Zachary Zahos
In the course of an average day, archivists at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research handle one-of-a-kind materials, whose historical value draws researchers from across the globe. But rare is the day when we stumble upon a genuinely lost film in our holdings.
This happened recently with the WCFTR’s rediscovery of Lafcadio (1948). Directed by Jean Béranger, Lafcadio is an avant-garde short, filmed in Paris in 1948, that stands out for its time due to its nonlinear structure and candid, sympathetic depiction of queer sexuality. At present, we have not found evidence that other prints of Lafcadio exist, on either side of the Atlantic, nor have we encountered a record of Lafcadio screening publicly, or otherwise being available to view, for over 50 years. Accordingly, the WCFTR is thrilled to rectify Lafcadio’s decades of obscurity and spread the word about this fascinating and innovative short film.
Directed by Jean Béranger, Lafcadio is an avant-garde short, filmed in Paris in 1948, that stands out for its time due to its nonlinear structure and candid, sympathetic depiction of queer sexuality.
The print in our collection, a 16mm internegative, originates from Amos Vogel, founder of New York’s influential film society Cinema 16. In the annals of postwar American film culture, Vogel stands out as one the era’s most important educators, curators, and authors, as evidenced by his authoritative book Film as a Subversive Art, his co-founding of the New York Film Festival, and his years of teaching film at leading institutions including the University of Pennsylvania. Among his peers, Vogel was particularly attuned to, in his words, “the accelerating worldwide trend toward a more liberated cinema, in which subjects and forms hitherto considered unthinkable or forbidden are boldly explored.”
Vogel’s belief in cinema’s potential as a subversive art attracted him to the work of Jean Béranger. For a 1963 Cinema 16 distribution catalog, Vogel described Lafcadio as follows:
The confusions of adolescence are suggested in this sensitive study of homosexual emotions culminating in real or imagined suicide. The constant blending of realism and fantasy is reminiscent of stream-of-consciousness poetry. Interesting experiment by young [sic] French filmmaker.
As implied by its inclusion in Cinema 16’s catalog, Vogel not only screened Lafcadio at his film society (in June 1951), but he also acquired it, as well as several other short films by Béranger, for Cinema 16’s circulating film library. One of these other Béranger films was Elisabeth (1946), which first showed at Cinema 16 in October 1951. In the aforementioned 1963 catalog, Vogel described Elisabeth as follows: “Filmed in Paris by a now well-known French film maker, this is an unorthodox story of a lonely young woman whose longing for love finally culminates in tragedy. The ending carries a shock of its own.”
Notably, Lafcadio did not receive commercial distribution in its native France, and we have yet to find evidence it played at all elsewhere in Europe. But thanks to the wide reach of Cinema 16—and after 1966, its distribution partner Grove Press—Lafcadio and Elisabeth screened at dozens of “nontheatrical” venues across the United States between 1950 and 1974. These venues ranged from college film societies across the Upper Midwest to Jewish Community Centers in the New York Tri-State area. Lafcadio last screened publicly on September 30, 1974, at the Peoria School of Medicine in Illinois. In 1976, Grove Press returned its prints of Lafcadio and Elisabeth to Béranger in Paris, where he died in 2000, at the age of 75.
The path to Lafcadio’s rediscovery was paved by individual determination, institutional support, and ample good luck. Vogel donated his papers and film materials to the WCFTR in the early 1980s. It took until 2023 for the WCFTR to begin processing this collection in full, thanks to a $103,063 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. This generous grant facilitated the WCFTR’s two-year project, “Expanding Film Culture’s Field of Vision: Processing and Sharing the Collections of Amos Vogel, Jump Cut, Angles, and the Wisconsin Film Festival,” the full details of which this blog has shared previously.
