When you think of film preservation, what comes to mind is probably distributors such as Criterion or Janus Films, the vaults of studios such as Disney, Paramount and MGM (a catalog now owned by Amazon) or the archives of institutions such as Harvard and UCLA. While that’s all true, it’s also incomplete.
Peter Flynn’s latest documentary, “Film is Dead. Long Live Film!,” tells us that the keeping of film isn’t so much a science or even an industry requirement but a hodgepodge of efforts big and small. The film, which plays The Brattle on Friday as part of a weeklong program called “Long Live Film! The Art of Collecting,” looks at the latter: the hobbyists, aficionados and small-time companies filling the gaps. The intricately crafted doc is by intent a testament to the passion of such niche collectors as well as a primer on the state of film preservation, and it comes with healthy amount of cinematic history.
Flynn, a self-proclaimed film nerd and professor of filmmaking and film studies at Emerson College, has turned out four features to date. With the exception of “Inauguration” (2017), documenting the women’s march on Washington, D.C., when president Donald Trump took office, all dive into esoteric aspects of film, filmmaking and film exhibition. His “The Dying of the Light” (2015), which examined the transition from celluloid to digital as a medium, the art of projection and state of arthouse cinema, got a four-star review from The Boston Globe. It also exposed him to a network of people connected with preservation that interested him as a path to explore.
Flynn, who has a doctorate in media studies with a focus on film history, was born in Dublin and came to America in the 1990s as a young man looking to escape a suffocating economy. His first film, “Blazing the Trail: The O’Kalems in Ireland” (2011), chronicled the exploits of the New York film company Kalem making films in Ireland in the early 1900s, and wove together elements of his past life and present pursuits.
Much of Flynn’s interest, as one might guess, is in the silent and early (pre-Golden Age) studio eras. “It’s astonishing how much back then was just dumped in the trash,” Flynn said.
Flynn’s film embeds the viewer with those who seek out those discards with often profound results, from the unearthing of an early Boris Karloff serial or a Morgan Freeman film from the early 1980s, when, even then, his suave, avuncular charisma was evident and clear.
Many of Flynn’s human subjects are quirky sorts, though undeniably committed to their craft and exhibiting meticulous care and skill on camera as they go about their restoration tasks and delicate handling of the fragile film strips. One collector, Lou DiCrescenzo, whom Flynn bonded with over the five-year making of the film, often ponders what will happen to his collection when he dies, and at times, seems more concerned with that than bridging some of the family tension caused by his obsession. (DiCrescenzo died this year. The film is dedicated to him.)
One of the aims of “Film is Dead” is to showcase these private collectors, Flynn said. There are bigger, more well-known collectors by the names of Tarantino and Scorsese, but it’s hard to imagine either dumpster diving for a tin of nitrate and spending hours gingerly wiping down cels to piece reels together.
The Brattle program “Long Live Film! The Art of Collecting,” which Flynn helped curate with theater staff, runs Thursday through May 14, kicking off with Quentin Tarantino’s genre-defining, instant classic “Pulp Fiction” (1994). Its inclusion is a nod to the video clerk-turned-A-list-filmmaker being part of the film-collecting community, and how his homages to older films keep often-unheralded achievements alive and in our minds.
Also included are some of those Karloff rarities uncovered by one of Flynn’s subjects; the cult Italian gore fest “Zombie” (1979), which features an underwater battle between a great white shark and one of the undead; and “Bad Girls Go to Hell” (1965), in which a Bostonian exacts revenge by killing her rapist and goes on the lam in New York City – a quarter-century before there was “Thelma and Louise.” On the more familiar side, there’s Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960) screening for Mother’s Day, as well as some Saturday-morning TV rarities. The program, like an old reel rebuilt, is stitched together with care and purpose, and has something for the cinephile in most everyone.
“Film is Dead. Long Live Film!” just picked up the Best Feature Documentary Award at the Desertscape International Film Festival and Indy Film Festival. Flynn will be on hand for the Friday screening to introduce the film and do a Q&A, along with some of the collectors featured in the film.
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