FILM FILM - University of Macau Library

Fragmented Pieces: Writing the History of
the Lost Hollywood Films
The historiographical question of how to deal with lost or only partly preserved
material has been asked repeatedly by film scholars and archivists, in
particular those dealing with the silent era. Perhaps the most elaborate account
of the question has been offered by Giuliana Bruno in her groundbreaking
study Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, on the films by Elvira Notari. 1 Notari’s
films are to a large extent unpreserved, and there is little documentation on
the production company in which she was the driving force. In this book, the
author thus aims at “looking differently”: “While dissecting the minute and the
microhistorical, my study maps out epistemological paradigms. Like a filmmaker
using a rack-focus, I attempt to connect the analytic detail with a panoramic
vision.” 2
In the present study, the aim is more modest, though the method is similar,
to quote Bruno again: “The fragmentary textual body [... ] called for an ‘archaeological’
textual approach.” 3 As she notes, this is just as true of Notari as of
many other cases of loss within silent cinema; indeed, research in film studies
often comes close to the tonality or the mode of archaeology, its subject being
made up to a large extent of gaps and voids. Also, film history seems to share
the very process of knowledge with archaeology, as both are made up by the
investigation of indexical signs. Just like Bruno’s work on Notari, my study of
fragments in the case of Sjöström also “involves analysis that wanders across a
field marked by various lacunae whose texture is larger than the remanence of
complete texts”. 4 However, as far as Sjöström is concerned, the preserved material
offers at least some possibilities to approach the films, especially if the
research question, as in the present study, encompasses the larger question of
film cultures with all their different aspects included, and not only the (non)
preserved copies of the works themselves. Here, the Hollywood mode of production,
with its rigorous systems for different stages of scriptwriting or documenting
the filmmaking process in general, has proved to be helpful to the
historian. In any case, both lost and preserved material turns out to be equally
important; as Éric de Kuyper so aptly put it, the holes count just as much as the
cheese. 5
The method, however, is not that different from the one adopted for this
study as a whole, where the dynamics between lost and preserved is constantly