• • •
Publicly and privately funded institutions, film archives, museums, film festivals, and cinematheques hold quite a different status, in regard to the manifestos written on their behalf, than do those of solitary artists or groups of artists. Yet because of the cinema’s fairly recent emergence, its status as both art and popular entertainment, and the rise of neoliberalism in the last third of the twentieth century, these institutions have often been attacked by state funding agencies, governments, and artists who feel they are not fulfilling their mandate. In the series of manifestos that follow, we see that the role of these institutions and the function they play in society is under continuous scrutiny. The manifestos in this chapter can therefore be broadly defined as being one of two kinds: manifestos written by organizations and manifestos written on behalf of organizations.
Unlike manifestos covering other aspects of cinema in this book, the film archive manifestos demonstrate a surprising level of continuity from the first archive manifesto (and indeed the earliest manifesto in the book) from 1898 on through to the archive manifestos that address the current state of film preservation. If Bolesław Matuszewski’s “A New Source of History” proclaims that the emerging art of the cinema must be preserved because of its specific powers of documenting the world, subsequent manifestos foreground the fact that the worlds documented by the cinema are in many cases slipping away because of a lack of archives and archival space, the instability of film stock, the apathy of governments, and the digital revolution. For instance, Hye Bossin’s “Plea for a Canadian Film Archive” makes the nationalist case, arguing that the fragile nature of the Canadian film industry necessitates an archive because of the dispersed and often marginal nature of Canadian film production. In every other manifesto, an argument is made for the necessity of preserving film for historical, cultural, national, and political reasons in the face of, at best, benign neglect. These manifestos thereby articulate the weight of history placed on the shoulders of cinema during the last century, namely as a privileged and universal—or cursed Borgesian—archive or motivator of action.
Many of the manifestos on film archives directly or indirectly address, in one way or another, the philosophical battle that took place between Henri Langlois, cofounder and director of the Cinémathèque française, and Ernest Lindgren, curator of the National Film Archive at the British Film Institute from 1935 to 1973. To frame the debates around film archiving manifestos, it serves us well to look at this dispute in some detail. Langlois championed the screening and collecting of all films, without judgment. Screening of all films was crucial because if films weren’t shown, then preserving them was, in his eyes, useless. To this end he became an unsurpassed champion/defender of the cinema to a degree that even filmmakers could not attain. One of the key functions of archives, at least in the Langlois school of thought, is the catholic nature of their collections, and the ability to see the diversity of cinema in all its manifestations. Limits are placed on cineastes to which archivists are not subjected. There are many reasons for this, and as François Truffaut notes, cineastes are not the best keepers of film history: “When one becomes a filmmaker after having been a cinéphile, the number of specific problems to be solved makes one forget one’s admirations and obliges one to create all sorts of personal laws, which soon become so constraining that the filmmaker loses all freshness when confronted with the work of colleagues who have forged other laws and carried them through.”1 Ernest Lindgren, in contrast, was perhaps stereotyped in the image of the traditional British civil servant. He believed in closely selecting the films that archives collected and chose for preservation. Unlike Langlois, he could be seen as a gatekeeper. These two tendencies in archiving—programming versus preservation—still hold today and were at the center of a storm that brewed around film archiving in the 1960s. Indeed, one of the most famous incidents in the history of film archives is l’affaire Langlois, where the Gaullist state, through the actions of André Malraux, attempted to oust Langlois from the Cinémathèque française in the spring of 1968.
This development was a long time brewing. A year and a half before l’affaire Langlois, Jean-Luc Godard, in what could be described both as a manifesto on Langlois’s importance and an indicator of the storm clouds brewing, noted:
The whole world, as you know, envies us this museum. It is not in New York that one can learn how Sternberg invented studio lighting the better to reveal to the world the woman he loved. It is not in Moscow that one can follow the sad Mexican epic of Sergei Eisenstein. It is here. . . .
[Langlois] is grudged the price of a few prints, whose incredible luminosity will shortly astonish you. He is reproved over his choice of laboratory, whereas no one would dream of haggling over the colours used by the artists of the Ecole de Paris when they repaint the ceiling of the Opéra.2
Langlois was known as a great programmer of films and taught the history of the cinema through his screenings to the generation of filmmakers who would become the French nouvelle vague. However, because he channeled almost all his funding toward screenings and his Musée du cinéma, preservation fell very much by the wayside. For these reasons, and because no one, including the French government that was funding him, knew exactly what films he had, the government moved to put in place a bureaucrat named Pierre Barbin to oversee the Cinémathèque. This ouster led to a series of protests that foreshadowed the events of May ’68 (indeed Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the main agitators during the May ’68 uprising, was present at the protests at the Cinémathèque). During the protests tracts were distributed that anticipated the Situationist ones of May ’68. One written by Truffaut proclaimed: “Don’t go to the Cinémathèque. Let it become an imaginary museum until Langlois’s return.”3 Another tract from the “Children of the Cinémathèque” read:
Using bureaucratic pretexts, the worst enemies of culture have recaptured this bastion of liberty.
Don’t stand there and let them get away with it. Freedom is taken, not received. All those who love the cinema, in France and throughout the world, are with you and with Henri Langlois.4
Although Langlois was eventually reinstalled as a result of the protests (and because behind the scenes, the American studios threatened to pull all their films if Langlois was let go), this battle threw into relief the differing philosophies of film archiving. Lindgren himself was angered and taken aback by the uncritical press coverage of Langlois in 1968. He wrote an unpublished letter (held in his papers at the BFI) that he was going to send to the Listener but that he, perhaps wisely, as Penelope Houston notes, refrained from sending. Houston suggests that the letter constitutes a manifesto of its own: “The collection amounted, Lindgren said, to about 7,000 reels of film in excellent condition—those that were in more or less regular use for screenings. There were reckoned to be some 200,000 reels in storage elsewhere, acetate and nitrate indiscriminately jumbled together, of which only some 20 per cent was believed to be in good shape. ‘If more detailed examination confirms this analysis, the Cinémathèque under Langlois will not have been a saviour of the cinema’s heritage . . . but one of its most massive destroyers.’”5 Lindgren believed that because of Langlois’s shoddy preservation techniques, and the negligence he demonstrated toward film preservation, the perception of him as the savior of cinema was utterly groundless. Lindgren, like many other traditional preservationists, also felt angry about living in the shadow of the myth of Langlois. In recent years (this myth having faded to some degree after Langlois’s death in 1977) the philosophy of Lindgren has grown greatly in stature and in many ways represents the ethos of contemporary film archives. This can be seen in the final manifesto in this chapter, by archivist Paolo Cherchi Usai. “The Lindgren Manifesto” places the question of film preservation into larger cultural and political contexts, foregrounding the way in which, under contemporary capitalism and neoliberalism, the saving of films is often very far down on the list of government priorities. Despite these acrimonious debates, each of the manifestos contained herein functions as a plea to save the cinema’s past and, in so doing, the record of the world, documented through moving images, as it once was.
Bolesław Matuszewski
[First published in French as Une nouvelle source de l’histoire (Paris: Imprimerie Noizette et Cie, 1898). First published in English in Film History 7, no. 3 (1995): 222–224.]
The oldest film manifesto in this book, and probably the first, Bolesław Matuszewski’s manifesto arguing for the creation of a film archive is prescient in the way it postulates the role to be played by cinema as a historical document. The manifesto is all the more impressive as it is written three short years after the invention of cinema in France by the Lumière brothers.
It would be a mistake to believe that all the categories of representational documents which come to the aid of History have a place in Museums and Libraries. Unlike medallions, illuminated pottery, sculpture, etc., which are collected and classified, photography, for example, has no special department. To speak the truth, the documents it provides are rarely of a clearly historical nature, and above all, there are too many of them! Still, one day or another, someone will classify all the portraits of men who have had a marked influence on the life of their times. However, by then that will only be backtracking, and from now on the issue is to go forward in this direction; and official circles have already welcomed the idea of creating in Paris a Cinematographic Museum or Depository.
This collection, of necessity limited to begin with, would grow as the interest of cinematographic photographers moves from purely recreational or fantastic subjects toward actions and events of documentary interest; from the slice of life as human interest to the slice of life as the cross- section of a nation and a people. Animated photography will then have changed from a simple pastime to an agreeable method of studying the past; or rather, since it permits seeing the past directly, it will eliminate, at least at certain important points, the need for investigation and study.
In addition it could become a singularly effective teaching method. How many vague descriptions we will abandon the day a class can watch, projected in precise and moving images, the calm or troubled faces of a deliberating assembly, the meeting of chiefs of state ready to sign an alliance, the departure of troops and squadrons, or even the mobile and changing physiognomy of cities! But it may be a long time before we can draw upon this auxiliary source for teaching history. First we must accumulate these exterior manifestations of history so later they can be unfolded before the eyes of those who did not witness them.
One problem may trouble our thinking an instant—for the historic event does not always take place where it is expected. History is far from being composed uniquely of planned ceremonies, organized in advance and ready to pose for the cameras. There are the beginnings of action, initial movements, unexpected events which elude the camera exactly as they escape the news agencies.
No doubt the effects of history are always easier to seize than the causes. But one thing makes another clearer; these effects, fully brought to light by the cinema, will provide clear insights into causes which heretofore have remained in semi-obscurity. And to lay hands not on everything that exists but on everything that can be grasped is already an excellent achievement for any source of information, scientific or historic. Even oral accounts and written documents do not give us the complete course of the events they describe, but nevertheless History exists, true after all, in the larger spectrum even if its details are often distorted. And then the cinematographic photographer is indiscreet by profession; on the lookout for any opening, his instinct will often make him guess where things are going to happen that later become historic causes. He is more likely to be criticized for his excess of zeal than lamented for his timidity! Natural curiosity or the lure of profit, and often a combination of the two make him inventive and bold. Authorized to appear at somewhat ceremonious functions, he will rack his brains to insinuate himself without authority into others, and most of the time he will know how to find the occasions and places where tomorrow’s history is about to develop. He is not the sort to be frightened by a movement of the people or the beginnings of a riot, and even in a war it isn’t hard to imagine him bracing his camera against the same epaulements as the first-line guns, and catching at least part of the action. He’ll slip in wherever the sun touches. . . . If only for the First Empire and the Revolution, to choose examples, we could reproduce the scenes which animated photography easily brings back to life, we could have resolved some perhaps accessory but nonetheless perplexing questions, and saved floods of useless ink!
Thus this cinematographic print in which a scene is made up of a thousand images, and which, unreeled between a focused light source and a white sheet makes the dead and the absent stand up and walk, this simple band of printed celluloid constitutes not only a proof of history but a fragment of history itself, and a history which has not grown faint, which does not need a genius to resuscitate it. It is there, barely asleep, and like those elementary organisms which after years of dormancy are revitalized by a bit of warmth and humidity, in order to reawaken and relive the hours of the past, it only needs a little light projected through a lens into the heart of darkness!
The cinematographer does not record the whole of history perhaps, but at least that part he gives us is uncontestable and of absolute truth. Ordinary photography can be retouched, even to the point of transformation. But just try to make identical changes on a thousand or twelve-hundred microscopic images! It can be said that intrinsic to animated photography is an authenticity, exactitude and precision which belong to it alone. It is the epitome of the truthful and infallible eye-witness. It can verify verbal testimony, and if human witnesses contradict each other about an event, it can resolve the disagreement by silencing the one it belies.
Imagine a military or naval manoeuvre whose phases have been collected on film by a cinematographer: any debate can be rapidly brought to a close, . . . he can establish with mathematical precision the distances separating places in the scenes he has photographed. Generally he has clear indications to back up his attestation of the time of day, season and climatic conditions surrounding the event. Even what escapes the naked eye, the imperceptible progress of things in motion, is seized by the lens at the distant horizon and followed up to the foreground. Ideally, other historic documents should possess the same degree of certainty and clarity.
