Zoom Interview with Matteo Pavesi
- Zoom Interview with Matteo Pavesi
This interview was conducted on April 22, 2020; translation courtesy of Victoria Duckett.
Thank you for making time to speak to me. I know it is a difficult time in Italy, particularly in Milan. I am interested in how film archives respond to the current pandemic. From what I have seen so far, your archive is one that responded quickly to the changing needs of the current situation.
Yes, we have, but our response was coincidental and fortuitous, in the sense that our streaming initiative began in December 2019. Our intention, at that point, was to make our oldest archival materials visible; we wanted to publish these holdings for everyone to enjoy. This project was part of a national digitization project1 focusing on Italy's patrimony and supported by the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo [Minister of Cultural Heritage, Arts, and Tourism]. We thought that rather than merely depositing our digitized holdings into the national archive [the Cineteca Nazionale], we could make them available for public enjoyment. Our prime aim was to open the archive, to reveal what we hold because few know what is in our collection. There are many reasons for our online initiative—we have fragments of film, films that are little known—and these works can no longer furnish live screening programs in the cinema. We thought that this material could find an outlet and audience through online streaming. In January, we had about three hundred viewers a day of this material, which for us was a good number. Now, in March, we have had over 4 million viewers.
That is a lot.
Yes, it is a lot. We were moved by this tremendous increase in viewers, and so [End Page 99] began developing a new project. That is, beside the heritage or archival treasures we currently put on our streaming service, we began to put together a weekly palimpsest which—in addition to archive materials—also features new materials. These are new films that are not distributed in Italy—largely documentary material, and a few fiction films, such as a film review devoted to contemporary Swiss cinema2 that will take place from the thirteenth to the twenty-first of May with a lot of brand-new films never screened in Italy! In addition, we have determined some target audiences: teenagers, children, and so on. Because of this younger demographic, we have also developed our access to animation film. The next project we will work on focuses on the aged. The aged will be the last group who will be allowed to circulate freely in public (and so are the group confined the longest to the home). We aim to study and use our holdings in order to provide materials that will be of use and comfort to this age group.
So, if I understand you correctly, you already had a public-facing national project that saw the release of new material for online streaming. In terms of timing and funding, you had this first move in place . . .
Yes, we reasoned that a certain type of cinema—again, because it is fragmentary, because it is little known—could not generate a lot of interest in the cinema through local screenings. But material of this type can reach a specialized and diffuse public online. In fact, this particular material enjoyed incredible success online. That is, film that we cannot technically present in a cinema theater reached two, three, or four thousand viewers online. Historically, these films have never generated a comparable audience.
Are these Italian films? I know you have one of the largest collections of film in Europe, that as a European film archive you are important.
The films that enjoy a lot of success are not only Italian. They are international films, above all European films. Speaking as one who has worked in the film archive for twenty-six years, I am seeing material that I have not seen before. The digitization process, the work that we are making available, is being undertaken so quickly that I just...
