Moving Images_Bloomfield

Running head: Moving Image Archives: An Historical Overview 1

Moving Image Archives: An Historical Overview

Ian Bloomfield

Queens College/CUNY

Graduate School of Library and Information Studies

December 11, 2013

LBSCI 730 & 732

Instructor: Benjamin Alexander

Moving Image Archives: An Historical Overview 2

Abstract

This paper will provide an historical overview of the major cultural, technological and political

events which influenced the development of national attitudes and policies towards the collection

and preservation of audiovisual materials. Included among these evidences are the individual

notion to preserve, major changes in copyright legislation and the professionalization of the field.

Particular attention will be devoted to how these events have affected and effected selection and

appraisal at the Library of Congress, the holder of the largest audiovisual collection in the United

States and the primary federal agency responsible for the preservation of moving images.

Overall, popular accounts tend to provide a pessimistic view of this history, contributing to the

archival notion of a narrative of absence. While there are certainly significant gaps and periods

of institutional oversight, in a historical context, our overall record of preservation may be as

remarkable for its victories as its losses. Ironically though, not only are seemingly new issues

regarding selection and preservation of digital materials very much borne of their analog

legacies, they may also tend to repeat their mistakes.


Moving Image Archives: An Historical Overview

Moving image archives are responsible for preserving, restoring, and making accessible

moving image heritage, including, film, television, video, and digital formats. (AMIA, n.d.) In

order to preserve not only the technology that is the primary document but the mediating

technology as well, moving image archives “require an investment of millions of dollars in

equipment and trained personnel” (Greene, 2007, p.48). Moving image archives are also

concerned with the supporting documents related to the production of moving image objects, as

their creation “involves contracts, licenses and other agreements with individuals, directors,

producers, writers, talent and owners of other works, such as music and archival footage”

(Schreibman, 1991, p.89).

The challenge of preserving moving images began shortly after the advent of the medium two

centuries ago, when it was found that cellulose nitrate, the plastic used as the base material for

photographic film, “had the unfortunate habit of spontaneous combustion if stored in poor

conditions” (Greene, 2007, p.49). The original intention of this paper was to review the accepted

best practices for appraisal and selection in moving image archives. In a similar fashion,

research into this topic proved difficult from the onset, primarily because “archival literature on

the appraisal of film and video is almost non-existent” (Ide, 2003, p.199). The Society of

American Archivists official position is that general archival principles cut across any

differences imposed by a particular medium (Murphy, 2011). Along those lines, it can be said

that “moving images can be categorized by provenance, function, and form” (Kula, 2002, p. 53).

Otherwise, the field is wide open. The three general points of agreement between moving image

archives are that age matters, moving images have significant informational value and, as mass

media, film and television and become part of the public record” (Ide, 2003). However, can any


of those really be said to true, uniform and specific only to moving image archives? The truth is,

moving image archivists are not even inclined to develop appraisal guidelines and, if developed

at all, they tend to be institutionally specific and often unreasonably all-inclusive (Kula, 2002).

A second challenge is the lack of a controlled vocabulary for the subject. Moving Images is used

here in concert with the Association of Moving Image Archivists, “the premier professional

organization for individuals, institutions and enterprises” (Murphy, 2011) concerned with works

of this nature. That being said, articles used for this study were found using various search terms

such as audiovisual, film, television, video and moving images. To avoid repetitive phrasing,

some of these terms are used interchangeably but the with the caveat that all fall under the

banner of moving images for the purposes herein.

Another difficulty in assessing moving image archival practice is the commercial nature of many

of these archives. Whereas academics and researchers may view these records “as historical

documents and cultural indicators, in another reality, they are corporate property” (Schreibman,

1991, p.89). This makes it difficult to assess the policies and practices of these archives in terms

of providing access for scholarly research. Of similar difficulty is evaluating the nature of public

broadcasting archives, especially in England and Europe, as the dialogue can become quite

complicated when it comes to providing access for publicly funded works upon which copyrights

may be held by the institution and/or creators (Knapskog, 2010).

Lastly, the Library of Congress did not employ specific principles in developing its collection,

where historically selection often fell under the “jurisdiction of fire, chemistry and deliberate

destruction” (Spehr, 2013, p.160), as well as a decades spanning game of administrative musical

chairs. Nonetheless, as the holder of the largest moving image collection and the agency

eventually made responsible for selecting and appraising moving images for preservation, the


majority of research presented will focus on the development of these polices specifically at the

Library of Congress. The selection policies of other major archives are also considered.

As the general archival principles of selection and appraisal do not really apply to the

development of audiovisual preservation standards and policies, the focus of this paper is on the

cultural, technological and political events that have shaped the history of moving image

preservation. While this account is by no means exhaustive, it should provide a primary insight

into “a history marked by shifting politics, standards and ideals as much by the changing

technologies of preservation that continues to expand and control our understanding of the

historical nature of the moving image” (Fletcher and Yumibe, 2013, p.15). Other characteristics

of this history would be the triple fold “lack of preservation, lack of information and lack of

accessibility (Catterall and Morris, 1996) and, for good measure, where “lack of a consistent

public policy defines the terms of action” (Knapskog, 2010, p.31) Of course, some take the

optimistic view, merely characterizing it as “the often intentional and sometimes accidental,

preservation of the national cultural memory” (Jenkins, 2013, p.231).

