Blog posting written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

Last week the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) met in St. Louis for their 19th annual conference. Despite dire predictions that the economy would drive down attendance, attendees flocked to the “gateway to the West.” Founded in 1990, AMIA this year saw over 450 film, television, and digital media archivists from the private and public sector, laboratory specialists, vendors, and a healthy dose of students in moving image archive programs at UCLA, NYU, Rochester, and Texas Austin, all hoping to learn from practitioners and make contacts for future employment. 

The pre-conference kickoff is called “The Reel Thing,” a day technical symposium, where the newest methodologies of media preservation are introduced by an international group of speakers in powerpoint, before the actual results are shown. The day started with a talk about the restoration of a Cyd Charisse NBC-TV special on 2” quad videotape from 1959. Given that neither VTR machines, nor handbooks exist any longer, preservationists had to rebuild the machinery to read and transfer these rare images to digital. Another equally complicated preservation involved Quadraphonic stereo sound in Ken Russell’s Tommy, the only film ever to use that technology. The trick was how to convert the sound to modern quintaphonic sound, a process that took over 100 hours of work. Another presentation discussed a survey of 60 million media elements in a named studio library, which found statistically significant amounts of decomposition in polyester sound and film elements. This was somewhat surprising, given the fact that the industry has been telling the field for at least fifteen years that polyester would last forever, in contrast to nitrate and acetate, which decompose.

The greatest change this year is the number of panels dedicated to issues of digitization, digital asset management, born digital media, etc. More than half of the twenty-six sessions dealt exclusively with digital issues, while at least another quarter involved digital media at some level. Only five years ago, the digital occupied only a handful of panels.

Not surprisingly, then, a plenary session on analogue media archives and the digital future opened the official conference. One of the most interesting ideas in that plenary was the notion that we can no longer think of the archive as an endpoint, where moving image media goes to die (or lie dormant), with archivists as gatekeepers, allowing individual users to reanimate the corpses. Rather, once a significant amount of content is digitized and on line, the archive becomes a point of origin for all future work with those images, the archive constantly morphing as users discover, create, propagate new meanings through remix. In a digital world, the archive is the content, the medium also the message, i.e. archives have in the words of my colleague, Leah Lievrouw, become performative, making and enabling the production of culture.

Just how the internet archive has changed  the  ground rules was demonstrated by a panel on advertising films. Many commercials are now going to the internet for an afterlife, once their immediate commercial utilization has passed. Indeed, many well-known directors, like Spike Jonz, Michael Bay, David Fincher, and Ridley Scott have set up websites to advertise their work. These ads then get circulated through the web by fans who are not interested in the products anymore, but rather in the auteurs hawking them or in their cultish content.

The traditional archival screening night, held at the Tivoli Theatre, a neighborhood theatre turned art house in the St. Louis Blueberry Hill district (yes of Chuck Berry fame), was again a highlight. No less than 23 archives presented 3-5 minute clips of new moving image preservation work. My personal favorites: Julia Child making French onion soup on the Dick Cavett show with a blow torch, a Bobcat Co.  promo with a Bobcat operator dancing opposite a go-go dancer, and a tape from a sexual fantasy party sponsored by the N.O.W. Conference on Sexuality in 1973. The weird and the profane collide, as bits of popular culture enter the archive, hopefully to be recirculated in a never-ending digital remix.

Blog posting written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

A few days ago I spoke at a memorial for George Bluestone, who was my one of my mentors and a life-long friend. We first met in fall 1973, when I was a freshly matriculated graduate film student at Boston University. George was well-known for his book, Novels into Film, which has remained in continuous print since 1957; an accomplishment matched by only a handful of film books. Looking over my notes from that time, I was struck most of all by George’s intensely humanistic perspective, and the intellectual breath and depth of his thinking about film. 

