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The Moving Image 3.2 (2003) 136-141



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Film Archives in the Digital Era: New Concepts and New Policies. Archimedia Seminar. Amsterdam, January 16-18, 2003

David Walsh reports on the first two days of the seminar; Paul Read reports on the third day.

If the intention was to jolt the often narrow thoughts of film archivists into realizing that out in the big world a vast diversity of sound and images is being created that should—or perhaps should not—be preserved, then this event was completely successful. A stimulating mix of archivists, artists, technicians, and academics (some speakers seemingly all of these things) threw out ideas and considered yet more uses of audio and visual material, which we film archivists had conveniently been ignoring. Electronic cinema? Computer games? Art installations? Web sites? Is it all cinema? How do we save all this stuff? Who should save all this stuff? Why would anyone want to save all this stuff? How we longed for the simplicities of nitrate film.

Jon Jost, the renowned avant-garde filmmaker, started off by mischievously questioning the whole notion of archiving digital material. He wondered whether such an ephemeral medium, where electrons are converted into photons, should not just be allowed to fly off at the speed of light into infinite oblivion. He certainly seemed happy that his recent digital work (one of which, Trinity, an hour-long set of ever-changing abstract panels, we saw later that evening) should be allowed the dignity of being lost forever, once its carriers were no longer viable. But then he rather sheepishly admitted that all his nondigital film work is carefully preserved in the Portuguese film archive. Hmm.

I Know Where Bruce Lee Lives was presented by Tim Büsing of SKOP Media, an experimental design studio based in Berlin. Tim showed us how some old German VHSs of Bruce Lee kung-fu movies had provided the source material for an "ultra-interactive kung-fu remixer" on the Internet. This brilliant, neat conceit allows the user to select, sequence, and mix visual and audio samples in a kind of...well, go to www.skop.com, start hitting the keys, and see for yourself. Unlike Jost, Büsing was very happy for SKOP's work to be preserved for posterity, though he wasn't giving us any tips on how to do it.

On to more conventional images on the Web. Ann Ogidi from the British Film Institute (BFI) talked about the ScreenOnLine project (www.bfi.org.uk/education/screenonline/), a reference and education tool devoted to the [End Page 136] history of British film and television, which draws on material from a variety of sources, including some sixty hours from my own archive, the Imperial War Museum. She and her colleagues had gone to some lengths to find out exactly what the potential users wanted by speaking to teachers and students about content and functionality. One of the fruits of this consulting phase was a short video piece made by children from a school in one of the more deprived areas of the United Kingdom as a response to an early silent comedy film they had been shown. This must have been an experience far removed from their normal choice of viewing, and the intriguing result was described by a later speaker, Nicola Mazzanti, as a "pop video," though on reflection, perhaps the modern music video is indeed the silent short movie of our age.

Which country shows a new documentary in cinemas every week? For those of us coming from countries where documentaries on the big screen are rare beasts, it was refreshing to hear Kees Ryninks of the Dutch Film Fund talking about DocuZone, modestly described as "a digital experiment." As part of a three-year project, ten film theaters around Holland have been given a package of DVD players and projectors with the understanding that they each give a minimum number of screenings of selected documentaries. DocuZone has carefully worked out systems for selection, programming, publicity, and feedback, and...

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