: first of all, since its
beginning in the late 19th century the film industry was by and large not interested in keeping used

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film material and thereby, under normal circumstances, old films could not be watched once they
had finished their theatrical career. Long before the introduction of sound, used films were dis-
carded as soon as they appeared useless and worthless to exhibitors, distributors and producers.
The massive destruction of cinematic heritage was in fact long before the introduction of sound
and already in the 1920s one can find many lamentations from the circles of ciné-clubs about the
inaccessibility of classic films. My other doubt concerns timing: if sound film was really the trig-
ger for the archive movement, why did it take more than five years to bear fruit? Although the
introduction of sound was basically over by 1930, but it was the mid-1930s before these coun-
tries founded their archives. Similar to the mythical rivalry of Langlois and Lindgren which per-
sonifies the basic dilemma and dialectic between storage and access that every archive is facing,
this seems to me rather a shorthand that stands in for something else than a real explanation. To
quickly hint at the answer which will be given over the course of the paper: the introduction of
sound might have played a role in changing some individuals minds, but both the attitude of the
state and the public at large towards film played a much more decisive role (also visible in large
scale documentary projects in Britain and the US, in the foundation of film schools and film fes-
tivals and in other film cultural activities elsewhere), as well as in a willingness on the part of the
film industry to cooperate with these nascent institutions.
   The other question concerns, as mentioned before, similarities and differences between these
early archival initiatives. If we follow for example Penelope Houston in her history of the film
archive movement these were markedly different: “These four archives were founded by very dif-
ferent organisations and people, for very different purposes. They reflect not so much the unity
of the archive movement […] as its startling diversity.”8 To reiterate the standard history, here put
forward by Houston, in somewhat crude, but still popular terms: the French archive was a private
and amateur effort, in Germany it was the Nazi party, in Britain the initiative came from educa-
tors and the state, while in the US rich philanthropists wanted to spend their money wisely and
have their name remembered. By contrast, I want to argue that there was indeed a lot of shared
ground between the archives, both in their genealogy and how they discursively conceived of
their project.


The big four
   The foundation of the Reichsfilmarchiv (imperial film archive) has to be seen in direct con-
nection with the film policy of the Nationalsocialists.9 Under the rule of Goebbels, the newly
founded propaganda ministry considered cinema and radio as the key media for the control and
manipulation of the public at large.10 The Reichsfilmarchiv can be seen as a symptom of how
important film was to the political and social efforts of fascist Germany. Established in January
1934 on the first anniversary of the “rise to power,” but not officially opened until a year later
February 1935,11 the archive first concentrated on documentary and non-fiction film. It also
actively worked on gathering films from abroad which could not be officially screened in Nazi
Germany, but that were considered of interest because they could be taken up as potential mod-
els such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Bronenosez Potemkin (1926). Even though a large number of these
films were prohibited and could no longer be publicly exhibited, directors and screenwriters as
well as academics and researchers had access to these films, making this as much an institution
of research and learning as one of propaganda and state control. In very limited ways, the
Reichsfilmarchiv also kept a memory of films in Germany alive that was not possible publicly
and that very seldom found its way into films.

