The Archive and Academia

The past decade has witnessed the rapid transformation of motion picture archiving into a professional and, gradually, academic field. In the United States, the emergence of specialized degree programs designed to educate and train motion picture archive professionals has encouraged, even galvanized, interest in the film archive as a career destination. The promise of professional accreditation and vocational training has drawn a new generation of college graduates to archiving in much the same way, one could say, as many have turned recently to information science as a "cool" profession.¹ The vast majority of applicants for the new archival programs share an undergraduate degree in Film Studies and a desire to find a "practical" application for their interests in film and media history. This is, indeed, precisely the background common to the many aspiring archivists who have contacted me during my three years as Director of the Harvard Film Archive for advice on how to enter the field of moving image archiving.

In responding I invariably point back to my graduate education—to my PhD in Film and Television from the University of California–Los Angeles—as the crucial stage in my training and education where I gained the research and curatorial skills that remain invaluable to my work. I encourage those would-be archivists interested in pursuing work in conservation, collection management, or cataloging to consider applying directly to one of the excellent professional degree programs. Yet I also describe the PhD as an ideal preparation for a more curatorially oriented career in archiving, whether as a film programmer, archive director, or archivist with collection development/management responsibilities. I believe that the dedicated, patient work of a doctoral candidate—and specifically the development, research, and writing of a dissertation—can offer an ideal means of honing the type of judgment and understanding of historical and cultural values necessary for curating archival collections and cinematheque programs.

A career in the film archive is best suited, in my opinion, for those scholars whose PhDs have trained them as film historians. For motion picture archiving offers an exciting alternate mode of practicing film history to a teaching career, a firsthand engagement with and often direct shaping of the very material foundation upon which the history of cinema is built. Indeed, the knowledge and research skills of a film historian are essential tools for discovering or assessing the value of a collection. Archivists must be able to judge the value of the many collections—of films, manuscripts, photographs, technology, or periodicals—that come their way, often at a moment's notice, in order to determine if valuable resources should be used to bring these materials into the archive. From a long list of film titles provided by a film collector, for example, an archivist must be ready and able to evaluate the collection's research and preservation values by distinguishing the obscure and otherwise unobtainable works from those better known and more readily available films.

The work of the motion picture archivist requires a type of curatorial judgment grounded in precisely the type of broad knowledge of film history and aesthetics gained by graduate study—an understanding of key national cinemas and production companies, historical periods and movements, film technology, filmmakers, performers, and cinematographers, as well as their historical, sociocultural, and intellectual contexts. Experience in academic film study can provide a crucial base of knowledge and research skills that will continue to be built upon and expanded by work within a film archive. At the same time, however, curatorial judgment also calls for a set of skills for which most academic programs rarely provide training. Indeed, the type of engagement with and evaluation of a wide range of vital primary sources typical of archival work (whether in the form of film prints, manuscripts, or, perhaps most crucially, the artists themselves) is a mode of research that most graduate programs, at best, only touch upon. I have always felt that more attention should be given in graduate film studies to training in primary research beyond simply industrial and personal documents; students could be trained, for example, in actually viewing films to identify and appreciate...