In 1986, the Italian diva film entitled FIOR DI MALE (FLOWER OF EVIL*, Cines 1915) was shown at the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone. It was a revelation. Paolo Cherchi Usai, the festival's organiser and head curator of film at George Eastman House in Rochester, recalls the event:

The established ‘canon’ of classic films and directors was sent into free fall by the screening of a film which, up to that moment, had simply been ignored by film history. Historians of Italian cinema, who had thought that there were no further surprises in store, were compelled to take another look at both their discipline and its prevailing paradigms.

Nor was this all. Historians and film archivists were also intrigued by the source of the film. For it turned out to be part of a private collection, consisting of almost 900 films, which had made its way into the Netherlands Film Museum in Amsterdam. Besides FIOR DI MALE, THE DUTCH collection contained hundreds of films no longer available in their countries of origin and unseen anywhere since completing their normal period of release. The presentation at Pordenone attracted the attention of European and American curators who came to the Netherlands to identify these films and to select them for festivals and regular exhibition. The films in the Desmet Collection offered an excellent impression of the sheer abundance of films available for ordinary, everyday exhibition in the period between 1907 and 1916.

Festival screenings and retrospectives made an immediate impact, and the Desmet films played an important role in the rewriting of film history.