These characterizations may seem extreme, though, as described by Library of Congress

employees, from the 1940s into the 1960s “the principal duty of the Motion Picture Section was

destroying film” (Spehr, 2013, p.158) This refers to the process whereby after making a safety

copy, they destroyed the original nitrate film, a process which has obvious ramifications in

today’s practice of digitization. The case is similar in television, where approximately “fifty

percent of our television history is destroyed” (Schreibman, 1991, p.89). Primarily a broadcast

technology and not recording, early television was live and if recorded, it was on nitrate film.

When tape was made available, it was often recycled due to the high cost of stock, causing the

erasure of umpteen records. Simply put, in the early days of television no one considered their


duties as archival - in fact, “archivists have noted that the the major use of their television film

collections in the early years was responding to subpoenas sent to the stations” (Schreibman,

1991 p.92).

Undoubtedly much of this narrative is aided and abetted by what some refer to as the politics of

preservation. As Gregory Peck noted in 1972, “the widespread recognition of the significance of

motion pictures in American life is a fairly recent phenomenon” (cited in Spehr, 2013, p.158).

This is partially due to the late development of academic study of moving images. Film studies

programs began to develop in the mid-sixties, and television history did not gain momentum

until the 1990s (Jacobs, 2006). To understand just how deep cultural assumptions about moving

images may lie, consider this comment, made a mere seven years after Peck’s, by none other

than Lord Briggs, official historian of the BBC, regarding England’s own loss of moving image

history: “apart from some regrettable cases, little of value had been lost” (Catterall & Morris,

1996).

In recent years, attitudes have changed somewhat, although not entirely, as we shall see.

History

The Early Years

Given the scope of loss and fracture in this narrative, it is somewhat remarkable to consider that

anything survived at all. This would not be possible without the innate instinct of the individual

to preserve where institutions may fail to. By 1898, Polish cinematographer Boleslaw

Matuszewski had envisioned the establishment of a worldwide network of archives to acquire

and conserve films (Ide, 2003). A fascinating instance from the early film era is the Josef Joye

Collection: assembled by Swiss abbe Josef Joye, his collection, used as teaching aides,

“originally comprised an estimated 1540 international films produced between 1908-1912.”


(Fletcher & Yumibe, 2013, p.2) During this same period, the French banker and philanthropist

Albert Kahn created the Archives of the Planet, which eventually included 183,000 meters

of of 35mm film (Bergstrom, 2013). As it were, this wonderfully human individual instinct to

collect was soon to be out of sync with the dominant institutional position on this new medium.

Having accepted large rolls of paper prints as copyright deposits for motion pictures since 1894,

the Library of Congress decided in 1912 to reverse this policy. Though this decision is generally

attributed to the flammability of nitrate film, “skepticism about the suitability of film in the

national library probably played a role” (Spehr, 2013, p.151). While subjective opinions about

art and their inevitable associations with class warfare were likely as evident in this conversation

as they might be in any other conversation regarding Western civilization, the established and

accepted concerns over the stability of nitrate were certainly legitimate and substantial in their

own right. In fact, the preservation of moving images had an ironic champion in the person of

one William Hays. Historically portrayed as the villain behind the censorship agent that was the

Motion Picture Production Code, “throughout the 1920, Hays lobbied for a number of secure

environments for Hollywood’s creative product, ranging from a film vault in the basement of the

White House to dedicated space for film and audio recordings in the National Archives”

(Jenkins, 2013, p. 231).

Unfortunately, like most film stars of the era, Hays voice went unheard; if film’s combustible

nature can be seen as a catalytic spark igniting a flame, the 1912 copyright decision was the first

stick thrown on the fire.

War of Attrition

A less ironic and much sadder champion for film preservation emerged in the aftermath of

World War I. At Filmforum in 2011, presenter Malte Hagener noted that it was “the war that


revealed the powers of cinema to various nation-states, and this, coupled with massive

destruction of films during the war led to an increased awareness about cinema by the 1920s,

provided the initial impetus for its preservation” (cited in Kumar, 2012 p.172). In the early to

mid-1930s, the Library of Congress and the National Archives both began to develop their

moving image collections, as did the Museum of Modern Art. Similar efforts were under way at

the Reichsfilmarchiv in Germany, England’s BFI National Film Archive and the Cinematheque

Francaise in France. In 1938, the latter four agencies formed the International Federation of

Film Archives (FIAF). As the first consortia dedicated to film collection and preservation,

FIAF’s ability to serve the needs of its member archives would contribute greatly to

professionalization of the field on an international scale, especially after World War II (Murphy,

2011).

