The Past Is a Moving Picture: Preserving the Twentieth Century on Film

4. The Archive at the End of the Century: Discipline, Excess, and Access

4 4 4 4 4 THE ARCHIVE AT THE END OF THE CENTURY Discipline, Excess, and Access The federal government, the public, and the film industry’s investment in archives and film preservation has resulted in an abundance of historic andcontemporarycinematicmaterialflowing into moving imagearchives, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This archival abundance is tempered by the fact that much of our early cinema remains missing. JanChristopher Horak, an influential film scholar and moving image archivist , and the current director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive describes the alarming mortality rate of early film: As in life, the dead outnumber the living by a long shot. Although we have only just celebrated the first century of cinema, the statistics of mortality are frightening. Of all the films produced during the silent era, i.e. between 1895 and 1930, approximately 90% have been lost. In other words, only ten percent of all films from that era are still in existence. Of all films produced during the nitrate sound film era, i.e. between1930 and1955,onlyabout50%surviveinanyform....Meanwhile , the negatives are lost, the remaining distribution copies are routinely destroyed or worn out through continual use. Films disappear from view and consciousness, unless some interested party manages to put a print away for safekeeping.1 112 · Part II. Archival Techne A desire to recover the missing early twentieth-century film historical record has helped to shape the culture of the moving image archive since the early twentieth century. This drive toward recovery and completion remains a fundamental but impossible objective despite the fact that most archives are perpetually backlogged. Public archives do not have the financial resources to entirely manage their collections and archivists struggle to properly manage, conserve, and catalog archival collections. While the public moving image archives diligently work to ensure and protect the artifacts of cinematic history, the current material reality of the archive has tipped toward proliferation. With all of the filmic material flowing into the contemporary archives, present and future historians will have a plethora of artifactual evidence, but the backlogging condition creates a new condition of absence. Archives do have a relatively small collection of archival gems that they rely upon to help commemorate and acknowledge the cinematic past, but they do not have the time or the money to construct identities and cinematic meanings for most of their film material. The Safety Room The UCLA Film and Television Archive is a massive storehouse of mediated twentieth-centurypopularculture.Itmaintainsthelargestcollections of media material of any university in the world and is the second largest media archive in the United States, second only to the Library of Congress .TheUCLAvaultscontainmorethan220,000motionpictures(5,000 of which are 16 mm) and television titles and 27 million feet of newsreel footage. Among its holdings are 35 mm collections from 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros., Sony/Columbia, Republic, Orion, and the Hearst Metrotone News Library, as well as a substantial number of independent films from the Sundance Collection. The American Film Institute , the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Directors Guild of America, and the Stanford Theatre Foundation (as well as hundreds of predominant individuals, such as Rock Hudson, William Wyler, Stanley Kramer, Tony Curtis, Hal Ashby, and Jean Renoir) have donated filmstotheUCLAFilmandTelevisionArchive.Italsohasavastcollection of television programming, such as the entire run of The Jack Benny Program , The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The Carol Burnett Show, Hallmark Hall of Fame, All in the Family, and the Mary Tyler Moore Show, and The Archive at the End of the Century: Discipline, Excess, and Access · 113 over forty years of Emmy Awards broadcasts (as well as all the nominated programs). In addition, the archive holds more than ten thousand television commercials. A latecomer to the archiving community, the UCLA Film and Television Archive, established in 1969 without collections or financial support, wasoriginallynamedtheNationalTelevisionArchive.Thearchive’scollections grew slowly and somewhat unconventionally in its early years as its second director (and former dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television) Robert Rosen explains: A typical acquisition might take the form of a midnight caravan of student-owned cars and Volkswagen buses racing to the rescue of a mountain of nitrate prints stacked on a studio loading dock awaiting imminent deposit in the “ocean vault” off the Pacific coast. A typical storage area in the earliest days was a private garage or a decrepit turn-of-the-century vault in...