ARCHIVE WARS

by Mark Poole

This article was first published on Screenhub, the online journal.

The final session at the Film & History Conference on Sunday afternoon was “The Politics and Cultures of the Contemporary Film Archive,” chaired by Dr Ina Bertrand, with speakers Professor Ian Christie from the University of London, Ray Edmonson the former Director of our NFSA, and Graham Shirley who currently works as curator of Moving Image at NFSA.

It was a stellar panel, containing people with a vast experience and knowledge of film and sound archives. Graham Shirley is well known as an experienced filmmaker and researcher with three decades of experience on the other end of the desk, as it were, before joining the ranks of the NFSA. Ian Christie is still an advisor to the UK film archive, the NFTVA, which is part of the BFI. And of course Ray Edmonson has a practical working knowledge of our National Film & Sound Archive, and is presently actively engaged in archival forums around the world.

Christie was the first speaker and at pains to point out that film archives have the same problems throughout the globe. While other sorts of archives seem to have few problems getting adequate funding, he said, because film work is so expensive, film archives are constantly being reorganized and revamped according to the economic fashion of the day.

A big problem facing all film archives is the requirement to accomplish so many tasks all at once – not only to preserve our films, television and radio programs for posterity, and restore films to pristine conditions, but also to run ongoing exhibition of these works, as well as publishing suitably referenced catalogues and commentary.

Professor Christie postulated that what archives are required to do is simply too many things, and one thing we have to do is find a way of reducing these demands – particularly when budgets are tight.

The situation in the UK is complicated partly because there are a number of tiers of archive, not only the central ones in London, but also regional archives such as one in Scotland who are demanding a place at the funding table. These regional archives tend to specialize in preserving amateur film on 8mm, super 8 and 16mm gauges, Christie told us.

The next speaker was Ray Edmundson, well known in Australia as a past head of the NFSA, recently merged with the Australian Film Commission and still active as part of the Archive Forum that opposed the merger. Ray told us that UNESCO is interested in supporting international archives and professional  associations of archivists. Apparently UNESCO is planning a day – October 22 – as an international day to commemorate the works of archives.

Ray talked about his concerns with how the NFSA is presently organized within the bureaucratic structure of the AFC. In the past you could look up the archive’s budget and see how it’s being spent, but now the accounts are subsumed by the AFC colossus, and it’s impossible to tell how much is being spent on archival work, or to what effect.

Graham Shirley said that working on the other side of the counter has taught him how many people and organizations have requests for archival material, and one of his main preoccupations is to prioritise these requests. Another is to communicate what the archive has with the public, and currently work is being done on revamping online catalogues.

Christie added that one difficulty of all archives is that they are by definition behind the times – not only because they receive less money than they need to do their work, but also there is inevitably a lag between new technologies being invented and an archive catching up to them.

Shirley said that 35mm prints are still by far the best material to archive important works on film. Edmonson added that film technology is totally known, the lifespan of a print is known, and so is its rate of deterioration. Unlike the digital realm.

Christie commented that there’s a problem with nitrate deterioration in the UK, and a decision had recently been taken to bury fridges full of nitrate below ground level, in an effort to preserve the negatives as well as possible. The problem is that it isn’t known how successful this will prove to be.

Edmonson cited his recent hard drive crash as evidence that digital material has a lifespan just like film, except with digital data that span is likely to be far shorter. There is a perception that once a work has gone into the digital sphere, it’s immortal, but that isn’t the case. Digital data still needs to be preserved, and it’s not the panacea that politicians in particular imagine it to be.

Discussion raged around concerns stemming from the merger of the NFSA into the AFC. Deb Verhoeven suggested from the floor that people are no longer able to trust the NFSA because they don’t trust the AFC, although Christie commented that academics as well as filmmakers want to support film archives, and it would be a mistake to attack the archives just because they’re the victim of bureaucratic reorganization.

Edmonson mentioned that the place of the NFSA is currently in doubt under the Government’s review of all film agencies. A a merger between the AFC and FFC may well see the chance for the NFSA to again become an independent statutory authority.

A lively, well-attended and informative session.