Experimentations in Television’s Archivability: Visions of a Television Archive at MoMA

If the record of this newest and most pervasive pulse-quickener and association-maker is to be kept, the time is now. It is already very late.

—richard griffith, “a prospect for a television archive”

The lag of time between the introduction of a new medium and the recognition of its historical, sociological, cultural, and economic significance by people with the capacity for preservation inescapably results in the loss of irrecoverable material. There were considerably long gaps of time between the emergence of the film industry as a cultural and economic force at the turn of the twentieth century, the formation of the first film archives in the mid-1930s, and the crystallization of professional archival practices and movements to secure film’s legacy in the 1970s. For television, the lag was a bit shorter between television’s mass introduction in the late 1940s and the first dedicated archives to hold television programs in the late 1960s and 1970s.¹ The technological and distribution specificities of each medium undoubtedly play a role, as in the difference between a physical movie theater distribution system that requires physical film reels and decentralized, ephemeral, over-the-air broadcasts into the home. The invention of tape in 1956 and the networks’ increasing reliance on filmed programs were not enough to prompt preservation; after all, the fact of technologies to record and store images was never enough of a reason to initiate archival endeavors.² As Ralph Sargent explained about film, the “proper archival storage has existed since 1951. What has been lacking is a general awareness of the value of preserving a film heritage.”³ For television, Fay Schreibman recounted that 1950s television distribution and recording technologies inhibited preservation, but a more pressing matter was that “entertainment production companies did not even think of anyone’s responsibilities being archival; for the most part, they threw the programs out after a limited run.”⁴ The impetus to save the newest and not-so-new media requires a vision that such material will be valuable outside of commercial imperatives, and to sustain such a vision requires infrastructures and expertise to facilitate the acquisition and preservation of material that diverges from the well-trodden paths in archiving far more conventional, paper-based material.

Whereas the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is known for its visionary leadership in establishing the first film archive in the United States and was instrumental in formalizing the moving image archivist profession in the 1970s, it is less known for its role with television. The leaders of MoMA’s Film Library, founded in 1935, forged relationships with the film industry and advocated for films’ stature as worthy objects to stave off the destruction of film as history and history of film. Here was the Film Library’s second generation of leadership, Richard Griffith, stating within television’s first decade that the industry and observers were already late to preserve “the record of this newest and most pervasive pulse-quickener and association-maker.”⁵ Rather than judge the value of television’s content, Griffith indicated an ecological sense of television. If we fail to preserve the ephemeral sound and images of such a pervasive new medium, we will lose documents that capture influential sources of politics, cultural trends, and social issues.

MoMA does house an archive of television art, established in 1967.⁶ But in the mid-1950s, the prestigious cultural institution considered whether it was within its scope and ability to extend its film archiving activities to television. This is curious in light of common discourses that denigrated television as inconsequential at best to devoid of cultural merit and harmful for society at worst. However, as Griffith hinted, the preservation of television was not about artistic achievement but about defining television’s potential as comprising historical documents. Moreover, television as an industry and as popular culture was still fairly novel in the early and mid-1950s, and thus the discourses demeaning television were accompanied by exploration and experimentation. There were lively discussions about what television was and its potential uses.⁷ One...