In a lecture in my first seminar, “Religion in the Cinema,” George drew an arch from Milton, Dante and American transcendentalist poetry, to Carl Dreyer and Ingmar Bergman, from the world of absolute certainty about the existence of an all-powerful deity to a vision of modernity and ambiguity, in which god’s existence was unknowable. But George could also move from the sacred to the profane with amazing rapidity and humor. In a seminar on sex in the cinema, Bluestone explicated Gerald Damiano’s theatrical porn film, The Devil in Miss Jones (USA 1973), in terms of Catholic notions of sin and redemption and Jean-Paul Satre’s existentialism in “No Exit.” Such a discussion may seem commonplace today, given “Porn Studies” after Linda Williams, but in the early 1970s it was nothing short of revolutionary. For George there were no taboos to intellectual inquiry and no limits to his generosity in sharing ideas.  

Writing my remarks on the plane to Boston, I remembered my other mentor, named George. For over thirty years, George Pratt worked quietly and diligently at George Eastman House, collecting precious materials, saving bits of data which at one time seemed important to only a few isolated scholars and archivists, but now constitute a major, historical collection. For all those who came to do research at Eastman House, or wrote to him, George opened his files, generously, humbly, completely.

I first met George as a post-graduate intern at Eastman House in 1975. At the time, he was Associate Curator, responsible for all the non-film collections. He had just published  Spellbound in Darkness, a compilation of reviews and documents from the silent era. . Although in his introduction he stated that "My comments simply bind the chapters together", his remarks in fact constituted an intelligent, informative, highly original, and self-reflexive history of silent cinema. George was always too modest. But his life work was a compilation of filmographic data from the silent period, much of which flowed into the American Film Institute Feature Film Catalogue, thus creating a basis for all subsequent film archival work. George died in 1988, after I had become his successor at Eastman House.  

My first mentor was Gerald Barrett, the professor of record for all my film courses as an undergraduate. In winter 1971, he taught a non-credit seminar on Sergei Eisenstein, a tough entré into cinephilia. Yet, I realized almost intuitively, that, unlike my majors, History and English, cinema studies was indeed terra incognita. I was hooked. I took a couple more film courses with Gerry, including an independent study on classical film theory when no other film courses were to be found, and started writing film reviews for the student paper. Barrett was involved in Literature/Film Quarterly, but unfortunately eventually left the field, ABD, having published three excellent film monographs on literary adaptations of works by Ambrose Bierce and Conrad Aiken, and on Stan Brakhage. Apart from introducing me to the field, I owe my interest in American avant-garde cinema to Barrett.

Finally, I have to acknowledge my debt to two other mentors, Evan Cameron and Marshall Deutelbaum. Cameron was my advisor at Boston University for my master’s thesis on “Ernst Lubitsch and the Rise of UFA,” later finishing his career as Department Chair at York University. More importantly, he first suggested I write about film preservation for his film production methodology seminar and eventually recommended  me for my internship at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. Equally at home in the fields of mathematics, Kantian philosophy, and film studies, Evan taught me rigorous thinking and writing. Marshall Deutelbaum, who is an Emeritus Professor at Purdue University, was Assistant Curator at Eastman House during my internship. He demonstrated to me that you could be both an academic and an archivist, preserve films and produce film history through critical writing.

Over the past thirty plus years I have done just that.

Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

The first thing you do when you get to Pordenone, Italy, a provincial capital northeast of Venice, is walk a lot. The town is small enough to promenade around in half an hour. Invariably you meet colleagues on the street, because everyone is walking to and from various hotels. I first started going to the Giornate del cinema muto in 1988, when I was curator at George Eastman House. I mention this because I realized, how many people I know at the Festival. There are the many archivists, who show their latest preservation work or　come to look at other restorations; there are the American and European academics, who specialize in silent film historiography; and there are the cinephiles, who come faithfully every year at their own expense, just to see rare silent films. This year’s program is focused on canonical films, the French company Albatross, divas, and Sherlock Holmes. 　

