The Short Film Pool Project: Saving Short Films from Oblivion in the Digital Era

The Short Film Pool¹ is a large-scale digitization and access project initiated in 2013 at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. The project is aimed at improving the visibility of short films in the digital age, and as such, it can be an inspiration for others who are pursuing new and fruitful ways to promote collections, specifically short films that do not automatically fall under the standard preservation or presentation policies of archives.

While the project embraces short films without distinction of genre or period, my focus will be on Dutch experimental and artists' short films from the 1970s until recent times. Our archive has developed an active acquisition, preservation, and presentation policy for them, a process accelerated since 2010 as different institutions combined to form the EYE Filmmuseum.

The starting point of the Short Film Pool project was a relatively young distribution collection, assembled in 2003, thanks to the efforts of one of the organizations that merged into EYE in 2010, Filmbank. Its core business was promoting and distributing historical and contemporary Dutch short experimental films by means of curated touring programs, publications, and exhibitions at festivals in Holland and abroad. The organization did a great job of guaranteeing that the life span of the contemporary selected shorts went beyond the normal festival season of just one or two years. Considering that independent short films generally fall out of the main distribution channels, without active promotion, they would fall out of circulation altogether.

When Filmbank merged with EYE, its collection consisted of more than three hundred titles. Most of these were shot on 16mm, but there was also Super 8mm and occasionally 35mm. The collection also encompasses works on video formats like mini DV and Beta SP. The films showcase a variety of styles, genres, do-it-yourself practices, and artistic approaches to filmmaking from young and old practitioners alike. The canon of Dutch experimental cinema—Barbara Meter, Frans Zwartjes, and Paul de Nooijer, among others—is well represented, together with works by contemporary artists, such as Johan Rijpma and Joost Rekveld. The collection is a fine example of how creativity can often flourish under restrictive boundaries like low budgets, limited time, and affordable media types. It is striking that only ten years after this collection was founded, some of the formats used by the filmmakers—not only 16mm but also Beta SP—have become problematic in terms of preservation and access.

Although cinema production was already well on its way to a transition to digital prior to 2012, that year was the tipping point. That was the year that, in the Netherlands, full digitization of cinema distribution was accomplished, financed by the Cinema Digital Project, an initiative of the Dutch Cinema Exhibitors' Association, the Dutch Film Distributors' Association, and EYE.² The cinemas' conversion to Digital Cinema Package (DCP) format went hand in hand with the disappearance of almost all analog projectors from the booths. While it is still possible to find a few operating 35mm projectors in some specific cinemas that specialize in art house screenings, it is quite rare, if not impossible, to find well-working 16mm projectors, let alone the projectionists with the knowledge to operate them according to proper archival standards.

One of the direct consequences of this transition to digital was that, all of a sudden, the Filmbank distribution collection of short films, among others, became obsolete. Cinemas equipped only with the new DCP standard could not project them. This resulted in decreased screening requests and, thus, decreased visibility. Considering all the efforts that were necessary to put such a collection together in the first place, to guarantee its circulation in the cinemas, this was a negative turn.

BUSINESS TO BUSINESS

Some of the same people behind Filmbank who are now part of EYE initiated the Short Film Pool project as a response to digital exhibition. The project was born out of an idealistic desire to give short films a second chance in the cinemas of the digital era by embracing the potentials of the new technology. This meant that the films...