New York Times: James Card, 84, a Leader in Film Preservation, Dies
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James Card, 84, a Leader in Film Preservation, Dies
By MEL GUSSOW
James Card, one of the world's leading film preservationists, a
passionate devotee of silent movies and the founder and first curator
of the Department of Film at the George Eastman House of Photography
in Rochester, died on Sunday at a hospital in Syracuse. He was 84 and
lived in East Rochester.
Mr. Card joined the Eastman House in 1948, bringing with him his
personal collection of 800 films, which became the cornerstone of the
institution's archive. Under his direction, over a period of almost 30
years, Eastman House was generally acknowledged as the finest film
collection in the United States.
Paolo Cherchi-Usai, the curator who holds Mr. Card's former position at
Eastman, said that the collection would not have existed without Mr.
Card. He added that his predecessor ranks as a preservationist with
three other major figures in the field, Jacques Ledoux from Belgium,
Henri Langlois from the Cinémathèque in Paris and Iris Barry of the
Museum of Modern Art in New York.
"The others are better known, but he contributed very much the same
way," Mr. Cherchi-Usai said. "The difference was that his personality
was so flamboyant that he didn't seem like an archivist in the
traditional
sense."
Mr. Card frequently disagreed with Ms. Barry about her taste in films
and about the power that she held at her museum. He said that her
selections for preservation were crucial and that "her rejection of any
film
for preservation was tantamount to condemning it to death." He added
that the Museum of Modern Art and the Eastman House were "two of
the very few places one may still see projected, original, 35-millimeter
nitrate films."
Mr. Card's book, "Seductive Cinema: The Art of Silent Film" (1994), is
a personalized critical history of silent movies and also a kind of
memoir
about his life in film.
"There were some of us with an addiction, with fierce passion for the
medium," he wrote. "We were militant and protective, and we didn't want
to change it in any way. We loved its silence. When dialogue arrived and
the silent film almost vanished, some of us were so infuriated that we
actually refused, for many months, to even look at a talkie."
Among his many accomplishments, Mr. Card was instrumental in reviving
interest in the silent film star Louise Brooks. As a longtime admirer of
her
work, he persuaded her to live in Rochester. When Miss Brooks arrived,
Mr. Card screened her films for her, and she said it was the first time
she
had seen them.
"As a working actress," Kenneth Tynan wrote in a profile of Miss
Brooks in The New Yorker, "she had never taken films seriously; under
Card's tuition, she recognized that the cinema was a valid form of art,
and
began to develop her own theories about it."
Soon she began writing articles for film magazines. Among Mr. Card's
other enthusiasms were Theda Bara, Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford
and John Barrymore.
He was always in search of lost films. As he said, "From barns,
abandoned warehouses, attics, basements, even from bedroom closets,
these old nitrate prints are still being discovered, for every good
silent-film historian is a film hunter as well."
Mr. Card's dedication to film began very early in his childhood in
Shaker
Heights, Ohio, where he was born. He said that while others chose to
collect baseball cards or postage stamps, "for me there was never any
question -- I had to have film, motion picture film of my own." He began
by inhabiting "the Elysian fields" of movie theaters in downtown
Cleveland, and by the mid-1920's he was seeing five movies a week. An
obsession, he said, soon turned him into a monomaniac.
Soon he had his first hand-cranked film projector, and he began buying
movies. Even before he left high school, he said, "the mania to show and
share wonderful films became an intense concern," and he started
showing them to audiences.
"The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" was the film that changed his life and
"shaped what would ultimately become a kind of career." That film, he
said, "influenced every film to come" and "served dramatic notice that
film was a graphic art rather than a theatrical form or a branch of
photography." While studying drama at the University of Heidelberg in
Germany, he bought a print of "Caligari."
Back in the United States he became head of a documentary film and
photography project for the federal government, and then was drafted
into the United States Army. He was grateful for the end of World War
II, at least partly because "the collection could be resumed!"
In 1948 he became curator of the film department at Eastman House,
and the following year the movie archive was opened to the public. In
1974 he was a founder of the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. He
also taught film at Syracuse University and the University of Rochester.
He is survived by his wife, Jeannie; two daughters, Callista, who lives
in
California, and Priscilla Card-Fuller of Deerfield Beach, Fla.; and a
sister, Dorothy Grove of South Bend, Ind.
"I cannot conceive of living without showing films," he said in his
book.
"Movies have been the ambrosia of my life. To offer that gift to others,
sharing in their enjoyment of the movies I love, is my greatest joy."
© 2000 The New York Times
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