Archimedia: Changes and Challenges (1) Film Archives in the Digital era: New Concepts and new Policies

Nederlands Film Museum, 16-18 January 2003.

Reviewed by Michael Punt

mpunt@easynet.co.uk

A gathering of 18 speakers and 22 participants to discuss the future of film archives may sound like a rather esoteric topic for a review in a journal such as Leonardo. After all dusty archives of crumbling celluloid may only be of interest to more or less the constituency who attended. To some extent that is indeed true, but a number of issues that were raised affect us all, and particularly those artists and educators who have been expanding media and the concept of culture and art since the advent of cheap cameras and film stock in the 1960s, and more particularly the technologies of both analogue and the digital image that have arguably changed the face of what it means to be an artist.

Chaired by Mark-Paul Meyer, the conference (more precisely billed as an Advanced Course) raised three main topics: what shall we do with the celluloid archive as the collection grows and the need to restore previous restorations begins to increase the pressure on restricted resources? How to react to the opportunities that digital storage appears to offer to archives? And finally What are the limits of the film archive – should it for example restrict itself to cinema, or include the work by an avant garde that has embraced digital image making in response to the unfolding antagonisms to mainstream cinema? Almost at once it is clear that these questions affect us all regardless whether we have any interest in film or film history. The clarity of the approach to these problems was evident in the three strands of responses that were sought: first archivists from film and broadcast media reported on their strategies to deal with the overwhelming conflict between cost effectiveness and the volume of material that is being generated. Second a number of specialist engineers discussed digital storage as a practical option rather than the usual vapour ware, and finally a small group of artists and theorists offered their views on the problem as they saw it from a relatively disinterested position.

Three days of fascinating and intense debate produced some starling insights. While some archives are still attempting to discharge their responsibility to future research, others it seems had capitulated to government pressure to produce educational material (a buzz word for glossy presentations which would satisfy funders but not necessarily children), others had devised elaborate strategies to both save everything and recycle it at a profit. The issue that most affects the wider community was the headlong rush into digital archiving. This again has been promoted by major stake holders such as governments and the European Union. It is attractive on paper: all the images can be digitised once and for all and then migrated from one platform to another as the media changes. A great idea that has the following shortcomings: 1. Digitisation disposes of significant original data even without compression. Digitisation is an arbitrary system which, at its fundamental level of zeros and ones, is not value free (i.e. what constitutes a zero pulse and a one pulse is subjective since electricity is never stable). 2. No manufacturer will guarantee in writing the stability of their storage medium at all – let alone for ten years. 3. Perhaps the most startling realisation is that every migration (as machines improve etc) will involve a simulation of the previous machine in order to make the metadata of the catalogue available to the new platform. Putting the question of error, corruption, and sabotage aside, it begins to sound like a dubious economy. Those archives that felt able were also dealing with the expansion of film practice into areas that have been colonised by artists and especially those working directly in digital media with interactive websites, DVDs CD ROM’s etc. In the absence of an art archive (we just have galleries of the great and good) film archives have found themselves as the repository for this kind of work simply on the basis of the moving image content.

It was here that the debate was both enriching and depressing. Tim Buesing an artist from the Skop media collective, Berlin presented a charming piece of work on the ontology of games and Kung Fu using videotapes of Bruce Lee ‘found’ in the local grocery store. As yet no gallery has acquired it since it has no market value. Ernst Gombrich, in an impassioned letter about museum entrance fees, once argued that if we allow the one who pay the piper to call the tune, we may very soon find that only the financially viable tunes are remembered. There was even more at stake for David Rodowick whose discussion of the historiography of aesthetics raised doubts about the future of film studies. No great loss outside the field perhaps, but with it, a human centred strand of philosophy that made art intelligible was also in danger of burial. A version of his paper is at: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/filmstudies/digital-culture/StrangeMedia/ Malcolm Legrice reminded us of an endangered tune when, as a self confessed Modernist, he reviewed some of his own work relative to an emerging interest in the convergence of the digital and the analogue that began a thirty years ago and has arguably given licence to the present generation of artists and theorists working with technologies.

Three days did not provide the degree of resolution for action which may be expected but the problem is growing on a daily basis as new films get produced and old ones deteriorate. The most positive outcome was perhaps that some positions that were postulated were transparently unreconstructed and perhaps even duplicitous rhetoric. In particular the chic antagonism to Hollywood may sound left field but is frankly unsustainable, especially coming from those who have adopted wholesale the Hollywood blockbuster, model which is designed to eliminate competition by raising production costs. Secondly only Hollywood has shown itself willing or capable of producing sufficient of interest to sustain the real estate and technological basis of film (digital or otherwise). Blockbusters build the audience and pay the rent for the kit and the research that we use. This vital fact must be recognised in what we store, even though the cultural value of the work may be dubious and its audiences accused of a lack of discrimination.

The impressive social responsibility that archives take on is in contrast to their dusty self indulgent image. What is clear is that it is neither desirable not possible to store everything, and what we choose to store is a reflection of our cultural values. At the moment the thrust for total storage and digitisation will mean that our lasting gift to the future will be a trace of a culture of cynicism in which the quality and value of art is subjugated to cost effectiveness and temporary political power. The Archimedia workshop in Amsterdam was a wake up call to all of us who think that what we, and other artists and scholars, do is important: we had better ditch the rhetoric and turn or minds to a serious consideration of the function and future of all archives to make sure that they reflect the aspirations of the piper rather than the payer.