The Past Is a Moving Picture: Preserving the Twentieth Century on Film

2. Accessibility, Authenticity, and Anxiety

ACCESSIBILITY, AUTHENTICITY, AND ANXIETY When you ask a moving image archivist about YouTube, do not expect her to immediately exclaim its virtues as the twenty-first century town square. Do not think that she is going to straight away do a song-and-dance number for you about YouTube’s democratization of the moving image. For many film archivists, YouTube (and other hosting/streaming sites) is a conundrum that highlights present-day archival anxieties about technology and the liberation of moving images from a controlled context. While YouTube enables users to exhibit and view a mind-boggling amount of moving images, it is also a site where image manipulation reigns supreme. Content providers routinely re-edit and re-cut and add new soundtracks to films, giving moving images new and altered meanings, divorced from their original context. For example, the user drkatzjr27 edited the scene from the film Annie Hall where Marshall McLuhan chastises a professor standing in a movie line. The original scene, according to drkatzjr27, is too long, so he shortened it to punctuate the scene’s humor. “What a classic moment in film!” drkatzjr27 exclaims, as he modifies the very scene he is celebrating. For the archive to be relevant in our consumer culture, its holdings must be widely accessible, but accessibility is beholden to innovative technologies that also have the means to sever the moving image from the archive. This complex relationship between commercialization, 2 2 2 2 2 Accessibility, Authenticity, and Anxiety · 53 technology, and accessibility began in earnest during the 1960s and has been instrumental in defining the parameters of the film archive ever since. Many archivists find YouTube’s ability to provide free and instant accessibility to massive amounts of moving images quite enviable. Some archival institutions, such as Northeast Historic Film (NHF), take advantage of YouTube’s popularity and instant accessibility and post collection materials on the site, either in their entirety or as a teaser with a link that directs viewers to the institutional home page or online archive. NHF, for example, posted a fifty-six second low-quality video entitled “Fort Knox, Prospect, Maine 1936” in 2006. In early 2010, the video had been viewed on YouTube over 3,000 times, which is likely 300 percent more views than it would have received if NHF had not posted it on YouTube. Context is extremely important to archivists, Snowden Becker, founder and board member of the Center for Home Movies, told me. It provides meaning to moving images, particularly when it is older material and the knowledge of it has been forgotten or lost. In addition, many archivists bemoan the fact that when users watch material on YouTube, it usually becomes “a YouTube video”; its presence on YouTube trumps its origins in or relationship to any other locus of cultural production. “There’s a potentially pernicious flattening and equalization effect of having everything that moves available in one place. It makes establishing that all-important context, or the authoritativeness or authenticity or integrity of a piece of video, very difficult indeed,” Becker said “and these are values that are pretty sacred to archivists.” The ubiquity of YouTube heightens archival anxiety about accessibility , but the low level visual quality of YouTube videos also creates unease within the archive. While low-resolution files are great for streaming, they corrupt the original image’s clarity, grain, color, and the overall appearance of archival media. Archivists’ thoughtful, thorough restorations attempt to recover the pristine nature of the original images, and some archival restorations (as will be discussed in chapter 5) may take decades to complete. When a ripped DVD version of restored film (and it happens all the time) appearsonYouTubeorwhenanarchivepostsitsownmaterial,thelovingly restored images can be visually degraded. In some ways, YouTube brings us back to days when older films were primarily viewed by way of cheap televisionprogramming,forYouTubecorruptsthevisualclarityofmoving 54 · Part I. Archives in Formation images, helping to give the popular impression that older films are inherently scratched, faded, out of focus, and simply hard on the eye. Clearly YouTube and other similar hosting sites highlight some of the present-day concerns surrounding technology, accessibility, and image modification that archives are not in the position to easily resolve. The contemporary archiving community places high value on protecting artifactual authenticity and simultaneously strives toward comprehensive user access. The development of the American Film Institute (AFI) andthecolorizationcontroversythatledtotheNationalFilmPreservation Act (NFPA) both helped to shape the culture of...