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| Jacques Haïk: Se London! / See London! (FR 1927). The Hans Berge Collection, Nasjonalbiblioteket, Oslo/Mo i Rana. |
Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM), 2023
Programma a cura di Tina Anckarman
Tina Anckarman (GCM 2023):
" It’s time to pack your bags again! The Hans Berge Collection returns! Norway’s Hans Berge Collection of travelogues spans 1906 to 1934. In 2022 we presented films representing a variety of faraway places. This year’s itinerary will take us to more destinations, from the European cities of London and Berlin, to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, Trinidad in the Caribbean, and sheep farms in Australia. "
" A brief review of the origins of the collection: Hans Berge went to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915 to represent Norway, with the assignment of showcasing Norwegian tourist attractions, folklore, and industry at the fair’s Norwegian pavilion. This was due to his work the previous year as the off icial photographer at the Anniversary Exposition in Oslo, the Jubileumsutstillingen på Frogner (familiarly called the Frognerutstillingen), which celebrated 100 years of the Norwegian constitution. In the months between the Oslo Exposition and his journey to California, Berge travelled around Norway to record views from all over the country for the Panama-Pacific Exposition. "
" When Berge left San Francisco, he travelled around California and other states in the USA, primarily in regions with big populations of Norwegian immigrants, to give lectures and screen the footage he brought from Norway. Berge had trained as a photographer in Minneapolis around 1902-1906, and started on his path as a filmmaker upon his return to Oslo. As one can read in interviews from the mid-1910s, Berge was clearly very impressed by how fast the American film industry had grown since he left Minnesota in 1906. "
" Hans Berge was a filmmaker, but the programme mainly focuses on Berge as a collector. Most of the films were made by others and collected on Berge’s many journeys. At some point Berge obviously developed an interest in travelogues or actualities made far from his home country, and started to collect reels representing stories and cultures that were exotic and unknown for him and his anticipated audience back home. Some of the makers of these films are known to us, but more often they are not. We have no documents confirming that Berge himself ever travelled to Africa, Asia, Australia, or the Pacific, but he was indeed a travelling man, and visited North, Central, and South America. In many cases the context in which the films in the Collection were produced is clearly colonial; the context in which they were screened (or supposedly were meant to be screened) was educational or instructional. Many of these travelogues appear in distribution listings for schools. "
" Our first programme, screened at last year’s Giornate, contained six travelogues, with all the typical characteristics of the genre: we are travellers passing through a landscape, getting glimpses of local people carrying out their tasks in everyday life, and we see them perform various handicrafts, letting us, a passive audience, observe their traditions, either willingly or involuntarily. "
" A highlight this year is a unique invitation to see London as it was in the summer of 1927. Producer Jacques Haïk doesn’t want to take us for just another guided tour around the city centre’s tourist attractions. Besides the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace and detailed scenes of the workings of Tower Bridge, Se London! gives us a chance to explore the city through a kaleidoscope, letting us see its many contrasts from unexpected angles, jumping between bustling street life in the Jewish quarters to lazy strolls in the park, from weekday traffic jams to quiet alleyways just off Holborn. As an outsider, Haïk obviously understood why the big city was always such a fascinating magnet! "
" A couple of films with somewhat different characteristics have also crept into this year’s programme. Saueavl på Australia (Sheep Farming in Australia) shares the European attitude we find in many colonial films, but it is more of an instructive process film. Die Berliner Feuerwehr mit ihren neuen Automobil-Fahrzeugen (1911) does indeed take us to Berlin, but we really see only the Berlin fire department’s courtyard, where the firefighters demonstrate their drills and methods. "
" After Hans Berge’s death in 1934 the collection was administered by his son, Jan Berge. In 1969 the reassembled nitrate collection was donated to the Norwegian Film Institute, which during the 1990s initiated a project of cleaning and copying selected reels (including some of the titles in this year’s programme), at the laboratory Filmteknik in Stockholm. The aim was to remove mould growing on the reels due to incorrect storage. Colorized projection copies were largely copied to black & white film base in sound format, while a small number were copied to colour film, also in sound format. "
" The result was substandard copies that did not preserve important aspects of the films’ expression and information. Unfortunately, the cleaning of the nitrate reels sometimes also contributed to further deterioration: mould was removed, but parts of the emulsion were also dissolved and rinsed off. The original nitrate was later shipped to the National Library’s newly constructed nitrate vaults in Mo i Rana in northern Norway. Here the reels were placed in special cells dedicated to the preservation of mould-infested material, and then remained untouched for decades. In 2017 the National Library received a further deposit of approximately 1.5 cubic metres of nitrate material, which had been stored by Hans’s grandson, Hans Jan Berge. "
" The Hans Berge Collection is one of the oldest collections in the National Library’s archive, containing the largest aggregation of Norwegian actuality film (documentary records of current events). Considering its considerable historical value, we saw its preservation as a long-neglected responsibility. But how to deal with the issues connected to the mould infestation? We decided to build handling facilities dedicated to the treatment of moulddamaged materials, isolated from the rest of the laboratory. "
" Through this workflow we have registered, catalogued, cleaned, and prepared the film reels for digitization. Much work remains before we have reached our goal, to treat and digitize every reel that can be saved before it’s too late. Since this project began in 2018 we have digitized a couple of hundred reels and catalogued roughly half of the collection. There is more to come! " Tina Anckarman
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