Restoring the Audience
“The collector scene is vanishing everywhere,” replies Serge Bromberg when I ask him about the state of film collecting in France. “We are less and less. A few dozens. We used to be very young, we are not as young as we were,” he admits in his clear but heavily accented English. “The film collectors are moving to digital or dying, and their widows are trying to get rid of the film.” Although most of this book is focused on film collectors in the United States, there were—and continue to be—collectors in every part of the globe. In fact, the greatest film collector in history was quite likely a Frenchman, Henri Langlois, who, together with the marvelous, still-underrated director Georges Franju (Eyes Without a Face, Judex) and critic Jean Mitry, started the Cinémathèque Française in the 1930s. Langlois’s private collection morphed into the great-granddaddy of film archives, and his overwhelming passion for cinema has made him something of a patron saint for film lovers.48 By the time of his death in 1977, he’d acquired, scavenged, and rescued by some estimates over sixty thousand films for the Cinémathèque.
In the tradition of Langlois, Serge Bromberg has turned his passion for film collecting into a career as a world-renowned film preservationist, director, distributor, promoter, and tireless champion for cinema. Dark-haired, with a bit of a John Garfield quality, he speaks about cinema with an almost irresistible enthusiasm and a showman’s sense of how to sell a good story. Through his company Lobster Films in Paris, he’s been involved in the restoration of all surviving Charlie Chaplin films made between 1914 and 1917 and dozens of previously lost Georges Méliès films, including the recent painstaking restoration of A Trip to the Moon (1902) from the only known hand-tinted color print of the film, discovered in Spain. In France he’s a household name as host of the much-loved TV programs on film history Cartoon Factory (1993), Cellulo (1995–2001), and Ça tourne Bromby (1997–1999), and from 1999 through 2012 he was artistic director of the Annecy International Animated Film Festival. In 2010 he won a French César award for his superb documentary L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot (codirected with Ruxandra Medrea), a thrilling cinema detective story reconstructing a never-finished project by Clouzot, famed director of The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques. “If I had remained a simple collector, I’d be totally nuts today,” Serge confesses. “But turning the passion of film into the profession of saving and showing films kind of saved my life, because my job is my passion.”
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of his collecting is how he’s managed to popularize long-forgotten films of the silent era, making them seem fresh and important. Nowhere is this more visible than in his live presentations called “Retour de Flamme,” literally “Back from the Flames,” which always include Serge igniting a piece of old nitrate film in front of a startled audience. Retour de Flamme began in 1992 when he was asked by a small theater in Paris, Théâtre du Nord-Ouest, to put together a show: “It was an old theater, but they’d removed the seats, and they’d put out the little tables and a bar—and you could watch the film and drink at the same time. I must admit it was bizarre, but nevertheless, they had a piano in house,” he recalls today. “We said, ‘We have some films, but they’re nitrate and we can’t run them.’ They found a small institution that funded the restoration of an hour of nitrate.” Among the films was a 1925 Stan Laurel two-reeler, Pie-Eyed (under the delightful French title Picotin noctambule), Philips Broadcast of 1938 by George Pal, and what he describes as “two primitive French comedies of 1910.” The night of the first show, he arrived at the venue at rue du Faubourg Montmartre—and realized he’d forgotten to hire a pianist. “I’d studied piano for fifteen years and still remembered my A, B, and C’s. So I had to play. Of course the music was terrible,” he confesses with a smile. “While the leaders were going through the projectors, I’d stand up and apologize for the quality of the music and explain where we found the prints, and why these films are so miraculous, all kinds of stories. And it worked. It’s like a cocktail that worked instantly exactly, maybe because of my storytelling. Not because of my piano.” For over twenty years now, he’s performed Retour de Flamme around the world, most recently at the Telluride Film Festival and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “It’s fun to find films, to restore them, but it’s much, much more fun to restore the audience,” he observes.
Serge was born in 1961 in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, a suburb of Paris surrounded by a loop in the Marne River. When he was nine years old, his father purchased a film projector and showed Serge a print of Chaplin’s A Night in the Show (1915). It would have a lasting impact on him. After graduating from ESCP Europe Business School in 1983, he started his own audio restoration company, Lobster Films, in 1985. Throughout his career he’s shown a canny knack for turning an admittedly obscure obsession with old films into a paying job. He is, as he describes himself, a “crazy film collector who is also a wise businessman.” In 1988 he was asked to work on a sound restoration of Jean Renoir’s 1935 film The Crime of Monsieur Lange. Lobster quickly became one of the first companies to specialize in digital audio work on vintage films, including Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise for Pathé. Serge is especially proud of his efforts on the films of Jean Vigo, the tragically short-lived genius of early 1930s French cinema, including the director’s final film, the sublime L’Atalante (1934). “The film was cut down very, very early,” he says of the movie, which later became a key influence on the French New Wave, most notably François Truffaut. “The only surviving long version was in London, that’s where we got it. We took that sound because all the other prints had rerecorded sound. They’d used all kinds of noise reduction from the 1940s and 1950s that were totally destructive.”