The Albatross films turned out to be somewhat of a mixed bag. Albatross was founded in Paris by a bunch of Russian exiles in the very early 1920s. Unfortunately, previous festivals have shown some of the best films from the company, films by Rene Clair, L’Herbier, and the actor Moujoukine. By the mid 1920, Albatross was supporting a lot of experimental work, but the films shown so far are from the early 1920s by people like the second-tiered Viktor Tourjansky, who had an incredibly long and undistinguished career in pre-revolutionary Russia, France, Nazi Germany, and word and sandal epics in Italy in the 1950s.

In the divas program, we saw some previously lost film fragments from Asta Nielsen (Europe’s greatest film star in 1914) and Francesca Bertini, and Italian diva who started making films around 1912 and was as popular in Italy as Pickford was in America. I’ve really liked the Bertini films, especially one we saw tonight where she kills her rival in her dressing room, then proceeds on stage to die (as a title tells us, blood gushing from her mouth, due to consumption).

So far the only real masterpiece was a Soviet film from 1928, Boris Barnet’s THE HOUSE IN TRUBNOI STREET, a slapstick comedy that was a scream. I was also impressed with a German comedy from 1926, THE LITTLE GIRL FROM THE VARIETY SHOW by Hanns Schwarz, starring Ossi Oswalda, who became famous as Lubitsch’s star in a series of comedies in the late teens.

Finally, I discovered ROTAIE (RAILS) (1929), a film by Mario Camerini. The film begins with an abborted double suicide of a young couple, who then find a wallet filled with money and head by train to Monaco. Despite this seeming fantasy narrative, the film has many realistic scenes, and only a few sparse intertitles, the rest of the narrative conveyed solely in images. 　　　　

Another great feature of the Giornate is a the Collegium, which brings graduate film studies students to discuss films and discuss other issues with prominent scholars in the field. I attended a session dedicated to canon formation. Ian Christie, formerly of the BFI and Paolo Cherchi Usai, now at the Haghefilm Foundation, lead the very interesting discussion about how film canons developed, why they have changed so little over the years, and how they do change. The consensus was that even when films are rediscovered though new restorations, - as happens so often at the Giornate - it still takes a very long time for those discoveries to filter into the canon.

A second Collegium session featured a lecture by Giovanna Fosetti, the preservationist at the Amsterdam Nederlands Filmmuseum, who has just published a book on film preservation: From Grain to Pixel. The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam University Press). As mentio0ned in previous posts, the digital is completely changing the paradigm of film restoration and archiving and this book is a first attempt to get a handle on those changes.

Finally, I attended a lecture by former Eastman House students, Daniela Currò & Uli Ruedel, who discussed scientific studies they have been doing at Haghefilm on color restoration. Taking the same piece of film, a 1912 Alfred Machin film that was tinted and toned, they copied onto Kodak b& w stock, Kodak color negative, Fuji color negative, using the Desmet method of flashing, and doing what they called a digital Desmet restoration. The digital looked the absolute worst, the Desmet was the best, but not really great.

Again, we see there are limits to digital restoration technologies.

Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archives

In the general public there is the notion that archives are spaces where almost everything is saved and preserved for posterity. However, the founding of an archive is no guarantee that its contents will ultimately be saved. This tells us that while the archive exists in an idealist sense to capture both the evident and hidden meanings of our culture, through the preservation of objects and information, the reality of such institutions is more chaotic, survival much more a matter of the serendipity of time than archival management.

Some of the largest and most important film archives in the world, like the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris or George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., were founded by collectors who were cinephiles, hell-bent on collecting every scrap of film and film history. Other archives, like the Library of Congress or the Czech National Film Archive were started by enlightened governments, wishing to preserve national culture.  Still others were set up as warehouses for multi-national corporations, whose mandate it is to control intellectual assets and copyrights. Moving images that have entered into these archives have gotten there more or less as a result of the whims of time, curators, donors, and government officials. Changes in administration, curators, budgets, often brings changes in acquisition policy. 

The history of moving image archives thus always also includes a hidden history of what has been lost. Motion Picture companies have been notorious for “de-accessioning” their archives into the proverbial trash bin. Every collector has a story about dumpster diving for priceless movie memorabilia treasures, whether scripts, photos, or films. When I was building an archive for Universal Studios in the late 1990s, I realized that the company had sold a warehouse in New Jersey that contained the papers of Irving Thalberg, who had worked for the company for several years in the early 1920s, without bothering to remove its contents. Much of MGM’s corporate history ended up in the trash after the sale of its historical assets to Turner in the early 1980s. 
   