                                                                                                    31
MALTE HAGENER

   While one can easily see the Reichsfilmarchiv as being just another cog in the machine of Nazi
ideology (and in one way this is exactly how it functioned), a look at the key figure in these early
years complicates the history even more. Frank Hensel was an enigmatic character, an equally
ardent cinephile and Nazi who had already joined the party in 1928, a polyglot and charming man
by all accounts who loved masquerade and whose life would provide material for a serious spy
thriller.12 Born in 1893 to a winemaker and hotel-owner on the Rhine (Bingen) and to a British
mother, he travelled the world and dabbled in photography before he began making films for the
Nazis in the late 1920s.13 Despite his quick rise within the Nazi party and an undercover stint in
the then still free Saar region where he filmed political activists, so they could be identified (and
incarcerated) later on, he nevertheless was most keen on international contacts and exchange.
Meeting Iris Barry and her husband John Abbott when they travelled in Germany in 1936, show-
ing up at the founding session of FIAF in 1938 and almost playing a double agent game in occu-
pied Paris when he actively helped Henri Langlois to hide some of his treasures, he is not an easy
character to pinpoint. Even a fascist-nationalist project such as the Reichsfilmarchiv had at the
helm a film activist that apparently had his cinephile leanings, even though he was undoubtedly
a convinced Nazi.
   In the United States, the Museum of Modern Art had provided a new model of how modern art
could be communicated to the public at large. Founded in 1929 only ten days after the stock mar-
ket crashed, the institution under the directorship of Alfred Barr took the Bauhaus as its model of
integrating the arts and crafts, design and theory into a synthesis that resonated with the culture
of modernity.14 The original plans for the museum had encompassed film and photography,
design and radio, but due to the economic crisis, which hit the private patrons hard, these plans
were indeterminately suspended.15 Barr kept on lobbying though and employed Iris Barry, British
émigré, film critic and veteran of the London Film Society, in the library. The formation of the
Film Library, supported with a grant by the Rockefeller foundation, was publicly announced in
June 1935 by John Hay Whitney who also became its first president with Barry as curator and her
later husband John Abbott as director. Even though one might argue that MoMA, a private enter-
prise solely founded by endorsement, was a long way from the state institutions that were being
set up in the same year in Germany and Britain, MoMA nevertheless understood itself as a radi-
cally public institution, geared not towards small elite circles, but towards educating the masses,
making it, in Haidee Wasson’s words “a privately endowed institution with an ostensibly public
mandate.”16 One has to keep in mind the fundamental differences between Europe and the United
States in order to understand that MoMA was basically geared towards educating the public and
making an intervention in on-going discourses about art, the role of technology and the modern
life world.
   The film library set about collecting the canon of classics which had been developed over the
course of the 1920s and consolidated in many film programme of the screening clubs across
Europe as well as a number of books on film history that had been published in the previous ten
years, among them: Georges Michel Coissac’s Histoire du cinématographe, Léon Moussinac’s
Naissance du cinéma (both in 1925), Hans Richter’s Filmgegner von heute – Filmfreunde von
morgen accompanying the Stuttgart exhibition in which Richter curated a programme (1929),
Paul Rotha’s The Film Till Now (1930) and, of course, the notorious Histoire du cinéma (1935)
by Maurice Bardèche and Robert Brasillach, translated by none other than Iris Barry into English
(1938). In brief, the emerging archives employed the canon established in the wider avant-garde
circles in the 1920s, but to a large extent relied on support from the public at large, be it in the
form of a social-democratic idea of the public sphere, the fascist state or the civic society of rich
East Coast-socialites.

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                                                               INVENTING A PAST, IMAGINING A FUTURE

   In Britain, it was an official government report, The Film in National Life written by the
Commission on Educational and Cultural Films and published in 1932, which argued for setting
up a British Film Institute that was to be put in charge of cultural activities in the field of cinema.
The BFI, which was officially founded in September 1933, was financed via a special tax on film
screenings on Sunday linking it to the state and its governmental efforts, but at the same time it
was not directly a government institution, a fact which occasionally made it difficult to win offi-
cial support. Within the institute, a film library was established (on 9 July 1935) which was head-
ed for almost forty years by information officer Ernest Lindgren, legendary nemesis of the even
more legendary Henri Langlois.17 Their personal animosity and rivalry in fact can be seen as the
reason why these two personalities and institutions are still so often juxtaposed because a more
sober look reveals that they were quite similar in a lot of respects. Even though the original plans
for the film library concentrated on educational film and the connection between schools and pro-
ducers – the film library was to have three parts concerned with circulation, reference and repos-
itory respectively – the early practice (in the 1930s) turned out to be very different.18 The circu-
lating library rapidly turned into an archive, a place for storage, as more than 80% of the prints
held by the institution in the late 1930s were in the storage section, while only 2% were in the cir-
culating library.19 The library received donations, both in the form of films and money, from a
small number of collectors and film enthusiasts, among them Adrian Brunel who was a vital part
of British alternative film culture in the late 1920s.20 Moreover, the two names that conspicuous-
ly show up on a list of donors within a week of the NFL’s launch are H.G. Wells and George
Bernard Shaw, not coincidentally all founding members of the London Film Society in 1925
(Lindgren himself, being born in October 1910, was too young to have played an active part in
that chapter).
   Whereas the BFI and the NFL are often portrayed as originating from the circles of educators
and schools, the early practice of the library proved it to be an archive that was in fact much clos-
er to avant-garde screening practices of the 1920s than normally assumed. Already in 1935, after
publicly lamenting that classics such as Metropolis, Caligari or Potemkin were not publicly avail-
able in Britain, Lindgren attempted to acquire the collection of Will Day, which proved to be too
expensive for the fledgling institution and was finally bought by the Cinémathèque française in
1959. In February 1936, seven months after the institution of the NFL, the first public screening
took place commemorating forty years of cinema in Britain with a programme ranging from
Lumière to Griffith the same canon reiterated across these different nation states. In fact, by
“1940, the distribution section had completely abandoned its educational remit to focus exclu-
sively on films based on prints kept in the preservation section and illustrating the history of the
cinema.”21 While the public image of the British archive, possibly due to the juxtaposition of
Lindgren and Langlois, sees these institutions as educational providers of film, the actual practice
of the NFL in the second half of the 1930s reveals it as quite similar to the other institutions: based
on a largely agreed upon catalogue of “classics,” the library collected and screened the same films
as MoMA, the Cinémathèque française or the Reichsfilmarchiv.
   France had of course the most active alternative film scene in the 1920s,22 but even there no
archive was founded in the course of the decade. In the late 1920s, a young Jean Mitry thought
that Jean Mauclaire would financially back an archive, but instead he started his own avant-garde
cinema: Studio 28.23 When Henri Langlois and Georges Franju (with important help from Mitry)
got together with Pierre Auguste Harlé, editor of the trade paper Cinématographie française who
acted as a liaison to the French film industry, an archive could finally be established in France on
2 September 1936. Having emerged from a film society (Cercle du Cinéma), the French archive
is most closely linked to avant-garde institutions, but this was already markedly different in style

