Guest Editor's Introduction

Just like videotape, film is at the end of its life. Archivists must realize that we are in a digital world.

—Jim Wheeler, December 14, 2007, post on AMIA-L listserv

Delegates at last year's AMIA conference, hosted by the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, were confronted with stark evidence of the rapidly approaching obsolescence of photographic film: the empty shells of buildings 65 and 69 at Kodak Park, awaiting demolition a fortnight after the conference. With the major cinema chains now starting a rollout to digital projection in significant numbers, the market for the bulk of film stock sales—35mm release printing—is likely to decline relatively quickly. The future of motion picture film manufacture as a mass medium may now be measured in years rather than decades. Perhaps in response to the fears of archivists who feel that they have seen the writing on the wall, our hosts organized a panel on "Kodak's Continued Support for Archival Film Media," in which four senior executives sought to assure AMIA's membership that Kodak's core product lines of origination and intermediate and release print stocks would continue to be available for the foreseeable future. The outcome of that meeting was a mixed one: while many of the stocks on which film preservationists depend for their everyday work are not endangered in the short term, an increasing proportion are now only available on special order, with minimum quantities and long lead times. But ultimately, Eastman and other film manufacturers (principally, at the time of writing, Fuji and OrWo) are, as Jack Nicholson put it in Chinatown, not in business to be loved, but they are in business. Once preservation [Begin Page ix] becomes the last significant market remaining for film stock, it is open to question whether that is a big enough market to sustain any sort of manufacturing operation.

For the moving image archivist, the implications of this are huge. They cover almost all of the practical, theoretical, and ethical aspects of our profession and challenge one of the fundamental principles on which it has operated since its inception: that moving images originated on film should always be preserved on film. This principle is based primarily on two beliefs: one pragmatic and the other ethical. The first, and less controversial, is that no replacement medium exists for moving images, which equals the proven longevity of film when stored in appropriate atmospheric conditions. While the inexorable advance of Moore's Law has in recent years enabled computer technology to scan, manipulate, and represent film-based images to an equivalent aesthetic quality as the source material, the use of digitization for preservation repeatedly hits the same brick wall: no offline storage medium exists that can even preserve the image data reliably for decades, let alone centuries; moreover, online solutions (e.g., RAID arrays) are prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthiest archives. The second underpinning rationale for always preserving film as film (even if doing so requires photochemical duplication) is that by capturing and representing film images using a fundamentally different set of technologies, the aesthetic qualities of the original medium are lost and we are left with something that is quite simply not preservation.

Sooner or later, we would have to find solutions for both of these problems. As Dylan Cave discusses in his article, almost all television drama and publicly subsidized independent and low-budget film production in Britain are now "born digital." DVCAM has for all practical purposes replaced 16mm, and high-definition digital camcorders are currently starting to enter the consumer market. In arguing that archives need to "come out of their comfort zone," he observes that digital imaging has led to an explosion in the volume of production, which in itself is forcing archives to take a more curatorially critical approach to their acquisition policies (a similar point was made by Jamie Lean of the New Zealand Film Archive at the 2004 AMIA conference at Minneapolis concerning the challenges in cataloging amateur footage: that in the days of Super 8, a typical filmmaker might have taken twenty minutes of footage each year, whereas the advent...