But even non-profit and government archives are subject to destruction or loss. Several years ago, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan attempted to destroy that country’s national film and television archives, because they interpreted Islamic law as a ban against “images of all living things,” including any and all documentary films. In 2002, Agence France Press reported that almost 12,00 boxes of paper materials from the Cinémathèque Française were destroyed in a fire at the Bibliothèque du film, including film publicity materials, posters, photographs, and periodicals, almost all of it uncatalogued. Two disastrous nitrate film fires at the United States National Archives in Suitland, Maryland in 1977 and 1978 destroyed over a million feet of The March of Time and close to 12 million feet of Universal Newsreels, respectively. A fire at the National Film Board of Canada in July 1967 destroyed much of that institution’s illustrious production.  

Every archive I have worked in keeps lists of nitrate films that have decomposed, materials that have been de-accessioned, duplicates that have been sold, traded, or just lost. Lack of funds have often been the root of the problem, hindering Archives from building proper storage facilities, hiring staff for regular inspections, beginning or completing a rigorous program copying to newer formats, whether film or digital. Indeed, budget cuts at every major American public media archive in the present economy have made certain collections inaccessible, if not lost.

History can only be created from what survives. Survival is more a matter of chance than most of us archivists would like to admit.

Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, Director, UCLA Film & Television Archive
      
      The professionalization of moving image archives over the past three decades has been accompanied by changes in film studies, which have precipitated a new consciousness not only in media historians, but also in moving image archivists themselves. Earlier generations of film historians perceived film history teleologically as a progressive evolution towards film art, a hermeneutic upward spiral of technical and aesthetic improvements that brought the medium to its maturity with the addition of sound, color, and 3-D. But history is not that easily compartmentalized. Moving image media and culture have been subject to breaks, fissures, dead-ends, two steps forward and one step backwards, all of which did not inevitably lead to what we now term classical Hollywood narrative or some variation there of. 

      The new film historians have been much more interested in contextualizing film and television history in the broader arena of cultural studies and cultural critique. They have attempted to ground film history in an empirical methodology, based on academic conventions of evidence gathering and presentation. No longer is film history a matter of connoisseurship and the analysis of individual examples of film art or the oeuvre of so-called film auteurs. Rather, the new media historians see film and television as one form of evidence in an historical discourse. 

      While the goal of standard film histories of the past was to establish aesthetic norms of quality for cinema history, the new media history is interested in describing and analyzing the technological, economic, social, political, ethical, and aesthetic development of the medium of film and the institution of cinema. Furthermore, the new methodologies have shifted the focus from a critic’s reading of a given artifact to a reconstruction of the historical audience’s readings and usage of cinema and television.    

      Such an agenda means that virtually any form of moving image can function as historical evidence, whether fiction feature film or short, documentary or avant-garde film, advertising film or ethnographic film, industrial or medical film, amateur film or newsreel. It also means that the material culture of moving image media has become a much more important factor in the construction of history. Not just the images, but the documents produced in film production, distribution, and exhibition become the raw materials of the new history, whether film scripts and treatments, film production records, contemporary film reviews, film industry trade periodicals, film stills and posters, oral histories, and personal correspondence.

      The inevitable conclusion for moving image archivists must be that they should neither exclude material from their archives, nor actively participate in the judgmental game of deciding what is important and what is not. Finally, it means that a symbiotic relationship now exists between archivists and historians: new academic research leads to the formulation of new preservation priorities. For example, a new sensitivity in the archives to amateur film was brought about by academic research, concerned with the cultural value of such material. Conversely, the preservation of materials outside of the classical canon, has lead to further reevaluation of moving image history. 

      Only the continual interplay between archives and academics will lead to increased knowledge of these media which have so vitally impacted on our perceptions of the world.