Peter Delpeut's compilation of film fragments ca. 1905-15 (no big names or faces) from a cache discovered in the attic of the Cinema Parisien in Amsterdam in 1955. Though arranged into several loose categories — "Looking," "Protagonists," "Passion," "Dying," etc. — this is a most un-Chuck-Workman-like creation. Individual clips are allowed to unfold at their own pace and without Workman's channel-switching impatience. (Delpeut takes some questionable liberties with freeze-frames and blow-ups, but only in order to make an instructive point.) Many of the selected clips are hand-tinted in color, a process that might come as a revelation to some — though never really one of the more expressive devices of the silent screen. On the other hand, there is none of the herky-jerkiness of improperly projected silents, and plenty of that graceful and beautiful subaqueous slow-motion that helped, not quite as much as the absence of speech, to create a totally artificial and alternative world. The main revelation, however, particularly for those accustomed to seeing silent films (if at all) in washed-out transfers onto 16mm or video, is the old orthochromatic film stock. Such texture! Such detail! Such nuance! The impression left — an impression painfully intensified by the final segment of blobby obliterated decomposing footage — is not of how far we have come since then, but of how much we've lost. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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