I do have a discovery story, but I don’t really like to refer to it as such. Why? During a summer internship at the NYU Library Preservation Lab, the Tamiment/Wagner Archive received the Communist Party USA papers, a massive collection of paper, memorabilia, film, video, audiotape, and more dating back to the early 20th century. As part of a first pass at ingest, a fellow intern and myself were tapped to go through the films to looks for any major condition problems and get a very high level inventory to help with prioritization. We were excited because there was a lot of 35mm, much of it in old metal shipping containers labeled in Russian. Turns out, though, the CPUSA merely screened or distributed acceptable Soviet films, because reel after reel were prints of Russian history or war epics from the 60s and 70s, sometimes two or three copies of each. It was my first exposure to Orwo filmstock, but I’m not sure if even I am hardcore enough to have gotten really pumped about that.

But there was one particular metal box… There were some others like it, but they hadn’t had anything special in them. But this one stunk real bad-like when we opened it. I tried it first and quickly decided to attack a different box. The other intern tried later, but it was the end of a long, dusty, chemically day…and there was one more non-stinky box left for her. So after I finished what I was working on, I put on the gloves and the mask and said goodbye to my nose hairs and some brain cells. As I started pulling out reels, I noticed that the stench was more complex than a vinegar smell, that what appeared to be rust inside the can was all over the film, and that the solidification and bubbling gunk I could see through the projection reels was not typical behavior of acetate from the 1970s, whether the East Germans had made it or not. Nope, this was nitrate, and luckily most of the reels were heads out with the title cards for the reel visible. Passaic Textile Strike Reel 2. Passaic Textile Strike Reel 4. Passaic Textile Strike Reel 5. And so on.

After the nitrate excitement died down, my colleague began searching for the title online and found that the Library of Congress had a print, but two reels were considered lost, including reel 5. Things moved fast after that. Somebody called a contact at LOC. The head of the department and the Tamiment archivist were called in. We had to find someone with nitrate shipping certification. And soon the films were out the door to LOC. They were pretty seriously decayed, but that’s where all that slow, detailed, technical (dull) work comes in to play to do the restoration work.

*****

Exciting stuff, but not ‘my’ or ‘a’ discovery. There were a lot of people involved in the overall process, and I was just the one to physically pull the reels out of the box and look at them. Also, the film was not truly lost or discovered. It was sitting there in a box, not caring one way or the other. It couldn’t be lost because no one was missing it. Anyone at anytime could have peeked in the box and wondered what was on those reels.

In fact, it should have been someone else. If an organization or an archive truly cares about the materials they create or collect, if they care about the investments made in creating and storing those materials, if they care about the longevity of their organization and fulfillment of organizational goals then, plain and simple, they should take care of their stuff. #tcys and whatnot.

To be clear, I’m not picking on archives here — this diatribe refers to the whole enterprise. Either you have pride in your work or you don’t, and that institutional attitude or support for it starts at the top. This doesn’t mean that the organization absolutely must care about those assets, but to market them based on quality of the content/materials or the institution’s history/dedication would seem to require a certain degree of commitment to those expressed ideals in order to retain any level of validity.

*****

And that, my friends, is polemics (I minored in it in college). Do you agree in total? Do you reject it outright? Do you agree in principle but not in practical reality? I’d like to know, but, I feel, save for the derailment, the gauge of my original track is true. ‘Lost’ films are not the result of inevitability (unless you believe that humans will inevitably mess things up), but are lost through our own decisions at action or inaction. The celebration of their discovery turns irresponsible behavior into an applauded activity. This approval, and subsequent social/monetary benefit, promotes hoarding, negligence, and other high risk behaviors enabled by the belief that 1) the ultimate payoff will be great and 2) the material will always be recoverable.

One has to assume that, given human and corporate nature, the potential for benign neglect as a preservation strategy would become the default position in most cases. After one assumes that, one has to ask, has the line between benign and malignant ever been sufficiently delineated so as to ensure that action occurs before it is crossed, and what extra cost is incurred if that line is ignored, despite the potential capability of recovering the content? Perhaps, in this arena, we need to better document our less direct failures and losses in order to counter the distracting jubilation of films grasped from the ravages of decay, to fully delineate the real costs and risks so that we take care of our stuff in the first place or accept the decision not to.

— Joshua Ranger

Most Interesting Acquisition: Library of Congress to receive entire Twitter archive
Though easily mocked by Your Dad (Yes, Twitter is mostly banal content, but so are the journals and letters of the past that are considered important source materials today) this acquisition is important not only because of the snapshot it provides of everyday life and the way that technology affects or is adapted by society, but also because of the technological efforts required to ingest and preserve the collection. As LOC Digital Initiatives Program Manager Bill Lefurgy says in the article, the Library needs to develop guidelines and methodologies for how to accept and manage very large data sets in anticipation of future acquisitions. The Twitter data presents an excellent opportunity to collaborate with private industry on improved means for data transfer and preservation.

