Ernest Lindgren

Who was Ernest Lindgren?

Ernest Lindgren was a British film archivist and writer.

Lindgren joined the British Film Institute in February 1934 as Information Officer, and became the first curator of the National Film Library in 1935, renamed the National Film Archive in 1955. He remained curator until his death in 1973. He was succeeded by David Francis.

Lindgren's approach to the preservation of film materials is often contrasted with that of Henri Langlois, the founder of the Cinémathèque Française; the scientific against the romantic. Unlike Langlois, Lindgren adopted a selective approach in opposition to accumulating every possible film. Along with Langlois though, Lindgren played a major role in the development of FIAF, the International Federation of Film Archives. It is argued that the NFA gained an reputation for being uncooperative in this period, and Lundgren reportedly applied the Alizarin Red test to films which were on loan from other institutions. Langlois in contrast had an eccentric, or non-existent, approach to record keeping, and the Cinémathèque suffered a nitrate fire on 10 July 1959.