Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
In the late 1960s, with the development in the United
States of government funding sources for preservation
through the National Endowment for the Arts and the
growth of local, regional, and television archives, a sea
change occurred in the US archival community. While
moving image preservation had previously been handled
by only a few nitrate-holding archives, including George
Eastman House, UCLA Film and Television Archives,
MoMA, and the Library of Congress Motion Picture
Division, literally dozens of new archives were founded
in the following years, making the need for a North
American organization apparent. Suddenly a host of
regional archives, archives of special collections (dance
film, for example), and television news archives appeared
on the scene. What had been a loose organization of film
and television archives at the end of the 1970s, the Film
Archives Advisory Committee/Television Archives
Advisory Committee (FAAC/TAAC) was formalized into
a new organization, the Association of Moving Image
Archivists (AMIA), founded in 1990. Unlike FIAF,
which was based on institutional membership, AMIA became an organization of individual archivists and other
persons engaged in film and television preservation,
including commercial laboratories, the major studios,
and stock shot houses. By 2003, membership had grown
to nearly one thousand, with yearly conferences, a newsletter, archival education, scholarships, a journal, and an
Internet Listserv as a part of its mandate. The organization
has also expanded from a strictly North American organization of archivists to one with members from all over
the world. As a result of these structural changes, the field
of film and video preservation has matured from a group
of individual collectors into a discipline with standards
and sanctioned practices.
While films and videos were often stored in substandard environments, film/video archivists now attempt to
maintain strict standards for climate control and vault
safety. By the late 1980s, it became increasingly clear
that both acetate and nitrate materials benefited from
extremely low humidity and very cold environments.
The lifespan of nitrate film, for example, could be
doubled by lowering the ambient temperature in a vault
by 5 degrees and the humidity by 5 percent. Storage
suddenly became the first line of defense for preservation,
not the transfer of images to newer film stocks, making
the 1970s slogan ‘‘Nitrate Can’t Wait’’ an anachronism.
At the same time, the Library of Congress and other
institutions developed cataloging standards for moving
image materials, while the archives themselves began the
massive project of properly cataloging their holdings.
Finally, most archives discontinued the old policy of
sending out ‘‘unprotected’’ prints (materials that had
not been preserved) for screenings. Instead, preservation
priorities were often formulated based on the need for
public access to given titles.
Making all this possible was regularized funding.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was created in the United States in September 1965 through an
act of Congress. Based on a recommendation from the
Stanford Research Institute, in June 1967 the NEA formally awarded a 1.3 million dollar grant for the establishment of an American Film Institute (AFI), which
furthermore received matching grants from the Ford
Foundation and the Motion Picture Association of
America. Based on the model of the British Film
Institute, the AFI’s mandate was to support the production of quality films, train filmmakers, and foster the
preservation of American film. From the start, the AFI’s
role was not actually to preserve film, but to act as a
conduit for collecting films and funding archives, such as
the Library of Congress and George Eastman House.
Essentially, the AFI became a regrant agency for NEA
film preservation funds, while taking an allowable 30–35
percent cut for administrative overhead. And while the
archives received a total of more than 10.5 million dollars
for film preservation between 1968 and 1972, the AFI’s
overhead costs took an ever bigger bite out of funding
so that by 1972 film preservation accounted for a mere
9 percent of its expenditures. The NEA continued funding the archives through the 1970s and 1980s, but its
funding levels remained at about 350,000–450,000 dollars despite inflationary costs for film preservation due to
increased laboratory costs.
While the NEA discontinued funding moving image
archives in the early 1990s, other organizations took up
the challenge. As early as the late 1980s, the American
Film Institute’s campaign ‘‘Nitrate Won’t Wait’’ had
increased public consciousness about the need to save
and preserve the precious moving image heritage.
