Taking history back from the "storytellers"

About a month ago, a group of moving image archivists that participate in AMIA-L, one of my favorite listservs, started talking about the problem of poorly-produced (and poorly-thought-out) reenactments, and how they had grown to infect historical documentaries. I was on vacation and couldn't participate in a timely way, but the clear desert air incubated a bit of a rant, a slightly revised version of which I'm now sharing.

Please bear in mind that when I say "we," I mean moving image archivists.

While there seems to be agreement that the reenactment trend has spread way too far, I think there's a deeper problem facing historically/archivally oriented docs, and it's actually something we can help to solve.

Some of the most interesting documentary films take their structures from organic phenomena like the hours of the day, or the trajectory of a river from source to mouth. Others are essays that follow a structured thought process. Still others divide into sequences or parts that need to be understood and compared as discrete units for the film to generate meaning in the viewer. In fact, there are nearly infinite possible documentary structures, of which I think we've only seen a small fraction. By contrast, the mainstream documentary focuses on what's now called "storytelling," a highly traditional representational strategy that in recent years has come to imply the omnipresence of characters (good and evil), a narrative arc and a conventional act-based structure in which seemingly insurmountable problems are frequently solved.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with storytelling, whatever it may be, and not all stories are bad. What's wrong is the assumption, which has become not only pervasive but compulsory, that documentaries need characters, that the narrative arc must reign supreme, and that we're obliged to show people wrestling with and resolving problems. I've sat with PBS gatekeepers and heard them refer to programs as "stories," not films or shows. Ultimately this insults potential audiences by assuming they're only able to ingest a limited narrative menu. Is it really true that, when it comes to media, "the best surprise is no surprise?"

The vernacular language of documentaries is freezing in place. If I tried to pitch The River today, they'd say "A river? Where's the story? You need to find characters with great stories who live along the banks." If I sought money for The Man with the Movie Camera, I'd be sent back to research more about the cameraman's inner life and emotions, and to find or invent interpersonal (rather than interframe) conflict. Now, there are indeed essay-based makers, like Adam Curtis, perhaps Errol Morris, and many others (forgive my lack of knowledge, but I'm not a Netflix guy). Sam Green is now making a film on utopia that I think is not shrinking from ideas, even though it does follow a few people around. And then there's James Benning. But it's just harder to make different work and have it seen.

So, where do archives come in? The last 20 years have witnessed the emergence of new kinds of documentation, such as home movies and other unofficial materials. Much of this kind of imagery reflects personal historical perspectives, unlike other kinds of archival material that emanate from institutions, governments, studios and corporations. This is great, but what's happening (especially with amateur material) is that film is being used to construct histories that emphasize personal experience, that rely on the depiction of struggle and transformation at an individual level, and that constitute "stories" in a narrow rather than broad sense. I'm not advocating socialist realism here, just criticizing the reduction of world-historical events and phenomena to the story of "a day in the life of my cranky grandfather who survived the war and is just about to get evicted."

Many of us who collect or take care of moving images and sounds feel that original materials tell pretty good stories on their own. Aside from some courageous DVD collections of uncut archival films, a supplement here and there, and several sketchy sites presenting downloadable archival materials, most original materials don't reach the public without being run through the storytelling Cuisinart. While context is essential to really understand and work with most moving images, overbearing narration, emotionally invasive music and highly personalized visions of history don't constitute context. Bits and pieces from our collections are being woven into works that don't really speak to the value of their components.

So, where do we come in? I propose two ideas.

The first is easy. Let's put original, unedited archival material out in the world in such a way that it competes with documentaries. This isn't going to kill our stock footage income, because producers and directors always feel they can improve on reality by imposing structures of their design, and they'll still come around. But it will insure that audiences can see original documents without the imposition of artificial layers of narrativity. (Plus, I have always wondered how archives can ethically let historical mediamakers use clips without making the original works from which the clips come available to anyone who wants to see the complete continuity. When someone cites a passage of text or a still image, there's a powerful implication that someone can check the citation themselves. We don't make this easy.)

Archives are part of the system of cultural production. So are archivists. Which brings me to a second suggestion.

We have all noted that the cost of production and distribution is going down quickly, even though it isn't zero. Why then aren't archivists making more documentaries, and why isn't production seen as an integral archival mission? Why on earth do we observe invisible barriers of specialization that cause producers (whose interests are often fleeting and superficial) to become the chief interpreters and contextualizers of our collections?

Librarians write books, too. Museum curators make text and media. Why don't we make more movies? Everyone else in the world feels entitled to.

As more and more archivists become curators and preservers of digital files, and as working with physical moving image materials becomes an unjustly underfunded artisanal specialty, we may have to figure out what exactly it is that we do. I suggest we consider becoming moving image authors too.

Seen at the Detroit Public Library last month

Media in Transition conference

OK, I'm going to try to be a better blogger. But it's been hard — the combined effort I pour into Facebook, Twitter and email feels like an unpaid, half-time job.

Anyway, I'm attending the Media in Transition conference at MIT next week. It looks great.

Anyone want a partial run of Printer's Ink magazine?