The issue now is to give this perhaps privileged source of historical evidence the same authority, official existence and accessibility as other already well established archives. It is being arranged at the highest echelons of the government, and in addition the ways and means do not seem so difficult to find. It will be sufficient to give the cinematographic proofs of historical nature a section in a museum, a shelf in a library or a cupboard in the archives. Their official depository will be at the Bibliothèque Nationale, the library of the Institut de France, under the care of one of the Academies concerned with History, in the Archives Nationales, or even in the Musée de Versailles. It’s merely a question of choosing and deciding. Once it is established, there will be no lack of endowments as gifts or even motivated by financial interest. The price of cinematographic projection equipment, like reels of film themselves, very high at the outset, is diminishing rapidly and falling within the reach of mere amateurs of photography. Many of them, not even including the professionals, are beginning to be interested in the cinematographic applications of this art, and ask nothing better than to contribute to the constitution of History. Those who do not bring their collections themselves will leave them freely as a legacy. A competent committee will accept or reject the proposed documents according to their historic value. The negative reels it accepts will be sealed into marked, catalogued cases. They will be the prototypes which will not be touched. The same committee will decide the conditions under which positive copies may be lent out, and will put on reserve those which for special reasons of propriety can only be released to the public after a certain number of years. The same is done for certain public records. A curator of the chosen establishment will care for the originally limited new collection, and an institution of the future will be founded. Paris will have its Depository of Historical Cinematography.
The creation of this foundation is indispensable and will sooner or later come to pass in some great European city. I should like to contribute to its establishment here in Paris where I have been welcomed with such easy good grace. And at this point I modestly request to enter the picture.
As the photographer of the Emperor of Russia, and on his express orders, I have been able to catch a cinematographer’s-eye view of, among other curious tableaux, the important scenes and intimate incidents of the visit made by the President of the French Republic to St. Petersburg in September 1897.
These shots, which the initiative of such a high authority permitted me to take, were projected before his very eyes, after which I was able, for some sixty consecutive showings, to offer the same spectacle to the soldiers in Parisian military bases. I was surprised and charmed by the effect they produced on these simple souls to whom I had the opportunity to show the physiognomy of a foreign land and its people, the concept of ceremonies so foreign to them, in short, the manifestations of a great nation.
I offer this not uninteresting series of cinematographic exposures as the basis for the establishment of the new Museum. I have had the good fortune to take films of persons of considerable importance, and with their support perhaps I will be able to see these archives of a new genre founded in Paris.
I have described why I augur a rapid and easy development for this depository. I shall contribute to it myself. In addition to the scenes I have mentioned, I already have a great many others to my credit: the coronation of His Majesty Nicolas II, the Russian visits of the two other emperors, and the Jubilee of Queen Victoria of England. Most recently I was able to photograph in Paris parts of completely unexpected and compelling events. I propose to collect throughout Europe reproductions of all scenes which would seem to me to be of historic interest, and to send them to the future Depository.
My example will be imitated . . . if you are only so good as to encourage this simple but new idea, making suggestions of your own to improve it, and above all giving it the wide publicity it needs to thrive and be fruitful.
A.P. Hollis
[First distributed in film canisters starting circa 1920.]
Written in 1920 as a cautionary note to film projectionists, this manifesto had a worldwide circulation inside film canisters and was reprinted widely in trade journals and film catalogues, most notably in Eastman Kodak’s. The “Prayer” was still in circulation in the 1950s in Crawley Films film canisters. This is the only manifesto written from film stock’s point of view.
I AM FILM, not steel; O user, have mercy. I front dangers whenever I travel the whirling wheels of mechanism. Over the sprocket wheels, held tight by the idlers, I am forced by the motor’s magic might. If a careless hand misthreads me, I have no alternative but to go to my death. If the pull on the takeup reel is too violent, I am torn to shreds. If dirt collects in the aperture, my film of beauty is streaked and marred, and I must face my beholders—a thing ashamed and bespoiled. Please, if I break, never fasten me with pins which lacerate the fingers of my inspectors.
I travel many miles in tin cans. I am tossed on heavy trucks, sideways and upside down. Please see that my first few coils do not slip loose in my shipping case, and become bruised and wounded beyond my power to heal. Put me in my own can. Scrape off all old labels on my shipping case so I will not go astray.
Speed me on my way. Others are waiting to see me. the next day is the last day i should be held. Have a heart for the other fellow who is waiting, and for my owner who will get the blame.
I am a delicate ribbon of film—misuse me and I disappoint thousands; cherish me, and I delight and instruct the world.
Iris Barry
[First published in the Spectator (UK), July 1925.]
Film critic and future cofounder of the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Library, Iris Barry was highly active in the London film scene in the 1920s, writing extensively on film for the London newspaper the Spectator. Here Barry announces the founding of the Film Society, and, in so doing, writes a manifesto clarifying its goals and arguing for its cultural importance.
The Film Society has been founded in the belief that there are in this country a large number of people who regard the cinema with the liveliest interest, and who would welcome an opportunity seldom afforded the general public of witnessing films of intrinsic merit, whether new or old.
It is felt to be of the utmost importance that films of the type proposed should be available to the Press, and to the film trade itself, including present and (what is more important) future British film producers, editors, cameramen, titling experts and actors. For, although such intelligent films as Nju or The Last Laugh may not be what is desired by the greatest number of people, yet there can be no question but that they embody certain improvements in technique that are as essential to commercial as they are to experimental cinematography.
It is important that films of this type should not only be shown under the best conditions to the most actively minded people both inside and outside the film world, but that they should, from time to time, be revived. This will be done. In this way standards of taste and of executive ability may be raised and a critical tradition established. This cannot but affect future production, by founding a clearing-house for all films having pretensions to sincerity.
Joris Ivens (Technical Advisor), Henrik Scholte (Chairman), Men’no Ter Bbaak (Secr. Treasurer), Hans Ivens (Secretary), Charlie Toorop, L.J. Jordan, Cees Laseur, Hans Van Meerten, Ed Pelster (Technical Advisor)
[First published in Dutch in Filmliga 1 (1927). Translated into English in Joris Ivens, The Camera and I (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 21–22.]
The “Filmliga Manifesto” demonstrates the rise in interest in a number of film societies in Europe that decried the state of commercial cinema and called for a return to the European avant-garde traditions of the cinema. The aforementioned London Film Society had many of the same goals, as did Studio des Ursulines in Paris, mentioned in this manifesto and still operating today.
Die Nibelungen, The Big Parade, Potemkin, Mother, Meniemontant, Variete.
FILM IS AT STAKE
Once in a hundred times we see film, the rest of the time we see movies.
The herd, commercial cliches, America, Kitsch.
In this arena films and movies are natural opponents. We believe in the pure autonomous film. The future of film as art is doomed if we do not take the matter into our own hands.
This is what we intend to do.
We want to see the experimental work produced in the French, German and Russian avant garde ateliers. We want to work towards film criticism that is in itself original, constructive and independent.
We have therefore founded
FILMLIGA AMSTERDAM
For the purpose of showing to limited audiences those films one does not see in the movie theatres or which one discovers only by accident.
We have one advantage: good films are not expensive, for the very reason that they are not in demand. Good films lie profitless in the vaults of Paris and Berlin. We will buy these.
During the 1927–28 season we will present in Amsterdam:
12 SUNDAY MATINEES
Each matinee will include the first showing in the Netherlands of a new feature-length film for those people genuinely interested in film. Following the example of the Studio des Ursulines in Paris, we will revive such old films of Asta Nielsen and Charlie Chaplin, which have unfortunately disappeared, alongside à la Querschnitt [i.e., potpourri] films.
These will be shown in a hall to be selected later. In case this is not possible we are making arrangements for the use of a small theatre in the city. Outstanding technical advisors will assist in arranging our programs. If you believe in the film of tomorrow and if you are bored with available programs, then join us, all you need do is fill out the attached form. We ask you to contribute
EIGHT GULDEN
(Which may be paid in two installments), which means sixty-five cents for each matinee, less than the usual price of a movie matinee.
On the next page is a tentative list of the films we plan to show. Let us hear your choice. This will determine the final selection and help us to progress.
Amos Vogel, Cinema 16
[One-sheet first distributed to Cinema 16 members and potential members in 1948.]
This statement was used to solicit members for Amos Vogel’s groundbreaking film society Cinema 16 (1947–1963). The statement highlights Vogel’s interest in screening and bringing to light cinematic detritus, a very different goal from that of institutions like MoMA. An early pioneer in screening American experimental cinema, Vogel was quite catholic in his tastes and did not delineate an absolutist line between experimental work and other forms of marginal cinema, screening documentaries and industrial and scientific films alongside experimental cinema.
CINEMA 16 is a cultural, non-profit organization devoted to the presentation of outstanding 16mm documentary, educational, scientific and experimental films.
CINEMA 16 endeavours to serve a double purpose. By its screening of superior and avant-garde films, it will contribute to the growing appreciation of film as one of the most powerful art forms. By its screening of documentary as well as scientific and educational pictures, it will provide its audience with a more mature realization of the nature of this world and of its manifold problems.
The complexities of industrial society, the contraction of the world into an interdependent whole, the advance of modern science and technique impel modern man toward greater knowledge and a more profound understanding of his world.
It is to the credit of the documentary film makers that they have attempted to provide this knowledge and understanding. Together with the scientific, educational and experimental producers, they have given us a comprehensive and multi-colored interpretation of life. Unadorned and free of Hollywood tinsel, they have recreated the stark reality, the poignancy, the brutality of life. By their cinematic dissemination of knowledge about other cultures and peoples, as well as topical social problems, they have aimed at greater international and interracial understanding and tolerance.
Yet their creations are gathering dust on film library shelves, where a vast potential audience—numbering in the millions—can never see them. Shall this audience continue unaware of these hundreds of thought-provoking, artistically-satisfying and socially purposeful films?
It is the aim of CINEMA 16 to bring together this audience and these films. CINEMA 16 will thereby advance the appreciation of the motion picture not merely as an art, but as a powerful social force.
SPECIFICALLY:
1. CINEMA 16 will screen at regular intervals outstanding documentaries, factual and sociological films. It will present the classics of a Flaherty, Grierson, Ivens and Cavalcanti as well as newest releases dealing with the life of man, be he a Navajo Indian, a Southern sharecropper, a Trappist monk or a “displaced” human being.
2. CINEMA 16 will screen superior educational and scientific films, hitherto made use of only by schools and the medical profession. It will show films dealing with psychology and psychiatry, biology and chemistry, art appreciation and literature. It will present newest releases in micro-photography as well as such classics as Professor Pavlov’s film on conditional reflexes.
3. CINEMA 16 will screen the best in experimental and avant-garde films. It will show expressionist, surrealist and abstract films, presenting such pioneers as Fernand Leger, Man Ray, Watson-Webber, Maya Deren.
4. CINEMA 16 will encourage the production of new amateur and professional documentary and experimental films. First, it will provide an audience for new releases of special interest by both exhibiting and distribution. Secondly, by sponsoring film contests, it will provide recognition to individual film producers. Thirdly, by purchases and rentals of prints, by establishing regular booking circuits in various cities for films of this type, it will provide funds for amateur and professional producers to help them carry on their work.
5. CINEMA 16 will invite well-known directors, producers and cinematographers to lecture before its audiences and to participate with them in forums on motion picture appreciation and technique.
6. CINEMA 16 will at all times encourage the presentation of foreign masterpieces of the documentary and experimental screen. The American public must be made aware of the truly international aspects of the fact and art film movement.
