Saving Cinema by Frick Caroline;

Author:Frick, Caroline;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2011-07-19T16:00:00+00:00

For the next several years, the LOC, in conjunction with the National Archives, continued to turn down FIAF invitations, while sending State Department representatives to observe and report upon conference proceedings. Repeatedly, these representatives conveyed the ardent interest held by FIAF in better determining what was happening to American films, most specifically the Hollywood “classics.” A 1953 report from the FIAF Congress in Vence, France, bluntly stated that the European community, with its “methodical mind,” was very “disconcerted” by “typical American factors” involving the U.S. approach to film preservation.69 Unsurprisingly, of particular concern was the lack of a centralized U.S. agency for cultural functions and private enterprise’s involvement in areas fully sanctioned by, or “entrusted” to, the European public sector.70

The U.S. government, however, appeared uninterested in what Europe thought of their work. Instead, Washington bureaucrats worried more over FIAF’s international distribution goals. As LOC staff discussed, FIAF’s plan possessed an almost activist stance, rather than a purely benign, educative exchange of informational or historical films. The FIAF’s distribution aspired to send films to “all member nations of the FIAF and the nations where the directing committee of the FIAF deem it necessary to encourage or stimulate the creation of a national cinema archive with a view to its ultimate entry in the FIAF.”71 In addition, the LOC representatives expressed concern over the fact that FIAF worked both with older film material and promoted the “circulation” of new motion pictures as well. Such a program lay outside of, if not contradictory to, the Library’s guiding mission— particularly, if the United States could not control the distribution of product to specific areas of the globe.

Despite incipient U.S. concerns over the Soviet Union’s participation in FIAF activities, the Cold War bore little impact upon the organization— barring some difficulties in obtaining visas to Eastern European conferences for some members. In fact, one FIAF member acknowledged that the organization “was always split between the film enthusiasts and the administrators, never between East and West.”72 The schism between advocates for a more informal, cinémathèque-oriented model and those interested in creating strict, scientific-based standards for archival practice became even more pronounced over the ensuing decades. In addition, television’s growing influence in showing older films, heretofore the domain of the cinémathèque or archive, pushed FIAF further toward a focus upon science, technology, and the practice of preservation. Influential film critic Raymond Durgnat passionately described early broadcasting in those very terms: “T.V. programming has placed a film archive in every home. It’s high time we had a channel showing nothing but old movies from midday to midnight, over and over again.”73

Without their relatively exclusive role of gatekeeper to film’s past, moving image collections around the globe mirrored the BFI film collection’s move from “library” to “archive,” placing more discursive emphasis upon guarding their sacred “treasures.” Indeed, FIAF’s minutes rather dispassionately reported that directors of member organizations were becoming “more and more ‘archivists’ (in the technical sense of the word)” and less “curators” and “historians,” with “the scientific and technical character of our archives getting every day more specific.

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