The advent of the second World War once again showcased the bittersweet relationship between

military devastation and film preservation. In 1942, a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation

implemented a pilot project between the Library of Congress and the Museum of Modern Art to

begin selecting copyrighted films for inclusion in the Library’s collection. The project was

justified as “a contribution to the war effort”, which was really a default administrative decision,

as the Library had also become home to copies of German, Japanese, and Italian films seized

during the war. This was the result of some brilliant bureaucracy on the the part of the Office of

Alien Property of the Justice Department. The OAP, the agency responsible for seizing the films

as well as administering their copyrights and licensing usage, did not want to actually keep and

service them. (Spehr, 2013). And so began the building of our national moving image archive.

Selection


An important first step in professionalization and preservation is the articulation of a policy for

selecting and appraising objects for inclusion in the archive. This process began in with the

Library of Congress/MoMa pilot project, which set the stage would be set for what appears to be

the first major institutional conversation regarding selection and appraisal of moving images in

the United States. Much to our cultural benefit, this would involve the intellectual acumen of

two deserving advocates in the Librarian of Congress, Archibald MacLeish and Iris Barry of the

Museum of Modern Art. A battle of true heavyweights, this dialogue would feature two

dichotomous views, creating an intellectual divide which pitted Barry’s “pioneering film-as-art

collection policy” (Jenkins, 2012, p.231) against MacLeish’s “broader and more all-inclusive”

selection criteria (Spehr, 2013, p.152).

While Barry’s ideology was likely influenced by her international colleagues and museum

training, Macleish emphasized significance over artistry, aiming for works “which most

faithfully record in one way or another the contemporary life and tastes and preferences of the

American people” (Spehr, 2013, p.152). Accounts of the exchanges between these two

luminaries provide a more detailed insight into their differing ideologies: “MacLeish overruled

Barry and the Library acquired For Whom the Bell Tolls, which Barry condemned as a

flawed version of Hemingway’s novel; however, she won on Bambi, which she dismissed as

‘derivative and by no means a popular imaginative expression’. MacLeish could be equally

acerbic. He rejected films starring the newly popular Frank Sinatra. ‘Why not preserve a good

case of the mumps instead?’” (Spehr, 2013, p.157).

Over the next three years, the Museum selected 603 reels of theatrical film, 188 newsreels, 62

documentaries, and 118 reels of short subjects (Spehr, 2013). In the 1944 Annual Report of the

Librarian of Congress, MacLeish described our earliest moving image selection criteria: “those


films which will provide future students with the most truthful and revealing information the

cinema can provide as to the life and interests of the men and women of the period” Spehr, 2013,

p.157). MacLeish went on to note several categories of interest, including newsreels,

documentaries, important artistic or technological advances, as well as science and geography.

These precedents would guide the building of the collection for several years (Spehr, 2013).

Through the coming years, several administrative decisions regarding the housing and delegating

of responsibility for care would impact the collection and preservation efforts of the Library. For

example, when the pilot project with the Museum of Modern Art expired in 1945, the Library

established the Motion Picture Division. In 1947, the post New Deal Republican Congress voted

to cut all funding for motion pictures, and the short-lived Motion Picture Division was liquidated

(Spehr, 2013). It would be several years before major changes took place to centralize and

relatively solidify the nation’s collection and preservation mandate of film. As momentum for a

national policy on the collection and preservation of moving images slowly developed, an

exciting new medium was poised to capture the world’s imagination.

Television

Akin to the Library’s 1894 decision to accept copyright deposit copies for motion pictures, the

acceptance of the first television program for copyright in 1949 was equally important (Murphy,

2013). While this became a regular pattern (Spehr, 2013) that would eventually augment and

complicate our moving image preservation, it was not yet a major step forward from the dark

days of film preservation for one simple reason: television is a broadcast technology and not a

recording technology. Early television broadcasts were only produced and viewed as live events

and the only preservation of these records occurred in the rare instances where broadcasts were


filmed; “entertainment production companies did not even think of anyone’s responsibilities

being archival; for the most part, they threw the programs out after a limited run.” (Schreibman,

1991). The American appetite for archival footage was whetted when the popular program

Victory at Sea, airing in 1952, “paved the way for an interest in historical compilations”

(Spehr, 2013, p.154). And so collections began to develop - in the 1950’s, University of

Wisconsin and the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY began to collect feature films and

later television programs (Schreibman, 1991). The Library of Congress’s selection policy

expanded more on the broad aspect of MacLeish’s cornerstone policy, if not so much the

inclusive part: it was deemed that a single sample program was considered representative for

broadcasts in series (Spehr, 2013).

Selection and preservation demands for television would soon be heightened by the introduction

of a technology for recording it. In April, 1956, the first prototype professional videotape

recorders, using two-inch magnetic tape, were demonstrated at the National Association of

Broadcasters Convention (Greene, 2007). In 1958, the Mass Communications History Center of

the Wisconsin Historical Society at the aforementioned University of Wisconsin-Madison began

when NBC donated its records for preservation (Hilmes, 2010). On July 24, 1959, the Kitchen

Debate between Vice President Nixon and Nikita Kruschev became the first videotape received

by the Library of Congress (Spehr, 2013).

