Opening Night at The Reel Thing
The Reel Thing will open with a reception at 6:30pm, followed by Serge Bromberg!
Serge Bromberg in Performance!!
“Retour de Flamme – Cinema Firsts”
The incomparable Serge Bromberg will be presenting amazing silent films, sound films, premieres and surprises, presented with great stories about the historical and technical background on the making of the films, all while accompanying himself on the piano. Don’t miss it!
SERGE BROMBERG, ALL AROUND WHIZ
by David Shepard
Novikoff Award honoree, 2010
Although Serge Bromberg is based in Paris, France, he is an international crusader for cinema. His enthusiasm is bottomless, his energy even more so. He lives the lives of four men, all of them passionate and amazingly accomplished cinephiles.
Serge began as a child collecting Laurel & Hardy comedies, but he soon discovered that rare old films come to him as flies come to honey. Serge will go to a butcher shop to buy some chops and instead see and buy a pile of hundred-year-old 35mm prints. One day I was in his office when a kid on a bicycle rode up with a handlebar basket full of films. He had found them in the milk house on a farm and wanted to donate them because he thought they might be interesting (they were). In another lucky find, Serge discovered 17 Melies films which were previously unknown.
Serge founded Lobster Films in Paris in 1985 when he was barely out of his teens with the hope of collecting, preserving and sharing rare film treasures. Today the Lobster collection comprises some forty thousand reels. Standing in Lobster’s vault and looking at the vast accumulation of wonders stretching into the far distance, it is hard to imagine that this is all the work of Serge Bromberg and his self-effacing colleague Eric Lange. But Serge is not a collector who gloats over his rare holdings; he has deposited thousands of unique original negatives and prints with pubic-benefit archives in Europe and America, where they will be preserved and made available for study.
Several times a year, Serge becomes a cinema evangelist and takes to the road. Since 1992 he has presented brilliant programs to the public like the one we are going to see today, accompanying the silent films on piano and providing all with high-energy personal introductions. He calls these unique film concerts “Retour de flamme.” Beginning with showings at vintage music halls in Paris, at the Cannes Film Festival, the Musee d’Orsay, the Louvre and in the Tuileries Garden, he has performed them not only across France and Europe, but also in many U.S. venues and in Mexico, India, South America, China, and heaven knows where else.
The films go even where he cannot. Serge organized through Lobster films a web site, www.europafilmtreasures.eu, where hundreds of rare films from many archives are streamed for the pleasure of anyone who wishes to watch them. He co-produced award-winning DVD sets including Georges Melies, First Wizard of Cinema, which includes 200 films – almost all of Melies’ surviving work; Chaplin at Keystone: An International Collaboration, including eye-opening restorations of all the comedian’s surviving work from his first year in movies; and the previously-lost Bardelys the Magnificent directed by King Vidor and starring John Gilbert.
Animation is another of Serge Bromberg’s special passions. From 1999 until 2012, he was Artistic Director of the International Festival of Animation, a world conclave held annually in Annecy, France. For several years, he also produced and hosted a very popular daily kids television show called “Cellulo,” breeding a new generation of cinephiles with the delightful short films he displayed. The profit from this venture he mostly invested in first-class 35mm preservation of unique films that document the work of some worthy, forgotten artist, or some fascinating, little-remembered event.
As the result of getting trapped in a stuck elevator with the widow of director Henri-Georges Clouzot, Serge won the opportunity of working the unedited footage from Clouzot’s unfinished film Inferno into a provocative new docudrama which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won for Serge ecstatic reviews and a 2010 Cesar (the French equivalent of the Academy Award) for Best Documentary Feature. The film was featured in last year’s SFIFF program and is in release theatrically and on DVD in many countries including this one where it is available from Flicker Alley (www.flickeralley.com). Serge has also produced over 500 newsmagazines, corporate films, documentaries and television programs, having organized Steamboat Films, a production company, as an affiliate of Lobster.
This tornado of activity has not gone unnoticed. Serge is a member of the Board of Directors of the GAN Foundation for Cinema, the Cinematheque Francaise and the French Muscular Dystrophy Association (organizer of the annual Telethon). He was honored for Inferno and his preservation work by the Los Angeles Film Critics in 2011, made an officer of the French Order of Arts and Letters in 2002, and in 1997, was awarded the Prix Jean Mitry, presented by the Province of Pordenone, Italy, for his lifetime of work in conserving vintage cinema.
You will not believe this, but Serge is also the President of the French Army Cinema Unit, ECPAD, a 400 people department of the French Army, in charge of all audiovisual productions for the Ministry of Defense, and the archiving of all films that were shot by or for the Army since 1915. ECPAD is the second largest FIAF archive in France.
Beyond all of this, Serge has a fabulous sense of humor, is an intensely loyal and encouraging friend, a devoted husband, and father to three terrific children. The only mystery I’ve never been able to unravel about Serge is how he does it all.