A Trip to the Moon and Other Trips through Time and Space…with Serge Bromberg

Serge Bromberg began to search for forgotten films as a 9-year-old boy, hunting through attics, flea markets, and abandoned houses. After meeting another passionate collector, Eric Lange, they started a shared collection in 1985—37 years ago this June—with the goal of bringing old movies back to life and sharing them with the public. 

Today, Bromberg/Lange’s Lobster Collection boasts about 150,000 film reels. It is an immensely valuable collection because during the first fifty years of cinema films were not kept—on the contrary, stores were deliberately destroyed, because it was thought old films took up unnecessary space. Old forgotten nitrate films are also facing chemical destruction and physical decay, as well as the threat of burning, since they are quite flammable. Searching, finding, and preserving old films is a race against time.

Since 1992, Serge Bromberg has toured the world presenting the gems of his collection to the public. In his unique one-man-show, he introduces his most astounding discoveries and accompanies the films by playing the piano, thus honoring the way these films were originally featured. In addition, Bromberg speaks about the origin of the films—and in these stories, fact is often stranger than fiction.  

This program is presented in conjunction with the LACMA exhibition City of Cinema: Paris 1850–1907. Placing cinema in the context of 19th-century Parisian visual culture, the exhibition explores how film emerged amid a wave of social, political, artistic, and technological developments. The exhibition brings together paintings, sculpture, posters, prints, photography, and film to reflect the range of artistic experiments that culminated in cinema as a mass medium.