These funds went directly to the processing of Vogel’s collection, in part through the WCFTR’s hiring of Matt St. John as a processing archivist. Last August, while researching the films donated by Vogel, St. John looked into the 16mm internegative print for Lafcadio, as well as one for Elisabeth (1946), and determined they were no longer in circulation nor seemingly available at other archives. With the help of WCFTR Film and Video Archivist Amanda Smith and UW-Madison’s Department of Communication Arts, these internegative prints were soon digitized. Neither print is in pristine condition, and the WCFTR’s print of Elisabeth is notably incomplete, as it is missing about five minutes of its originally stated 15-minute runtime. But the archive’s print of Lafcadio is complete: projected at 24 frames per second, it runs 14 minutes and 40 seconds, from opening titles to “FIN.”
As an internegative, this 16mm print of Lafcadio was likely not intended for viewing on its own. Vogel likely kept this internegative print in New York to strike additional rental prints, or otherwise use as a backup. Given its faded condition, the WCFTR’s print has probably been duplicated or projected on its own many times in the past. In addition, this print is silent, as was the original film. According to a separate collection of Amos Vogel manuscripts, housed at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Lafcadio circulated across the U.S. with a gramophone accompaniment of classical music cues by Erik Satie and Darius Milhaud. The WCFTR does not possess this gramophone record, nor have we identified the exact cues on this accompanying soundtrack as of yet. Yet even with these caveats, of all the Lafcadio prints that once circulated, this internegative survives and thus functions as a record of Béranger’s original intentions.
As a result of these collective efforts, Lafcadio is a lost film no more. Last month, our partner institution the UW-Cinematheque inaugurated its Spring 2025 series, “Treasures at the WCFTR,” with a joint screening of Lafcadio and Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959) at the Chazen Museum of Art. Lafcadio screened via a silent DCP, while Pickpocket was projected off of Vogel’s personal 35mm print. This January 26 screening was the first time Lafcadio had publicly screened in over 50 years. If you would like to learn more about Lafcadio’s distribution history and reception as a queer film, read these recent program notes written for the UW-Cinematheque’s blog.
Like Lafcadio, Pickpocket first screened in the United States at Cinema 16—specifically in 1963, over three years after its world premiere in France. Pickpocket has hardly been an obscure object since, given its prevalence on college syllabi, its multiple Criterion Collection editions, and the much-noted influence it cast on New Hollywood filmmaker Paul Schrader. Yet both Lafcadio and Pickpocket found their initial American audiences through the same film programmer, Amos Vogel.
This semester’s “Treasures from the WCFTR” series aims not only to highlight notable holdings in our film collections, but also to recreate the contemporary viewing experience of these titles. For instance, a silent Cinema 16 trailer—featuring abstract, hand-drawn animation by Carmen D’Avino—preceded both Lafcadio and Pickpocket at the Chazen on January 26. Organized by WCFTR archivist Matt St. John, this screening series will continue over the coming months with two screenings dedicated to the WCFTR’s Wisconsin Film Festival collection: 13 Conversations About One Thing (2001) on February 9 and The Apple (1998) on March 9, both of which will be preceded by 35mm Wisconsin Film Festival trailers. The series concludes on April 27 with another Cinema 16 program, featuring seven short films that Vogel screened or distributed through his film society.
Interested in watching this rediscovered work for yourself? Currently, a complete digitized scan of Lafcadio and a ten-minute digitized excerpt of Elisabeth are both available to view on-site or remotely. (If you wish to view one of the films remotely, please reach out to WCFTR at wcftr@commarts.wisc.edu). We are working to determine the copyright status of these films, in order to facilitate their wider access in the near future. Watch this space for relevant updates!
In the meantime, we are excited to share an excerpt of Lafcadio below. This two-minute, 42-second clip depicts the opening sequence of the film, including titles. The early scenes featured in this clip display Béranger’s expressionistic style of on-location photography, as well as the film’s overall melancholy tone. As a content warning, this clip culminates in a scene where the eponymous protagonist is discovered unconscious, as a result of a suicide attempt. The lead-up to and surprising aftermath of this scene are not shown until the film’s very end.
The opening minutes of Lafcadio can be viewed below, via Kaltura. The clip is silent, in keeping with how it was filmed.
Zachary Zahos is a Public History Fellow at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. In 2024, he earned his PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.