7. The final goal of CINEMA 16 is the creation of permanent “CINEMA 16” movie houses in the major cities of the nation, in which the documentary and experimental film will for the first time find a proud home of its own. The existence of such theatres in England and France testifies to the feasibility of this plan.
CINEMA 16 is determined to bridge the gap which exists between documentary film production and the people. By bringing purposeful films to the general public, film groups, labor unions and schools, CINEMA 16 will contribute to a greater realization of the problems facing man in the atomic age.
Ernest Lindgren
[First published in Penguin Film Review 5 (1948): 47–52.]
Ernest Lindgren was curator of the National Film Archive at the British Film Institute from 1935 until his death in 1973. In many ways he was the antithesis of the Cinémathèque française curator Henri Langlois; where Langlois wanted to save every film possible, collecting them to the point of not being able to preserve them, Lindgren was more selective and meticulous in his acquisitions. In this manifesto Lindgren outlines his vision of the Utopian film archive.
The film is a new kind of historical record; the film is a new art form. True; but unless the records are kept, history will gain nothing; and unless technicians and the film-going public have the opportunity to study the finest film works of the past, and the cinema is able to acquire something in the nature of a tradition, it will be seriously limited in its development as an art. These are the justifications for a film archive.
A film archive, properly speaking, can never be anything but a national concern; commercial films seldom come into private hands, and in any case, the preservation of film requires facilities which are normally beyond private resources. Unfortunately, national action is nearly always tardy, and perhaps that is why the national film archive movement is barely a dozen years old. In 1935 the British Film Institute decided to form its National Film Library; at almost precisely the same time the Museum of Modern Art Film Library in New York was started by John Abbott and Iris Barry, and a few months later Henri Langlois was launching the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. Today there are national archives of one kind or another in Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Italy, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.S.S.R.
The word “archive” rings with a deathly sound in the world of the cinema, which is so young, vital and dynamic, eager for the future and impatient of the past; but there is no reason why a film archive should be a mausoleum. Perhaps the most direct and graphic way for me to describe the functions of a film archive is to present the picture of the future of our own National Film Library which I always cherish in the back of my mind, the Utopian ideal which I cling to in face of the shortages of money accommodation and staff which at present make its realisation impossible.
Through one side of the vestibule of a large and attractive building in the heart of the metropolis, one passes into an exhibition hall occupying an area of some 3,000 square feet. The exhibits illustrate every aspect of film production and film history. There are frames of stills from all the best-known productions of all countries, a representative collection of the designs of the finest art directors, models of studios and of film sets, specimens of posters of all countries and periods, a collection of apparatus dating back to the earliest types, and specially designed wall-charts to explain the processes of production and distribution. The production of animated cartoons, scientific films and the like are demonstrated, and in the centre of the hall there is a special exhibit devoted to some current film of interest—a Henry V or an Overlanders.
Attached to the exhibition hall, and accessible through it, is a small cinema of some 500 seats, attractively designed and representing the last word in comfort. Here a programme of film classics is shown three times a day; the programme is changed once every week, and although each programme or group of programmes is self contained and illustrates some such topic as The Foundations of Modern Technique, The Realist Trend in the British Film, The Comedy of Chaplin or Films of Travel and Exploration, they are so arranged that in the course of a year the whole history of the cinema, silent and sound, in all countries is effectively surveyed. There is a modest charge to the public for admission to the exhibition hall and cinema combined, but bona fide students are in certain circumstances admitted at a reduced fee, and certain of the film programmes are reserved for students only.
Returning to the vestibule, we can make our way to other parts of the building. There is a well-equipped book library and reading-room where the student can work. There is a large library of stills numbering many thousands, suitably arranged and indexed, for the use of the student, the author, the journalist, the lecturer and the compiler of film-strips and exhibitions. The originals never leave the Library, but in an adjacent photographic-room copies can be made in an hour or two, and are supplied at cost. There is a large and representative store of film scripts, and virtually all the scripts of British films, and the most important foreign ones, are kept here and may be consulted. The Library also has a music department, where important film-music scores are kept, either originals or photostat copies; here also is a collection of discs of recorded film music, commercial or private, which the student can play in a sound-proof cubicle adjoining. Elsewhere in the building are other cubicles where individual students with suitable credentials may examine films, either on a 16-mm. projector, or on a viewing apparatus of the Moviola type. Finally, there is a small lecture hall, with accommodation for some 200 people, where public lectures on various aspects of the film are given from time to time.
Quite as important as the facilities provided for the public on the Library premises, however, are the services which it can distribute abroad. In order to see the Portland Vase, one must perforce visit the British Museum; but in the case of a film, it is not the copy itself which is of interest so much as what is seen on the screen. Contrary to general museum practice, therefore, the film archive need not restrict its benefits to those able to visit the archive building, but by the circulation of film prints can extend them to all parts of the country (and even, in our own case, beyond, to the Dominions and Colonies of the Commonwealth).
One of the most active departments of my Utopian National Film Library, therefore, is its Lending Section. It contains 35-mm. and 16-mm. prints of all the most important films in the history of the cinema, from the earliest films of the Lumière brothers to the latest masterpiece withdrawn from commercial circulation: it also has extracts from important films, prepared for the use of lecturers, composite films illustrating particular developments and periods and styles of production, and instructional films on film technique and methods of production; last but not perhaps least, it has a collection of film strips for the use of lecturers. All this material is supplied at reasonable rates of hire to schools, museums, libraries, universities and film societies. The service, in short, is essentially non-commercial and educational. It is available only to those who are enrolled members of a recognised educational group or society.
The Library also has an exhibitions department where traveling exhibitions of stills, wall-charts, art designs, posters and models are prepared for circulation to museums, art galleries and libraries. Each exhibition may be on show at any particular place for anything from a week to a month, and usually an officer is also sent with it to arrange the exhibition, to show parties round, to give public lectures and to show relevant 16-mm. films from the Library. The organisation concerned pays a weekly rental fee which largely covers the cost of the exhibition and its display.
All these are the public services which this ideal archive would perform, but we have still said nothing of the fundamental archive activity on which all this is based, namely, the permanent preservation of films. Film is one of the most ephemeral and perishable materials imaginable. It is bulky and expensive to store, so that film companies junk every copy the moment it has ceased to have any considerable commercial value. Moreover, standard cinematograph film, employing a nitro-cellulose support, is not only highly inflammable, but within a comparatively short time (possibly between fifty and a hundred years) it is liable to become unstable and disintegrate; if kept under unsuitable conditions it will do so much sooner. The chief function of the film archive, therefore, is to acquire copies of historically valuable films and to preserve them in perpetuity by storing them under the best possible conditions.
Films are chosen for preservation by a selection committee. Current commercial films selected are deposited with the archive, as books are deposited with the British Museum Library, under the terms of the Copyright Act. Private films are acquired by gift or purchase. Many films are obtained from archives abroad, either by exchange or purchase.
The copies thus received are never used for projection: for this purpose dupe prints must be made. The originals are treated as master prints, and are kept in specially constructed storage vaults erected on a country site of several acres. The temperature and humidity in the vaults are carefully controlled, and the films are subjected to chemical tests at regular intervals to check their condition. When a print appears unstable under test, a new copy must be made, and this in its turn is preserved. This new copy is made on cellulose acetate stock, which is far more stable than celluloid and also non inflammable. In ten or fifty years’ time the scientists may have found an even more durable substitute.
It is useless, of course, to have a vast quantity of film unless a particular film, or even a particular section of a film, can be readily identified and found. Beside the testing laboratory at the vaults, therefore, stands the cataloguing room, where three or four trained assistants work through the archive’s new acquisitions and catalogue and index them in detail.
This, or something like it, is the National Film Library of the future I like to imagine. How near or how far away it may be I dare not contemplate. A careful assessment of costs indicates that such a Library could be maintained for something less than £50,000 a year, which is roughly a quarter the cost of the British Museum, a third of the cost of the Natural History Museum and a half that of the Science Museum. The benefits it would confer on the public, the student, the apprentice film technician and the film industry (depending so entirely as it does on public interest) are incalculable. The important thing about my idealistic picture for our present purpose, however, is that it represents a goal for which all the national film archives are striving, and towards which they have all begun to move in varying degree. In the United States the Museum of Modern Art Film Library has a theatre in which a great range of film programmes are shown to the public; it runs a well-stocked circulating library of film appreciation programmes for American colleges and universities, and it selects the current films which are to be deposited with the Library of Congress under American copyright law. Here in Great Britain we have as yet no cinema, and our Lending Section is extremely small; on the other hand, we have devoted a great deal of attention to the technique of preservation, and our film vaults and our system of chemical tests are the envy of many other archives. In France and Czechoslovakia, there appears to be a lack of adequate storage facilities, but the Cinémathèque Française and the Czech Film Archive are extremely active in organising both displays of films and exhibitions. The Czech exhibition on Fifty Years of Cinema, which showed first in Prague, and afterwards in Brno and Bratislava, was probably the finest of its kind which has been assembled anywhere. So one could continue through the rest in turn. Each of us, inadequately equipped and financed, is tackling some part of the whole, but never quite the whole; some are only at the beginning. The war has helped none of us, and post-war conditions are scarcely more favourable. Yet the archive movement will grow, and the existing archives themselves will grow, because they are all manned by small groups of enthusiasts who carry the picture of an ideal archive in their minds, and believe that it is worth working for in foul weather or in fair.
Much of the strength of the national archive movement lies in the ability of the national archives to co-operate with each other, to exchange films, museum material and information, and for this purpose they have combined to form an International Federation which has its headquarters in Paris. The post-war conference of the Federation was held last July, and although it is still in the formative stage and has numerous difficulties to surmount, its members have the highest hopes for its future.
Hye Bossin
[First published in Canadian Film Weekly, 26 January 1949, 9.]
In this manifesto Hye Bossin, the editor of the trade journal Canadian Film Weekly (1941–1970), argues that a Canadian film archive is needed to preserve Canadian film heritage, an idea that was developing in many “small” countries at the time.
Canada, even though it has the largest and most successful documentary organisation in the world as a government agency, has yet no film archives.6 Yet there are many Canadian films dating back to the early 1900s. Some were made by government departments, others were shot for the CPR by Guy Bradford, a cameraman imported from England.7 They show pictures of life in another day. Then there are film records of sporting events involving Canadian champions; feature films made before and after World War I in various parts of the Dominion. There are the early newsreels made by Ernest Ouimet of Montreal.8 If some effort is not made to gather these soon they may be lost forever. If searched out now they could provide the basis for a library which could be enlarged by the films of Canadian life which have been made by the National Film Board and others.
A Canadian Film Archive in Ottawa is one of the aims of the Toronto Film Study Group (prospectively the Toronto branch of the National Film Society) which is headed by Gerald Pratley, CBC writer. The purpose of the Canadian Film Archive will be “to trace, catalogue, assemble, exhibit and circulate a library of film programmes so that the motion picture may be studied and enjoyed as any other of the arts is studied and enjoyed.”
This worthy desire to create a Canadian film library equivalent to those of the New York Museum of Modern Art and the British Film Institute should be supported but the first need is a government depository of early pictures of our country.
Another example of the lack of interest in Canadian motion picture industry background is that virtually no history of biography of a local or national nature is to be found in the Toronto Reference Library, probably the largest English language reference library in Canada. Recently this publication offered the library copies of historical and biographical articles which appeared in it during the past eight years. These were welcomed by the Chief Librarian, C.R. Sanderson, and will be placed in scrapbooks.
