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286 R. GRIFFITH [j. s. M. P. E.
study of the history and development of the motion picture or of its influence or aesthetic value could be undertaken. The Film Library, therefore, conceived as its first and most immediate task the collection and exhibition of the maximum amount of film.
Here it was, of course, a case of first catch your hare. How were the necessary films to be obtained? It is not widely realized that a motion picture can not usually be bought or otherwise procured as can a book or a painting; or that, even if a print of a film be so obtained, its physical possession does not necessarily entail the right to its use or showing. It is true that in the early days of film history there were many producers, like the Frenchman Georges Melies, who sold prints of their films outright, so that a purchaser could dispose of a copy of, say, A Trip to the Moon, exactly as he wished until it wore out. Here were obvious disadvantages. The producer could flood the market with as many prints as he could sell to competing showmen, yet it was generally they who reaped the profits through exhibition, and there was no way of ensuring that the purchaser of a print would not, as he often did, illegally make duplicate negatives from his print and so compete with the producer himself in the sale of still more prints. It is also true that in those early days a successful film continued to be shown for a long period of time (for all we know, A Trip to the Moon is even now being shown commercially in Zanzibar or in the Australian interior) instead of, as today, for a mere year or so. But most of the men who made the early films went bankrupt. From a collector's point of view it is fortunate that their methods of business left behind a residue in the form of numbers of prints in private hands or in the vaults of dealers in scrap-film. And so, anomalously, the Film Library often found it easier to acquire very old films than more recent ones.
It proved, in fact, relatively simple to acquire by token purchase, gift, or loan a fair representation of film-making in this country and abroad from 1895 to 1912. Prints of primitives of the art like The Great Train Robbery were acquired from the widow of the pioneer Jean A. Leroy. From amateurs, from scrap-film or "junk" firms, from film pioneers or their heirs most of the outstanding early films were obtained. In one instance Mr. William Jamison of the Film Library's staff found a print of The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (much spotted with tobacco juice) in an open garbage can in the Bronx. Another day a total stranger telephoned to offer a film that she had had in her hat-closet for many years.