The Past Is a Moving Picture: Preserving the Twentieth Century on Film by Janna Jones (review)

The must-reads for every archivist and scholar concerned with moving image history and culture would surely include Anthony Slide’s Nitrate Won’t Wait, Paolo Cherchi Usai’s The Death of Cinema, Karen Gracy’s Film Preservation: Competing Definitions of Value, Use, and Practice, and Caroline Frick’s recent Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation. This group of go-to texts ranges from manifesto to melodrama, polemical to practical, all in shared service of the twin pillars of archival advocacy: preservation and access. The Past Is a Moving Picture completes this pentateuch with a study of the film archive itself in theory and practice. This exploration of U.S. film archives rather than (solely) their contents provides a useful perspective on what (and who) is working and a context in which to understand impassioned calls to arms among stewards of film preservation. And I do mean film: this is a project focused on the analog processes, technologies, and media of film preservation. By confining her study to the twentieth century on film, Jones stops short of the digital revolution and its associated multitudinous preservation and archiving issues. The digital archive is another labyrinth, ably explored by other scholars. Jones’s previous book, The Southern Movie Palace: Rise, Fall, and Resurrection (2003), was a celebration of architectural historic preservation and cinema-going communities in the southern regions of the United States. The present work focuses on the establishment, preservation, and working principles of film archives across the United States, treating these institutions as comparable palaces of preservation.

Through painstaking archival research and gentle questioning, Jones secured access to public and private film archives and their guardians to tell the story behind the story of protecting the nation’s precious moving image history. The book is divided into two sections: the first on theory and history and the second on practice. She divides the history of moving image stewardship into two successive waves: 1930s to 1980s and 1988 to the present, the latter ushered in by the passing of the National Film Preservation Act. This chronological narrative intersects with specific institutions, their collections, and archival policies at various junctures, offering both longitudinal and latitudinal insights into the evolving practice of moving image preservation and collection across the century. What emerges is a story of the often intentional, and sometimes accidental, preservation of the national cultural memory.

The first half of the book covers “Archives in Formation”: the vision and establishment of major U.S. film archives and preservation initiatives and the vacillating governmental policies that loved, lost, and rediscovered moving image heritage. Jones makes elegant and insightful use of the archival record in published reports, letters, and personal accounts. She also conducted firsthand interviews with a number of the congressional witnesses at the orphan film preservation hearings of 1992 and provides a roster of heroes who would appear on my imaginary deck of Association of Moving Image Archivists trading cards.

Her discussion of the prehistory of U.S. film archives begins in 1921, with the appointment of Will Hays as president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. Hays, known as the author–enforcer of the Production Code, enjoys partial rehabilitation through Jones’s discussion of his sincere belief in the civic need to archive the industry’s output. His early efforts to mandate preservation as part of the production–distribution–exhibition trifecta do deserve credit. Jones reports that, throughout the 1920s, Hays lobbied for a number of secure environments for Hollywood’s creative product, ranging from a film vault in the basement of the White House to dedicated space for film and audio recordings in the National Archives. Hays foresaw that the moving image could capture and shape the historical record. This chapter is rounded out by discussions of the development of moving image collections in the early to mid-1930s by the National Archives and Library of Congress and of Iris Barry’s pioneering...