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MALTE HAGENER

from earlier models as debate and discussions did not take place in order to be able to show more
films (even their film programmes and flyers note “Sans debate” [no discussion] as a marker of
distinction). Whereas in the 1920s, the avant-garde had seen film as a means to restructure the
relationship of life and art (with the ultimate goal of breaking the distinction down altogether),
Langlois and Franju wanted to maximise the number of films being shown.
   Whereas traditional histories portray the Cinémathèque française and Langlois as a one-man
show, the detailed reconstructions written by Patrick Olmeta and Laurent Mannoni paint a dif-
ferent picture:24 Harlè and Mitry emerge as considerable helpers, especially in channelling
Langlois’ will and energy towards adequate solutions with their connections both in the film
industry and in state institutions. Despite Langlois’ efforts, the Cinémathèque française remained
a poor institution with little means and few films at their disposal until the war. It is conceivable
that the institution under different circumstances would have met the fate of other short-lived
institutions, which had to discontinue their efforts. Franju goes so far to claim that it was during
the occupation that the number of films held by the Cinémathèque française increased tenfold,
from 300 to 3000 thanks to Frank Hensel who tipped off Langlois and Franju when films were
about to be confiscated. In this perspective, it is less Langlois’ personality, but rather the politi-
cal and institutional machinations on an international level that are the decisive factor for the
long-term success or failure. True enough, it was Langlois’ will and stamina that carried it
through its first years, but only once sufficient official support was established, could the
Cinémathèque française develop into a sustainable institution.
   This opens up the international dimension with FIAF as the crucial hub for exchange and col-
laboration on an international level. Despite these huge political differences, the foundation of the
Fédération International des Archives du Film (FIAF) appears to have been a harmonious occa-
sion; John Abbott and Iris Barry had been in close contact with Frank Hensel when they visited
Berlin for the Olympic Games in 1936 and international exchange of film material between
archives was being put into practice on an informal level. Two years later, in June 1938, FIAF
was established in Paris and Alfred-Ingemar Berndt, a functionary in Goebbels’ propaganda min-
istry, bragged in an internal paper: “This foundation has the advantage that the imperial film
archive can acquire films which are important for us through exchange and without requiring for-
eign currency.”25 Nevertheless, the inclusion of the Reichsfilmarchiv as well as the fact that this
happened only very shortly after the institutions came into existence shows that the archives con-
ceived of themselves as part of an international network (much like the ciné-clubs of the 1920s
and early 1930s), but they also considered themselves to be similar enough to communicate and
collaborate.
   I would see three driving forces at work and the long-term success of these institutions depend-
ed on the active involvement of three factors: firstly, avant-garde ideas about the value and the
function of the cinema, secondly a broad-based public support (whether the state as such, gov-
ernmental agencies or influential circles) and thirdly, the cooperation of the film industry. Despite
all political, social and ideological differences between the US, France, the UK and Germany, in
all countries they were influential groups of people that realised the value and importance of film
for the nation state, which was needed as a support mechanism not only in terms of financing, but
also regarding regulatory and legislative issues. The avant-garde on the other hand had run out of
steam after 1930 concerning its revolutionary potential, but it had laid the groundwork in respect
to the serious and sustainable engagement with film; theory provided a basis as to how one could
think about the cinema and gave criteria for value judgements, history books proved that film was
a dynamic cultural objects worthy of study, while specialised cinemas, festivals and magazines
aimed at gathering a larger public. While the state would provide the framework and the basis for

34
                                                                INVENTING A PAST, IMAGINING A FUTURE

any archival undertaking and the avant-garde had constructed the discursive superstructure, the
industry was necessary because without them, the majority of films would not have been avail-
able.