Administrative Musical Chairs

The early days of film had introduced the demands of preserving moving images. The advent of

television and videotape would foster great advances in broadcasting and preserving moving

images. Neither of these could hold a candle to the bureaucratic difficulties that complicated the

development of a national moving image collection at the Library of Congress, which at this


point in time held about fifteen thousand motion pictures (Spehr, 2013). Administrative

concerns were allowed to dictate policy and “overshadowed the cultural and intellectual

potential of the collection.” (Spehr, 2013, p.153)

A major obstacle was simply knowing who and where to report to: “the problem of managing the

collection was given to the Office of Keeper of the Collections, then transferred to Reference

Department in 1951, who assigned it in 1952 to the Stack and Reader Division” (Spehr, 2013,

p.153). Another obstacle was moving past the fears over nitrate, which allowed the Library’s

administration to give priority to weeding the collections and consolidating them in a

government-owned vault” (Spehr, 2013, p.153). This period of time would come to be known as

“the era of copy and destroy” (Spehr, 2013, p.164). In 1958, the Library had received an

appropriation of sixty-thousand dollars from Congress to make safety film copies of nitrate films

in the collection. This was an important step in the funding of film preservation, if not a model

of best practices: “the success of the preservation program was measured in footage copied and

pounds destroyed” (Spehr, 2013, p.164). It was also a step forward in selection ideology -

though “justified as preservation, the real purpose was access” (Spehr, 2013, p.158). A policy of

selection for preservation and access was indeed beginning to emerge but further advances

would be stymied by more administrative hurdles. On November 1, 1961, the Library of

Congress collection was transferred yet again from the Stack and Reader Division to the Prints

and Photographs Division (Spehr, 2013).

The Library was not the only institution wantonly destroying moving image records. In 1958, in

the wake of Paramount Pictures acquisition of Desilu’s stored footage, “thousands of feet of the

technicolor footage were dumped into the Pacific Ocean” (Leigh, 2006, p.50). Meanwhile, the

producers and distributors of television seemed stuck in a repeat cycle of their own, allowing for


the destruction and loss of vast amounts of records: “during the mid-1960s, when kinescope was

replaced with videotape, many aired programs were taped over because the cost of the stock was

too high” and “scripts for these programs were lost as well” (Schreibman, 1991, p.90) Though

popularly attributed to cost, it is likely that cultural assumptions once again factored in these

decisions.

Progress

As the 1960s progressed, the existence of two prolific and popular audiovisual mediums began to

manifest the distinct need for a national policy regarding the collection and preservation of the

records and materials produced by these mediums. The middle of the decade would usher in

major steps towards such a policy. By 1965, UCLA had started to collect television programs

(Schreibman, 1991) in what is now the nation’s second-largest collection. That same year, a

huge ideological and financial gift was made and for once, it wasn’t the outcome of a war (well,

maybe the Cold War) with the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1966, the

NEA administered a planning study that would produce the Stanford Report, which endorsed a

national initiative “to foster the the art and preserve the heritage of film and television in

America.” This laid the groundwork for establishing the American Film Institute in 1967 and the

launch in 1968 of its archival program, “to seek out and acquire endangered films and place them

in existing archives” (Spehr, 2013, p.156). The application of this mandate was limited at best,

as it applied to the only three archives capable of handling nitrate at the time: the Museum of

Modern Art, the George Eastman House and the Library Of Congress (Spehr, 2013).

Nonetheless, the Library of Congress staff “were anxious to fill the gap” (Spehr, 2013, p.158)

from the years prior to Macleish’s 1942 decision. Deposits from the major studios soon

followed, including “the RKO collection, followed by shipments from Columbia Pictures,


Warner Bros. Hal Roach, MCA/Universal (also owned Paramount features made prior to 1948)

and some Monograms”, though, in a foreshadowing of future legislation, “finding independent

productions and films from the silent era was a challenge” (Spehr, 2013, p.159).

Astute readers may have noted that, although the Stanford Report mentioned television and film

in the same breath, the AFI was focused on film and a comparable television-oriented institute

did not follow. Once again, cultural assumptions likely played a hand, as did the concurrent

emergence of film studies programs at many universities and colleges. Whatever preferences

film might have been shown were short-lived, as television would soon assert itself on the

national agenda when the CBS network sued Vanderbilt University for breach of copyright,

based on the University’s project of recording its own copies of news broadcasts aired during the

year’s presidential election campaign. The eventual resolution of this case in the next decade

would have a radical effect on moving image preservation, though at the time it is somewhat

ironic considering that the Department of Defense was doing virtually the same thing in

kinescoping network news stories concerning the Vietnam war (Schreibman, 1991).

Though actual film preservation was still limited in application and television preservation had

taken a back seat, moving image preservation was certainly now a part of the national

consciousness. As an outgrowth of that, it was a necessary step to join the international

conversation which had been gaining momentum since the early 1930s. In 1969, the Museum of

Modern Art hosted FIAF’s annual meeting, literally bringing the English and European fervor to

American soil. The impact of the conference was felt in one simple outcome: the Library of

Congress applied and was granted membership in 1970 (Spehr, 2013). The United States now

had an national institution concerned with the collection and preservation of audiovisual

materials on an international scale .


