Reflections from "Archive and moving images", written in 2022.
Exam reflections in "Archive and moving images" - Iris Landar Lygren VT-22
Part 2 For the first part of the assignment I have chosen to analyze the material from the American Genre Film Archive (AGFA) and what material they have chosen to archive and how they make these choices. The information on their website about this is very short and the answer I got by e-mail as well, but I will still try to analyze their catalogs with the material I have gathered.
My main question about the choices they have made regarding the archive concerns where the films are from, why these films are of greater interest than other genre films for the archive and by whom this archive might be of use. I have chosen this archive because of my own interest in genre films in combination with an interest for the subject of this course, archives of moving images. AGFA is a small American archive which centers on specific types of films. Their goal is to store these films in a way that keeps them a part of film history as well as making them accessible to an audience (American Genre Film Archive [AGFA], n.d.). Some of their material could be hard to both get a hold of and get the rights to show without their archive. It also contains a lot of cult films that have a status in some communities, but might not be stored in larger archives and because of that these films could be forgotten or unavailable in the future without the help of an archive. Since these films do have a value to these communities a loss of the material could become a loss of those genre specific communities cultural history which would affect not only the communities themselves, but also further research on these types of genre film. This might be seen in different communities where films reflect that specific history (Brunow, 2019 ; 100-103). Another reason could be that genre films mirror history. Horror film, as one of the genres AGFA focuses on, as well as other artforms is known to reflect history (Lowenstein, 2005 ; 113) and therefore becomes an important part of that history as well. Because of this the stored material, which is both stored in a physical archive by AGFA and some of the material continues to be digitized by the archive, is of value to examine in regards to what is stored, for whom and why. Therefore I will focus my assignment on AGFA in relation to these questions.
I will also focus specifically on AGFA’s Digital Cinema Package (DCP) catalog mainly because of three reasons: first and foremost because it would be impossible for this short assignment to go through their entire 35mm catalog, which are immensely larger than the DCP catalog. I have requested and received the 35mm catalog as well and looked through this, but have chosen to not focus my analysis on this. The second reason for this choice is that the DCP catalog could be interpreted as a representation of what films AGFA have chosen, or have the possibility to, make more accessible to the public. The DCP catalog is, according to information from the archive personnel, surrounded by different rules regarding who might show these films and how they might be used than the 35mm films. All of the 33mm material can not be digitized at once, partly because of legal reasons, which is a recurring issue in digitalisation processes (Brunow, 2019 ; 99). That, in combination with the differences in accessibility between digital media and 35mm film, makes the DCP catalog the part of AGFA’s catalog most people will have contact with. With DCP as a standard format in cinema theaters (Monizza, 2017 ; 129), these 35mm can’t be played in all theaters which make the DCP catalog the most available one. Because of that the choices of what films are in the DCP catalog might be considered even more important than the stored 35mm film, even though the 35mm film is a very important part of the archives work. The third reason for my choice to focus on the DCP catalog is that this becomes a larger and larger part of the archives of moving images. This has many reasons from accessibility to the evolution of the film media, but also causes new problems for example with environmental issues. That makes this type of archival catalogs of more relevance to how the archives of moving images evolve today.
To make this short analysis I have gone through AGFA’s entire catalog of DCP films and examined what material is stored and from where and when these films are made. To do this I had to contact AGFA to get the complete information since only part of this is available on their website and go through some parts of the material one by one to categorize where the films were produced since this was only written down for parts of the archive on the lists I got access to. I chose to analyze this material mainly through three concepts from this course, the concept of film as dispositif, the film archive as a counter archive and representation and ethics within the archive, with a focus on representation. These concepts are all related to the work AGFA does in different ways. Since the archive contains films, distribute them, digitize and make them available for cinema theaters and organizations to show AGFA is another type of archive than the text archive and they seem to want these films to be shown when possible, regardless of how the films were shown when they were published. This makes AGFA both a type of film counter archive and an archive that uses the film as dispositif. But at the same time they have made a choice of what and who is represented in their archive and this has an effect on how the archive could be used.
