The Strange Case of The Fall of Jerusalem : Orphans and Film Identification

Abstract

[End Page 26] In my thirty years as a film archivist and film historian of silent cinema, I have never come across an orphan film as perplexing as The Fall of Jerusalem.1 Despite several years of intensive research, carried out by numerous scholars and with the cooperation of international film archives, this film seemingly eluded exact identification. Few traces were to be found in surviving paper records for what looked like a big-budget feature-film production. Film historians are usually confronted with an abundance of material in the paper record, but the films themselves have disappeared, especially if they are from the silent era, where survival rates fall below 10 percent. In this case, ironically, a film had apparently survived in relatively complete form but could not been identified through filmographies or other surviving paper records. Were this an industrial or an early cinema short without a head title, this [End Page 27] might have been understandable, but feature film filmographies, at least from the major film-producing nations, are thought to be more or less complete, making it difficult to understand how this one got away. That the film was finally identified after painstaking research in early trade periodicals reveals something about the inadequacy of most published filmographies. This essay, then, will address the process of film identification, using hermeneutic methodologies, while describing the unraveling of the mystery of a specific film, The Fall of Jerusalem. It is my contention that when orphan films in particular are at stake the discovery of provenance can be as much a process of reconstruction as the actual restoration of the physical material. Hermeneutics involves the process of searching for available documentation, looking for clues, making connections between disparate pieces of information, developing theses and counter theses. After analyzing the physical print, film identification involves looking for actors, researching producers, distributors, copyright records, national filmographies, trade periodicals, distribution patterns, genres, publicity materials, and any other documentation tangentially connected with the object in question. We may follow paper trails, image trails, genre trails, but ultimately we may run into a blank wall. Indeed, we have to live with the fact that film history will retain some of its mysteries. In the case of The Fall of Jerusalem, its origins are now unambiguously clear, but that was far from the case for several years. It existed physically but as a true orphan: an artifact whose provenance had dropped out of film history. In what follows, I will trace the efforts undertaken to identify the film while theorizing the process of identification. One major lesson here is that the construction of film history is and will remain a communal effort, dependent on a community of film scholars and archivists. Found in Massachusetts by the film and camera collector Alan Katelle, The Fall of Jerusalem was donated in 1998 to Northeast Historic Film in Bucksport, Maine. The tinted, 35mm diacetate print was initially identified by the paper band holding the 35mm reels together and by an original title in the print. There are no credits on the film other than the name of a distributor and the names of the characters in the English language intertitles. Preservation work was handled by Haghefilm in the Netherlands in June 2001 for George Eastman House (GEH), which had received the film in November 2000. Haghefilm generated a fully timed, tinted answer print on Estar stock, as well as a negative. The title card created by GEH suggested it was preserved from a nitrate original, but that contradicts both Northeast Historic Film and GEH's paperwork. [End Page 28] Click for larger view Figure 1 Prophet Jeremiah in The Fall of Jerusalem. Courtesy of Northeast Historic Film. The film relates the Old Testament story of the prophet Jeremiah and the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar that ended in the so-called Babylonian captivity, during which the Jewish people were...