Canadian industry folk, like their British colleagues, could provide the same type of material from which the History Committee of their Institute worked in preparing material for its book. The Canadian Picture Pioneers, a national organisation, already has much material in its archives. Perhaps it is that organisation which should see that some of it, in acceptable form, finds its way into reference libraries or print.
Even now, when Canada has just begun the march towards its great destiny, it is strange that such a powerful industry and art as the moving picture should be without historic records in places designed to house them. How ridiculous will it seem several generations from now?
Jonas Mekas
[First published in Cinim (UK) 1 (1966): 5–8.]
Written for Cinim, a short-lived journal published by the London Film-Makers’ Co-op, Mekas’s “Open Letter” proselytizes the New American Cinema and how its distribution practices can be deployed in the United Kingdom. Mekas condemns contemporary film festivals and their promotion of “new cinema,” arguing in the process for radically new forms of film exhibition and distribution.
I would like to speak to you through this open letter. Although some specific feelings expressed may be personal, I’ll be speaking in the name of the independent film-makers of America who have delegated me to do so. You don’t often see us at film festivals. Very often, the “independent” American films that you see at Pesaro, at Oberhausen, or Mannheim have very little to do with what we are doing. There is a special festival-minded breed of film-makers, and you find them in every country, who will get their films into any festival, no matter how bad or indifferent their work is. Whereas some of our best film-makers, those who are doing really exciting work, cannot afford the festival prints of their films or, simply, aren’t interested in film festivals. There is a feeling in the air that film festivals have become commercial and bureaucratic fairs at which we would feel very much out of place. Even the most advanced ones, like Pesaro, are working within the same commercial festival tradition; they do not truly reflect what’s really going on in cinema. At least we know they do not represent or reflect the new American cinema. Yes, what about Pesaro? To select the new American films for the current festival, it delegated a French film critic to do it.
Now, this critic, no matter how much we respect him, doesn’t know much about what’s happening in America: his knowledge of American cinema comes from Paris releases and from film festivals. So we told him: we know best what we have, what’s really happening new in our cinema, what would really be of interest for a festival of new cinema. This year, for instance, we would have sent Stan Brakhage’s Songs, Gregory Markopoulos’ Galaxie, Harry Smith’s Heaven and Earth Magic, Tony Conrad’s Flicker, Andy Warhol’s My Hustler, Bruce Baillie’s Quixote. But the festival representative seemed to be very clear in his mind what kind of films he wanted. He had a very definite conception of what “new cinema” is or should be. He wanted something that already corresponded to that conception. He wanted more of “cinéma vérité,” for instance. And he didn’t even look at the truly new and important work done in america today, the work that would have been a real discovery for the festival. And this happens with that festival whose main aim is to serve the cinema.
Or take the Cannes Film Festival. I was asked, this Spring, by the Festival to suggest what, if anything, there is that they should consider bringing to the Semaine de la Critique. I wrote to them approximately this: “When you ask about films suitable for the Semaine de la Critique, you still have in mind the same type of film you saw four years ago. I could suggest a few titles of that kind of cinema—but since our cinema has changed and is still changing, it would be wrong to help you to continue that dream. Yes, there are the other, and truly new films to take to Cannes. But what’s the use even suggesting? What’s the use telling you that Andy Warhol has taken Cinéma Vérité into completely new areas and has produced some of the most important contemporary cinema? Or Brakhage’s Songs? Cannes wouldn’t even consider 8mm films. Or Gerd Stern, or Robert Whitman, or Nam June Paik? They can’t even be previewed! You still think in old terms. You still think that everything that is really good and new in American cinema can be packed up, wrapped up and shipped to you like any other movie, for previewing. This is no longer true. Very often, you have to bring the film-maker, and one or two technicians, and even equipment. For what they are doing, very often are film evenings, cinema evenings, but no films in the usual, conventional sense. These evenings, like some of the evenings of Gerd Stern (USCO), or Andy Warhol, or Jerry Joffen, or Stan Vanderbeek—with multiple projections and multiple sound systems, and with live participation, would shock Cannes into new visual, kinesthetic perceptions and into the cinema of the future. They would realize that there is truly new cinema, that something revolutionary is happening in cinema. Etc. I ended by suggesting six programs to take to Cannes. And what do you think happened? A representative of Cannes came to New York, looked at some familiar work, ignored whatever new and revolutionary was happening, ignored film-makers’ suggestions, and went back to Paris, declaring to the Press, before leaving, that he has found no interesting work done here and that, therefore, the young American directors will not be represented at Cannes this year.
Dear colleagues, film-makers and film critics: the conception of film festivals must be changed. Bureaucracy has got to go. Film-makers should decide what should be shown; they know what’s happening. Money should be used not for importing stars or for publicity but for paying for the prints of the films shown, for the shipping of films, or for importing film-makers, their technicians, their equipment (for inter-media shows). For instance, even if [the] Pesaro representative would have seen and liked Songs or Galaxie, the film-makers wouldn’t [sic] have afforded to make prints of these films for sending to the festival. Cinema is changing, but the film festivals have remained the same—that’s what’s wrong.
I went into the film festival aspect in more detail only to show that the new film-maker (and that goes for all countries) can not trust any commercial (or State; or one that is based on commercial tradition) film financing, film production, film distribution, film exhibition or film promotion set-ups and organizations. we have to start everything from scratch, from the beginning. no compromises, however small.
Five years ago, the young American film-makers got fed up with what we saw around. We started by abandoning all commercial illusions. We started from scratch. We did our work, no matter what distributors or film critics said. The new American cinema grew up like a child, from nothing, not even wanted. Our critics even say that, like children, we don’t listen to our parents; we are irresponsible; we use dirty language; we masturbate; we are oversensitive; and other such things of young natural growth. There is much that they don’t like about us; there is much that isn’t mature or “perfect.” We aren’t even “beautiful” sometimes. Some of us have pimples on our faces. but we refuse to use plastic surgery to change our faces and our souls into the faces and souls you would like to see. Take us as we are, or go your own way—we say. We keep seeing attacks and distortions of our work in French, German, Russian film periodicals—articles usually written by people who have seen only one or two of our films. We stopped bothering about them: we couldn’t care less what they say, because we know that what we are doing is beautiful, is important, is changing the face of cinema around the world, is an expression of the changing times, is coming out of our hearts & out of the needs of our souls, and we have a great responsibility to continue that way, not to compromise it, not to betray it—and the dangers & the temptations are many.
Since all commercial film-distribution and film-financing organizations are set-up on a private business basis and not to help the film-maker to continue making films,—four years ago, the independent film-makers of America organized their own film distribution center, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which is run by the film-makers themselves. We decided not to give our work to any of the commercial distributors. We developed a more human working system. We stuck together, we grew and expanded. Through the Cooperative, we increased our outlets ten-fold. We created a distribution circuit embracing colleges, universities, film societies, art theaters, art galleries and museums.
The circuit is still growing. By now we can make a film for $10,000 and get the money back with no great effort. Many of our films have been sponsored by the Coop, by advancing money from the coming rentals. At this moment we are setting up 100 theaters (friendly theaters) across the country for the distribution of our work. For this purpose a new division has just been created—the Film-Makers’ Distribution Center, which will work in conjunction with the Coop. Fifteen theaters have already pledged to exhibit all our new work. This new set-up, in about a year from now, should make us free to increase our budgets—if the need arises—to $100,000 or even $200,000 with no great risks involved and with no commercial distributor or investor dictating to us what we should or shouldn’t do. To promote the idea of free cinema, of new cinema, and to assist some of our European colleagues, this October we are opening a branch of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in London. Arrangements are being made for a distribution center and for a theater, through which our work will be easily available and with little unnecessary shipping expenses to any place in Europe. Through this London center, we also hope that some of the European new cinema—the European Avant-garde cinema—will be able to reach New York.
We want to stress that the Film-Makers’ Co-operative and the Center do not divide films into any budget, length, or subject categories. We take cinema as a whole. We are letting all film-makers know that any film-maker who has an extra print of his film (all prints at all times at the Coop and the Center remain the property of the film-maker) can send it to the New York or London branches of the Coop and the film will be distributed, no matter how much or how little it cost to make. We are not categorizing films. Each film at the Coop requires special treatment, each film has its own audience; each film has its own life. At this point, we would like to urge you—and I direct this Open Letter to the independent film-makers of the world, to anybody whose life is cinema, who is making and must make films—to create Film-Makers’ Cooperatives of your own, in your own countries. There is no other visible solution. There is no other way of escaping the grip of the commercial set-ups. This net of international Coops could then exchange among themselves and help each other beyond the boundaries of their own countries. The boundaries are bound to disappear and very soon. With the changing times, with the new spirit in the air, with communications and speed increasing, it would be too bad if we were to delay action. We have to surround the earth with our films, lovingly, like with our hands. We have to abandon the commercial distribution methods. With whom are we competing? With ourselves? The film-makers should set up cooperative distribution centers, coops, and eliminate all the competitive and negative spirit that still pervades cinema. Let’s not worry about the big commercial success and the audience of millions. If the health and freedom of our art needs it we should be willing to retreat to our own homes, to our friends’ homes: cinema as a home movie. The art of cinema can not be created with money but with love; it can not be created by compromises but by purity of our attitude. Certain simple truths sound like preaching. But I don’t mean to preach.
This is an expression of an attitude which I share with many other film-makers.
A note on the Financial Set-Up of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative: The film-maker deposits his print with the Coop. That print is his membership card. During our yearly meeting, film-makers elect an advisory board of film-makers to supervise and to advise the running of the Coop. The film-maker remains the owner of all his prints. He can take them out whenever he wants to. No contracts of any kind are signed. Trust is the basis at the Coop. That’s the first condition. Income: 75% of the rentals (from gross) goes to the film-maker, 25% goes to the Coop, to cover the running expenses, the shipping etc. The London branch, the rentals in Europe being much lower, will (at least for the time being) operate on 50% to the Coop, 50% to the film-maker (from the gross) basis. The film-maker is allowed (and encouraged) to distribute the same film through other distributors—as long as the other distributor doesn’t object to the Coop’s distribution of the film and works on humanly acceptable terms. We have been trying to break up the monopolistic film distribution idea. It would be ridiculous to try to sell, for instance, a book through only one bookshop, or rent it thru only one library. But that is what we still find in film distribution. Films should be distributed through as many different distribution centers as possible. By this coming Christmas the Coop is placing film prints, on 16mm and 8mm for sale in bookshops, in record shops and in general stores. It is time that we revolutionize, bring up to date the methods of film distribution and exhibition. The prints of our films soon will be in every home, on the shelves, like books, so that one can pick them up and look at them whenever one feels like doing so. Film-makers of the world: let’s do it now. Let’s go home and start from there. Let us not waste time with any of the old-fashioned set-ups: they are not for us. They are ugly, sick leftovers of egoism and competition. They are from another world. They don’t wish us any good. They drag us down. Let’s spread the new vibrations of the spirit across the world and keep us growing and keep us in love.
Which brings me to my last point: the social engagement. There is all this talk going about our being irresponsible, about the new cinema (all over the world) being socially disengaged. Don’t listen to that. We are the most deeply engaged cinema there is. When the film critics say that we are not reflecting the social realities, they mean we are not reflecting those social realities which they think are important and those are, usually, the realities (or aspects of reality) of yesterday, not today. Film critics and the public go by inertion [sic] carrying yesterday’s engagements on their backs. Artists, when we are really creating from our hearts, we deal with the changing, new realities, new content of the spirit, and we say that we are closest to the pulse of man’s heart, we know where it hurts him and what he needs and where he is going or should go. Let’s not become weak, let’s not give in to the blabber of the press, or film-distributors, or film critics, or politicians: we have to do what we have to do.
