Journal of Film Preservation N° 60/61 - FIAF

Les archives dans les pays de la
Baltique
L ’auteur présente brièvement les résultats
d’une enquête réalisée par l’Association
Royale des Archivistes des Pays-Bas sur
l’initiative des autorités d’Estonie, de
Lituanie et de Létonie qui ont demandé à
des experts de conseiller leurs archives sur
l’état de l’archivage audiovisuel et sur les
moyens à mettre en œuvre pour l’améliorer.
Cette enquête a débouché sur une
coopération plus étroite entre ces pays et
représente une opportunité pour tous
d’apprendre l’un par l’autre. Durant la
période de transition entre l’occupation
soviétique et l’indépendance, les institutions
cinématographiques baltiques se sont
retrouvées dans un état chaotique et
connaissent maintenant un processus de
redéfinition. Des systèmes d’archivage
audiovisuels sont mis au point au niveau
national et les différents services qui le
composent pourraient être complémentaires
au niveau des pays baltiques. Ce système
pourrait déboucher sur un mode de
coopération régional entre les pays
baltiques.
Les problèmes à résoudre sont nombreux et
sont principalement dus aux restrictions
budgétaires ainsi qu’aux années d’isolement
durant l’occupation soviétique. Actuellement,
aucune collection audiovisuelle n’est
conservée selon les conditions minimum de
température et d’humidité relative. Les
collections sont donc conservées à l’étranger
dans l’attente d’un équipement adéquat. Le
catalogage est encore effectué manuellement.
L’adoption de systèmes informatisés apparaît
tardivement à cause du manque de support
et de sécurité. Heureusement, une
coordination des systèmes entre les différents
pays se met en place progressivement grâce
à des groupes de travail spécialisés.
Si la mission de sauvegarde de l’héritage
audiovisuel s’accomplit difficilement, les
autorités nationales et les professionnels sont
conscients de cette responsabilité et
contribuent activement à cette tâche. Leurs
efforts sont essentiels pour parvenir à
améliorer les équipements, le matériel
informatique, la formation et l’éducation; ce
qui a déjà commencé grâce à l’engagement
et au professionnalisme dont les intervenants
font preuve.
photograph collections may or may not be considered as “national”
collections. Finally there is a number of university and cultural
institutions including museums that have their own specialised
audio-visual collections; in Lithuania the Parliamentary Archive has
started to record plenary and some committee sessions and considers
video taping them in the near future.
The transfer of [copies of] television and radio programmes from the
national broadcasting organisation to the national archive, which
used to be more or less constant, has now become the object of
policy and technical discussion. Though all parties concerned
recognise the importance of the programmes, there are a few major
issues that need to be addressed. On the whole the broadcasting
archivist does not have the authority to select programmes for
permanent safeguarding and the archives tend to be areas where
programmes are stored that the producers consider important. The
theoretical possibility that the national archive itself has to select
programmes, still remains to be operationalised due to a shortage of
information carriers, pending an agreement on copyrights and also
pending decisions of the broadcasting organisations what they wish
to do with their own collections now that they have to operate more
commercially. In practice this means that the inflow of television and
radio materials in the national archive is as yet more or less
accidental since Independence and one may congratulate the parties
concerned on their having decided to come together and try and
resolve the problem.
In the case of films the three countries experience a rather complicated
situation, too. During the Soviet occupation each country had
its own central film production institute where all fiction and nonfiction
films had to be produced. Copies of the non-fiction films had
to be deposited in the State archive, though negatives of fiction films
often were taken to the central film archive in Moscow. After
Independence the central film institutes found themselves in a state
of flux - even if their duties were not always formally revoked, in
actual fact they more or less ceased to function and came to be informally
replaced by private studios and/or free lance producers. The
regular flow of films to the State, now National, Archive became a
trickle, as indeed has also been the case with photographs. As a consequence
post-Independence productions are not necessarily with the
national collections. An additional complication is that the Russian
Federation as legal successor to the USSR claims to possess copyrights
on fiction films, even though these may have been produced in
the former Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian SSR
With local budget, this issue also remains to be settled, the more so
since the present copyright situation prevents the Baltic countries
from using part of their own national audio-visual heritage.
From this briefest of summaries it will be obvious that there is as yet
some distance to go to realise an integrated national audio-visual
archiving system in which the component services complement one
12 Journal of Film Preservation / 60/61 / 2000