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gallery shows, and in 1924 the Grossen Berliner Kunstausstellung did the same. Both exhibits featured photographs and designs from outstanding national productions by Gance, L’Herbier, Lang, and the like. In 1925 the Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the Kino und Photo Ausstellung in Berlin displayed graphic material from European film classics. Other international exhibitions were held in The Hague and Stuttgart.'8
Just when cinema was winning official recognition as a fine art, sound movies arrived. With a shock, cinéphiles realized that their beloved classics would probably vanish from the screens. It took the death of the silent film to drive home to intellectuals that motion pictures would need to be preserved for future generations.
From the ciné-club movement came many of the men and women who established the world’s first film archives. The Cinémathéque Francaise, founded by Henri Langlois, Georges Franju, and Jean Mitry in 1936, grew out of the Cercle du Cinéma, a club that had shown silent classics. The Museum of Modern Art Film Library, created in 1935, was headed by Iris Barry, one of the founders of London’s Film Society. A Brussels ciné club, Le Club de lEcran, became the basis for the Belgian cinémathéque. “Each of these archives,” wrote Langlois, “is the last creation of that great movement of opinion that, from 1916 to 1930, had arisen in defense of the cinema.”!9
Other film archives appeared in Sweden (1933), Germany (1934), London (1935), and Milan (1935). Most took as their mission the preservation of the country’s film heritage and the dissemination of national film culture, but they also maintained the canon that had emerged in the silent era.2° The Birth of a Nation was one of the first two films Langlois acquired.2! The initial public screening sponsored by London’s National Film Library included The Great Train Robbery, a Lumiere short, a Chaplin film, and The Birth of a Nation.22
The Museum of Modern Art Film Library in New York illustrates how a prominent archive could grow out of 1920s film culture and consolidate the Basic Story. In 1932 Alfred H. Barr insisted that film have a place in the new museum he would direct:
People who are well acquainted with modern painting or literature or the theatre are amazingly ignorant of modern film. The work and even the names of such masters as Gance, Stiller, Clair, Dupont, Pudovkin, Feyder, Chaplin (as director), Eisenstein, and other great directors are, one can hazard, practically unknown to the Museum’s Board of Trustees ... The only great art peculiar to the twentieth century is practically unknown to the American public most capable of appreciating it.2°
Despite MOMA’s commitment to modernism, the Film Library focused comparatively little on cinema’s avant-garde—the films made in the wake of
DEFENDING AND DEFINING THE SEVENTH ART