Through the National Film Preservation Act of 1988,
Congress established a National Film Preservation Board
and created a National Film Registry (twenty-five titles
are added each year by the Librarian of Congress), which
identifies ‘‘national film treasures.’’ The initial impetus
for the act was the concern over the commercial treatment of classic films, including re-editing to fit television
time slots, panning and scanning to fit the television
screen, and electronic colorization of black-and-white
materials. The National Film Preservation Board consists of
appointed representatives from virtually all of the
medium’s professional organizations, including the
Society of Cinema and Media Studies, the Screen
Actors Guild, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, and the National Society of Film Critics. The
reauthorization of the board in 1992 asked the Library of
Congress to complete a study of the state of film preservation, Film Preservation 1993, which in turn led to the
founding of the National Film Preservation Foundation
(NFPF) in 1999. The NFPF, which was reappropriated
by Congress in April 2005, is now funding film preservation projects at a national level through direct government monies and grants from private foundations and
companies. While the National Film Registry’s titles are
overwhelmingly culled from mainstream Hollywood’s
output, the NFPF mandate is to fund only so-called
orphan films (films that were never copyrighted or
have entered the public domain). As a result, many
previously marginalized films and film genres, including
amateur films, industrial films, educational films, medical films, avant-garde films, and silent films are being
preserved.
The 1990s also saw a number of private foundations
become involved in the preservation of films, including
the Film Foundation (founded by Martin Scorsese [b.
1942] in 1992), and the David and Lucille Packard
Foundation, both of which have shown a preference for
classic Hollywood cinema. Meanwhile, the major film
studios, including Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner
Bros. and Universal Studios have redoubled their own
preservation efforts, at least of materials on which they
own copyright or which they are planning to rerelease
in digital formats. In 1997, the Librarian of Congress
commissioned another study to look at the state of television preservation, Television and Video Preservation
1997: A Report on the Current State of American
Television and Video Preservation. Seven years later, the
National Television and Video Preservation Foundation
(NTVPF) was finally established, albeit without the participation of Congress or the Library of Congress, which
had initially funded the NFPF. Instead, Sony Pictures
Entertainment, the Association of Moving Image
Archivists (AMIA), and Jim Lindner, a video preservationist, have made initial cash donations, while video
laboratories have offered in-kind services. The NTVPF
has thus secured preservation services valued at over
350,000 dollars from preservation sponsors for an initial
round of grants.
In Europe, major national archives have continued
to dominate film preservation of fiction features, but
smaller regional archives have developed in the United
Kingdom, France, and Germany that target amateur,
newsreel, and documentary films. In the UK, for example, while the British Film Institute Film Archive has
floundered due to four major reorganizations in less than
a decade, North West Film Archive, the Scottish Screen
Archive, and the East Anglian Film Archive, among
others, have taken the initiative, establishing the Film
Archive Forum in 1987.
Meanwhile, in 1991, several European film archives
founded the Association des Cine´mathe`ques de la
Communaute´ Europe´enne (ACCE) and launched the
Projet LUMIE`RE (LUMIERE Project) with support
from the European MEDIA I Program. Projet
LUMIE`RE focused on three main activities: the restoration of European films, the search for ‘‘lost’’ European
films, and the compilation of a European filmography.
More than one thousand films, mostly dating from the
silent era, were restored through interarchival cooperation. The national filmographies of all European Union
countries, which in some cases had to be created from
scratch, were compiled in a single database. That was
followed by the establishment of the Association des
Cine´mathe`ques Europe´ennes (ACE) through MEDIA II
in 1996, as well as of Archimedia, which was initiated the
same year within the framework of the European
MEDIA Plus program. Archimedia aims to establish a
network of archives and universities throughout the
European Union and has funded seminars and symposia
on new digital media, film archives training programs,
film festivals, and preservation. Meanwhile, film festivals,
like the Giornate del Cinema Muto (Pordenone, Italy)
and Cinema Ritrovato (Bologna) have focused attention
on film archives and preservation.