During the last two years, Film-Makers’ Cooperative has sent Expositions of our work to various places of the world. We are watching what is happening in new cinema around the world. And often we are alarmed. Most of the time, what’s called the New Cinema by Cahiers du Cinéma or Cinema 66 we find is only another variant of the same old cinema. Beware: Dorian Grey is at large! Dorian Grey, the dandy of the supposed New Cinema, will die soon and you’ll see his shriveled, dry, old body appearing slowly from under the beautiful make-up. Beware of film-critics: with their terms and categories they keep you tied down to certain established ideas of the “new.” Film-makers: there is very little New Cinema at Pesaro, or Cannes, or Oberhausen, or Karlovy-Vary. Let’s not fool ourselves. There will be little new cinema at any film festival unless the festivals change; change immediately and drastically and totally. The feeling is in the air, however, that things are beginning, will begin to move, are moving. Already, and the movement will increase in speed, until it reaches the speed of light and sparks fire. The commercial, competitive empires are crumbling. Let’s not even waste energy in fighting them, in kicking them: surely, they will fall by themselves. It is more important to do our own creative work, the work of building, no matter on what budget, on what size of film or how long a film; no matter whether film festivals or theaters will or will not show our work; no matter how many people will see it: we have to do it the way we feel it should be done when we really listen to ourselves, our deepest intuitions. That’s the only way of doing it. That’s what we (I) wanted to communicate to you. A few facts about ourselves, a few feelings, a few passions. And we hope you are with us. We are with you. There is really no distance between us.
Committee for the Defense of La Cinémathèque française: Jean Renoir, Alain Resnais, Henri Alekan, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Kast, Jacques Rivette, François Truffaut, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, J.-G. Albicocco, Alexandre Astruc, Roland Barthes, Robert Benayoun, Claude Berri, Mag Modard, Robert Bresson, Marcel Brion, Philippe de Broca, Marcel Carné, Claude Chabrol, H. Chapier, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Philippe Labro, Jean-Paul le Chanois, Claude Lelouch, Claude Mauriac, Jean Rouch
[First published in Cahiers du cinéma 201 (1968). Translated by Scott MacKenzie.]
A call-to-arms published in Cahiers du cinéma to raise funds to defend Henri Langlois, the founder of the Cinémathèque française, who had just been ousted by André Malraux, DeGaulle’s culture minister. Filmmakers from around the world blocked their films from being screened until Langlois was reinstated; the demonstrations outside the Cinémathèque in April 1968 in many ways set the stage for the events of May ’68 in Paris.
The Committee for the Defense of la Cinémathèque française proposes: 1) the reestablishment of the normal functioning of la Cinémathèque française, 2) to take all actions to respect the integrity of la Cinémathèque française and its liberty. The Committee will continue its activity beyond the reinstatement of Henri Langlois as Artistic and Technical Director, a reinstatement required by all the film profession and the spectators of la Cinémathèque française.
Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, and Michael Snow
[First published in Filmmakers Newsletter 2, no. 7 (1969): 1–2.]
This letter, written to MoMA, speaks to the desire on the part of experimental filmmakers for MoMA not to function as a gatekeeper in regard to New American cinema and argues for the need of a true film museum that will preserve cinematic works for the future.
To the Public Hearings Committee Art Workers’ Coalition
Gentlemen:
As filmmakers, we wish to bring to your attention the following points concerning the Museum of Modern Art as a whole, and its Film Department in particular:
1) The Museum’s repeated assertion of its own “private” nature, in reply to a variety of requests from the art community on behalf of the whole community, is socially retrograde, reminiscent of 19th Century laissez-faire arguments. That private institutions used and supported by the public have public responsibilities is knowledge at least as old as the Sherman Act.
2) In view of its tax-exempt status as a nonprofit organization, the Museum is, like churches, quite obviously supported by the public. Therefore, like churches, it should limit its admission charge to a voluntary donation.
3) We support plastic and graphic artists in their demand that the Museum return to the terms of its 1947 agreement with the Whitney and Metropolitan Museums, whereunder work was to be sold after 20 years, the proceeds of such sales going to finance the purchase and exhibition of new works by living artists. However, we retain important reservations with respect to film. It is plain that the archival functions so admirably fulfilled thus far by the Film Dept. are in no way comparable to the formation of a permanent collection by the Fine Arts Dept., since the work of the former is to preserve for future circulation artifacts which run high risks in the present, while the latter, in an attempt to eliminate present risks, tends to limit severely the availability of works or remove them from view entirely.
4) We demand the fullest possible autonomy for the Museum’s Film Dept. consonant with the acknowledged kinship film bears to the other visual arts. The Museum at large must recognize both the separateness of film with respect to the other fine arts and its absolute parity with them; or risk the embarrassment of being the last intellectual organism in the community to do so.
5) In line with this new departmental autonomy and recognition of film, we demand that the Museum allocate appropriate funds to the Film Dept. to carry on its work and expand its programs.
We gloss the word “appropriate” as follows:
The Museum has reportedly admitted that the largest number of its paying visitors come to see the daily film programs. We therefore suggest that the Museum give to the Film Dept., for its own uses, all admissions paid during the sixty minutes immediately prior to each film showing plus a portion of the total operating budget and endowment income proportionate to the number of membership cards shown during that same time period.
Of course the Department must retain the entire net proceeds of its rental program and of all Museum publications relating to film. In addition, it must be made possible that the Department receive, for its specific use, grants, gifts, and bequests as well as a fraction of all monies left or made available to the Museum at large, in accordance with the importance of film art to the community (as evidenced by its admitted drawing power).
6) Such expanded resources should make possible the elimination of certain deficiencies and abuses in the following respects:
6a) The Film Dept. has recently undertaken to acquire new films for its Archive. We consider this necessary and laudable. But the Dept. has been driven, unwillingly and presumably through penury, to ask for films at or near laboratory cost.
Now we are aware of the Museum’s general policy of buying paintings and sculpture below market (i.e. gallery) prices, and we deplore that policy for its bumptious immaturity of viewpoint. But to ask for films “at cost” starves our persons and insults our art, however much we may admire the archival program and wish to help it, since it presumes to single us out among all artists and, indeed, among all persons who perform work in our society—in questioning our right to be paid for our work at all.
Furthermore, we are thus asked to become philanthropists, benefactors of the institution, in spite of the fact that film is an art made cruelly expensive by commercial rates (tax deductible for commercial movie makers as “legitimate business expenses”). As for philanthropy, that is typically an activity of persons of great means who make no art at all.
6b) The Film Dept., desiring to show new work to the public, has been unable to pay either a nominal rental (about $1 per minute) for the use of films shown to large paid audiences or any honorarium to filmmakers appearing personally. This must be from sheer lack of money, since members of the Department have repeatedly expressed regret over this state of affairs.
6c) In a tentative agreement of October 31, 1967, between the Film Department and the New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative, the Dept. was to distribute new films under its regular rental system on an agreeable basis of shared costs and returns. Filmmakers viewed such an arrangement favorably as tending to show new work to a wide audience: film is, after all, an art to be seen and enjoyed and not merely buried in storage vaults. However, nothing has come of that agreement—presumably because the Museum would not spare the Film Dept. funds to hold up its end of the bargain.
7) We are profoundly puzzled by the Film Department’s action in arrogating to itself the privileges of a pre-selection jury for a recent international film festival, the XV Kurzfilmtage at Oberhausen, Germany. In a word, they decided who might and might not have their films shown abroad. Bearing in mind that the Museum was, in all probability, acting on a request from the festival organizers, we ask nevertheless whether the Department will attempt to pre-screen films for the next Belgian festival, for instance; and whether, had they done so for the last one, they would, in fact, have chosen the films which, at Knokke-le-Zoute, bore witness to the tremendous innovative vitality of the New American cinema.
But there is a more crucial problem hiding here.
Film festivals had their origin in a desire on the part of responsible persons of sensibility to bring new films to their own locales. Prizes were offered as bait. The films brought visitors, the visitors spent money, the innkeepers were delighted.
But now festival juries presume to judge which films are “best.” In a world which let the Divine Comedy lie fallow for centuries and lost half the work of Bach, they decide which works are to be rewarded and which ignored.
As an institution dedicated to expounding the most advanced principles in the arts, the Museum must instigate a continuing dialogue in the film community, concerning whether the competitive mode is really germane to the arts.
There is a crucial distinction between the roles of middleman and mediator, and the Museum’s usefulness to the community rests precisely upon a constant effort to maintain that distinction in critical focus.
Meanwhile, we offer for the Museum’s reflection the fact that last month the good burghers fattened in the festival town of Oberhausen, while in America the vivid and ebullient art film went begging. Does the Museum love the art of film as we do? Then they must perform an act of love for our art that will somehow compare with our own in making it.
8) Finally, we wish to state, both as a reminder to the Museum and as encouragement to those working in other arts and now anxiously considering alternatives to the Museum-and-gallery hierarchy, that filmmakers long ago abandoned all hope of using the established commercial channels for distribution and exhibition. We have our own cooperative distributors, our own theaters, our own publications and lecture bureau—but: above all, our own free and uncoerced judgment of what may be done with our work, by whom, how, and when. We feel that we best serve our own needs and, ultimately, those of the community as a whole by these means.
We have always had a school: the Museum’s film department was our grammar school and university, as 42nd Street and our own Cinematheque have been our graduate school. The film department was and is unique in the world, and no one has valued the Museum more, or for better reason, than we filmmakers.
What we do not have is a Museum, an impersonal public repository where our most permanent work will be maintained in trust for the whole people, to teach, to move, and to delight them: because we believe that art belongs to the whole people. It is part of our small permanent human wealth, since it is never diminished in use; it can be possessed only in understanding and never through mere ownership.
So we call upon the Museum of Modern Art to become our museum, in the largest sense. As filmmakers, as artists, and as human beings, we cannot demand less.
P. Adams Sitney
[First released upon the opening of Anthology Film Archives in New York on 1 December 1970. First published in P. Adams Sitney, ed., The Essential Cinema: Essays on the Films in the Anthology Film Archives, vol. I (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1975), vi–xii.
Anthology Film Archives was founded in 1969 by Jonas Mekas, Jerome Hill, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, and Stan Brakhage. The goal of the archive was to establish a comprehensive collection of the “masterworks” of art cinema (broadly defined by experimental film, European cinema, and some silent Hollywood films) that would screen continuously and be called “The Essential Cinema.” The following manifesto, written by P. Adams Sitney, sets out this (never completed) goal at the inauguration of Anthology in 1970.
When it opened on December 1, 1970, Anthology Film Archives issued the following manifesto, which summarized its polemical position:
The cinematheques of the world generally collect and show the multiple manifestations of film: as document, history, industry, mass communication. . . . Anthology Film Archives is the first film museum exclusively devoted to the film as an art. What are the essentials of the film experience? Which films embody the heights of the art of cinema? The creation of Anthology Film Archives has been an ambitious attempt to provide answers to these questions; the first of which is physical—to construct a theater in which films can be seen under the best conditions; and second critical—to define the art of film in terms of selected works which indicate its essences and parameters.
One of the guiding principles of this new film museum is that a great film must be seen many times. For that reason the entire collection will be presented in repeated cycles. With three different programs each day, an anthology of one hundred programs (approximately equivalent to our present collection) can be repeated monthly. In this way frequent periodic viewing will be possible for the dedicated spectator. The cycle will also provide a unique opportunity for students of the medium to see a concentrated history of the art of film within a period of four or five weeks. One would have to travel extensively and spend a few years in film museums to acquire the cinematic education of equal magnitude.
Alan Lomax
[First published in Filmmakers Newsletter 4, no. 4 (1971): 31–38.]
