Una buona notizia per il Film Museum e per tutti noi: La collezione Jean Desmet è stata nominata dal registro dell’Unesco Memory of the World.

The Desmet Collection was acquired by the Netherlands Film Museum in 1957. It is the professional legacy of the cinema owner and film distributor Jean Desmet (1875-1956) and consists of almost 900 – predominantly foreign – films, a business archive and thousands of posters, stills, programmes and flyers. There is no other collection in Europe containing such a wealth of information about film distribution and cinema operation in the period 1907-16. Furthermore, the film collection contains a large amount of material that is actually nothing less than a representative sample of the commerciai stock of its time. These films come mainly from France, the United States, Italy, Germany, Denmark and to a lesser extent Great Britain, Russia, Sweden, Austria, the Netherlands and Belgium. All the popular genres of the time are present in both short and long form: dramas, comedies, variety numbers, travelogues, scientific documentaries, actualities and cinema newsreels. Many of the films are no longer extant in the countries where they were first produced.

Ivo Blom (Jean Desmet and the Early Dutch Film Trade, Amsterdam University Press 2003)

Molti auguri al Netherlands Film Museun per il meritato riconoscimento, per conservare, preservare e restaurare questi tesori.

Come sicuramente sapete, un fetta consistente della collezione sono le copie, uniche al mondo, dei film italiani “degli anni d’oro”. Quelli che tutti noi vogliamo vedere. Approfitto dell’occasione per sollecitare, ancora una volta, il rilascio in DVD di qualche film italiano.

Grazie in anticipo!

(Grazie a Ivo per il libro! Auguri anche a te!)