Ad historians, culture historians, collectors: We have a partial duplicate set of Printers Ink (the weekly, not the monthly), starting about 1927 and running through 1957. Some volumes great condition, others not. We would be delighted to offer it to someone with an interest in this material and the ability to pick up in downtown SF, as it's too much to ship.

It is full of interesting copy and fascinating ads about the ad industry. Let me know!

--> Printers Ink found a home.

New films starting to trickle online

Thanks to AV Geek Skip, new films from our collection are starting to come online. Many of them are as new to me as they will be to you. Check out the latest uploads here.

Oh -- this is a repeat post, I see. Whatever.

New films coming online

For most of the year we've been promising that we'd upload 500 new films to our collection at the Internet Archive. This has taken longer than we anticipated, and we're sorry to have dangled this possibility in front of our archival fan community for such a long time. The reason for the delay has been that this year we started our "tapelessness" project — a project to convert all of our material presently living on Digital Beta and Beta SP videotape to high-bitrate digital files — and wanted to make the digital files for the Archive at the same time we were making our own. This is a complex workflow and we're still experimenting with getting it right, but I'm delighted to say that new films are starting to trickle onto the Archive site. It's going to be a diverse bunch of material with many items that haven't been seen in quite a few years.

Watch this link for new items as they appear.

Remembering Bill O'Farrell

Bill was an uncommonly kind, generous and convivial person, a sympathetic enabler of archival activity and a collector and redistributor of evidence that might help to contextualize films that seemed without history. We will all miss him. We're thinking of his loved ones.

Coming to Berlin and Budapest

I'm doing a mini-Grand Tour in June, presenting at the Deutsche Kinemathek's Kolloquium on Friday, June 13; doing a screening that afternoon and then two evening screenings on Sunday and Monday, June 15 and 16. The schedule is here. Berliners and travelers, please come and say hi.

Note that the June 16 program will be an all-35mm show, featuring the recently restored Master Hands, the even-more recently restored Tuesday in November (a project of Mark Toscano at the Academy Film Archive) and a vintage IB Technicolor and SuperScope print of Chevrolet's Populuxe classic, American Look.

Then on June 19-21 I'll be in Budapest for the NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies) conference.

Microsoft ends Live Book Search program

This morning MSFT announced it was ending its Live Book Search program, and will be taking the site down next week. They're also ending their support of key digitization initiatives, including many of the library scanning projects operated by the Internet Archive.

Prelinger Library books that MSFT paid to scan will still be available through the Internet Archive and the Open Library, which also offers full-text search and download of over 300,000 public domain books.

The blogosphere is buzzing on this and I anticipate hearing more today.

Brewster has just posted an announcement, with some good news.

We had fun today at MakerFaire

About 200 people visited our little satellite library in the Fiesta building. If you can, come by tomorrow!

Photos.

Mock Up On Mu

Just saw Craig Baldwin's new (and, he says, unfinished) film. It is beautifully done. Whatever limits it may have, and I can't pin down any walls it might hit until I've seen it again, will be the limits of found-footage films, not any deficits of his skill and imagination. The first interview is pretty good.

Google peers into our living room, and sees...

M first found this on Google Street View. It points up at our living room, and you can distinctly see the split reel behind the window, though you can't see the Elmo (a special kind of projector used to make quick-and-dirty film-to-video transfers) to which it's attached.

how could I forget?

Pix from the Orphan Film Symposium in March.

Murketing's Virtual Festival of Sponsored Film

Rob Walker writes "Consumed" for the NY Times Magazine and keeps up quite a pace with the Murketing blog. In the last week he's been viewing, reviewing and contextualizing a bunch of films from the Field Guide, five so far. This is exciting.

Recent presentations

I recently attended the Economies of the Commons conference at de Balie in Amsterdam. This was at once a provocative and congenial meeting, and it was fascinating to hear from people who are working on major national moving image digitization projects in Europe and from members of the "freer culture" community. The sessions were blogged here and elsewhere.

My keynote, "Audiovisual Archives and the Social Contract" is downloadable here, but beware, as it is a 24MB pdf.

Future Histories keynote

This was a great conference, intimate enough to get to know almost everyone and to have really interesting discussions. The organizers put together a memorable event and the Northern hospitality was heartwarming.

A few resources:

My keynote (pdf, 10.8MB)
My photoset, mostly people
The conference program and abstracts

Many of the papers will probably be published in a future issue of Convergence (which unfortunately seems to be behind a paywall).

Future Histories of the Moving Image

I'm off to the UK to speak at this very promising conference (you will have to click on "conference" to see the program). Stay tuned for more from Sunderland.

San Francisco Bay oil spill

Megan (who is trained as an oil spill responder) has been activated and is working up at International Bird Rescue Research Center in Cordelia. IBRRC's blog is updated regularly and gives a good sense of what they're dealing with up there.

DLF Forum, Philadelphia

Working on my talk. It's about to start.

Later: The organizers posted the pdf, but it lacks my notes, so you will have to interpret the pretty pictures for yourself.

OCA digitization contract

By permission of the Boston Public Library and Internet Archive, here is their book digitization contract.