Conclusion
   The mid-1930s saw a serious engagement with the cinema as an art form and as a cultural force
on many different levels. One key event in this respect has to be the founding of archives in four
major film production countries. While traditionally, the differences between the institutions have
been stressed, I propose to look instead at the similarities in their respective practices. Without
wanting to deny the existing differences, I nevertheless believe that this near-simultaneous emer-
gence is far from coincidental and illustrates the emergence of film culture on a broad transna-
tional basis. As Haidee Wasson has argued concerning the logic behind the Museum of Modern
Art:

    Undergirded by archival logics, MoMA established a distinct mode of exhibition, and by
    extension, of viewing, films. It presupposed that noncommercial and nontheatrical exhibition
    constituted an essential element of the cinematic and civic infrastructure. As a result, it con-
    tributed inestimably to shaping a much wider field of debate about culture, museums, and
    modern life, securing a stage for film in the ongoing drama of precisely what objects and
    media matter within the politics of cultural value and visual knowledge.26

  The archival movement was important in elevating film in this way since film needed to be
available for screening and study if one wanted to work on these fields. At the same time, the side-
effect, and a testament to the similarity of the four projects, was standardisation and canonisation
as invariably the same films were selected as worthy of storing, restoring and studying. As much
as these institutions then shaped the path towards the discipline that we are active in today, as
much did they also block out those elements of film culture that were not deemed to be important
at the time. Yet again, perhaps the most lasting legacy of these institutions is how they engen-
dered important post-war activities such as the French cinephile culture which heavily influenced
the Nouvelle Vague or the important work done by Siegfried Kracauer, Lotte Eisner or Jay Leyda
within these institutions, but that is another story to be told on another occasion.



1    See Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back. The European Avant-garde and the Invention of
     Film Culture, 1919-1939, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2007 and the collection: Malte
     Hagener (ed.), Studying the Cinema. Film Culture, Knowledge Production and Institution Building in
     Europe, 1919-1939, Berghahn, London 2012 (forthcoming).
2    See more generally on the political role of archives Caroline Frick, Saving Cinema. The Politics of
     Preservation, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2010.
3    Similar activities, albeit on a much smaller level, took place in Sweden. See Mats Björkin, Pelle
     Snickars, 1923/1933. Production, Reception and Cultural Significance of Swedish Non-Fiction Film, in
     Peter Zimmermann, Kay Hoffmann (eds.), Triumph der Bilder. Kultur- und Dokumentarfilme vor 1945
     im internationalen Vergleich, UVK, Konstanz 2003, pp. 272-290.
4    Originally published in Le Figaro on 25 March 1898, then later as a mimeographed pamphlet; see the
     English translation “A New Source of History: The Creation of a Depository for Historical

