A Question For The Archivists

[Dominique De Bast]

or anyone who has the answer.

i'm in Paris for two days (🥳) and went to a 35mm projection of a silent film (double 🥳)

The lafy who did the introduction to the film explained that the film came from a Polish cinematheque and they found two problems when they opened the can (or should I say the cans because they had the same problems with another film, yesterday)?). First, the scenes were not in the proper order, so without the explaination of the story before, it would have been impossible to understand anything. But that's not the reason for my post. The second problem was that the intertitles were missing . I assume they are in Polish, but I'm not sure, anyway, the cinema had the translations in French and projected them on the film (with more or less succession : although the texts was in yellow, it was sometimes impossible to read). What surprised me a lot was the reason given : the lady said that usually the intertitles are kept separately, and respiced each time the copy is used. I never heard that before. Is that really something common? As someone who lnows few about archiving, I can see no benefits at all doing that. Does anyone have an explanation?

[Brian Fretwell]

The only reason I can thnk of would be so that they could use the same prints (in Europe) to take different language intertitles with a small number of prints "bicycled" round the continent.