The Seventies: Decade of Change

Several factors and events would contribute to the advances in moving image selection and

preservation. One was the widespread expansion of interest in the humanities, an example of

which is urgent anthropology. The idea that cultures are changing rapidly and therefore needed

to be documented would obviously mandate a need to collect and preserve film. From this

connection came, in 1975, the establishment of the Human Studies Film Archives, the first of

what would become several archives housed within the Smithsonian Institute and responsible for

collecting moving images (Tarr & Shay, 2013). That same year, UCLA took a major step in

enhancing its collection and moving image curriculum by forming an alliance with the Academy

of Television Arts and Sciences (Schreibman, 1991). Cultural interest in film and television

moved beyond the campus when William Paley founded the Museum of Broadcasting (known

today as the Paley Center) in New York City. Though not technically an archives as its holdings

are for the most part copies received from other archives, the Museum of Television and Radio

was the first institution to offer access to past television programs to the general public instead of

being restricted to scholars” (Schreibman, 1991).

The major shifts however were still on the horizon. As Schreibman (1991) describes it, “three

phenomena which catapulted the media preservation field into a new era were the passage of the

Copyright Revision Act of 1976, the advent of videocassettes and the introduction of alternative

distribution outlets (p.91).

The Copyright Revision essentially invented a whole new generation of viewers which would

have major ramifications in terms of distribution and access to copies of materials. The 1976

Copyright Act resolved the Vanderbilt case by establishing a major revision in U.S. copyright

law that “encouraged taping off-air taping of hard news broadcasts” (Murphy, 2011, p.105).


The Library also now had the power to require deposits of works, ensuring that significant

productions are available for scholarly access (Schreibman, 1991).

In 1975, Ampex had introduced commercial videotape, followed by Electronic Industries

Association of Japan’s open reels and U-matic cassettes with the result being that “videotape

libraries become ubiquitous outside network television” (Murphy, 2011, p.105). This also

resulted in “a deluge of cassette deposits” at the Library that almost doubled acquisition in the

first year and included “theatrical releases, industrials, commercials and pornographic films as

well as broadcasts (Schreibman, 1991, p.91).

A precursor to the burgeoning home video market of the 1980s, the standardized cassette was

now the major distribution medium for industrial video, educational programming and

independent producers. Despite these great advances, short-sighted reactions to the new

technology allowed for the further destruction of records and the concomitant addition of more

absence to our history, as many television stations decided to dump all their film as well as their

film equipment and developing labs (Schreibman, 1991).

Professional Development

By the mid-seventies, the moving image archival profession “had dramatically grown based on

collection or acquisition policies that recognized moving images as a legitimate part of our

cultural heritage to be preserved” (Murphy, 2011, p.108). Two events in 1977 would lay the

foundation for further advance. An internal review of the NEA “determined that grants could not

be made to agencies of the US government, specifically the Smithsonian and the Library of

Congress” (Spehr, 2013, p.171). This ruling would greatly impact the Archives Advisory

Committee, a panel which had been set up in the early seventies to review applications for funds

from the AFI-NEA preservation program. Now only an advisory group, it was easier to add


participants to the committee, which would expand the scope of participation from within the

field.

The second event of 1977 was another administrative reorganization at the Library of Congress.

The Motion Picture Section and the Recorded Sound Collection were combined to form the

Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, with Erik Barnouw named chief of

the re-named of Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Barnouw

recognized the need for a forum that would allow moving image archives and archivists to work

together and share information. Since the number of television archivists was deemed too small

to be a committee in the SAA, Barnouw organized a television archives conference for North

American television archivists from non-profits and networks (Schreibman, 1991). Spehr aptly

refers to the the following year of 1978 as “the year of change” (Spehr, 2013, p.171) because its

ripple effect, such as the International Federation of Films Brighton conference, one of the first

joint academic and archival considerations of early cinema (Fletcher & Yumibe, 2013), as well

as a Library of Congress-AFI sponsored moving image cataloging conference (Murphy, 2011).

In 1983, the NEA and AFI jointly established the National Center for Film and Video

Preservation, an independent organization of archivists, which took over the administration of

film preservation grants from the NEA and would implement and oversee the National Moving

Image Database (Schreibman, 1991). Then, in 1985, the National Archives and Records Service

became the National Archives and Records Administration. The effect on professionalization

was that now, as an agency of the executive branch, it could not accept NEA funding and could

only observe rather than guide” (Murphy, 2011, p.103). Amidst these changes, “the mid-80s saw

a huge increase in the number of individuals and institutions caring for moving image

materials...people trained as archivists, librarians, and museum specialists found themselves


responsible for film and video collections (Shay, 2011, p.98). In 1986, the NCVFP issued a

“two-year national moratorium on the destruction of television programs” and produced

guidelines for archival selection and preservation of video documents (Schreibman, 1991, p.93).

It seemed like a national collection and preservation mandate was taking shape nicely, which

should prompt cynics and skeptics to ask, what happened next?

