Along with its special holdings like the Desmet, Mutoscope-Biograph and Uitkijk Collections, EYE Filmmuseum Amsterdam also has a rich and eclectic silent film collection mostly put together with donations by private collectors. The variety and quantity of silent films still to be found today is astonishing for a small country like the Netherlands. The nitrate collection grows steadily, and every year new discoveries are made. Regrettably, often only fragments or single reels reappear; nevertheless, one hundred years after their first release, it seems more and more relevant to preserve and screen these miraculously surviving images.
Perhaps this year’s most sensational discovery is the fragment of Una notte a Calcutta starring the incomparable Lyda Borelli in one of her last films. The rediscovered reel amounts to only eleven minutes (about 1/6 of the film), but Borelli’s presence is magnificent and the film’s elegance evident. After the rediscovery of several Rosa Porten films, which were screened last year at Il Cinema Ritrovato, yet another fragment of a film with her was found and especially restored for this year’s festival. We believe it to be Die Barfusstäenzerin, but further research is needed since so little information is available, as often is the case for Rosa Porten. Similarly, after Tragico Convegno (shown at Il Cinema Ritrovato in 2013) material from La falsa strada (1913), another film starring the young Maria Jacobini, was rediscovered and preserved, and the few minutes of the Bertini film Fedora which recently arrived at EYE are included as a bonus in the Assunta Spina Dvd.
The programme includes short color films and the presentation of the new book Fantasia of Colors in Early Cinema by Giovanna Fossati, Tom Gunning, Joshua Yumibe and Jonathon Rosen (Amsterdam University Press, 2015), a celebration of EYE’s endeavor to preserve the colors of early cinema. Since 1986, when our institution decided to reproduce the colors of nitrate films, dedication to color continues. In 1995, the Amsterdam Workshop Disorderly Order: Colours in Silent Film became a milestone event. Twenty years on, Fantasia of Color seeks to reveal the beauty of early color films to the widest audience possible with almost 200 frame enlargements taken directly from 60 nitrate film prints kept at EYE’s vaults.

Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi