Reimagining the Archive: Remapping and Remixing Traditional Models in the Digital Era (review)

"Reimagining the Archive" was a three-day symposium organized by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Film & Television Archive, the UCLA MA program in Moving Image Archive Studies, the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA), France, and the European Centre for Research, Training, and Education on Digital Media (Ina SUP), with support from the US Library of Congress (National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program) and the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. Jan-Christopher Horak (Director, UCLA Film & Television Archive) introduced the event by highlighting its goal: while industry technicians are already making digitality a reality, academics need to begin changing their thinking away from a culture of objects to one that is made up of ephemeral data and information. The keynote presentation on the first evening by "archivist-outside-the-box" Rick Prelinger kicked off two full days of parallel sessions, in which a variety of contributors—including representatives of commercial and noncommercial archives, artists reusing archival material, and academics—all pointed to the different aspects of the "digital problem." In trying to rethink and theorize the shift to a less material culture, the event exposed a deeper, underlying set of problems, related to distribution. This infused the discussions with another more persistent theme: film's analog legacy and its value in a digital era.

All symposium events were centered around the foyer of UCLA's Melnitz Hall, where participants were surrounded by a unique collection of autographed posters of movies made by former students. This legacy foreshadowed the event's introduction by Nick Browne (Director, UCLA Moving Image Archive Studies MA program). Browne drew parallels between the conference's themes and the city of Los Angeles. As a matter of public policy, in the 1950s, the city replaced its railways with highways in its headlong pursuit of the new and was obliged to reverse the process forty years later to provide a sustainable infrastructure. This begged a comparison with some debates concerning the digitization of the archive, for example, "What is our useful history?" and "What part of it is important to preserve?"

In his keynote "We Are the New Archivists: Artisans, Activists, Cinephiles, Citizens," Rick Prelinger wondered whether moving image archives can survive at all if archivists do not shed their "legacy mind-sets." He brought to bear the alternative that the new archivists—supported by archival users—should become advocates for archives, which in turn should not function as mere repositories (e.g., for copyright holders) but as workshops where ideas originate. Archivists, according to Prelinger, need to "define an interest and pursue it."

This vision of the reimagined archivist was reiterated by the academics on the "Archival Philosophy and Principles" panel. Although the complexities associated with a subject such as digitization seem to call for new labels for this new, reimagined archivist, the enduring polemic that also resurfaced here—that an archivist is apparently either a custodian or a shaper of the archive—seems to be as old as the profession itself. ¹

During a subsequent panel, in which faculty members of CalArts were represented, filmmaker and UCLA graduate Thom Andersen showed an excerpt from his new film Get Out of the Car (2010). The film was shot on 16mm, and according to Andersen, the inspiration to use this format was twofold. Initially, what prompted the choice was a controversy among the faculty of CalArts—one of the few schools left where students make films on 16mm—whether to keep encouraging this practice or to actively discourage it. The second inspiration was the fruitful collaboration with Mark Toscano, one of the archivists at the Academy Film Archive. Somewhat to Andersen's surprise, in the preservation process of three of his short films, Toscano was able to make better prints of the films than Andersen was able to make himself in the 1960s. More funding for the preservation meant that the better color-graded prints made from new internegatives (struck from...