Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation

REVIEWS 172 for ancillary merchandise and experiences has become so successful that, as Trope eloquently puts it, “the film itself may no longer play the starring role in Hollywood” (169). In industry parlance, brands have become tent poles under which films, Hollywoodized museums, and other related material all coexist. Stardust Monuments is a much-needed contribution to the growing literature on film and cultural institutions, including work on film museums, film education, and fan culture. The chapters on theme parks, stores, and home entertainment are particularly rich with carefully observed detail. Trope walks through a Warner Bros. store, for example, with the eye of a museumgoer: Office of the United States, and in 2011, he filed an amicus brief in the US Supreme Court case of Golan v. Holder. Professor Decherney has been an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Scholar and a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. Upon exiting the escalator on the fifth floor, the visitor first viewed a group portrait of three of Warner’s classical-era artisans (Friz Freleng, Carl Stalling, and Bob McKimson) flanked by famed and iconic Warner Bros. characters (Sylvester, Porky the Pig, Yosemite Sam, and the Tasmanian Devil). Entering the gallery, the visitor then encountered an interactive display called “Making Art That Talks” that provided a simple seven-step illustration of the animation process. (119–20) It is a description one might expect to find of a new wing at the Louvre rather than the Warner Bros. flagship store in Manhattan. Trope admirably brings together disparate and eclectic topics, very successfully showing how they all belong in the same history and stem from the same industry motives. The book is a great way to invite undergraduates to reflect on the pervasive presence of Hollywood in their lives, and it helps take media analysis one more step beyond the screen, where film and television shows continue to live on after we leave the theater or hit the pause button. Peter Decherney is associate professor of cinema studies, English, and communication and director of the Cinema Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet (2012) and Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (2012). He regularly testifies before the Copyright Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation by Caroline Frick Oxford University Press, 2011 Jan-Christopher Horak Caroline Frick’s book Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation is not the first work outlining the development of our field, but it is the first to systematically articulate an historical interpretation of the field of moving image archive preservation. There have been other books, for example, Penelope Houston’s Keepers of the Frame (1994), Joanne Yeck and Tom McGreevey’s Our Movie Heritage (1997), and Haidee Wasson’s Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (2005); however, as Frick herself notes, the first two works are more journalistic than academic, whereas Wasson’s work focuses on a specific institution. Frick’s published dissertation is the REVIEWS 173 first book-length study to attempt to encompass the whole history of moving image preservation and the development of film archives, even if it does so selectively. That fact alone makes it worthy of attention. Not surprising, given her later theses, Frick begins with her own biography, identifying herself as one of the new generation of academic moving image archivists who have received formal training in a graduate training program for moving image archivists. After graduating from the East Anglia (United Kingdom) program in 1995, she immediately began making a name for herself working at American Movie Classics, the Library of Congress (LOC), and Warner Bros. She then went to the University of Texas, Austin, to become one of the very few colleagues in the field of moving image archiving to qualify for a PhD. She is now an assistant professor at the University of Texas, Austin, as well as the founder of the Internetbased Texas Archive of the Moving Image. This last real-world accomplishment has led Frick to relegate to the dustbin many of the precepts and presuppositions of motion picture archiving as it has been practiced over the past forty years. As an ideologically highly charged work that proudly proclaims its biases, Saving Cinema will ruffle feathers among traditional archivists and engender the kind of discussion and controversy that is very good for a field still in the process of becoming. Frick’s introductory thesis is both provocative and an essential truism, namely, that establishing national, public-sector institutions for film preservation was a necessary step in the development of the field but that it also blinded film archivists to any form of cinema other than mainstream, Hollywood fiction features. For decades, the aim of both American and foreign national archives was to copy and thereby protect national fiction feature film productions on 35mm nitrate film stock, produced before its obsolescence in 1950, while theoretically arguing that this activity was couched in a discourse of cultural heritage and loss. Frick’s second chapter essentially deals with the sometimes tortured history of the LOC Motion Picture Division during the 1940s tenure of Archibald MacLeish as librarian of Congress and its political ups and downs in establishing a public rationale for moving image preservation. Simultaneously, she attempts to make a case that the Hollywood studios, through the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, supported film heritage—although that seems to have been more propaganda than fact—while summarizing the Museum of Modern Art’s contemporaneous efforts in cooperation with the federal government. She concludes that although many of these efforts were focused on access rather than preservation, subsequent historians have glossed over in celebratory fashion “the overt sexism, extreme competitiveness, and cross-cultural distrust that embodied a significant component of early film preservation” (43). The third chapter, which continues the LOC’s history into the latter half of the twentieth century, emphasizes the way national agendas of loss dominated