Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

Dublin: The Irish Film Archive
Kasandra O’Connell
FIAF and
Affiliates
FIAF et affiliés
FIAF y afiliados
The Irish Film Archive
2002 is an auspicious year for the Irish Film Archive; it sees the
completion of our first ten years, a decade of salvage, discovery and
hard work and the beginning of our second decade complete with a
new set of challenges. That is not to say there have not been moments
of great satisfaction, but as any archivist will attest, in many ways, the
creation and maintenance of an archive is an act of faith and a labour
of love. From humble beginnings the Irish Film Archive has attained a
level of professionalism that was officially recognised last year when
the IFA attained full membership of FIAF, a particularly proud moment
for those who had seen the Archive through its various stages of
development.
History
Ireland was a late starter in the field of film preservation and acutely
aware that it was amongst the last country in Europe to set up a
national film archive. The need for a national film archive to preserve
the nation’s moving image heritage had been mooted for several
decades, indeed the first recorded call for such a body was published in
1917. In 1986 the first step on the road to achieving this aim occurred
when the Irish Film Institute established an archive section and began
to archive Irish material from its library.
Although there were no climate controlled
vaults in which to house the isolated
material, the archive section of the Institute
was admitted as a provisional member of
FIAF in 1989. This was in some ways a cruel
honour as increased communication with
established FIAF archives, while inspiring and
helpful, also served to highlight the enormity
of the task ahead of us. Our late start also
had advantages; it allowed us to learn from
the mistakes and successes of our longer
established colleagues and also to avail from
the beginning of new technologies such as
computer data -bases and specifically
designed numbering and cataloguing
systems.
The material held in the Library of the Irish
Film Institute provided a rich basis for the
establishment of an embryonic national film
collection. The Irish Film Institute had
developed from the National Film Institute,
which was founded in 1943 under the auspices of Archbishop John
Charles McQuaid 1. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s it produced public
information and safety films and functioned as a distributing library
until the 1980s, thereby giving the newly formed archive section an
79 Journal of Film Preservation / 65 / 2002