A Commonplace Book

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   An historian finds it difficult to re-see films after their initial releases and his memory is not always reliable. I can offer various examples of the fallibility of memory.

   The film which made the strongest impression on me at the end of the "silent" period was Sternberg's Underworld (1927). I therefore felt it important to discuss it in detail with my students at the IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques, Paris) where I taught film history with Jean Mitry after 1944. I described to them in considerable detail an apartment, a stairway, stuffed birds — the lair occupied by the gangster (Bancroft). I described this repeatedly for five or six years until Henri Langlois discovered a print of Underworld for the Cinémathèque Française. As soon as possible I had it projected at IDHEC. But the apartment in the film bore no relation to that in my memory — which I had, I suppose, recalled from The Drag Net, an exactly contemporary film of Sternberg's in which Bancroft also appeared.
-- Georges Sadoul. Dictionary of Films. Preface (p. v)
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