Quirino Cristiani and the Fragility of Art

  

        The first ever animated feature film was an Argentine political satire known as El Apostol, which translates to The Apostle in English. It was directed by Italian-born animator Quirino Cristiani, who was by all means an innovator both in his pioneering of simplistic cut out animation and of the animated feature film as we know it. And, to be honest, The Apostle haunts me. Not because I’ve seen it and I was scared of the rickety old cardboard puppets or something like that, but because I literally can’t see it. In fact, nobody can see it because it and the large majority of his other work, one of which was the first animated feature film with sound, was all lost in two separate fires in 1957 and 1961. Cristiani died in 1984 with almost none of his art left and with basically no name recognition outside of hardcore animation nerds. This story haunts me.

This story tells of an artist, one who put his life’s work into making art that innovated and influenced the course of his medium’s history, only to be overshadowed by those with more money and influence than he ever had, and all for his art to literally be destroyed out of sheer ambivalence and ignorance. The entire idea of lost media terrifies me. There’s a reason why people give so much of a shit about video game preservation, because they don’t want the classic titles of the medium to be lost to the sands of time the same way so many classic films of the silent era were. 

The mere fact that somebody could just callously put a match to celluloid and not realize that they’re destroying a piece of history speaks to my fears and anxieties as an artist. What if my work follows the paths of so many other filmmakers’ work and becomes lost? What will happen to my work after I die? Will people even look at or think about my work after I die? Is what I’m doing even important? Or is it just a hobby I do to keep myself from going insane? Do I matter? Will anything I ever do actually matter?

What are the answers to these questions? I don’t know. None of this really matters in the end. Animation is still great despite all of the lost art we can now never learn from. Film is still great despite all of the lost art we can now never learn from. Music is still great, video games are still great, paintings are still great, books are still great, internet videos are still great, everything’s fine.

But when I hear a story like the one of The Apostle, all I can think about is what could have been. Animators and artists from all around the world could have been able to learn from this master and his innovative films. He could have been renowned amongst film fans as a pioneer of a bold new medium and an important figure in film history. Or, maybe his movies sucked ass and he would have been nothing but a footnote in the long and storied history of animation and film. Nobody knows or will know the answers to these questions. But all of them keep me awake at night.