In my research of AGFA’s material I have found that a large part of these films are from the USA. This itself was no surprise given the name of the archive, but what was a surprise was the number of films they collected from other countries, though that itself would not have raised further questions. But even though their DCP catalog contains films from a lot of different parts of the world, some countries are a lot more represented than others. This made me wonder what these choices were based on, except the films genre. As an example the DCP catalog contains 702 films produced in the USA and 143 films originated from Italy but only 7 films from the neighboring country Mexico and only 3 films from the entire continent of Africa, 2 films from Uganda and 1 film from Nigeria. This could of course be because of a problem to get a hold of movies from other countries. It could also be because of ethics, based on a thought about where these films should be stored and if the archive can work together with people from the country the film originates from regarding what should be stored and who, this in accordance with how other institutions, as an example museums, work with similar issues (Rao, 2010 ; 107). But the first potential reason would not be a problem in the case of Mexico since they have a strong horror film culture all the way back to the first years of sound film (Villegas Lindvall, 2021 ; 50) and therefore a lot of films that could be part of this archive. The second problem could still be an issue if the archive does not have or strive to get a working relationship with filmmakers in different countries. This makes the question of which films and who is represented in the archive even more interesting. Representation is important because of many reasons, one being the possibility to reach another audience and for the possibility to preserve a part of that community's history (Rao, 2010 ; 119). This is important in regards to the film genres community, but probably even more important to ethnic minorities and other minorities such as the LGBTQIA-community who have suffered and still suffer from violence and colonization. Still, these communities might need to take precaution of who the material gets shown for and under what circumstances as in the case with the The Swedish Archive for Queer Moving Images (Brunow & Linder, 2020 ; 5). The same material could be seen in many different ways depending on the context and who is watching, which could be a problem within small communities or minorities as the LGBTQIA-community (Brunow, 2019 ; 107-111). This might not be of a wider concern regarding fictional genre film, the archive do contain documentaries as well, which could make the ethical decisions of the archive more complex. Still, if the archive should contain films from different parts of the world the issue of representation should be considered.
AGFA stores a lot of different films within the spectrum of genre films, but in this mission they also digitize and distribute films for audiences, both through home video and by cinema showings. This makes their archive not only a storage for these films for future generations, but also an archive who sees film as dispositif. AGFA shows and distributes these films in a way that might differ from how they were originally shown, because the meeting between the fim and the audience is important for the film identity, in this case the genre film identity (Fossati, 2011 ; 171).This could be seen as a type of film as an art framework as well (Fossati, 2011 ; 170), but with a greater intention for these films to become a part of this community and identity instead of focusing on how the films were originally shown, a view of film as an original where the films becomes more of a technological artifact than a living work (Fossati, 2011 ; 161). You could see this practice of keeping the films alive and digitizing them as a film as a state of the art framework (Fossati, 2011 ; 174) since AGFA do seem to focus on the films intentions, but I haven’t found any part where AGFA has stated that the digitizing or distribution tries to frame the films in another way. Instead it would seem that the archive focuses on preservation and the audiences access to these films. This also makes, the older parts of the archive in particular, a preservation of cultural history as well as an opening to continued cultural movements within the communities. A bridge between the “new” and “the old” or a type of media archeology (Fossati & van de oever, 2020 ; 138). In that regard AGFA is a type of counter archive where media is used in a similar way to the text archive, but shows another part of the same history. This makes even a small archive as AGFA a institution with an “archival force” (Amad, 2010 ; 162). It becomes history from another perspective in the same way as was requested in France during the 1920’s to complement the textual archives (Amad, 2010 ; 138). That makes AGFA, even though they are a small and very specific archive, a part of archival history.
Part 2
For the second part of this assignment I will reflect on my own use of archives and moving images. When I asked myself the question of how I make and use archives in my own experience I have thought about how I store both physical things and digital media, how I chose what to store and why I store it. I have also thought about which archives I actually use, how and when I use them and for what purpose. In my everyday life I have stored more than a fair share of material and digital things. My most recent encounter with how much I actually store comes from the experience of moving, something that is still going on in my life when this is written. At the moment I’m not really sure what to do with all the things we can’t keep in wardrobes and our storage room. Still, it seems to be a hard thing for me to get rid of anything. This applies to the digital world as well. The amount of files on harddrives, cloud storage, web services and social media that I created and kept are impossible for me to even grasp. On top of that I digitize material as well, and keep both the digital version and the material ones. I’ve digitized some of the films, especially home movies, that I have on old VHS-tapes. When doing so I have thought about the possibility that information gets lost, but just as Monizza states in a text about the The Short Film Pool Project the risk of not doing so is that this material could be lost entirely (Monizza, 2017 ; 134). It is a time consuming practice to digitize media and there is always a risk that the new format becomes outdated faster than expected (Monizza, 2017 ; 132). I have digitized essays, dissertations and interviews for a university when I was younger. This was made both for the accessibility of the information, but also because the interviews on cassette tapes get old and might not last. I have a vision in doing this with my own cassette tapes as well, but haven’t gotten that far yet.
