Big_Sleep™ by Video Data Bank (review)

Evan Meaney and Amy Szczepanski’s 2015 movie Big_Sleep™ may present itself as a “codec tutorial,” but this moving image work is far fromstraightforward.Thetwenty-six-minute-long video revolves around the demonstration of a fictitious new format (named Big_Sleep) that halts the unintended modification and corruption of digital files (often called “data rot” or “data decay”) forever. However, once encoded into Big_Sleep, the files can never be opened again. The format even has its own end user license agreement developed by Meaney and Szczepanski, and visitors to Big_Sleep’s website can upload their own files and encode them into Big_Sleep.

Described by Meaney as a “desktop movie,” Big_Sleep opens with a black Mac OS X desktop and the familiar “Funk” sound effect indicating an error in the operating system— creating an uncanny experience when viewing Big_Sleep on an Apple desktop or laptop. The work’s running time is continuously updated through a loading bar in the bottom left corner of the screen. A series of QuickTime windows opens and plays videos while the Big_Sleep codec transcodes other videos in the background. Through the QT videos, along with audio from various interviews and music by Ben Babbitt, several narratives emerge.

In an unconventional manner, Big_Sleep tackles some of the most fraught and controversial topics within the field of moving image archiving and preservation. After Big_Sleep screened on April 7, 2016, at the tenth Orphan Film Symposium (held at the Library of Congress’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia), Rick Prelinger called it “a creative response to a deep deep contradiction. . . . In our field we talk about preserving things forever and yet we’re dealing with the most ephemeral media possible.” In Big_Sleep, the contradiction becomes manifest in the deployment of a codec that claims to preserve audiovisual content forever by not allowing it ever to be accessed again.

Big_Sleep’s forays into both the analog and digital worlds provide evidence that the point at which film production studios or archivists think they have long-term preservation under control is precisely when we should start worrying. To this end, the movie displays the gory sarcophagi of the digital preservation failures of the past few decades (including two attempts to digitize the Fox Movietone newsreel collection, both by IBM and the University of South Carolina as well as 20th Century Fox and WRS Labs). But Big_Sleep does not confine its presentation to the digital realm—glitchy video footage is shown alongside scans of 16mm and 35mm film with dust, scratches, and varying states of nitrate decomposition. Avoice-over describes celluloid film as composed of “molecules that just inherently want to fall apart.” However, Big_Sleep fails to discuss one of the analog equivalents to these early digital failures—namely, copying decomposing and highly flammable nitrate film to acetate “safety” film that would later begin to experience a type of decay known as vinegar syndrome.

Big_Sleep’s voice-over interviews, juxtaposing archivists, funeral directors, health care workers, and scientists, bring out, among other things, the frustration with the distinct (and sometimes antagonistic) motivations for saving moving images— of “business models” and archiving. In addition, the treatment of imminent death and of corpses becomes a metaphor for the treatment of archival film. Even the decay and ultimate loss of all magnetic media get a small mention.

Through their interviews with preservationists, Meaney and Szczepanski tap into some of the counterintuitive, almost magical aspects of moving image media and digital files. Films enjoy an “afterlife” in the archive. Hard drives fail and servers crash for no apparent reason. Data become corrupt just by copying them, or sometimes even when the file just sits untouched on a hard drive.

Another thread within Big_Sleep follows the real-life story of Harry Burch and his son Bill, both successful newsreel cameramen for Fox Movietone. Bill Burch speaks about how he located the newsreel footage that his father shot, which was stored at...