MS:
Your last comment seems to be related to the sea change you mentioned the other day, from archiving following a collecting model to being more access oriented. Can you explain the philosophical differences between these two paradigms and how the shift impacts the film community?
AL:
I am one of the first generation of archivists specifically trained to handle moving-image materials. Jonas comes from a different era. His model as an archivist was Henri Langlois [director of the Cinémathèque Française from 1936 until his death in 1977]; in fact, they were friends. If you know about Langlois, you must understand that he was, at his heart, a collector. And so is Jonas. I’m fairly convinced that one reason that archivists hoard films is because they are, at heart, collectors. Objectivity doesn’t fly in this field. As conflicting an impulse as it is to be both an archivist and a collector, there would be no archives or museums without the stockpiling mentality. In the cases of Jonas and Langlois, they employed their fine tastes and cautious judgments to build collections that, as is the goal of any real collector, hold a great number of gems, rarities, and golden finds. Virtually all archivists and film programmers know that, on occasion, dealing with collectors is next to impossible. Rusty Casselton was a guest speaker while I attended the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation. He is said to have one of the finest personal nitrate collections around. I asked how many reels were in the vault at his house and received a reply that my question was “like asking a woman how old she is; you don’t do it.” I don’t see much of a difference between Rusty’s response and the general archival attitude. Archiving is a field fraught with politics. I think every institution has its own particular motivations for hiding things or burying them in paperwork. There are practical reasons why an archive considers something restricted, but these reasons can be hard to understand from the outside. Some of these are justifiable and others unreasonable or downright preposterous.
MS:
I wonder if there is something specific about this particular cultural moment that brings more interest in access. Or is it just the result of time? The archives are bulging with the past, so much of it that it needs to get out. What are some of the ways you feel archivists, filmmakers, film historians, curators, and lovers of cinema can work together to ensure that today’s obscure, independent, or little-known films do not become the lost films and secret histories of tomorrow?
AL:
That is a mighty question, and I don’t know the answer. As much as I try to be an optimist, I’m usually a cynic. Rick has been at this a lot longer than I have, and his vision is endless. I think of him like a person on top of a mountain who peers down and can see how everything works. He is a genuine pioneer in this field, a collector who always understood the historical importance of his unique collection and the latent and apparent benefits of making it available. I honestly cannot see how everyone listed above can or will work together. That does not mean we should not all try, but there seem to be too many conflicting concerns and pressing drives in this mixed group for a cohesive plan to take hold. Even though I have not read his response, Rick’s answer to this question might be the closest thing we have to The Answer. I can only offer some apocrypha. As far as it goes with academics, in my general experience, most of the films they are interested in accessing aren’t the hidden collections. They are watching/writing about Brakhage, Warhol, Mekas, Anger, Snow, and all the respected elders who already have reams of thesis papers devoted to them in our library files. It seems to me that they are the ones keeping the canon safe and sacred, and I do find it frustrating. It seems that offering access to a wide array of works doesn’t guarantee that anyone will want them. Scholarly access, to me, should not be the end-all, be-all goal of preservation. In this case, access seems to be almost too academic of a word. I think we should speak as a field about creating more awareness. Access isn’t necessary if you are unaware of something even existing, and it should be our goal to make people aware. Access will naturally follow. You’d think from the little writing being done on experimental film today that this tired genre died in approximately 1979.
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HIDDEN HISTORIES