EYE’s Desmet Collection inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register

The Desmet Collection at the EYE Film Institute Netherlands has been inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. This was announced May 25 by the Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, in Paris. The entire collection will become part of this prestigious UNESCO programme that assists countries in safeguarding and sharing documentary heritage. The Jean Desmet Collection includes many films from the early years of cinema that were once presumed lost.

Beside its relevance to film history, the collection forms an equally important cultural and corporate archive. Film pioneer Jean Desmet was the first major distributor and cinema owner in the Netherlands.
UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register is a list of documentary heritage and includes books, archival records, and film and sound recordings that are of exceptional significance for the world. The Register includes Anne Frank’s diary, the Magna Carta and the Gutenberg Bible.

The collection of Jean Desmet (1875-1956) is held by EYE Film Institute Netherlands (formerly the Filmmuseum) since 1957. The vast collection contains, among many other items, masterpieces by D.W. Griffith and Louis Feuillade, films with Asta Nielsen and Lyda Borelli, and productions from the film companies Pathé, Gaumont and Edison. The film-historical significance of the Jean Desmet Collection is acknowledged worldwide. A large number of the films in the collection from the Netherlands’ first professional distributor are unique copies (the only preserved copy in the world). Among the more than 900 films from 1907-1916 are masterpieces that had not been seen for decades. These discoveries have cleared up a number of misconceptions, and the film-historical appreciation for historical genres such as Italian diva films, German melodramas and French comedies has been changed once and for all.

Window washer
In most countries, three-quarters of the films produced during the silent film era have been lost due to neglect. Because Desmet kept almost everything – even the bills from the window washer were archived – EYE now has a collection of (primarily non-Dutch) films that were often no longer available in their countries of origin. When these films were restored and screened at festivals abroad in the 1980s, they caused a revolution in the international film history world. Many of these films had previously been presumed lost.

Many myths surrounded early cinema up until the 1970s; people often laughed off the overexaggerated acting and the ‘primitive’ filming methods. This began to shift in 1978 after an International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) conference in Brighton where silent film was seen from a fresh, favourable perspective and archivists and film scholars realised that opinions needed to be radically readjusted. By opening up the Desmet Collection, the then Filmmuseum made an important contribution to the revaluation of early film. The study of the Desmet Collection has, among other things, ensured that the research into early film, which was in its infancy before 1978, expanded enormously. Film scholars could now set aside misconceptions; it became clear that early films also featured exceptional direction, mise-en-scène, ingenious use of dramaturgy, and the use of colour was not eschewed. The myth that all old films were black and white was conclusively disproved.

About the collection
The donation from the Desmet heirs in 1957 forms an important base for the current collection of silent films at EYE. It’s the particular combination of films, posters, photographs and business archives that makes the Desmet Collection so valuable, providing an incredible insight into the early years of cinema. As a distributor, Desmet focused on financial gains; film wasn’t yet seen as an art form. The significance of this substantial collection lies thus in the combination of all the films, big and small, that definedthe daily programming of the cinemas. The films and paper documents Desmet preserved reveal much about supply and demand at the time, and tell the history of what was then a very popular, new form of entertainment.

The collection includes 933 films, nearly all of which originate from the period between 1907 and 1916. Most of the films are ‘one-reelers’, with a running time of about 10 minutes, and a large number of these films are unique. The collection additionally includes circa 2,000 posters and nearly 700 photographs.

The Desmet Collection is unparalleled worldwide as a cultural and social-historical document due to both its size and its contents.