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Reviewed by:
  • Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation
  • Jan-Christopher Horak (bio)
Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation; by Caroline Frick; Oxford University Press, 2011

Caroline Frick’s book Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation is not the first work outlining the development of our field, but it is the first to systematically articulate an historical interpretation of the field of moving image archive preservation. There have been other books, for example, Penelope Houston’s Keepers of the Frame (1994), Joanne Yeck and Tom McGreevey’s Our Movie Heritage (1997), and Haidee Wasson’s Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (2005); however, as Frick herself notes, the first two works are more journalistic than academic, whereas Wasson’s work focuses on a specific institution. Frick’s published dissertation is the [End Page 172] first book-length study to attempt to encompass the whole history of moving image preservation and the development of film archives, even if it does so selectively. That fact alone makes it worthy of attention.

Not surprising, given her later theses, Frick begins with her own biography, identifying herself as one of the new generation of academic moving image archivists who have received formal training in a graduate training program for moving image archivists. After graduating from the East Anglia (United Kingdom) program in 1995, she immediately began making a name for herself working at American Movie Classics, the Library of Congress (LOC), and Warner Bros. She then went to the University of Texas, Austin, to become one of the very few colleagues in the field of moving image archiving to qualify for a PhD. She is now an assistant professor at the University of Texas, Austin, as well as the founder of the Internet-based Texas Archive of the Moving Image.

This last real-world accomplishment has led Frick to relegate to the dustbin many of the precepts and presuppositions of motion picture archiving as it has been practiced over the past forty years. As an ideologically highly charged work that proudly proclaims its biases, Saving Cinema will ruffle feathers among traditional archivists and engender the kind of discussion and controversy that is very good for a field still in the process of becoming. Frick’s introductory thesis is both provocative and an essential truism, namely, that establishing national, public-sector institutions for film preservation was a necessary step in the development of the field but that it also blinded film archivists to any form of cinema other than mainstream, Hollywood fiction features. For decades, the aim of both American and foreign national archives was to copy and thereby protect national fiction feature film productions on 35mm nitrate film stock, produced before its obsolescence in 1950, while theoretically arguing that this activity was couched in a discourse of cultural heritage and loss.

Frick’s second chapter essentially deals with the sometimes tortured history of the LOC Motion Picture Division during the 1940s tenure of Archibald MacLeish as librarian of Congress and its political ups and downs in establishing a public rationale for moving image preservation. Simultaneously, she attempts to make a case that the Hollywood studios, through the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, supported film heritage—although that seems to have been more propaganda than fact—while summarizing the Museum of Modern Art’s contemporaneous efforts in cooperation with the federal government. She concludes that although many of these efforts were focused on access rather than preservation, subsequent historians have glossed over in celebratory fashion “the overt sexism, extreme competitiveness, and cross-cultural distrust that embodied a significant component of early film preservation” (43).

The third chapter, which continues the LOC’s history into the latter half of the twentieth century, emphasizes the way national agendas of loss dominated American film archival discourses. Encapsulated in the slogan “Nitrate Can’t Wait,” the prevailing policy of the major American film archives was to copy nitrate, 35mm films as quickly as possible, which indeed limited the preservation strategy to mainstream Hollywood. Connecting preservation of films to the larger project of cultural heritage allowed archivists to legitimize their objectives and overcome film’s bad object status. However, Frick characterizes the...

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