Alan Lomax’s (1915–2002) commitment to ethnography and ethnomusicology was quite single-handedly what preserved much of the American folk, country, and blues musical traditions in the early to mid-twentieth century. First at the Library of Congress from 1937 to 1942, and subsequently on his own, Lomax recorded folksinger Woody Guthrie, blues singers Lead Belly and Muddy Waters, and jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton, among countless others. His manifesto extends Lomax’s philosophy of recording music and the spoken word, adapting that philosophy to cinema and calling for a national ethnographic archive to preserve these films for posterity.
One of the great opportunities and urgent tasks of this generation is for the anthropologist to use the sound film to make a complete record of the life ways of the human species.
The human race has come to a big turning in the road—to the successful climax of man’s long effort to control his physical environment. Many, many ingenious systems of organization and communication have been evolved in this long struggle to maintain the continuity of the species and to satisfy increasingly complex needs. Now most of these cultural types will fast disappear. If action is not taken now, not only will science have lost invaluable data, but much of the human race will have lost its history and its ancestors, as well as a vast treasure of human creativity in adaptive patterns, in communication systems, and in life styles.
Electronic devices now make it easy to record, store, retrieve, and reproduce these patterns. Moreover, it is clear from recent studies of style and culture (such as my own on song and dance) that a great part of this data is still there to be recorded, at least in vestigial form. Furthermore, enough film exists and enough film analysis has been done to convince me that no data is comparable to what we can have from a well-organized sound-film survey of our species. The work of Bateson, Mead, Birdwhistell, and their colleagues shows that the impress of culture and communicative models is captured on film and may be retrieved from it. Good sound films are multi-leveled and almost infinitely rich recordings of multi-layered, clearly structured inter-action patterns, communication patterns, and stylistic controls.
But not only can ethnographic film be a fundamental research tool for the historian and social scientist in the future, it will also serve three other functions:
1) A full and eloquent sound-film record will enable the whole human race to know itself in objective terms, and the use of this material will make for a communication system that represents all culture and all histories, not just our own. The principles of cultural equity will come into function in this better balanced communicative system. Subordinate to this larger view are the purposes of education within our own culture. If we establish a baseline in planetary self-knowledge, the educational needs of the young people in this culture will also be taken care of.
2) This total human record will be a resource for our less varied future—of body style, behavior pattern, group organization, mind and body skills—all of which can be represented and captured easily in film, almost none of which can be communicated through print, since film records the whole of a process, print only the steps. Thus the achievements in speech, in rhythm, and in body can be stored up for the human future.
3) Feedback and cultural renewal. We do not know how much demoralization the loss of culture, language, and tradition bring about, except that it is great and long-lasting. All strong cultures depend upon a matured and crystallized self-image. As things are at present, the simpler economies and nonliterate folk of the planet—in whom our human variety really reposes—struggle vainly to maintain a healthy self-awareness. They need technical help in preserving and adapting their extra-verbal and oral traditions, for there is no time to reduce them all to print. In any case, print leaves out the non-verbal.
• • •
Even more urgent is the matter of feedback—the voices and the images of the underprivileged are, unlike ours, seldom or never amplified and repeated by the big communication systems. Quite naturally then, these people fall into despair—their enforced silence convinces them that they have nothing to contribute. But broadcasting sound and film, especially song, dance, drama, narrative, ritual, and the like, can put the human race on terms of parity, communication-wise, for all aesthetic systems carry their own message of perfection. For example, the vitality of folkways, given parity, is evidenced by their comeback in India and the Balkans. We have seen in the U.S. how the expressive styles of the backward Southern Appalachian and Southern Black communities have thrived and developed (even though subject to a corrupt commercial influence) simply because they had communication space on records and radio. If we film now with the purpose of feeding back to the carriers of all human traditions, we will learn, as we work, about how to foster all culture and all expressive models. We will have gained time and somewhat postponed the otherwise inevitable cultural grey-out.
It is only within such a broad perspective that the plans for a national ethnographic film program ought to be conceived. In what follows I shall not address myself to detailed matters concerning the establishment of the National Film Archive, its location, and its techniques for preservation, for others have been at work on this and have made excellent suggestions. One point, however, should be obvious. There is in no one country the finances or the housing to take care of this gigantic enterprise. The U.S. Ethnographic Film Archive should have the responsibility of looking after only a certain portion of the footage and the task, but beyond this it must collaborate and work out standards of indexing, filming, and preservation with other centers in this country and abroad. Therefore, it is of primary importance to establish the ethnographic film enterprise on an international basis. Americans were slow to begin making ethnographic films, and even now our performance is not equal to that of the French, the Italians, the Germans, the Canadians, and the British. The job cannot be done without the Musée de L’Homme, Gosfilmofund, BBC, the Canadian Film Board, the German Encyclopedia Cinematographica, and other foreign groups. Therefore, a major and primary task is to establish these working relationships, and for this we need a minimal plan that all can agree upon. The following proffers some ideas for this plan.
Our first obligation as scientists is to make sure that, minimally, we have a filmed record of all the main families of human culture. G.P. Murdock and his center have developed a Standard Cultural Sample of reasonable size. My own recent factor analysis of the Murdock sample indicates that a minimum of about sixty culture styles could represent the full range of human social and expressive structures. Within some such frame we can begin work on the Standard Filmed Sample—in terms of the following steps:
1) Study the extent of ethnographic footage and determine which members of the World Sample have been filmed with reasonable adequacy (as have the Netsilik, the Kung, and the Miao, for example).
2) Promulgation of a listing (or preferably a basic library) of this Preliminary Film Sample so that ethnologists and kineseologists here and abroad can begin to use it and to prepare recommendations for further filming that will represent the range of culture patterns.
3) Plans for films to complete the sample. Our prime goal here is a standard library of human culture to be used by all social scientists—a universally shared body of data to serve as a source for illustration and a base for discussion. Thus the whole human species will become known for the first time.
4) Establishment of standards. A commission on ethnographic film should be convened in order to make preliminary recommendations for: a) minimal standards for filming; b) an outline of activities and topics so that future film documents will be more comparable; c) plans to meet the requirements of film analysts; d) editorial and indexing procedures that will protect the data.
5) An International Commission. Since the cooperation of museums, television networks, and governments will be necessary to finance this task, one necessary step is to establish a working commission concerned with the question. This group should be small and should bring together the best of film administrators whose job is to carry out the suggestions of the ethnographic planning group.
Film is the most flexible and most honest medium to represent the cultures which are partially extinct or on the edge of disappearing. This enterprise, since it is so extensive, cannot be subject to the level of scientific control applied to the Standard Cultural Sample. Again, however, the same approach may be helpful.
1)From the findings of the Committee on Urgent Anthropology and elsewhere, establish a list of those cultures that ought to be filmed immediately.
2)Research the extant footage of these cultures.
3)Establish a Committee for Urgent Ethnographic Film to commission low-budget films of the cultures that urgently require documentation.
4)Set up a plan and develop a handbook so as to involve all interested agencies and individuals in shooting high-quality footage of these cultures. Here the use of 8mm film should be encouraged.
5)Feedback. This film should, of course, be archived. But perhaps the most important function is in situ and in the culture territories it represents. Our most important job is to make sure that culture members see their own films, understand them, and offer suggestions for their improvement. I therefore recommend that careful experimental work in feedback be initiated immediately. Moreover, the United Nations and other agencies should be brought into the picture to initiate feedback in all world areas.
6)Example: North America. Although the cultures of North America have probably been studied more thoroughly by linguists and ethnologists than those of any other continent, this came early; and the amount of available modern film of Indian behavior is paltry compared to other world regions (such as Australia, for instance). The full cooperation of the tribes is essential to this work, and this is a problem, since American Indians have good reason to feel that our science has made little contribution to their welfare. It may be possible to enlist the help a well as the financial interest of the tribes in making these films, provided they are convinced of their importance for the Indian. Thus far in our work with Choreometrics we have been able to find behaviors that clearly establish the antiquity, the staying-power, and the aesthetic validity of Amerindian continental and area culture styles. Such evidence can win Indian cooperation in creating an Amerindian film record to match those of other continents. This enterprise is “urgent anthropology” so far as the American anthropologists are concerned, and so it seems to me, too.
7)The number of subjects that come under the heading of urgent ethnographic films is very large, but so also are the number of 8 and 16mm filmmakers who want to help. The Commission on Urgent Anthropology must set up and continually improve standards for the non-specialist filmmaker or field worker who, in the past, shot so much of the best documentary film. If we provide a handbook to guide the amateur and training programs for the field cameramen, we can hope to put all the cultures and unique life ways of mankind in the film record before modern technology communications have obliterated them.
The total corpus of film of human beings shot and stored since the invention of the movie camera is the richest data bank of human behavior we have. One of the ironies of this era is that the American motion picture industry has not built up a Motion Picture Museum—an International Archive of Sound and Vision—as a monument to Hollywood and the art that all the world regards as so American. But perhaps the Ethnographic Film Archive must come first, to prove what a fabulously interesting and useful place such an electronic museum could be. At this writing, of course, the cinema corpus is virtually unused by the human sciences, both because the stuff is so hard to get at and so expensive, and because film analysis techniques are new and unfamiliar. Only in the past two decades have techniques for the study of human behavior on film—such as kinesics and its offshoots—begun to develop. Only quite recently have social scientists begun to turn to filmmaking, and then too frequently it’s as if they were or wished to become great artists in the medium. Indeed, most ethnographic film conferences consist of a display of the art of cinema, in terms of films, most of which are simply bad, rather than in discussion of the complex and pertinent questions of what is in the films, how film can be used as data, and so on. Today there is a rush toward the field, but all too often as a means of personal expression and with little consideration, in many cases, of the scientific interests which should be paramount in anthropology. Without, therefore, gainsaying the importance of additions that filmmakers now wish to make to the cinematic corpus, the anthropologist is obliged, it strikes me, to find, evaluate, and learn to utilize the relevant footage that already exists.
I am impatient with colleagues who demand that before they begin to work they must have footage that meets all their research requirements. For me this is a technique for postponement. In the first place, many of the cultures and much of the behavioral patterns in this footage can never be filmed again—the cultures are gone and the life ways have changed. Second, these documents give our fledgling science the time-depth it needs—provided we are willing to do what every historian does: learn to evaluate the evidence he has. In other words, since motion pictures of human behavior are layer cakes of structured communication patterns, there is ethnographic data of some sort in all documentary footage (which hasn’t been chopped absolutely to pieces), if not at a fine-grained level, then at a grosser one. This is not to say that we should not have data standards and that they should not improve, but rather that our fledgling science should learn to use what is already in the record. A primary problem is, then, to find and preserve the extant footage.
Ted Carpenter and many others have discovered that there is a world of invaluable ethnographic film in the hands of amateur enthusiasts, government bureaus, and movie and TV companies. One learns with shock that it is a regular practice of business to destroy old footage in order to save storage bills, and one knows (from experiences with the recording industry) that the documentary, the everyday, the folk, the primitive is always the first to go, while all prints of Pola Negri and Rudolph Valentino are preserved forever. It should become our business to change those attitudes. An initial display of research interest and enthusiasm about what the industry has done would certainly slow this process down (that, too, we found with the recording industry). We could then face the problem of paying storage until we can store this footage, electronically or otherwise. Stimulating examples of using this footage as scientific evidence, either in compiled films or in writing about human history, would also tend to slow this process of destroying data.
It is even more shocking to learn that most editors, including very many ethnographic filmmakers, cut up the original negs in the process of editing their display film, so that much valuable field data is destroyed. No ethnographic documentaries should be financed, sponsored, or shot unless there is a budget to keep one or two complete prints of all footage with a complete shot list. An International Film Commission or other appointed body should take the following steps:
1) Through the United Nations, or by other means, address an appeal to all the government agencies that make film—especially the TV corporations such as BBC, RAJ, and others—briefing them and asking for their cooperation in preserving and making their footage available. Some film ethnographer in each country can then, hopefully, be commissioned to examine and report on collections of the ethnographic film there.