NFPA 1988

The second act ender of this narrative occurred when Ted Turned purchased the MGM library

and began airing colorized versions of classic films on his cable networks because “colorized

versions earned several times as much through cable and video as the original unaltered

versions” (Real, 2013, p.131). This resulted in a backlash from the creative community on the

grounds of moral rights, although “the ultimate goal was to give creators greater control over and

protection when need form all alterations to their films, not just colorization.” (Real, 2013,

p.131). Understanding that corporate copyright holders would have blocked any legislation

including moral rights because of the new rights such a law might provide to contributors to

works or for creators to be able to block commercial exploitation of works-for-hire, Congress

decided to deal with moral rights in separate legislation and passed the National Film

Preservation Act (Real, 2013). Moral rights was not the only compromise: “preservation in this

instance meant the preservation of motion picture content in its original form rather than

preservation in relation to proper archival storage that prevents physical deterioration” (Real,

2013, p.135). The Library was encouraged to solicit by gift a preservation copy of every film in

the registry, but no formal mechanism for enforcing this was included in the legislation (Real,

2013).


It was during this period that the concept of orphan works was first floated about, surprisingly by

a Turner VP, Roger Mayer. It was Mayer who “suggested that government efforts might be

better focused on films of historical or cultural interest which are in the public domain or are, for

other reasons, not being preserved rather than on the twenty-five Film Board ‘best film’

designations, which are, undoubtedly, already being preserved” (Real, 2013, p.140).

Despite its flaws, the 1988 National Film Preservation Act did establish the National Film

Preservation Board within the Library of Congress, with its focus on establishing a federal public

policy on motion picture preservation. After one hundred years of moving image history, a

national selection policy had finally been articulated. With its passage, the Library of Congress

has been required by law to add twenty-five American films that are ‘culturally, historically or

aesthetically’ significant” every year to the National Film Registry (Barstow, 2011).

The Nineties: Professional Organization

The NFVP of 1988 was not a perfect document, nor without its critics. By 1991, national

funding spent far more on cataloging than preserving. Of that preservation funding, almost none

was awarded to television, documentaries, newsreels, independent videos or home movies

(Schreibman, 1991). NFPA ’88 was also far from being the final legislative word on a national

collection and preservation policy for moving images but it did establish the subject as part of the

national conversation. Viewed by the the archival field “as a means of increasing the visibility

of preservation issues to Congress and the general public” (Real, 2013, p.130) it also allowed,

perhaps mandated, that those involved in the profession take steps towards organizing and

concentrating efforts towards advocacy, awareness, and professional development.

On November 1, 1990, the Film Archives Advisory Committee (an iteration of the Archives

Committee) convened at the Oregon Historical Society and drafted a formal resolution to


establish the Association of Moving Image Archivists. Once again, SAA was not involved as “it

was felt that SAA did not offer substantial resources or program time for moving image archival

issues” (Murphy, 2011, p.103). In November 1991 the AMIA held its first official conference,

November 5-9 at the St. Moritz Hotel, Central Park South, where it was recommended to

develop membership among production and broadcast communities, students and faculty in

moving image archive programs, and commercial and nonprofit institutions connected to moving

image preservation (Horak, 2011).

Digitization

By the mid 90s, electronic editing systems were being introduced. These systems allowed for

manipulation of media in real time that was non linear and non destructive, meaning an

audiovisual document could be created without ever physically changing the source.

Additionally, digital optical disc technologies - CDs and DVDs - were now available. (Greene,

2007). While digitization dominates the conversation in today’s world, the major impact of

digital technology on moving image preservation in the 90’s was its effect on film. As less film

was used in assembly - no more rushes, check prints, answer prints - film manufacturers began

to sell less stock and profit margins declined, which further accelerated the adopting of digital

moving image technologies.” (Greene, 2007, p.4). Seen at the time as a panacea of sorts, it has

been realized in the years since “the advance of digital technologies presents something of a

Pandora’s box” to archival collections (Hilmes, 2010, p.77). Then again, “analogue was never a

well-defined concept to begin with (Fossati, 2011, p.155). Good, bad or ugly, archival studies

have certainly been “transformed through the digitization of production, distribution and

exhibition” (Thompson, 2011, p.523). The nature of this transformation will be discussed later.

NFPA Revisited


As mentioned, there was indeed much criticism of the 1988 legislation was, as documented in

1992’s Nitrate Won’t Wait, authored by longtime Library of Congress employee Anthony

Slate. The concentration of professional interests in this era would form a vital voice when the

legislation came up for revision. In October 1994, the NEA suspended the AFI-NEA Film

Preservation Program, meaning that copyrighted films became the exclusive responsibility of

copyright holders and such organizations as the Film Foundation (Horak, 2011). In 1995, the

National Film Preservation Foundation was established “to help preserve those films which are

held in the public trust by non-profit institutions and which simply would not survive without

public intervention” (Horak, 2011, p.122). Building on this concept, the NFPA of 1996 “guided

preservation priorities for non-corporate archives away from a focus on commercially released

feature films and toward the preservation of orphan works” (Real, 2013, p.130).