He met his longtime collaborator and partner at Lobster, Eric Lange, at a flea market in 1989. “He tried to sell me stuff. It didn’t work out well,” he says with a smile about Lange, who was attempting to sell him a 17.5mm projector. The two quickly hit it off and began working together, with Serge the visible frontman and Lange the behind-the-scenes technician. “He does not speak so much,” Serge says of his friend and partner, with whom he recently directed the acclaimed documentary Le Voyage extraordinaire, about the making of Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon and their restoration of the single, precious hand-tinted copy. “I don’t know if he’s shy or doesn’t enjoy speaking. Basically he’s the brain and I’m the voice.” There’s a pause as he considers this picture, then he amends it: “Okay, let’s say he’s the arms and I’m the voice, and we share all the brain.” When the two men met, they had by Serge’s estimation about fifty prints each. Now their combined collection amounts to a staggering 120,000 cans of film, spread out between two private vaults in Paris, the CNC Archives, the Cinémathèque Française, and the Academy Film Archive in L.A.
Their most famous find together—and one of the most astonishing discoveries of lost films, ever—occurred almost by accident in the late 1990s. Serge explains, “A man called an archive and said, ‘I have a film by Méliès called Paris—New York. Does it exist and are you interested?’ The man at the archive checked the catalogue of Méliès films, and there was no title of this kind listed. He thought the man had made a mistake, which was not the case. What happened was on the leader of the Méliès film, it said ‘Paris—New York,’ because he had an office in Paris and New York. He thought it was the title. The man at the archive turned it down.” The owner subsequently contacted Eclair Laboratories in Paris, who recommended him to Lobster. Serge happened to be filming that day, so Lange agreed to drive down to the south of France to meet with the collector. It turns out the man had twenty films in his possession, and a fellow collector had another eighty films, which they’d purchased from a local antique store for one hundred euros. “Eric grabbed the things. He negotiated and got all the films—and he got back to the hotel, because it was too late to drive back to Paris, and spent two hours watching those films.” There’s a pause as Serge recalls the excitement and anticipation waiting to hear from his partner. “Eric called me that night. He said, ‘These are pre-1906 nitrate, and if we announce a new lost Méliès film every year, you and I will be grandfathers before we announce the last one.” The discovery, which they famously dubbed “Treasures from a Chest,” was the cinema equivalent of discovering Tutankhamun’s tomb: they had found over two hundred pounds of film, ninety-eight movies total from before 1906, including a staggering seventeen previously lost Méliès films.49 I ask, almost as an afterthought, what the actual chest looked like that held these wondrous treasures. “They mention it as a chest, but we never got the chest,” he finally admits. “That’s what we imagined, that’s the legend—how do you say, ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend?’” He’s quoting, of course, from another famous film, John Ford’s 1962 classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and it’s a fitting coda to this tale of treasures from a chest that wasn’t actually a chest.
As with any collector, there are of course ones that got away, even for a fanatical Méliès scholar and preservationist like Serge. In 2003 during a blistering heat wave in Paris, he was contacted by a woman who said she had an old film to sell. “She came to Lobster, and she took out of a plastic bag a roll of film that was all white, totally decomposed—except the middle was still there. We opened it and looked at the middle section that survived. It was A Trip to the Moon in black-and-white, but the last tableau was complete. That’s all that survived of the print, but that’s the part that did not survive in any other print. We asked her, ‘Why is it that decomposed?’ She said, ‘It’s because it was nice in July, but the film was a bit sticky so I put it on my window, and I was hoping the heat would dry it.’” Still hoping to salvage the precious middle section, Serge offered her 500 euros. “She said, ‘I want 100,000 Euros.’ I said, ‘It’s a bit too much.’” The woman left. After attempting unsuccessfully to sell it elsewhere, she returned a month later. There’s a strain in Serge’s voice as he continues: “But the film had melted from the first to the last image, and it was too late.”
“Our best find is our next one. The one we’ll do tomorrow,” he responds when I ask if he has any favorites among his collection. He admits he has had to make sacrifices with his family to keep up his tireless role as film champion/promoter/preservationist. “Mostly because of my traveling—it takes a lot of time to do the shows. So I’m not often at home, and I’m sorry for this,” he confesses. He grows contemplative when I ask him for his thoughts on the transition from film to digital. “I would put it this way: papyrus—the Egyptian way of leaves and bamboo—was the only way to write stories. But those stories have been translated and printed, and now we know those stories in translation,” he says. “What’s interesting is not the papyrus but the story.” He acknowledges that for most audience members, even the ones that thrill to his Retour de Flamme shows, it’s the images that count, not how they’re presented. For him, as with other film collectors, the technology they cherish has made them men out of time in the modern world. “For us, being in a small room with a 16mm projector, it’s part of the poetry, but it’s our poetry. So many people now think it’s a Stone Age technology—which it is.”
While Lobster continues to preserve films in 35mm, at least for the present, Serge admits that they rarely make 35mm prints for screenings, preferring DCPs instead for digital presentation.50 I ask which films they’re currently restoring, and ironically one turns out to be A Night in the Show, the 1915 Charlie Chaplin short Serge’s father screened for him when he was nine, which he’s restoring digitally in 2K in partnership with the Cineteca di Bologna using material from the Museum of Modern Art and the Cinémathèque Française. I inquire if he feels like he’s come full circle, restoring the film he watched with his father so long ago. There’s a quiet pause. “How could I answer this?” he finally responds.