Serge Bromberg

What is the biggest challenge you face when restoring films?

The biggest challenge is to restore audiences. To make them go to the movie theatre without telling them: “This is important, it is part of your cultural heritage, you should know your own past”, but to let them realize that those old movies are as thrilling as the latest blockbuster. It is not that because the special effects of today are more sophisticated that you get better emotions, on the contrary. As far as the restoration itself is concerned, the hardest part is to find films; you know, fifty percents of all the movies that have been shot in the history of cinema are now lost. Film archives only arrived in the 30s, before that, films were bought without royalties and disposed of when out of fashion. Out of the five hundreds films Méliès shot, only two hundreds have survived. Edison and other companies pirated A Trip to the Moon, a huge box office hit in the USA, so that Méliès could not make it in America because of pirates!

What are the criteria according to which you decide to restore a certain film and not another?

There are many criteria such as rarity, availability and so on. Then you have ‘institutional’ motivations: the Institute of Italian cinema will restore Italian films, the Lumiere Institute in Lyon restores for example all the Lumiere Brothers films. We pick those films that we think have a potential in terms of distribution and also entertainment. Furthermore, to restore a film can mean ‘only’ to preserve it or to recover its original status. In the case of silent features you have to commission a soundtrack and then of course you have to market it, release it on DVD and so on. You understand that this is possible only for a limited amount of films.

Is there a particular film you are after, and that you would like to restore?

There are a few. We found this King Vidor film from 1926 called Bardelys the Magnificent which seems very interesting, then there is the long version of Greed by Erich von Stroheim. I can also mention 4 Devils by F.W. Murnau or Humour Risk, the first film by the Marx Brothers. Divine Woman with Greta Garbo is lost too. The list can go on forever but I am going to tell you which my favourite one is: it’s the ‘next one’. That’s my life, the next one. I want to find more and as long as there are films to be found and to show to people I am happy. I want films to come alive, and films are alive only in the eyes of the spectator. If there is no spectator, there is no life nor film. My only concern is to bring joy, amazement and emotions as in the early days of cinema. In a way cinema is just an excuse to have people finding each other, to see them being amazed by the same wonder, to have them talking to one another, to see a man meeting a woman.

What do you think draws people to old and forgotten films?

We do face this issue with our foundation, how to attract younger audiences that for example have never heard of Méliès? That’s why we called the electronic duo Air, because the people who know Air will come to the screening and I hope that eventually they will also remember the film…[he is interrupted by a friend he hugs]…that’s what I was telling you about, cinema is about meeting people!

By Celluloid Liberation Front