At this point, national policy still remained focused more on film than television. There is

clearly a chronological explanation for this, as well as arguments previously alluded to about

perceptions of high and low culture. Change seemed imminent, as “with the NFP established,

the Library of Congress set its sights on television preservation”; unfortunately, “the Library of

Congress failed to muster the legislative will to establish a Television Preservation Foundation

similar to the NFPF. Indeed, it abdicated all responsibility for television preservation at a

national level by recommending in its national plan that such a foundation be strictly a separate

and private sector entity rather than chartered by Congress and eligible for federal matching

funds;” this prompted AMIA’s official response that “a single preservation entity would have

been preferable given the rapidly accelerating convergence of all moving image media” (Horak,

2011, p.123). Ultimately, a group of private individuals founded the National Film and Video

Preservation Foundation in 2004 (Horak, 2011).


Modern Times

Contemporary moving image archives face many challenges, some of which are entirely new

and some of which are reiterations of old problems. “Archivists prime challenges today are

funding, managing physical and digital storage, and format migration” (Compton, p.36, 2007).

The cost of maintaining obsolescing formats, playback technology and providing trained

technical support are of major concern, as “not only are audiovisual archivists faced with an

ever-increasing tide of new records that were ‘born digital’, but the tools and processes the relied

upon to preserve ‘traditional’ analog audiovisual media are rapidly disappearing” (Greene, 2007,

p.4). As commercial film and television archives are often “divisions within large corporations

and institutions, they must compete for ever-dwindling funds year by year (Schreibman, 1991).

Given that preservation needs are always much greater than available funding (Murphy, 2011),

the bottom line for these projects is a practical and political concern. As “agencies are tending to

shift funding away from straight item-level cataloging and digitization projects towards ones that

involve collaboration among institutions, that can be used for research or the development of

new tools, or that involve expected cost sharing” (Ranger, 2011, p.131), there is a general

“wariness of utopian discourses of digitization that many see as functioning politically as a

screen for cuts” (Thompson,2011, p.526).

While cost, along with physical space and appropriate climate, are major concerns regarding

storage, perhaps more alarming is that “there is not wide agreement about what the single,

archivally sound wrappers and codec for file-based moving images are” (Ranger, 2011, p.132).

When digital formats first arrived, they were viewed “as the format archivists have been waiting


for as it compensates for any deterioration” (Schreibman, 1991, p.94). Today, we know that

“codecs and hard drives are optimistically measured in increments of three to five years and thus

must be constantly migrated at great expense” (Fletcher & Yumibe, 2013, p.2).

Today, selection and appraisal apply as much to what is included in the archive as to choosing

the technologies for digitization, preservation and storage and how they will factor into project

management and workflow. A major concern for the Images for the Future Project of the

Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision,( http://www.eyefilm.nl/en/collection/images-for-the-

future), responsible for digitizing 17,500 hours of Dutch audiovisual heritage at a rate of 3,000

hours per year by 2014, was to establish “the best possible way of scanning different types of

source material” Kumar, 2012, p.173). In some instances, the ideologies at work can seem eerily

reminiscent of their analog forebears. Jurgen Keiper of Deutshce Kinemathek partially described

the latter phenomenon at Filmforum in 2011: “an audiovisual archive that employs digital

means is comparable to Noah's ark: both select the best available examples, rely heavily on

reproduction, and reject the original (cited in Kumar, 2012, p.171). This notion should be of

particular concern, not only with regards to theoretical debates about the difference between an

object and its digital copy but because, more importantly, digitization “is not a loss-free process”

Thompson, 2011, p.524).

From a broad standpoint on selection and appraisal, “there continues to be little systematic,

intuitive or opportunistic acquisition of moving images by archives and libraries or by the

moving image industry itself” (Kula, 2002). As for some of the more practical tasks at hand,

there is still a great need today for more attention to image data format specification,

development and standardization, as articulated by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts &

Sciences: “today, there are no industry standards for the unambiguous interchange of digitally

http://www.eyefilm.nl/en/collection/images-for-the-future

http://www.eyefilm.nl/en/collection/images-for-the-future


mastered motion picture elements, and this results in production mistakes, inefficient workflows,

increased costs, accidental reductions in image quality and no suitable archival master...with

today’s variety of digital acquisition and imaging technologies, every company can develop its

own proprietary approach to workflow and color management, and that is largely what has

happened” (AMPAS, n.d.). Standards can be found in the AMIA Compendium of Moving

Image Cataloging Practice, in addition to those made available from the Library of

Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, FIAF, UNESCO and the Visual

Resources Association. Even the SAA provides guidelines in DACS which are supplemented by

appendix C of Archival Moving Image Materials, second edition (AMIM2) (Leigh,

2006). While this proliferation of options makes it harder to analyze and define best practices,

it does allow each institution involved in this complicated field the flexibility to adapt to the

specific needs of their collection.

