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

Introduction

INTRODUCTION The Past Is a Moving Picture details and interprets the twentieth-century project of preserving moving images. This study is an analysis of some of the major assumptions and paradigmatic shifts about history, cinema, and the moving image archive, prior to the current shift toward digitization . This book frames the twentieth century film archive as a project of history making, an endeavor undertaken by modern men and women who not only have attempted to sustain and fix, but also transform meanings about the twentieth century. Film collecting and preservation has played a national and public role in easing various cultural anxieties and desires during the twentieth century. How and why Americans thought (ordidnotthink)abouttheircinematicheritagerevealsimportantinsights into the nation’s views of history making, technology, nationalism, the film industry, and the role of cinema in public life during the twentieth century. 5 Ushering in the second generation of the film archive in the United States, the United States Congress passed legislation establishing the National Film Preservation Board (NFPB) and National Film Registry at the Library of Congress as part of the National Film Preservation Act of 1988. “The National Film Preservation Act,” according to David Francis, the 2 · The Past Is a Moving Picture retired chief of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, “was guided by the belief that the most important films should be kept and preserved in the form that the team created them and to help the contemporary movie industry be more mindful of the original intentions of filmmakers.” Since 1989, the Librarian of Congress James Billington has selected twenty-five films for the National Film Registry each year. He chooses the films based on criteria of aesthetic, historical, or cultural importance. The films named to the registry are deemed worthy of preservation and the library is obligated to do all it can to ensure that they will be preserved in their original film formats. The establishment of the NFPB and a new widespread national focus on honoring, maintaining, and recovering the intent of filmmakers moved the Library of Congress’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division into a national spotlight. The library was pushed to the forefront of the film archiving movement in the United States because the library’s film collection is widely recognized, Francis told me, as “immense, valuable, and important.” Shortly after the creation of the National Film Registry, the Library of Congress and American Movie Classics, the AMC cable network, developed a nationwide film preservation tour. The tour exhibited National Registry films in theaters around the United States in an effort to educate thepublicaboutfilmpreservationandofferedthemcinematicexperiences with preserved films. But the tour was also a public relations campaign. Francis told me that the library wanted it to have better and more complex interactions with the American public, so the tour was developed, in part, to give a public face to the Library of Congress. Regrettably, a lack of resources brought an end to the tour before the registry films were exhibited in all fifty states. The tour was elaborate, requiring appropriate venues for the exhibition of preserved films, guest speakers, and a spokesperson from the Library of Congress. Many of the film titles were chosen, to some extent, for their canonical stature. Film historians, archivists, and the public generally acknowledge the historical and cultural significance of such films and directors as The River (Pare Lorentz, 1937), Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock , 1943), My Darling Clementine (John Ford, 1946), The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955), Gigi (Vincente Minnelli, 1958), Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), Introduction · 3 China Town (Roman Polanski, 1974), and Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980). Given the desire to attract the public, the selection is not surprising . The library wanted to educate people about film preservation, and the tour’s films were selected to attract a wide and diverse audience. When the National Film Registry tour came to the Tampa Theatre, I saw The Great Train Robbery (Edwin Porter, 1903) and fifty feet of Edison footage depicting troops unloading cargo from a train in Tampa during the Spanish-American War. Together these two films offered the registry tour audience a sample of both historic completeness and fragmentation; the canonical and the obscure linked as film history. Film students and scholars regard The Great Train Robbery as a foundational film in the history of narrative cinema, and it is...