Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

archive could become frozen in time and serve an ever decreasing
group of aging film enthusiasts. Also the commercial moving image
industry would be alienated because it could not readily satisfy it’s ever
increasing demand for film images from the past in digital form - the
way they will obtain them from other sources.
Another approach would be for the film archive to accept now that it
cannot sustain the film experience because technology will eventually
force a change. If it begins to transfer its vast holdings into the digital
environment immediately, it will be able to provide on-line access to the
national cinema heritage for anyone interested wherever they live. This
will attract both private and public support and possibly allow it to
receive a significant income from the sale of copyright free images to
commercial disseminators. It will not be an anachronism but a vibrant
contributor to what inevitably will be the most audio-visual century so
far.
Of course we do not know whether the archive’s collection will in fact
be secure in the digital environment. It will certainly have to be
transferred from one format to another many times in the next
hundred years because software and hardware obsolescence will
happen even more frequently in future. We are told that there will be
no loss of quality during this exercise and that it can be achieved
automatically, but little is known about the costs involved. Certainly at
the Library of Congress, we are being advised to put $5 million a year
aside to refresh our digital holdings. There is also no guarantee that we
can reproduce the cinema experience in the digital environment and
born digital moving images, which will be created in unimaginable
numbers, could compete with the films of the past for preservation
resources.
Also the curators who in the past had the luxury of seeing actual
images when they looked at the film support will have per force to
pass over those curatorial functions to an Information Technology
Officer who is likely to be completely unaware of the history or
importance of those images – or perhaps I should say potential imagesin
his or her care. Does the Information Technology Officer add the
study of film history to his or her skills or does the film curator take an
advanced course in digital image management.
Or could it be a mixture of both scenarios. The film archive could
continue to preserve and present films on film and it could acquire
born digital moving images and preserve and present them in that
form. It could also, subject to copyright approval, make digital copies of
films available on line or in the form of video tapes, DVD’s etc and
maintain the film experience in a properly equipped cinema.
The preservation laboratory of the future then will also be a hybrid but
it will have to be infinitely adaptable so that as the balance moves
from the photochemical to the digital, the appropriate workflow and
adjacency requirements can be maintained.
The laboratory will have to be self-supporting. It will have to undertake
all the photochemical operations. The archive will have to do it’s own
colour printing, processing and sound re-recording as well as the
specialist tasks like tinting and toning and step-printing. It may have to
19 Journal of Film Preservation / 65 / 2002