2025 Montreal Symposium
Session 4 - Historical Memory of Film Practitioners
Montreal, 29 April 2025
Please do not publish or re-use in any way any of these documents without prior permission of the speakers.
History of Films on Filmmaking
Dimitrios Latsis (University of Alabama)
The sub-genre of films on filmmaking – behind-the-scenes movies focusing on some aspect of the production and/or afterlife of a given movie – will be intimately familiar to anyone browsing through the bonus features of a Blu-ray today. It has long flourished as part of the non-theatrical distribution market even before the advent of video, with featurettes forming part of specially produced newsreels or promotional shorts that various Hollywood studios churned out – often in dedicated production units. Nor has this niche escaped the attention of film historians like Anthony Slide, Christopher Ames, Rudy Behlmer, James Parrish and Richard Meyers (among others) who have written both scholarly and popular histories of how Hollywood views itself on screen and how the history of the industry mirrors that of the wider culture. Cinema is indeed unique among all art forms in that it was born at roughly the same time as attempts at the documentation of its own history and pre-history, including by cinematic means. This presentation examines the production, early exhibition and subsequent preservation by the Museum of Modern Art and George Eastman Museum of Thirty Years of Motion Pictures (ca 1926-7), later exhibited under its more commonly known title March of the Movies, which is very likely the first feature-length archival compilation film produced anywhere in the world that attempted to comprehensively trace the history of cinema up to that point. I argue that the film went much further than any history before the advent of academic film historiography in its attempt to compile a comprehensive account of the medium, art, technology and social practice of cinema, covering a very wide variety of films, devices, theatres, individuals and events while looking at the movies as more than a filmed product, as a wider field of projected moving image.
La Pologne en mémoire
Ania Szczepanska (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
Marie-Charlotte Téchené (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)
These two presentations focus on 20th-century Poland, its painful memory, the archives, and the people who preserve and revive it. In the form of a diptych, the two speakers will examine the creation and transmission of images of the past. How does cinema take on the task of exhuming images of places, people, and things, and the quest for reparation, by creating new shared configurations of memory?
Cavalcanti: A Man and the Cinema
Carlos Augusto Calil (Cinemateca Brasileira)
In 2025, the Cinemateca Brasileira presented a major retrospective of filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti, the most internationally renowned Brazilian director. The research conducted by the Cinemateca – which informed both the screening programme and a dedicated website – reveals a professional who worked across various technical and creative areas of cinema in multiple countries. He began his career as an art director on the films of Marcel L'Herbier, participated in the French avant-garde movement, and, in England, joined the GPO Film Unit team. In Brazil, he coordinated the first industrial-based cinema initiative.
This is a presentation and discussion of a film directed by Cavalcanti (or "Cav", as he was known in Europe) about his own work: A Man and the Cinema. This anthology compiles scenes from several of his films, providing an overview of his exceptional career. His career was so unique that it inspired a book organized by Wolfgang Klaue, which includes texts and testimonials from colleagues worldwide. The film revives a filmmaking style that still captured the daring spirit of the pioneers; it explores the vocation of documentary filmmaking, pays tribute to the working class, and educates new generations by fostering a deeper understanding of other cultures, even though Cavalcanti voluntarily lived as a permanent exile. The film is organized into two parts and compiles excerpts from a selection of films in which Cavalcanti was involved (his filmography includes 138 titles in various roles), creating a narrative that encourages reflection on key issues, such as the film archive as a creative institution and the potential artistic constraints faced by a director working within a structure tied to an official state apparatus.
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