                                                                                                      35
MALTE HAGENER

     Cinematography” (Introduction by William D. Ruott), in Screening the Past, http://www.latrobe.edu.au/
     screeningthepast/classics/clasjul/mat.html, last visit 20 July 2011.
5    See the special issue: Film History, Cinema during the Great War (edited by Stephen Bottomore), vol.
     22, no. 4, 2010; see also Martin Loiperdinger, Die Erfindung des Dokumentarfilms durch die
     Filmpropaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg, in Kay Hoffmann, Ursula von Keitz (eds.), Die Einübung des
     dokumentarischen Blicks. Fiction Film und Non Fiction Film zwischen Wahrheitsanspruch und expres-
     siver Sachlichkeit 1895-1945, Schüren, Marburg 2001, pp 71-79 and Uli Jung, Martin Loiperdinger
     (eds.), Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland. Band 1: Kaiserreich 1895-1918, Philipp
     Reclam jun., Stuttgart 2005.
6    See Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back. The European Avantgarde and the Invention of
     Film Culture, 1919-1939, cit., pp. 113-119.
7    On the (early) history of FIAF see Penelope Houston, Keepers of the Frame. The Film Archives, British
     Film Institute, London 1994, pp. 60-77.
8    Idem, p.18.
9    For the history of the institution written by a long-term employee see Hans Barkhausen, Zur Geschichte
     des ehemaligen Reichsfilmarchivs, in Günter Moltmann, Karl Friedrich Reimers (eds.), Zeitgeschichte
     im Film- und Tondokument. 17 historische, pädagogische und sozialwissenschaftliche Beiträge,
     Musterschmidt, Göttingen-Zürich-Frankfurt 1970, pp. 241-250.
10   On the central role of Goebbels in the propaganda efforts of the Nazis see Felix Moeller, The Film
     Minister. Goebbels and the Cinema in the “Third Reich,” Menges, Stuttgart-London 2000; on the organ-
     isation of the cinema sector in the years 1933 to 1945 see Jürgen Spiker, Film und Kapital. Der Weg der
     deutschen Filmwirtschaft zum nationalsozialistischen Einheitskonzern, Volker Spiess, Berlin 1975 and
     Boguslaw Drewniak, Der deutsche Film 1933-1945. Ein Gesamtüberblick, Droste, Düsseldorf 1987.
11   On the early development of the RFA see Rolf Aurich, “Kurvenreiche Geschichte: vor 75 Jahren wurde
     das ‘Reichsfilmarchiv’ gegründet,” in Film-Dienst, no. 8, 2009, pp. 15-17; Rolf Aurich, “Film als poli-
     tischer Zeuge. Zur Geschichte des einstigen deutschen Reichsfilmarchivs,” in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 20
     June 2009 and Rolf Aurich, Das Reichsfilmarchiv. Ein Archiv mit Nachgeschichte, in Wolfgang
     Beilenhoff, Sabine Hänsgen (eds.), Der gewöhnlicher Faschismus. Ein Werkbuch zum Film von Michail
     Romm, Vorwerk 8, Berlin 2010, pp. 310-317; revised English translation forthcoming in Malte Hagener
     (ed.), Studying the Cinema. Film Culture, Knowledge Production and Institution Building in Europe,
     1919-1939, cit.
12   See Rolf Aurich, “Cineast, Sammler, Nationalsozialist. Der Funktionär Frank Hensel und das
     Reichsfilmarchiv,” in Film-Dienst, no. 15, 2001; English translation in Journal of Film Preservation, no.
     64, 2002, pp. 16-21.
13   On the film production of the fascist party see Thomas Hanna-Daoud, Die NSDAP und der Film bis zur
     Machtergreifung, Böhlau, Köln-Weimar-Wien 1996.
14   For a general history of the institution see Sam Hunter, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The
     History and the Collection, Abrams, New York 1984 and Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, jr. and
     the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 2002.
15   See the original paper: John E. Abbott, Iris Barry, “An Outline of a Project for Founding the Film
     Library of the Museum of Modern Art,” 1935; reprinted in Film History, vol. 7, no. 3, Autumn 1995,
     pp. 325-335.
16   Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies. The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema, University
     of California Press, Berkeley, CA 2005, p. 88.
17   See for the Langlois-Lindgren rivalry Penelope Houston, Keepers of the Frame. The Film Archives, cit.,
     pp. 37-59 and Richard Roud, A Passion for Film. Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque Française,
     Secker & Warburg, London 1983.
18   For a detailed look at this practice see Christopher Dupin, “The Origins and Early Development of the
     National Film Library: 1929-1936,” in Journal of Media Practice, vol. 7, no. 3, 2007, pp. 199-217.
19   Christopher Dupin, “The Origins and Early Development of the National Film Library: 1929-1936,” cit.
     p. 211.

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                                                                INVENTING A PAST, IMAGINING A FUTURE

20 See Jamie Sexton, Parody on the Fringes. Adrian Brunel, Minority Film Culture and the Art of
   Deconstruction, in Alan Burton, Laraine Porter (eds.), Pimple, Pranks and Pratfalls: British Film
   Comedy Before 1930, Flicks Books, Trowbridge 2000 and Jamie Sexton, Alternative Film Culture in
   Inter-War Britain, University of Exeter Press, Exeter 2008.
21 Christopher Dupin, “The Origins and Early Development of the National Film Library: 1929-1936,” cit.,
   p. 215f.
22 See Christophe Gauthier, La Passion du cinéma. Cinéphiles, ciné-clubs et salles spécialisées à Paris de
   1920 à 1929, Association Française de Recherche sur l’Histoire du Cinéma-Ecole des Chartes, Paris
   1999.
23 See Patrick Olmeta, La Cinémathèque française de 1936 à nos jours, CNRS, Paris 2000, p. 24f.
24 Ibidem and Laurent Mannoni, Histoire de la Cinémathèque française, Gallimard, Paris 2006.
25 Quoted by Rolf Aurich, Das Reichsfilmarchiv. Ein Archiv mit Nachgeschichte, cit.
26 Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies. The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema, cit., p. 7.




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