2) Ask Margaret Mead and Ted Carpenter, as a committee of two, to go after the participation of the American film industry. Also, we should find Senators who are interested in sponsoring the legislation that will show the government concern.
3) Commission two full-time researchers—in the U.S. and Europe—to look over the field. Eventually the International Commission on Ethnographic Film should have several full-time researchers—in North America, Europe, South America, the Soviet Union, the Mid-East, Near East, India, and the Far East. Here again, of course, the Europeans are far ahead of the Americans and should lead—Jean Rouch and his Ethnographic Film Center, the people at the Encyclopedia Cinematographica in Germany.
4) Establish a program of graduate degrees in film research, both here and abroad.
5) Before systematic viewing and indexing begins, a computerizable system for film subject and sequence indexing should be devised for all researchers to use.
6) Initiate the development of an international system of electronic storage and retrieval of sound-on-film and videotape.
Few film professionals are yet trained in the techniques for seeing the structure in behavior. This training in observation can bring rigor into the human sciences and an undreamed-of sensitivity to the ethnographic filmmakers. The savants in the field—scholars like Gregory Bateson, Haxey Smith, Margaret Mead, Paul Byers, William Condon. Albert Schefflen, and especially Raymond Birdwhistell—should be aided in setting up orientation and training programs.
Several methods exist, each useful for working at a different depth in the visible stream. Among them are: Micro-analysis of inter-personal synchrony (William Condon); the kinesis-linguistic level (Ray Birdwhistell); and the Choreometric cross-cultural rating.
Each of these ways in will contribute to an emerging science of human ethnology. An important step, still to be taken, is to develop the concepts and the methods by means of which the social science filmmaker can record the gross visible patterns of familial, community, economic, and political systems at work.
It would be possible to hedge this beautiful field about with such a thicket of rules and caveats that it would lose the independent and creative souls, like Flaherty, who have shot so much of the best ethnographic footage. This would be disastrous, for in order to reach and move the mass audience, ethnography wants all the art, all the cinematic skill it can enlist. The field will continue to need big, beautiful films, as well as straightforward data, and both needs can be met. The documentary artist can, as a side-line, shoot some of the footage science requires, so long as its specifications are kept reasonably simple and clear. To help the professional (with his commitment to the mass media) avoid perpetuating visual and cultural stereotypes is a subtler problem. Here visual anthropology can make a major contribution as it learns more about how culture pattern is symbolized in visible behavior. First there are other, more obvious problems created by amateurs playing Flaherty, by professionals using a shooting and editing style suitable for gangster films, but especially by those who make footage that is technically bad and painfully dehumanizing. Incompetent and insensitive cameramen are simply belittling the underprivileged people of the world in the name of truth and documentary filming. There is an ocean of ethnographic footage faulted by wrong exposures and focus, demeaning angles, unkind lighting, follow-shots that miss, and endless scenes in which the cameraman’s awkwardness is reflected in the bodies of his victims. One frequent and maddening practice is to pose a village group like a police line-up and shoot along the row of nervous faces from slightly above. Such inexpert and unsympathetic camerawork and lighting is not to be condoned and should not be supported, since the footage is likely to be the principal surviving record of the ancestors of many human groups.
Another besetting sin is the eternal use of the close-up and the endless zooming-in to shoot faces and hands. This is a bad but understandable practice in the West where the hands and face are the only uncovered body parts, but makes no sense at all when simpler, undraped peoples are being photographed. It reflects the cameraman’s nervous search for something he can like and understand, but distorts the event. Constant change of distance and angle and dramatic editing that makes hash of the continuity of interaction destroys the value of the filmed data, imposing the conventions of the Western art film on non-Western behavior. Mead and Birdwhistell long ago observed that when a cameraman changed shots it was because he couldn’t bear to look any longer, and they advocate the use of fixed, automatic cameras in gathering data. Sandor Kirsch has found that the European film editor cuts his film to a tempo of 5 to 8 seconds per edit—about breath rate. In the Choreometric survey we found that even the best of filmmakers shot and chopped their footage to fit the dimensions of Western movement form, no matter what its source or phrase organization happened to be. There can be no question that documentary film will be more truthful when filmmakers learn how to shoot and edit within the conventions of the visible communication system employed by those being filmed. Basic elements such as the use of space, energy, timing, and body parts emphasized, along with the subtler interaction and communication patterns, change drastically from one culture region to another. Documentaries filmed with these considerations in mind should not only be more truthful but more beautiful as well. Therefore, since the means now exist for discovering these visual and behavioral conventions, the collaboration of visual anthropologists and filmmakers will certainly be productive of better films. A set of minimum standards, including some of the following suggestions, would help immediately.
1) No one should be backed or encouraged to film in the field unless he is not only a competent but also an empathetic cameraman. Grant committees should have expert review boards to sift out the culls.
2) Practicing filmmaking on primitive or folk groups should be frowned upon. They are unlikely to be filmed twice. Thus this footage may be the only record many groups will ever have of their forebears.
3) A certain proportion of all ethnographic film footage should consist of uninterrupted long and midshots of whole groups in which the observer can study the interaction of all present, in context. A kinesic committee should set up the ground rules for this footage.
4) Filmmakers should be trained to observe and adapt their shooting style to the main behavioral patterns of the culture.
5) A minimal list of situations and behaviors should be photographed in each culture—main productive cycle, child rearing, family meals, dancing, free interaction, etc., etc.—This list should also be standardized.
6) Wherever possible, shooting should be done in synchronous sound or with lavish use of wild-track sound. All sound and music in the finished film (narration excluded) should be from the place.
7) The negative or one inter-neg copy of all field footage should be labeled and stored.
8) Editing should, so far as possible, reflect the non-verbal conventions of the culture from which the picture comes, not those of the editor.
9) Finally and most important—the ethnographic film, wherever possible, should be shot, supervised, or at least planned in collaboration with the most knowledgeable ethnologist, folklorist, or social scientist available.
There are at least five audiences for ethnographic film, all with different requirements.
1) The people and the culture who figure in the films should get to see this footage whenever possible, both in local screenings and over local TV. The ethnologist has a strong motivation to give these showings, for at them he can learn more about how the people see their own culture. This is the place where field use of videotape machines should make for great progress in anthropology. Even so, the healthy effect of feedback should be the principal goal. Indeed, the social function of these showings, per culture or culture area, would be the same as our daytime serials, women’s hours, sports shows, newscasts, interview shows, etc.—the reinforcement of culture pattern.
2) For the people in the surrounding nation or culture, the needs, situation, and potential of the group need to be better understood in the group. Tactful, regional, big-media use of the footage should be part of any overall film plan, wherever possible. Emphasis might fall on the inter-dependency of groups in an ecological territory.
3) Scientific analysts will want all or part of the unedited footage. Split screen, slow motion and speech stretching, close-ups, and rapidly iterating film loops—every laboratory optical trick in the business can serve the purpose of scientific illustration. Our national archive should have a large special effects department to serve the profession. At any rate, scientific editing of footage will often differ from that used for other types of audiences.
4) Students. There are at least two audiences—children and young adults—and at least three new sophisticated teaching approaches in various stages of development:
a) The cultural episode, as developed by Tim Asch and John Marshall, with its multi-dimensional, in-depth treatment of cultural motifs that give the “feel” of character and motivation;
b) The stylistic comparative approach where the student gains a world perspective by applying a set of qualitative measures cross-culturally;
c) The total experience, in which the student views then studies a whole way of life.
In this classroom slot there are many approaches and scores of films, and perhaps a certain lack of sophistication. It’s my feeling that if more emphasis were put on field technique and scientific analysis of the footage, the effectiveness of films in the classroom would quickly improve. The problem is not how to teach anthropology, but how anthropology can use film to illumine the human destiny. Without any method to work through to the structures of visible human events, teachers and students often have very little to talk about after a film viewing.
5) The General Audience. This is the audience that too many ethnographic filmmakers aim to capture, without the means or the money or the knowhow. We are all so caught up in the Hollywood success pattern that we feel that if a film doesn’t make it on American TV or in general theatrical distribution, it is somehow a failure in the medium. One tends to forget the enormous 16mm and foreign audiences of today, the huge 8mm and cartridge audiences just around the corner, as well as the scientific and humane uses, referred to above, which should be the central concerns of the anthropologist. Even so, the splendid success of the Netsilik film on CBS last spring was wonderful news. It shows us that the very best field film can win the great mass audience for the people and the ideas we cherish, if ethnographers have the money, time, and the right collaboration. Yet it is important to remember that the Netsilik was a one-shot affair, instantly swamped in the tide of ordinary TV, and that, even in Europe, where ethnographic film is regularly programmed, it is a drop in the bucket and without very notable effect on public attitudes. One reason, I suspect, is that the members of our practical Western culture do not like to look at their victims. But another is that anthropologists have not been able to make quite clear what their films were saying. If films about the animal world outsell our views of culture pattern, this is because we do not motivate our audiences to look at—nor teach them to see—what we see in the footage, as the natural sciences have. The public has a great interest in the natural environment and the fate of threatened animal species, but shows little concern about the disappearance of cultures.
A far greater intellectual and emotional feedback can come from ethnographic film when we learn how to look at it. Here is the real educational problem, here is a genuine goal for a scientific discipline—to teach man how to see and understand the structures of human behavior in their visible manifestations. That is what the study of body language, movement style, and the total context of communication has to offer. With the teaching of Birdwhistell, Mead, Schefflen, or Bartenieff, the most prosaic footage of the most ordinary human event becomes endlessly fascinating. The public will find it so as well when they discover that sensitive filming and sophisticated viewing will bring enriched understanding of the big human problems—communication, personal development, mating, child-rearing, work, illness, and peace.
Scott Miller Berry and Stephen Kent Jusick
[Originally circulated as a flyer announcing the birth of Brooklyn Babylon Cinema, 6 November 1996.]
The “Brooklyn Babylon Cinema Manifesto” demonstrates the importance of postpunk, queer, and DIY cultures in the creation of microscenes in the face of mainstream cinema and the domination of old guard avant-garde by capital. This manifesto is emblematic of the third generation American independent cinema scene, where high art aspirations are eschewed and a profoundly political interaction with popular culture comes to the forefront of experimental work. The two cofounders of “Brooklyn Babylon” continue to support queer and experimental work outside mainstream galleries and festivals: Jusick is now Executive Director of MIX NYC, the New York queer experimental film festival, and Berry is the Executive Director of the Images Festival in Toronto.
In these days of Mayoral fiat and rampant real estate speculation (the result of runaway capitalism), the people of New York City find themselves under attack in our own home, and alienated from our happily hurried way of life. This screening sets out to demonstrate how the excesses of the 80’s homophobia, overspending, genocide by inaction are not so far removed from today. Tonight’s selection of films shows that AIDS phobia is still being used to desexualize gay culture. The juxtaposition of explicit lesbian sex films (from 1973 and 1993) shows how incendiary this imagery remains. AIDS lingers on and even while the mortality rate is declining, the infection rate continues apace. So we present the somber meditation of “Two Marches” which reminds us that dashed expectations are nothing new while Stuart Gaffney’s video essays pull us into the present dilemma of problematic AIDS treatments. Jan Oxenberg’s classic is disruptive of homosexual complacency, underscoring the need for a dynamic identity politics that embraces the stone butch as much as the trans-lesbianism of Texas Tomboy. This program is defiantly experimental, because we believe that the narrative strategies employed by even such “transgressive” and “controversial” films as Happiness and Boogie Nights serve to comfort the viewer and distract the authentic expression of the individual. These films are the color of blood.
