Film Preservation: Competing Definitions of Value, Use, and Practice (review)

Film Preservation, a smallish new paperback volume published by the Society of American Archivists, makes a contribution to the literature of moving image preservation that is disproportionate to its modest size. Adapted from Karen F. Gracy's doctoral dissertation, the book presents the results of research Gracy undertook on the nature and character of film archives' preservation work.¹ Instead of assessing quantitatively the number of reels, titles, and collections involved in the effort to preserve film in a viewable form, Gracy opted for a qualitative approach—one that draws on the methodological traditions of ethnographers and the theoretical framework of cultural analysts—to extract from film preservation's practitioners a deeper knowledge of what it is we talk about when we talk about preservation, as well as how we go about that work.

As the twentieth century, the century of moving images, was giving way to the twenty-first, Gracy spent hundreds of hours in site visits at two major film archives, observing the work of people involved in film preservation in many capacities.² She also conducted interviews with archivists and with focus groups of individuals involved in commercial film preservation (through film studios, labs, storage facilities, and other nonarchive entities). This research was "exploratory and explanatory," a search for "institutional norms and practices rather than industry-wide statistics and trends" (221). The essential questions—What is preservation? How is it done at your institution?—yielded surprisingly varied answers from interviewees. Gracy's analysis of the qualitative data collected through her ethnographic field work and focus group interviews confirms what archivists with experience at more than one preservation facility might already suspect: film preservation is neither a universally defined term, a standardized practice, nor a value-neutral pursuit. In examining competing preservation definitions, identifying subjective stages in preservation practice, and gauging the autonomy and values of archivists involved in preservation work, Karen Gracy's Film Preservation provides a contemporary, research-based framing of film archive [Begin Page 52] theory and practice that complements well-known works on the history and objectives of film preservation such as Nitrate Won't Wait, Keepers of the Frame, and Burning Passions.³

Like Sam Kula's Appraising Moving Images, another fairly recent book that helps situate the moving image archivist's work within the larger field of cultural heritage preservation and practice, Film Preservation provides enough general background on film archives' history and character in chapters 1, 2, and 4 for readers outside the film archive world to feel comfortable with the detailed description of the preservation process offered later.⁴ Those looking for a basic introduction to film preservation, however, may find that chapter 3, "The Economics of Film Preservation," is misleadingly titled. It does not outline the costs of each stage in preservation work or list the major sources of funding for film preservation; rather, it explores the somewhat slippery notion of "value" (financial, symbolic, cultural) as it applies to cultural resources like film and the inadequacy of a purely economic framework for the assessment of heritage documents. This discussion of value in the cultural sphere is important, though, and should not be overlooked, as it lays the groundwork for discussion of influences on film archivists' choices in subsequent chapters.

In chapter 5, "The Social Economy of Film Preservation: Implementing a Bourdieuvian Framework," Gracy's academic bona fides are on display. Here she invokes the cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu and his definition of the field of cultural production as the initial framework for her own conception of the field of film preservation. Gracy notes, rightly, that text description alone is inadequate to characterize the complex relationships between dominated and dominant status, high and low degrees of consecration, and autonomy and heteronomy in film preservation. The illustrations she provides here, along with those in chapter 6 that concisely delineate the many steps and interrelating decisions involved in preserving a film, are valuable features in this book. Chapter 7, "The Definition of Preservation...