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

 With the development in the United States in the late 1960s of government funding sources for preservation through the National Endowment for the Arts and the growth of local, regional, and television archives, a sea change occurred in the U.S. archival community. While moving image preservation had previously been handled by only a few nitrate-holding archives, including George Eastman House, UCLA Film & Television Archives, Museum of Modern Art, and the Library of Congress Motion Picture Division, literally dozens of new archives were founded in the following years, making the need for a North American organization apparent. Suddenly a host of regional archives, archives of special collections (dance film), and television news archives appeared on the scene. What had been a loose organization of film and television archives at the end of the 1970s, the Film Archives Advisory Committee/Television Archives Advisory Committee (FAAC/TAAC), was formalized in a new organization, the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), founded in 1990. Unlike FIAF, which was based on institutional membership, AMIA became an organization of individual archivists and other persons engaged in film and television preservation, including commercial laboratories, the major studios, and stock shot houses. By 2003, membership had grown to nearly 1000, with yearly conferences, a newsletter, archival education, scholarships, a journal, and an internet listserv as a part of its mandate. The organization has also expanded from a strictly North American organization of archivists to one with members spanning the rest of the world. As a result, of these structural changes, the field of film and video preservation has matured from a group of individual collectors into a discipline with standards and sanctioned practices.
 

While films and videos were often stored in substandard environments, film/video archivists now attempt to maintain strict standards for climate control and vault safety. By the late 1980s, it became increasingly clear that both acetate and nitrate materials benefited from extremely low humidity and very cold environments. The lifespan of nitrate film, for example, could be doubled by lowering the ambient temperature in a vault by 5˚ and the humidity by 5%. Storage suddenly became the first line of defense for preservation, not the transfer of images to newer film stocks, making the 1970s slogan “Nitrate Can’t Wait” an anachronism. At the same time, the Library of Congress and other institutions developed cataloguing standards for moving image materials, while the archives themselves began the massive project of properly cataloguing their holdings. Finally, the old policy of sending out for screenings “unprotected” prints, i.e. materials which had not been preserved, was discontinued in most archives. Instead, preservation priorities were often formulated, based on the need for public access to given titles. Making all this possible was regularized funding.
 

The National Endowment of the Arts was created in September 1965 through an Act of Congress. Based on a recommendation from the Stanford Research Institute, the NEA formally announced in June 1967 the awarding of a $1.3 million grant for the establishment of an American Film Institute, which furthermore received matching grants from the Ford Foundation and the Motion Picture Association of America. Based on the model of the British Film Institute, the AFI’s mandate was to support the production of quality films, train filmmakers, and foster the preservation of American film. From the start, the AFI’s role was not to actually preserve film, but to act as a conduit for collecting films and funding archives, such as the Library of Congress and George Eastman House. Essentially, the AFI became a re-grant agency for NEA film preservation funds, while taking an allowable 30-35% cut for administrative overhead. And while the archives received a total of more than $ 10.5 million for film preservation between 1968 and 1972, the AFI’s overhead costs took an ever bigger bite out of funding, so that by 1972 film preservation accounted for a mere 9% of its expenditures. NEA continued funding the archives through the 1970s and 1980s, but its funding levels remained at about $350,00 - 450,000, despite inflationary costs for film preservation, due to increased laboratory costs. With restrictions placed by the Reagan NEA on the kinds of content that could be preserved, as well as continuing to cut back funding, film preservation reached another crisis in the early 1990s. (to be continued…)

Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive,
      
The first generation of film archivists were essentially collectors interested in showing their treasures. Before the age of television, old films were virtually impossible to see, since producers had little interest in saving material that had outlived its economic usefulness. Furthermore, mainstream cultural institutions and governments considered the cinema a crass commercial enterprise, a form of communication not worthy of serious intellectual consideration. Having what Roland Barthes has called "bad object status", the cinema was mistreated by governments, institutions of education, and commercial interests, alike. 

In the 1920s, a minority of intellectuals began championing the cinema as a new art form, advocating the creation of non-commercial screening spaces and the establishment of archives for the preservation of old films. Once sound film was introduced between 1927 and 1931, however, the matter of the medium’s survival became critical, since silent films were considered completely obsolete. Yet, in that era many critics, historians, and cinephiles believed that silent film was a superior art form, an art form that deserved to be preserved.

The first film archive in the world was established at the Museum of Modern Art in 1935 by Iris Barry and her husband, John Abbott, cinephiles who understood that the cinema was potentially a modern art. A year later, two young Frenchmen, Henri Langlois and Georges Franju, founded the Cinémathèque Française in Paris as a private initiative. Before the decade was out, two more archives were founded in London (the National Film Library) and Berlin (Reichsfilmarchiv). While the latter two were national in scope, MOMA and the Cinémathèque collected internationally.

Together, these archives established the Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF) in 1938. After World War II, FIAF expanded considerably with the founding of film archives in Switzerland, Prague, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Rochester, and Moscow. By 1959 FIAF consisted of thirty-three members and by the turn of the millennium had over 120 archives associated with the organization. 

The priority of the members of FIAF, then, was to collect films. Not without some justification it was thought that the very act of collecting prints also contributed to their preservation. Just as important as collecting films was the act of screening them, making them live again on the screen for a new generation of filmgoers. Most of the first generation of film archivists, including Henri Langlois (Paris), James Card (Rochester), Maria Andriana Prolo (Turin), Jan de Vaal (Amsterdam), Jacques Ledoux (Brussels), Einar Lauritzen (Stockholm), and Freddy Buache (Lausanne) were indeed film collectors, rather than film archivists. Films were stored in vaults which often did not meet standards for archival security; catalogues consisted more often tan not of lists printed in loose-leaf notebooks. 

On the positive side, many films were indeed saved from destruction, because the mentality of the film collector precluded throwing anything away. In other words, most of the first generation believed in saving every film they could get their hands on, legally, semi-legally or illegally. Indeed, until quite recently film archives often operated without the blessing of film companies and rights holders; according to the strict letter of the law, only the rights holders could acquire films, making the very act of collecting illegal.  

Finally, by the end of the 1960s, numerous countries around the world had established film and television archives, funded by their governments. This was also the case in Canada, where after numerous government and private initiatives, a national film archive was established in 1969. In the United States, however, moving image archives remained for the most part private affairs. At the same time, film companies now realized that they had lost many films, which now only existed in the archives, films that could be resold to television, and soon remarketed as videos. Suddenly, old films had a market value again.

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.