LICHTSPIEL / KINEMATHEK BERN PRESENTS
Imagine a collection of projectors and other technical devices from the world of cinematography. Like many other collectors of cinematographic material, Walter Ritschard, a Bernese cinema technician, was more focused on the technical equipment than on the films that could be produced and/or screened on them. However, a projector looks incomparably more attractive with a film on it. Therefore, the collection also contained some films, including trailers, newsreels, short documentaries and occasionally amateur films. The focus of the Lichtspiel collection has its origins in this inheritance. From our beginning in 2000 we wanted to take on tasks that were not the main focus of other archives, not limited to the content of the films or a specific format. On the content level, this inclusivity, combined with the fact that the films are also projected frequently, led the Lichtspiel to become the home of the UNICA Collection (Union Internationale du Cinéma), but also of the GSFA (Groupement Suisse du Film d’Animation) and other similar organisations. The film distribution services of Switzerland’s school film producers found a new home and filmmakers such as Clemens Klopfenstein handed over their works to our archive. Thus the collection grew rapidly to about 30,000 short films.
Formally, the wide range of the archive collection policy leads increasingly away from 35mm, today the largest part of the collection is 16mm material and in the last years we more deliberately set our focus on amateur film formats such as 9.5mm – the oldest successful film format for home use also set standards for all that followed. Pathé first used it to remarket its own productions, but also to successfully win over the middle classes by invading their intimate space at home. With our two programmes curated for Il Cinema Ritrovato we would like to present a selection of the 9.5mm films available not only in our archives but with a broader Swiss perspective: some films are from the Cinécollection Peter Fasnacht and two films come from the Cinémathèque suisse. The silent version of the film L’Hippocampe by Jean Painlevé has found its way into the programme to show that sound was no serious obstacle. There is undoubtedly much missing: Max Linder for example, or examples from the British Pathescope Library. The condition of the films was a serious criterion for exclusion; many are brittle and heavily warped due to years of storage in small metal containers.
The very important two-part aspect of the format: filming one’s own life and buying what others have filmed from the enormous Pathé Library is also not present in these two programmes, mainly for conservation reasons. At the Lichtspiel, the analogue format is at the centre, so preservation concerns were also important for the choices we made.

Brigitte Paulowitz