The Haghefilm Digitaal ‒ Selznick School Fellowship 2022
The Haghefilm Fellowship was established in 1997 to provide additional professional training to outstanding graduates of The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. The Fellowship recipient is invited to Amsterdam for one month to work alongside Haghefilm Digitaal lab professionals to preserve short films from the George Eastman Museum collection, completing each stage of the preservation project.
The recipient of the 2022 Haghefilm Digitaal – Selznick School Fellowship is Florian Höhensteiger, from Berlin, Germany, who recently completed the Certificate Program of The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman Museum. Prior to this, Florian earned an MA in film heritage from the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, and worked for several cinematheques and festivals, such as the Zeughauskino of the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Filmmuseum München, and the Berlin Film Festival. As a projectionist he ran shows for the Dryden Theater and the Nitrate Picture Show in Rochester, and as a curator he programs non-fiction films for the film society CineGraph Babelsberg. Currently, he is part of the film access department of the Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives).

THE CHICKEN THIEF (US 1904)
regia/dir: Wallace McCutcheon, Frank J. Marion. photog: G.W. Bitzer. prod: American Mutoscope & Biograph Co.; Biograph prod. no. 2977. riprese/filmed: 16+26.11.1904. copia/copy: DCP, 11′, col. (da/from 35mm pos. nitr., 718.50 ft. [orig. l: 758 ft.], 15 fps, imbibito e virato/tinted & toned); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; Haghefilm Digitaal, Amsterdam.

When in 1904 cinema grew from simple moving pictures into films of several short scenes and more elaborate story lines, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. and their chief director Wallace McCutcheon, the so-called “father of the story film” (The Moving Picture World, 12.10.1907), decided to take on a common trope in one prologue and four acts: the African-American chicken thief.
Already popularized by motion pictures such as Edison’s Chicken Thieves (1897), or Lubin’s Chicken Thief (1903), this was meant to be a sure hit with American audiences, and was advertised as a “masterpiece of its kind” as well as a “rollicking comedy of the Sunny South; full of hilarious laughter from start to finish.” (Biograph Bulletin no. 39, 27.12.1904)
Shot by future D.W. Griffith collaborator Billy Bitzer in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and Biograph’s studios in New York City in November 1904, the film shows two black men stealing chickens for their poor family from a white farmer, culminating in a chase sequence through tinted moonlight with the better (twist) ending on the farmer’s side.
Drenched with stereotypical depictions of African Americans and on the verge of heralding lynch justice – all in supposedly good clean fun – this short gives a sobering glimpse into the racial reality of the United States 40 years after the American Civil War.
The DCP from Haghefilm being screened is derived from a newly preserved print originating from an undated tinted and toned nitrate print with non-standard perforations and slight yellow fading from the George Eastman Museum collection. The cyan tint and sepia tone were re-created through the Desmet method.

Florian Höhensteiger