Many years ago I was active in a youth union and for a short time period I worked for the same union as an election ombudsman. During that period I came across a lot of old documents of meetings and earlier politics of the union which were an interesting eye opener to how people had made the same type of documents as we did to preserve what was decided 20 or 30 years earlier. In a way I think that made me feel a part of the union itself on a deeper plane. When I go through my own boxes of things and decide what to keep and what to throw away I sometimes come across documents from this union and that time. They are more than 10 years old today and even though I do know that they already have documents from that time in the organization headquarters I ask myself if there is something that could be better kept over there, if something of this still has value for anyone else. Still, I need to remember that it would be impossible to keep everything for the future. Both for me and the people who might work at this organization today. The same kind of thoughts occur when I go through material I have from small organizations and companies within a specific community. What parts of this are stored by someone else and what will be lost if I throw it away? Both small alternative culture organizations and memories from gatherings for minorities, like HBTQ-communities have some kind of cultural value for me. Maybe they have or will have for other people? I can’t know what parts of my belongings will be of value to someone in the future. When I read about how the LGBTQIA-communities have gotten new perspectives through home videos (Brunow, 2019 ; 100) I wonder what media and artifacts I have in my home that could be of use in that way. Probably nothing. But still, if there were something of value to others it would probably be taken care of a lot better by an archive and their archivists who could create metadata for it and store it in a way where it won’t be destroyed (Brunow, 2019 ; 101).
Another thought that occurs to me is if I own something that I shouldn’t. Something that shouldn’t be mine. In my life I have traveled to countries who have been colonized in the past. I have belongings bought in these countries and memories gathered in both material and digital form. Do any videos I have filmed or any pictures I have taken show something that could be questioned through ethics to keep? I don’t think so, but as I read about how the Smithsonian Institution has material collected from amateurs as well as anthropologists (Shay & Tarr, 2013 ; 179) I ask myself if I have something that I don’t understand the ethical problem of now, but could become a problem for someone in the future. Probably not, but I can’t know that for sure.
But this is only the parts of my records I do think about. The digital traces I make everyday and how these might be used by companies such as google or facebook is a much larger matter. I might only be one person, but that information is out there for as long as they store it. That could mean a very long time. And not only that, they create systems based on my pictures and what I write everyday. I don't feel that this is problematic for my own person, but it might be good to think about it now and then since it does affect others. From all the searches I make, all the times I help the Google AI learn how a cat looks when categorizing pictures, they do collect that information and could use it for something I haven’t thought of yet (Acker, 2021 ; 241). And sometimes it does affect me personally. I do get advertisements based on what I have searched, even though I know that I can change this to a minimum. But even then, the data they collect on my accounts might be used for other types of advertisements such as what have been seen in earlier cases (Acker, 2021 ; 241-242). It’s a balance between how this might help me, but also what they could use the same information for. It’s the power of information and the possibility to form history through that power. They might use it for something fantastic, but they might sell the same information to someone who could use it in an unethical way. Still, I don’t think a way like only using local data and “resisting digital universalism” (Loukissas, 2019 ; 26) could be a way I would be comfortable with. I actually do think there is a point to collecting data in some cases to develop new technology. But there is a balance and I can’t know what will prove to be for better or worse now.
Another part of me, the film enthusiast, keeps me thinking about what material I have in the form of recorded vhs-tapes, stored digital films and independent films published in small editions that could be of use if any of the would be lost originals would be lost. I think about the tv-series Doctor Who, where some episodes might be lost forever (BBC, 2014). Or the archives of film that have burned or in other ways been destroyed, as in the case of Canada's cinematic history (Cook, 2017 ; 137-138). If that would happen to originals it might be of help that I have kept a copy. Still, they will be far worse than the original and in most cases it wouldn’t help at all. The films I keep are probably kept by more people than I can count, and the risk of the ones who aren’t kept by that many disappearing entirely are probably very small today with all digital copies made. But if I threw it away and then understood that the original of the same material became damaged and couldn’t be recollected, I would feel guilty. Of Course I can’t live my life after that feeling of potential guilt, but I can keep what is important to me for my own sake and if needed, for others. But if I decide to keep collecting and storing material, both moving images and other types of materials, at some point I will have to find a better way for storing it. Not only because of the large space it takes up in both material and digital form, but also because I couldn’t consider the way I store it optimal. I might not have the possibility to get a special climate for the physical material and the small amount of space we have to use makes any kind of special storage where different things are stored in different climates, as with some parts of the Smithsonian collections (Shay & Tarr, 2013 ; 181-182), impossible. And since I am a private person I can’t be blamed for lacking space. I do not own an archive or the knowledge of how I should archive all of my things. But even so, I will find a way to store it that at least will keep it in better shape than today, because material gets old and when all of it is gone, a part of history will be forgotten.
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(Exam reflections written by Iris Landar Lygren in 2022)
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