Kino, kino, KINO!, as Guy Maddin would say - cinephiles are easy to suss out amid the meta-glamour, thrill-seeking and distraction-ism that amounts to American film culture, since they alone are betrothed to celluloid for its own refulgent sake. The average movie-head needs to be enthralled in a conventional, narrative way, needs to respond empathically with characters, "believe" the plotline, and so on. But cinephiles can be rapt before - and find art within - an 1899 "reality" of a mountain train or a chubby belly dancer, a rigorously composed Western or home movies that glimpse Central Park in 1927. The difference between cinephiles and the rest of us is not so huge - we may merely require a little deprogramming, a refocusing of our attentions not on the what happens next of commercial cinema, but on the right now of the celluloid image, which is nothing if not the Proustian melancholy of lost time frozen in nitrate amber, forever young.

"Orphan films" - forgotten scatterings of film that by definition profit nobody, and are therefore rescued only by archivists and publicly-supported restoration efforts - could be considered the cinephiles' litmus test, falling short of conventional cinematic entertainment and yet hypnotic and gripping for what they reveal about history, society, cultural distance, and the nature of movies itself. The three-so-far sets released by the National Film Preservation Foundation - themselves comprised of hundreds of recovered wonders, from governmental public-service hilarities to paper-print copyright deposits to newsreels to Yiddish shorts to one-reel comedies and beyond - have established the paradigm in the DVD epoch, and into the mix comes now a welcome addition to the pig pile, the new three-disc set from Flicker Alley, Saved from the Flames. The flames in question refer to the very real threat old films always face from their own nitrate stock, which has the propensity as it ages to dissolve into goo and/or easily ignite and explode. There is no rhyme or reason to the collection, as there shouldn't be; the orphans gathered here are random biopsies of filmed history. The set differs from the NFPF boxes in the simple fact that these films have not all been restored in the charity-funded archive laboratory (some have), but, rather, are simply digitally-spiffed-up prints of films residing in two professional collections, the U.S.'s Blackhawk Films (which used to be a public-domain VHS factory) and France's Lobster Films. The set comes with copious notes in regards to the films' origins and, telling us sometimes more than we need to know, where the contemporary collectors' in question found the prints and how much they paid.

Such as it matters. The films thus packaged all have the immortal, immaculate, poignant nimbus of captured time, of a time-machine experience of becoming intimate with a distant past you cannot touch. Among the substantial French silents on display are a fair number of surprises, including Segundo de Chomon's "An Excursion to the Moon" (1908), a shockingly elaborate and precise rip-off of George Melies "A Trip to the Moon," made six years earlier - down to story, entire compositions, background paintings, effects, and general design. Similarly, we're presented with several "alternate versions" of Lumiere films we've come to know too well from film school; this version of the "Card Game" film of 1895, for instance, features working-class boyos sipping wine instead of stuffed-shirt grandpas swilling beer. (This extra version of "The Train Arriving at the Station" comes from the opposite direction, and may not even have been filmed in Lyon.) There's also 1900 footage of serpentine dancer Mme. Ondine performing inside a cage full of angry lions, experimental sound films from 1900 and 1907, a "soundie"-ish 1939 short centered on a performance by Django Reinhardt, and so on.

The U.S.-made films also have plenty of historical torque: we get the newsreel of Charles Lindbergh's 1927 take-off, a pristine and eye-poppingly vivid copy of Ub Iwerks's immortal "Balloonland" (1935), 1936's "Master Hands," a gung-ho portrait of General Motors skilled laborers that's recently been elected to the National Film Registry, the infamous, surreptitiously-MGM-produced fake newsreel story "California Election News #2," anonymously aimed at scotching Upton Sinclair's 1934 bid for governor, a sampling of WII-propaganda "soundies" (including a 1941 Ray Noble rendition of "Dear Arabella," made famous by Glenn Miller that same year), D.W. Griffith's outlandish 1912 anti-Coca Cola melodrama "For His Son," and a richly-colored copy of Chuck Jones's fiery, luridly surreal FDR campaign cartoon "Hell Bent for Election," which hit theaters in 1944 and makes contemporary campaigning seem mild-mannered, at least in terms of iconography. Less sensational in content but hardly a slouch in terms of simple old-school visual zest, Mack Sennett's Lizzies of the Field (1924) serves as a preeminent example of silent-era automobile slapstick, to the degree that the destruction and risks caught on film take your breath away.

But two of Saved from the Flames's richest treasures originated elsewhere on the European continent: in 1938, stop-motion animator George Pal, then a new-blood animator in England and occasional ad-agency hireling, went to the Netherlands to make a Phillips Radio "broadcast" party-film (originally titled "Radior r-revolusjonen"), intended to advertise the newest radio hardware but instead packed more flamenco-flavored, rainbow-colored, cranked-puppet song-&-dance fun into five minutes than Disney ever has in a decade. Still, the deliberately climactic set-piece of the program is a honey: a montage of censored silent film clips, swatches of unknown actors kissing and hugging and trading amorous glances, cut from their films at the time a la "Cinema Paradiso" by an unknown projectionist in Brussels. As the set's notes say, it was too good a story in the Tornatore film not to be true, and here they've spliced the bits together into a modest but helplessly moving paean, born out of an older era's prudery, to cinephilia at its most basic and lovely.

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by Michael Atkinson