An anonymous band of renegades is pleased to announce the debut of Brooklyn Babylon Cinema, a monthly screening of film and video. Brooklyn because that’s where we are. Babylon because it connotes the type of moving-image media we present: the profane, the filthy, the rejected. But this also includes the visionary, the naive and the artful. Babylon because of Kenneth Anger’s indelible linking of the word to the sordid side of Hollywood, which is the only side we’d want to see. Babylon because we can go from Michael Snow to Guy Debord to Forbidden Zone to secrets from the Prelinger Archives, to Vaginal Davis videos.
Formats accepted: Super-8, Regular 8, 16mm, VHS and 3/4 video, filmstrips, slide shows, performance incorporating film or video. Submit VHS preview tapes with some sort of description or statement to: P.O. Box 20900, Tompkins Sq. Station, NY, NY 10009.
We prefer queer work, experimental work, political/progressive docs, works about alternative music. We also have concerts; it’s always all ages and usually $5. Sometimes we can pay fees, but visiting makers will get a homecooked meal and can crash at the space.
Friday November 6th, 1998, 8:00 p.m., $5
Hisashi Okajima and La fédération internationale des archives du film Manifesto Working Group
[First adopted by La fédération internationale des archives du film at its General Assembly in Paris, April 2008. Final version released September 2008, adopting recommendations from the General Assembly. First published in Journal of Film Preservation 77/78 (2008): 5–6.]
The FIAF manifesto is in many ways the antithesis to the pragmatism underlying Paolo Cherchi Usai’s “Lindgren Manifesto,” which follows. A full-throated defense of analog film in the face of the digital revolution, the FIAF manifesto makes the case that any and all film, no matter its aesthetic, political, or historical significance, ought to be saved. If Cherchi Usai is channeling the pragmatism of Ernest Lindgren, the FIAF manifesto is much more in the tradition of Henri Langlois.
Motion picture film forms an indispensable part of our cultural heritage and a unique record of our history and our daily lives. Film archives, both public and private, are the organizations responsible for acquiring, safeguarding, documenting and making films available to current and future generations for study and pleasure. The International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and its affiliates comprising more than 150 archives in over 77 countries have rescued over two million films in the last seventy years. However for some genres, geographical regions and periods of film history the survival rate is known to be considerably less than 10% of the titles produced. On the occasion of its 70th anniversary, FIAF offers the world a new slogan: “don’t throw film away.” If you are not sufficiently equipped to keep film yourself, then FIAF and its members will gladly help you locate an archive that is. Film is culturally irreplaceable, and can last a long time, especially in expert hands. While fully recognizing that moving image technology is currently driven by the progress achieved in the digital field, the members of FIAF are determined to continue to acquire film and preserve it as film. This strategy is complementary to the development of efficient methods for the preservation of the digital-born heritage. FIAF affiliates urge all those who make and look after films, whether they be professionals or amateurs, and the government officials in all nations responsible for safeguarding the world cinema heritage, to help pursue this mission. The slogan “don’t throw film away” means that film must not be discarded, even though those who hold it may think they have adequately secured the content by transferring it onto a more stable film carrier or by scanning it into the digital domain at a resolution which apparently does not entail any significant loss of data. Film archives and museums are committed to preserve film on film because:
• A film is either created under the direct supervision of a filmmaker or is the record of an historical moment captured by a cameraman. Both types are potentially important artifacts and part of the world’s cultural heritage. Film is a tangible and “human-eye readable” entity which needs to be treated with great care, like other museum or historic objects.
• Although film can be physically and chemically fragile, it is a stable material that can survive for centuries, as long as it is stored and cared for appropriately. Its life expectancy has already proved much longer than moving image carriers like videotape that were developed after film. Digital information has value only if it can be interpreted, and digital information carriers are also vulnerable to physical and chemical deterioration while the hardware and software needed for interpretation are liable to obsolescence.
• Film is currently the optimal archival storage medium for moving images. It is one of the most standardized and international products available and it remains a medium with high resolution potential. The data it contains does not need regular migration nor does its operating system require frequent updating.
• The film elements held in archive vaults are the original materials from which all copies are derived. One can determine from them whether a copy is complete or not. The more digital technology is developed, the easier it will be to change or even arbitrarily alter content. Unjustified alteration or unfair distortion, however, can always be detected by comparison with the original film provided it has been properly stored.
Never throw film away, even after you think something better comes along. No matter what technologies emerge for moving images in the future, existing film copies connect us to the achievements and certainties of the past. film prints will last—don’t throw film away.
Paolo Cherchi Usai
[First delivered at the Ernest Lindgren Memorial Lecture, South Bank, London, 24 August 2010. First published in Journal of Film Preservation 84 (2011): 4. Slightly revised by the author for this publication.]
Film archivist Paolo Cherchi Usai is the senior curator of the Motion Picture Department at George Eastman House and cofounder and codirector of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. In this manifesto, named after the founding curator of the BFI National Archive, Cherchi Usai challenges many of the sacred cows of film archiving, arguing that a pragmatic approach to archiving must develop in the face of both the realpolitik of contemporary State funding and the chemical and chimerical state of film stock.
1. Restoration is not possible and it is not desirable, regardless of its object or purpose. Obedience to this principle is the most responsible approach to film preservation.
2. Preserve everything is a curse to posterity. Posterity won’t be grateful for sheer accumulation. Posterity wants us to make choices. It is therefore immoral to preserve everything; selecting is a virtue.
3. If film had been treated properly from the very beginning, there would be less of a need for film preservation today and citizens would have had access to a history of cinema of their choice.
4. The end of film is a good thing for cinema, both as an art and as an artifact. Stop whining.
5. If you work for a cultural institution, make knowledge with money. If you work for an industry, make money with knowledge. If you work for yourself, make both, in the order that’s right for you. Decide what you want, and then say it. But don’t lie.
6. A good curator will never claim to act as such. Curatorship is a pledge of unselfishness.
7. Turning silver grains into pixels is not right or wrong per se; the real problem with digital restoration is its false message that moving images have no history, its delusion of eternity.
8. Digital is an endangered medium, and migration its terminal disease. Digital needs to be preserved before its demise.
9. We are constantly making images; we are constantly losing images, like any human body generating and destroying cells in the course of its biological life. We are not conscious of this, which is as good as it is inevitable.
10. Knowing that a cause is lost is not a good enough reason not to fight for it.
11. A film curator must look for necessary choices, with the ultimate goal of becoming unnecessary.
12. Governments want to save, not give, money. Offer them economical solutions; therefore, explain to them why the money they give to massive digitization is wasted. Give them better options. Treating with the utmost care what has survived. Better yet, doing nothing. Let moving images live and die on their own terms.
13. Honor your visual experience and reject the notion of “content.” Protect your freedom of sight. Exercise civil disobedience.
14. People can and should be able to live without moving images.
Mark Cousins
[First published on the Film Festival Academy website (www.filmfestivalacademy.net) in 2012].
UK film critic Mark Cousins laments the profit-driven, limo-polluted, red-carpet nature of contemporary film festivals and argues that, instead of reliance on faux-Hollywood glamour, they ought to radically challenge audiences about the nature of politics, of spectatorship, and of the cinema itself. He decries the function of the film festival as an alternative distribution center of the cinema and condemns this form of festival as a simple adjunct of commercial cinema.
The Oberhausen Manifesto helped launch the New German Cinema; the Danish Dogme 95 manifesto brought new ideas to, and detoxed, 90s cinema. The film festival world could do with a manifesto too . . . • In Italy in the 1930s, Mussolini launched the world’s first film festival, Venice, to celebrate fascist ideas and aesthetics. To counter this, two alternative festivals were launched, one in a former fishing town, Cannes, and one in the “Athens of the North,” a centre of the Enlightenment, Edinburgh. • Now there are thousands of film festivals. They are a cultural idea that is spreading like a Richard Dawkins meme. • As the elite of the festival circuit clink another glass of champagne at party after party to salute a venerable old festival or the launch of a new one, it would be no surprise if their smiles were a little strained. Masked by glamour and ubiquity, the world of film festivals is, in fact, in crisis. • There are too many of them chasing world premieres and film celebrities. • But they are also chasing a too narrow idea of what a film festival can be. • Marco Muller says that film festivals should “reveal what the markets hide.” Toronto International Film Festival’s Piers Handling called this counter-market an “alternative distribution network.” In European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, Thomas Elsaesser says that this network has created “symbolic agoras of a new democracy.” • Muller, Handling and Elsaesser each think that the purpose of a film festival is to act counter to the mainstream, cookie-cutter cinema that prevails in most parts. To show a broader geographic, stylistic and thematic range of films than is usually available to audiences. • great! • Except that that’s the content of a film festival, just as the content of Picasso’s Guernica is the bombing of a town, like the content of The Smiths’ “There is a Light That Never Goes Out” is the suicidal intensity of love, like the content of Singin’ in the Rain is the rapture of love. • What’s exciting about Guernica is how its black and white, graphic, epic, mythic imagery shows us the tragedy in a new way. What’s exciting about The Smiths song is the daring of the word and music cadences and ironies (“to die by your side, what a heavenly way to die”). What’s exciting about Singin’ in the Rain is that camera rising up to look down, from where the rain is falling, from where we think of the spirit to be, at this man who is so in love that night-time rain feels great. • In other words, what’s exciting is their form. • Film festivals are undergoing formal torpor. Too many of them use the same techniques—a main competition, sidebars, awards, late-night genre cinema, prizes, VIP areas, photo-calls, etc. • There’s a simple way of shaking film festivals out of this torpor: we should think of them as authored, just as films are authored. We should think of them as narratives—stories lasting ten days or two weeks, just as films are narratives. We should think of them as shows being produced on stages, where each has a mise-en-scène just as a film has a mise-en-scène. A film festival is a shape, a response to the lay of the land and light of a city, or to a flood in Pakistan, or the threat to bomb Iran. • The people who run film festivals must think of themselves as storytellers and stylists. They must ask themselves what the narrative structure of their event is, and its aesthetic. Most of all they must, as the best filmmakers do, challenge themselves to do things differently. • It’s about time that, in the spirit of Dyonisus or Guy Debord or Rilke or Patti Smith or Djibril Diop Mambety or Ritwik Ghatak or Samira Makhmalbaf, film festivals realise that they are poetry not prose. • Too many film festivals in the world are enthralled by their function as the alternative shop window for film industries. Film festivals should be more sceptical about business and industry. They should be the conscience of the film world. • There should, therefore, be no red carpets at film festivals. No limos. No VIP rooms. • These things will begin to strip out the excess and ponciness of film festivals—their mannerism—and return them to something purer and more beautiful, inclusive and alive. • Festival directors should use their most discrepant ideas: their funniest, most moving, sexiest thought about films. Start a film in one cinema and finish it in another—the audience runs between. Get Godard to recut Spielberg. • Festivals should be radically about joy, about countering alienation, about telling the world of money and commodity that—ha ha—it doesn’t know the secrets of the human heart or the inexpressible, stupendous need to be with other human beings. • Film festivals should be naked in front of the innovative, divine, political, honest facts of life. They should lob a thought bomb to show that cynicism is a false lead, art is amazing, cinema is, as Roland Barthes sort of said, “light from a distant star.” • And there’s the whole issue of festivity itself to restore to the centre of the world of film festivals. Like music festivals, film festivals should realise that, especially in the age of online, it’s the offline communality of film festivals, the fact that we are all getting together to do the same thing, that is part of the source of their joy.