Film Preservation and Archiving

            Every aspect in the life of film is violent, especially its death.  The decisions that go into the making of a film are done with strong passions for the subject.  The edits that land on the cutting room floor are fought over with that of a mother’s devotion to her child’s safety.  The presentation of a film is brought to the public in an extreme showcase of propaganda.  The reception of criticism can destroy futures and erase pasts.  And finally, the storage of a film print is but a sleeping dragon of deteriorating chemicals that could forcefully ignite its forgotten presence or lethargically wither to dust.  This is the characteristically modern challenge that faces the librarian of moving images.  The preservation of written material has been promoted and funded by the real prospect of loosing mass amounts of culture.  A librarian needs only to look at the destruction of Alexandria’s ancient library to know what has been irrevocably lost.  Yet, the future of the modern moving image faces a more prolonged disaster. 

The moving image is still one of the most influential developments of modern history.  Its introduction in the late 1800s ushered the world into the twentieth century and influenced the artistic world by its captured realism.  It could be said that the staying memory of a moving image is its own epitaph.  In the early days of making film, the practice of burning old film prints was ordered to extract its valuable silver properties to fund more films.  For years the process of storing film prints took for granted the shelf life of its chemical properties and brought about the wasteful deterioration of individual films.  And in some cases whole storage facilities were destroyed by the careless ignorance of its very flammable nature. 

In the last fifteen years there has been an increasing awareness of the real and potential losses to the documentation of history through the medium of moving images.  Over the years there has been a considerable amount of literature that has amassed on this crucial challenge.  The efforts to properly archive, meticulously preserve, and digitally restore moving images have been thrust into the traditional and well-worn duties of the modern archivist.  The following is a detailed exploration into these efforts and the challenges that face the librarian profession.  I have broken down this topic into four categories that correspond to the four months of time in the semester given to the directed research course.  Each topic has been given a great amount of research time and thorough readings.  I have summarized the articles, books, and websites researched in an effort to further expand the awareness of the librarian profession’s many faceted role in maintaining the survival of the human endeavor.

TO ARCHIVES