Showing and Telling: Film Heritage Institutes and Their Performance of Public Accountability by Nico de Klerk (review)

This is a critical intervention into the gatekeeping role of (wholly or partly) publicly financed film heritage institutes. I investigated two of their most visible public activities—public presentations and visitor information—as indicators of the ways they inform, and account for themselves to, their public. Partly based on case studies rooted in my experience in a film heritage institute and complemented by a survey of twenty-four institutes' websites worldwide during February 2014, I observed that performance of public accountability is generally a matter of shared poverty: materials entrusted to these institutes play a subordinate role in their presentations; technologically indifferent, sometimes archivally substandard screenings occur; an approach to film as an aesthetic object predominates. Information was generally insufficient and/or based on received opinion and perpetuated a notion of film as a universal language. I conclude that sharing materials and knowledge has a low priority, which may affect the trust in these institutes' public role.