Just returned from the American Film Institute's newly opened Silver Theatre, a 10-minute walk from us here in downtown Silver Spring, where Kari and I saw Holiday (1938) on the big screen, a delightful bit of whimsy starring Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. The Silver Theatre is splendid, and it's a priceless (if pricey) addition to the neighborhood. One of my best memories of living in downtown Lexington, Kentucky, was going to the Kentucky Theater just minutes from my door; we're both looking forward to the movie-going in our future.
Apropos of my previous post, preservation was much on my mind, not only because we're lucky to have a print for this 1938 classic (we've lost as many as half the American feature films made before 1950), but also because the building itself is an ambitious restoration of the theatre's Art Deco architecture and design (though some features, such as the original pattern for the tilework in the foyer, remain lost). On the walk up Kari reminded me that the history of textual studies teaches us that preservation also always entails loss; all of our archives and repositories are soaked in the waters of Lethe, is how she put it. Loss and forgetting, says Kari, are essential to the art of memory (witness the tragedy of Borges's Funes the Memorius); not for nothing, I would add, did Norbert Wiener celebrate the computer's ability to discard informaton efficiently.
Of course none of this offsets the awfulness of losing the complete holdings of the Museum of Antiquities in Iraq. There's a report now too that the National Library, also in Baghdad, has been looted and burned.
Posted by mgk at April 13, 2003 08:58 PMThese are really interesting observations to me, in part because I am a film scholar and one of the films I'm researching, Berkeley Square, a 1932 time-travel film starring Leslie Howard, is essentially lost--only non-screening silver nitrate prints remain. Also recalls for me some of the memorative functions of restoring old theaters, which always seem nostalgic for earlier modes of cinematic production. Kari's observations recall for me one of the more profound moments of Chris Marker's amazing cinema-essay, "Sans soleil," in which the voice-over narrator reflects that cinema itself is a memory machine, one that in ways depends on forgetting.