Many of the films shot in rural parts of Europe – Auvergne and Brittany were especially favoured by the French producers – offer a tourist’s view of picturesque towns, folk costumes and traditional customs. Picture books, travel reports, the Kaiser-Panorama and films from distant lands made virtual journeys possible in this time of great wanderlust before the age of mass tourism. In a good few films the infamy of colonialism, which continues unabated in today’s international trade, became an open secret (Récolte, manipulation et exportation du café). The parade filmed in Antwerp in 1909, with banana costumes and an elephant, only strikes us as funny if we put to the back of our mind – or don’t actually know – the fact that between 1885 and 1908 in the Congo Free State (in the private ownership of Leopold II) half the population, about 10 million people, were killed in a colonial crime without parallel.
In Argentina, previously a Spanish colony, every year on 25 May they celebrate the toppling from power of the Spanish viceroy and the installation of the first independent government in May 1810. Argentina’s first fiction film of 1909 depicts these events.
Japan’s magnificent cinema history began like that of many other countries: the first film productions and the first cinema presentations are credited to Girel (1897) und Veyre (1898), travelling cameramen working for the Lumière brothers. Production and exhibition developed swiftly, and since the mid-1920s the Japanese film industry has been one of the biggest – and best – in the world. It was not until after the Second World War that a few Japanese filmmakers became known in Europe and America.
The second part of the programme brings together a French-produced current affairs shot in Japan, an Italian Film d’Arte which premiered in Tokyo on New Year’s Day 1910 (of which the only known print was preserved in Japan thanks to the collector Tomijiro Komiya) and finally a 1909 Japanese film from the Waseda University collection: deep thanks to Hiroshi Komatsu for supplying the print to the festival. This is especially rare: the survival rate is close to zero.

Mariann Lewinsky