Access and the Experimental Film: New Technologies and Anthology Film Archives' Institutionalization of the Avant-Garde

In 2010, Anthology Film Archives (hereinafter Anthology) celebrated its fortieth anniversary and launched a new website, which offers online access to select film stills and experimental films.¹ Anthology, a major center for independent, avant-garde, and experimental moving images, is currently developing a digital archive composed of photographic, video, and paper material from its collection.² Filmmakers Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka, Ken Kelman, James Broughton, Jerome Hill, and historian P. Adams Sitney created Anthology in 1970, shifting experimental film exhibition through institutionalization. This polemical transition, from underground to institution, situated Anthology's origins within the rubric of formalist and modernist film criticism and history.³ Today Anthology is an example of open archival access, which reflects a history long predicated on increased access to experimental film. When Anthology opened in 1970, it declared itself the first film museum dedicated to film art, stating that its aim was to define its study and exhibition through the development of a canon (Essential Cinema) and a theater (Invisible Cinema). The Essential Cinema selection committee included Mekas, Kubelka, Sitney, Broughton, and Kelman (Brakhage was also briefly on the committee), and their choices contributed to Anthology's association to medium specificity and avant-garde film hierarchy. Anthology's origins, though polemical in theory, were practically grounded in the idea of access, as exemplified in Anthology's prehistory and early institutional activities.

Anthology's institutional fermentation begins in the 1960s, when experimental film access was scarce and geographically specific, thriving most prominently in New York and San Francisco, where its viewers relied heavily on word-of-mouth domestic viewings, membership screenings, and alternative public spaces.⁴ Portable film technology defined localized experimental film culture, and its exhibition evolved into complex networks of underground and itinerant microcinemas.⁵ During this period, venues were precarious, and instability characterized the distribution and exhibition of experimental film. This type of infrastructure helped initiate networks between the underground film community and other art forms. As an outgrowth of 1960s Greenwich Village culture, Anthology and its founders were informed by censorship and portable film technology, which forced them to rethink access. This shift offers an interesting parallel to Anthology's present archival hybridity, which, once again, reinforces their commitment to access in a changing cultural landscape.

For the moving image archive, new technologies have consistently shaped and sustained access discourse. Among its most vocal proponents is Rick Prelinger, who has steadily called on archives to place access as the preeminent discourse, revising the current preservation hierarchy. In volume 10, issue 2 (Fall 2010) of The Moving Image, Prelinger focuses on the concept of accessibility, arguing that it can redefine the twenty-first-century moving image archive.⁶ Prelinger describes this archival disposition as one of citizenship, where it is an active member of the community working in conjunction with both conservative and progressive institutions and collectors. Prelinger argues that free access is a form of preservation that can expand scholarship and enrich communities.

The archivist-scholar relationship is further articulated in Cinema Journal's "In Focus: The Twenty-First Century Archive," where Prelinger, Eric Schaefer, Dan Streible, Karan Sheldon, Lynne Kirste, Mike Mashon, and Margaret Compton describe archival challenges, particularly those of the marginal moving image archive (regional films, orphan films, lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender films).⁷ Experimental film is not featured in this discussion, however, Kirste acknowledges Anthology's preservation of the Kuchar brothers' 8mm films, and Prelinger alludes to the online experimental film community when discussing file-sharing sites and members-only downloadable archives. Each piece is an appeal to the moving image community to discuss and build the accessible twenty-first-century archive together.

Scholarly work on the accessible archive also frequently returns to a complex and crucial dynamic: that between access and preservation. Caroline Frick reinforces Prelinger's hierarchical shift in Saving Cinema, where she traces the cross-cultural development of film preservation through an investigation of national and international archives.⁸ Film preservation is fueled by the notion of heritage conservation, where cultural artifacts propel a nation's history...