Some of the challenges presented by today’s ambitious digital initiatives are certainly born-

digital. InaSup, the training center of the French National Audiovisual Institute, “faces questions

about the role of user-generated content and how to manage increasing amounts of volume on a

daily basis” (den Kamp, 2011, p.135). Modern archives are also concerned with computer-

based cataloging and description and the development of DAMS digital asset management

systems (Tarr & Shay, 2013, p.182). Other issues indicative of the new millennium are related to

metadata, online distribution, and social media. (Ranger, 2011). A major concern is the

“undervaluing of metadata and contextual information...in official calculations of the cost of

digitization” (Knapskog, 2010, p.22).

This last point speaks to some of the major conceptual shifts occurring as well. Among these is a

belief that moving image archivists need to “shift from a paradigm centered around saving a


completed work to a new paradigm of saving a wide body of materials that contextualizes a

work” (Besser, 2001). Speaking at Reimagining the Archive, Jan Christopher Horak

expanded on this idea: “academics need to begin changing their thinking away from a culture of

objects to one that is made up of ephemeral data and information” (cited in den Kamp, 2011,

p.133). Both of these ideas must succeed in spite of, or perhaps because of, what Lev Manovich

describes as the database complex, “an irrational desire to preserve, store and provide access to

history in its totality within our contemporary digital environment” (Fletcher & Yumibe, 2013).

This idea is complicated by the feeling that “a policy of total digitization...presents itself as an

unsatisfactory way of preserving and accessing archival material to the researcher of the audio

visual (Thompson, 2011, p.525).

Professional development continues the strong path started in the nineties. In 2008, AMIA

reached its peak membership at 1,033 members (Murphy, 2011). In 2010, the AMIA celebrated

its 20th anniversary with the premiere of the online journal AMIA Tech Review, although

training the next generation may be stuck in analogue mode: while there are now “sixty or so

annual graduates of specialized audiovisual archiving programs around the globe...there are

currently no degree programs that teach how to manage digital motion picture material” (den

Kamp, 2011, p.134).

There are many other challenges facing moving image archives today such as moral rights, the

preservation of experimental and avant-garde film, and access in digital and physical form as

well as arrangement and description, also in digital and physical form. Copyright remains an

issue, further complicated by digital access. Broader concepts being observed include the

relationships between “institutions and politics, memory and oblivion, histories and stories,

elation and frustration, sources and ethics, exhibition and migration and users and managers”


(Kumar, 2012, p.173). Some of these issues will be addressed in future papers but further

discussion is omitted here for limitations on the scope of this study in terms of time and content.

It is worth noting that “today, mixed-media collections are managed and arranged together

intellectually, which is reflected in a simple finding aid. Physically, they are stored separately, in

accordance with the needs of each format” (Tarr & Shay, 2013, p.181). At the same time, there

is a shift towards collection-level description indicative of “a stronger preference for grouping

together material containing the same provenance, subject matter or ideational content with a

goal of achieving greater interoperability” (Leigh, 2013, p.35).

Conclusion

Despite its rough-shod history of fracture and loss, the preservation of moving images emerged

from its first century with a fairly substantial record of progress and success. The lessons

learned from the legislation of the late 80s and nineties led to the National Recording

Preservation Act of 2000. That act owed a great debt in particular to the NFVP of 1992, as

“much of the legislation was coped verbatim, with references to motion pictures changed to

address sound recordings” (Real, 2013, p.145). That being said, it was a national plan on

preserving audio recordings as well as a public policy mechanism to promote the preservation of

recorded sound in the U.S. These mechanisms include the National Recording Registry, the

National Recording Preservation Board, and the National Recording Preservation Foundation

(Real, 2013).

The national preservation effort remains dedicated to orphan films, which by 2007 made up half

of the films selected annually; “popularity or commercial success is no longer a factor in

deciding which films are added to the registry each year, but instead films are selected based on


their artistic merit and ability to represent part of America’s cinematic heritage” (Real, 2013,

p.135).

Despite the many institutional oversights and snafus that have marred this history, and continue

to be repeated, as it stands today, we have preserved a robust legacy of moving image culture. In

the NFPF’s 2011 annual report, chair of the board of directors Roger Mayer noted that, fifteen

years after its creation, 239 archives, libraries and museum have rescued more than 1,870 films

with the help of NFPF grant programs (Spehr, 2013). As for a principle of selection to build

upon in future generations, history ultimately provided Archibald MacLeish with the last word

over Iris Barry, as Bambi is now number three on the AFI 10 Best Animated Films list.

(Hornaday, 2011).

It is perhaps fitting that this history features so many twists and turns, as “moving image media

are transitional in nature” (Fossati, 2011, p.155), characterized by literally capturing movement.

Though it is easy to submit to the “researcher’s temptation to create a narrative for absence”

(Thompson, 2011, p.525), there is ample evidence to rise against it, if not above it. The

individual instinct to preserve has played a major role in this, as has the professionalization of

the archival field. Essentially, when you make the argument that 50% of something has been

destroyed, you are also saying that 50% has survived. Considering the technical, political and

cultural obstacles that have seemingly worked more to destroy than to create within this

medium’s first century plus, it can be reiterated that it really is amazing anything survived at all.


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