American film archival discourses. Encapsulated in the slogan “Nitrate Can’t Wait,” the prevailing policy of the major American film archives was to copy nitrate, 35mm films as quickly as possible, which indeed limited the preservation strategy to mainstream Hollywood. Connecting preservation of films to the larger project of cultural heritage allowed archivists to legitimize their objectives and overcome film’s bad object status. However, Frick characterizes the relationship between the film industry and the federal government as one of cooperation and thus minimizes the very contentious relationships between nonprofit film archivists and the studios that existed until at least the 1980s. At the center of that controversy was the conflict between preservation and access, between the nonprofit sector’s stewardship of surviving materials and the studio’s corporate insistence on controlling all access through copyright protection. This struggle continues even today. Conversely, as Frick notes, the expenditure of federal funding through the American Film Institute (AFI) for the preservation of corporate assets was always problematic and became more so after the video era revitalized those dormant corporate assets. Frick switches focus in her next chapter to the international film preservation versus access debate, as reflected in the minutes and documents of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). Previously, Frick had already noted that American film preservation REVIEWS 174 was infiltrated by foreign nationals, especially British or British-trained people such as Iris Barry or the AFI’s Richard Kahlenberg, imposing European notions of cultural patrimony. In particular, Ernest Lindgren, the founder of the British Film Institute Archive, is stylized as the archival heavy denying access to its treasures, even when a copyright holder requests the material. Following a brief section on UNESCO’s cultural heritage policies, Frick then goes on to establish FIAF’s closed-door policies, especially regarding membership, and reevaluates the Henri Langlois debate (leading to the Cinémathèque Française leaving FIAF in 1960) as signs of FIAF’s insistence on regulating one national film archive per country. All attempts at support for regional archives were squelched, at least until the 1990s, when FIAF began to cave in to demands for more local autonomy in film preservation and access because it was in danger of becoming obsolete after the founding of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA). In her fifth chapter, Frick describes the sea change in film preservation strategies once the preservation agenda in the 1990s was broadened to include so-called orphan films, that is, all forms of filmmaking, including educational, scientific, travel, medical, amateur, and itinerant films, that were never copyrighted and usually produced outside Hollywood. This new agenda can be ascribed to the founding and development of AMIA, which formed to gather together film archivists from numerous local and regional film archives and also signaled a new level of cooperation between private-sector and public-sector archivists. Again, it is seemingly the British who led the way with the establishment of regional archives, including those in Manchester and East Anglia. Although it is true that a younger generation of university-trained film archivists, like Frick, have championed orphan films, there were also plenty of older film archivists pushing such an agenda a decade before AMIA’s founding—Pam Wintle, Bill O’Farrell, Toni Treadway, and Karan Sheldon come to mind—a fact Frick wishes to suppress in her rush to deny any value to the previous generation’s film preservation efforts. Most controversial, though, is Frick’s last chapter, which argues that in the new digital age, access should take precedence over pres- ervation; better said, the multiplicity of digital access copies constitutes preservation in the digital age. Such a thesis overturns one of the central precepts of moving image archiving, namely, that analog preservation of the most complete copy must occur, given “the digital dilemma”: “In the digital age, perhaps widespread, bountiful access is, itself, preservation” (153). This thesis is based on the fallacy that several low-resolution digital files on the Internet are equal to one analog preservation copy. This is like saying that five Xerox copies of the Mona Lisa are just as good as the original. The Texas Archive of Moving Images is in fact based on this model, which is more than adequate for general public access but does nothing for the preservation of material should the server crash. Frick also draws a false analogy between the major studios producing multiple distribution copies in the classical Hollywood era, some of which became preservation masters as the only surviving elements, and digital access, ignoring survival rates of studio prints of well under 50 percent. But Frick’s thesis is provocative and certainly worthy of debate. Despite these reservations, Frick has produced an extremely important book. Her vision of future archives as all-digital archives on the Internet is uncomfortable for traditional analog archivists but looks reality squarely in the eye. In the next twenty years, all moving image archives will be migrating their content to digital forms, whether they produce preservation masters or not. And certainly her point is well taken that digital archives allow the public to bypass archivists as gatekeepers, producing a more democratic distribution of moving image materials that parallels the democratization of production through digital tools. Jan-Christopher Horak is director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive and professor of critical studies at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, Germany. His publications include Making Images Move: Photographers and Avant-Garde Cinema (1997), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde 1919–1945 (1995), and The Dream Merchants: Making and Selling Films in Hollywood’s Golden Age (1989). Named an Academy Scholar in 2006, he is presently completing a book on designer Saul Bass. Copyright of Moving Image (15323978) is the property of University of Minnesota Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.