Peter Flynn’s “Film is Dead”. Long live the film!’ deals with fans saving history from the scrap heap

Filmmaker Peter Flynn sits for an interview in a bar in Boston on Wednesday. (Photo: Tom Meek)

When you think of film preservation, you probably think of distributors like Criterion or Janus Films, the vaults of studios like Disney, Paramount, and MGM (a catalog now owned by Amazon), or the archives of institutions like Harvard and UCLA. This is all true, but also incomplete.

Peter Flynn’s latest documentary Film is Dead. “Long Live Film!” tells us that film preservation isn’t so much a science or even an industry requirement, but rather a hodgepodge of efforts large and small. The film, which The Brattle premiered on Friday as part of a week-long program called “Long Live Film! The Art of Collecting looks at the latter: the hobbyists, enthusiasts and small businesses that fill the gaps. The elaborately designed document is deliberately a testament to the passion of such niche collectors as well as an introduction to the state of film preservation and contains a lot of film history.

Flynn, a self-proclaimed film nerd and professor of filmmaking and film studies at Emerson College, has produced four feature films to date. With the exception of “Inauguration” (2017), which documents the Women’s March on Washington, DC as President Donald Trump took office, all deal with esoteric aspects of film, filmmaking, and film exhibition. His “The Dying of the Light” (2015), which examined the transition from celluloid to digital media, the art of projection and the state of art house cinema, received a four-star review from the Boston Globe. It also brought him into contact with a network of people concerned with conservation, which interested him as a way to explore.

Flynn, who has a doctorate in media studies with a concentration in film history, was born in Dublin and came to America as a young man in the 1990s to escape the stifling economy. His first film, Blazing the Trail: The O’Kalems in Ireland (2011), chronicled the exploits of the New York film company Kalem, which made films in Ireland in the early 1900s, combining elements of his past life and his current one Occupations.

Flynn’s interest, as one might imagine, lies primarily in the silent film and early studio eras (pre-Golden Age). “It’s amazing how much just ended up in the trash back then,” Flynn said.

Flynn’s film places the viewer close to those who search for these discarded people, with results that are often more profound, ranging from the discovery of an early Boris Karloff series or a Morgan Freeman film from the early 1980s to being even then gentle, avuncular charisma was evident and clear.

Many of Flynn’s human subjects are quirky characters, although they are undeniably committed to their craft, displaying meticulous care and skill in front of the camera as they carry out their restoration work and careful handling of the fragile film strips. A collector, Lou DiCrescenzo, with whom Flynn formed a close friendship over the course of the film’s five years of filming, often thinks about what will happen to his collection when he dies, and sometimes seems to care more about it than it does caused family tensions to overcome his obsession. (DiCrescenzo died this year. The film is dedicated to him.)

One of the goals of “Film is Dead” is to showcase these private collectors, Flynn said. There are bigger, better-known collectors named Tarantino and Scorsese, but it’s hard to imagine either dumpster diving for a can of nitrate and carefully wiping cells for hours to assemble reels.

The Brattle program “Long Live Film!” “The Art of Collecting,” which Flynn curated with theater staff, runs Thursday through May 14 and begins with Quentin Tarantino’s genre-defining classic “Pulp Fiction” (1994). The shot is a nod to how the video salesman turned star filmmaker is part of the film collecting community and how his homages to older films keep often unheralded achievements alive and in our minds.

Also included are some of these Karloff rarities discovered by one of Flynn’s subjects; the cult Italian gore-fest “Zombie” (1979), which depicts an underwater battle between a great white shark and one of the undead; and “Bad Girls Go to Hell” (1965), in which a Boston woman seeks revenge by killing her rapist and going on the run in New York City, a quarter century before “Thelma and Louise.” On the more popular side, there is the Mother’s Day screening of Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960) as well as some TV rarities on Saturday mornings. Like a rebuilt old film reel, the program is put together with care and practicality and offers something for almost every film lover.