Journal of Film Preservation N° 56 - FIAF

think the reverse is true: archivists are in a much stronger position to say
no today when it is necessary to save a film. Borde does see the benefits
of the new situation: archives finally have gained the confidence of the
producers, which has greatly enriched the collections.
The third point, perhaps the most significant in the book, is the proliferation
of moving images through television and in the easy availability of
film reproductions on video. This means that archives must look at the
goals of their archive projections (and all of their means of providing
access) in a different light. All three archivists seem to fear the impact of
a broad audience experienced in viewing images, which seems to me to
be contradictory because our profession is mainly concerned with the
popular culture. For Dominique Païni, the exhibition program should
serve an educational function, to help spectators bring knowledge to the
mass of moving images now so easily available to them. For Borde, as for
Buache, there is inspiration in Langlois’s famous statement about his satisfaction
in showing a rare film in an empty theater to an audience of two
or three. Borde says that a balance must be found between educating the
mass public and the needs of the few. In fact, the archives’ audiences
have always been very small and specialized and still are, when compared
with the mass audiences for film and television. Whatever the level
of the public’s intellectual appreciation of cinema, in my opinion we
should be glad to welcome a new audience with a knowledge of moving
images of past times, at least in the form of video reproduction. The
problem is that the vast majority of young people in the United States,
and I suppose elsewhere, have seen only video reproductions of films
older than a year, if indeed they have seen the originals at all, but
nonetheless know much more of their cinematic heritage in this limited
way than past generations. We are now at a point similar to that time
when the first film archive movement found its inspiration in the disappearance
of silent films. Today, the vanishing of the original film viewing
experience is the real crisis. Our mission for the new century should be
to find more ways to show these young audiences the real experience of
cinema.
Borde points to the wide proliferation of film archives as an important
change for FIAF. He remembers when some members wanted to limit
membership in the federation in order to retain the ideal model of an
archive and, let us remember, to gain the confidence of the producers.
However, here is a change which Borde heartily approves, and FIAF itself
no longer worries about, because an acceptance of varied models of
archives has strengthened the archive movement. As well, it has insured
the preservation of moving images that had escaped the major archives.
Cooperation among regional archives and national archives has proved
highly productive. He also speaks for open catalogs and FIAF’s project for
an international data bank of holdings. Now that the collections have
become so large, he urges that archives must provide for exploration of
them. Borde remembers the thrill of discovery in ash cans, garages and
flea markets in the early days. In fact, the thrill is still very much alive on
the archive’s shelves, where vast collections wait for review. He insists,
and I would agree, on the right of historians to know about the availabil-
75 Journal of Film Preservation / 56 / 1998