Awards
2005 CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation
Paolo Cherchi Usai
Paolo Cherchi Usai
The CAA/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation recognizes an outstanding contribution by one or more persons who, individually or jointly, have enhanced the understanding of art through the application of knowledge and experience in conservation, art history, and art. This year, Paolo Cherchi Usai receives this award for his outstanding work in film preservation. Cherchi Usai is director of the National Screen and Sound Archive in Australia, and the former senior curator of the Motion Picture Department (1989–2004) and founder and senior curator of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation (1996), both at George Eastman House. Cherchi Usai is a renaissance figure in his field, widely respected as an archivist, educator, art historian, scholar, and preservationist. His work also has interdisciplinary influence in the development of scientific and technological solutions for the archiving and preservation of film. He elevates the scholarly discourse by affirming cinema as an art form that demands critical, theoretical, and formal analysis.
Cherchi Usai championed the film medium before there was public awareness of its fragility, and with little organized institutional commitment to its preservation. At George Eastman House, he founded a program devoted to film preservation, the first institution of its kind in the United States. His students now direct educational archives all over the world, in nonprofit and public institutions as well as in studio programs. With the University of Rochester, the House offers a two-year master’s degree program, the Selznick Graduate Program in Film and Media Preservation, in the first such collaboration between a museum and university in curatorial and film studies.
Cherchi Usai has devoted his professional life to insuring that great works of film survive, both physically and in our visual and cultural memory. He has shown great foresight in his passion for silent films, asserting their place in the emerging construction of a film canon. He is cofounder of Le Giornate Cinema Muto, the world’s foremost festival of silent film, held in Pordenone, Italy, where scholars, preservationists, and film lovers see rare films, loaned by museums and archives around the world, on a large screen with musical accompaniment. Until its founding, American scholars based their research on films available for viewing only in the study collections of the nation’s four largest nitrate archives; these repositories only screened silent films within their own institutions and through occasional special loans to limited audiences.
His significant scholarly contribution is informed by his perspective as an archivist. His publications include The Griffith Project, copublished by the British Film Institute, and Le Giornate, now in its eighth volume. Other books include The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age (2001) and Burning Passions: An Introduction to the Study of Silent Cinema (1994). Cherchi Usai richly deserves our recognition. His contribution to film preservation and film studies is immense, and his creative vision has inspired new respect for the art of cinema by raising consciousness and training a generation of preservationists and scholars. He has identified cinema as the representative art form of modern life and a precious component of our artistic heritage, worthy of our greatest preservation efforts.
Committee: Elizabeth Darrow, independent scholar, chair; Andrea Kirsh, independent curator and scholar; Jay Krueger, National Gallery of Art; Lisa Schrenk, Norwich University; Rustin Levenson, Rustin Levenson Art Conservation Associates.
