Eileen Bowser (1928–2019)

Abstract

Eileen Bowser (1928–2019) Paolo Cherchi Usai (bio) and Tom Gunning (bio) i Will remember Eileen as a model of intellectual integrity, generosity, and sharpness. True to herself, she laid out the essence of cinema curatorship in a very short piece, "Some Principles of Film Restoration" (1990). If I had to choose a single text in the vast literature pertaining to my profession, I would keep these two pages and happily leave everything else behind. In her own way, Eileen was a poet. With her husband, Bill, she wrote the perfect haiku of love as an art form. —Paolo Cherchi Usai, friend ________ Writing of Eileen Bowser is difficult because I owe her so much. As curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art, she preserved the Griffith heritage, and when she launched the Griffith retrospective in 1975, she brought me on board along with Ron Mottram as guest curator. Working with her on this retrospective forged a friendship and interaction that then led to my involvement with the International Federation of Film Archives project she devised with David Francis, "Cinema: 1900–1906," which undertook to view all prints existing in FIAF archives from those years and present our findings at a FIAF conference in Brighton, England, in 1978. Not only did this symposium of international scholars inaugurate a revision of the way early cinema was thought about but it also brought together film scholars and archivists in a new way. This was Eileen's dream and her achievement and led to many other projects that followed in the wake of Brighton. Eileen was [End Page 303] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Eileen Bowser delivering an acceptance speech. Photograph by Greg Lukow. essential to my dissertation on the Biograph films of Griffith as a most trusted advisor, and I dedicated the book version to her and my PhD advisor, Jay Leyda. As long as I lived in the New York area, she was my touchstone for both information and inspiration. I regret now that as I moved away geographically, I did not do a better job of keeping in touch. Bowser was what we might call an activist historian, influential within the archival field but also willing to venture out into the realm of academic conferences and make contributions as important authors in their own right. Eileen Bowser's volume in the Scribner's History of American Cinema series, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915, is not only the definitive treatment of this important era but a model of scholarship and clear writing. —Tom Gunning, friend [End Page 304] Paolo Cherchi Usai Paolo Cherchi Usai is senior curator of film at the Cineteca del Friuli and senior curator-at-large of the George Eastman Museum. He is co-founder of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation (1996), of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival (1982), of the Nitrate Picture Show (2015) and of Domitor (1985), the International Association for the Study of Early Cinema. A longtime resident curator of the Tel luride Film Festival, he directed the feature-length films Passio (2007), an adaptation of his book The Death of Cinema (2001), with music by Arvo Pärt, and Picture (2015), based on an original score by the Alloy Orchestra. His latest published works are Silent Cinema: A Guide to Study, Research and Curatorship (2019) and Film Provenance and Early Cinema, co-edited with Joanne Bernardi, Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe (2020). Tom Gunning Tom Gunning is Professor Emeritus in the Department on Cinema and Media at the University of Chicago. He is the author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (1986) and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (2000) and of more than 150 articles on early cinema, film history and theory, avant-garde film, film genre, and cinema and modernism. Copyright © 2021 Association of Moving Image Archivists