Most Appropriate Reaction to the Twitter Acquisition: Tweeted by @AlbertBrooks, “Damn. If I had known this I never would’ve done that one about my ass”

Most Archivally Philosophical Documentary: Knuckle
The argument over the best use of archival material in a documentary is a parlor game, no real answer but a playful way to show off one’s erudition and argue for argument’s sake. Instead I ask the question, when does source material become archival material? Ian Palmer’s Knuckle, a documentary about the tradition of bare-knuckle fighting to settle disputes among families in the Irish Traveller community, was videotaped periodically over 12 years before being crafted into a film. Palmer states that he put the tapes away in boxes and didn’t even know what the content was until reviewing it when production started. What defines an archive? Age? The way it’s stored? Frequency of access? Original intention for the materials? An original creator vs. a re-user of existing material?

Most Egregious Use of Archival Material in a Documentary: Flying Monsters 3D with David Attenborough
The 3D processes used in this film did not exist during the dinosaur age, so I can only assume that they used some crappy post-process conversion on the source footage. Very disappointing.

#waytotakeastand Award for Archives: Association for Recorded Sound Collections Copyright Committee
Many people don’t realize that audio recordings made prior to 1972 fall under state and not federal copyright law. This means that the same length of copyright, public domain applications, and Section 108 protections do not apply to audio recordings unless a state has modified its laws to mirror federal statutes. This is seldom the case, and as a result the access to pre-1923 works and the ability of libraries and archives to take care of such works has been severely limited. Since 2009, ARSC has been rattling cages in the federal government to prompt a change to this odd exemption, and the US Copyright Office will be releasing a report studying the issue in the near future. Way to take a stand!

#yourenothelping Award for Archives: Digital Photo Frames
I know all the HGH we’re taking is giving us enormous heads and wide bodies, but imagine those heads stretched from 4:3 to a 16:9 aspect ratio. We don’t have to worry about preserving digital photography because our great-great-grandchildren will be so freaked out by the monstrosities they see that they will destroy them all anyway. The insidious infiltration of devices like these (and widescreen televisions) present a major need area for media education.

Archive of the Year: That Box of Photos Under My Bed
It’s got some really great stuff in it. I swear I’ll get around to taking care of it in 2012.

Happy New Year!

— Joshua Ranger

Of course segments of these types mix together in contradictory ways. At my classmate’s house we were forbidden from watching Three’s Company because it was too racy, we went to a natural food store for snacks made from various puffed or toasted grains (after sneaking some Nerds and Bottle Caps on our way from the bus to his home), and we spent the evening watching 16mm educational films because his father worked for a distributor and could get a projector and films for free.

So my associative experience with 16mm film projection? Some combination of awe over moon landings, malnourishment (70s health food was a much different [soy-based] beast than what is available today), and primarily discomfort and slight concerns over my safety in case I made a reference to Loni Anderson or Soap. In my mind, viewing a film film in a non-theatrical venue equates to nervousness, low level fear, and hunger.

What, then, does this mean in terms of the format? Nothing, really. 16mm is not inherently Manson-like (8mm, perhaps), but these are my emotional attachments to the viewing experience. This is nothing against the format or the filmic experience — my next 16mm viewing came 20 some odd years later on a Brooklyn rooftop, discussing the deep magenta tone of a NYPL print of On The Town in between reel changes with my NYU archiving cohorts. There was probably a similar degree of fear and hunger involved, but, overall, a rather different experience than the earlier one.

Between these endpoints, my primary interactions with Cinema were the multiplex, television, home video, and TV/VCR combos rolled into classrooms. My film classes at two universities before NYU utilized projected VHS tapes, either from the library, Blockbuster, or dubbed from TV. Despite my chosen career and the obvious aesthetic qualities of film, my life and the lives of the bulk of people I know have to make me assume that over the past 30 years these types of experiences with movies are more representative of the broader culture than actual film projection.

And it is exactly these points of personal experience and aestheticism where the film-as-film preservation argument runs into the first of many impediments — not due to a question of quality but a question of how we communicate across a broad audience. We can write touching paeans about our personal attachment to film or create masterful homages to certain styles or periods in cinematic history, but in the end we have to consider whether these great enlightenment sermons are converting souls or just creating an emotional buzz for ourselves, whether they push ideas ahead or are more like resigned obituaries looking to reify the past ere it dissipates forever.

We also have to consider that media archiving and preservation extend well beyond motion picture film. Within the past 20-30 years how much content has been created on video as opposed to film? And what of audio? These media types do not have a viable long term format to migrate to outside of the digital realm, and many of them are already born digital. Perhaps we need to ask ourselves if a fundamental rejection of digital preservation and the work needed to establish archival methodologies in favor of film is ultimately detrimental to the preservation needs of non-film materials as well as the presentation needs of existing digital cinema.

The personal narrative can be an effective rhetorical angle, but it is not the entire argument. In order to more successfully advocate for the importance of media archiving and preservation we need to acknowledge that the unreceptive do not typically travel the Damascan road. Within the humanities, critical arguments based on the appreciation of all that is sweetness and light are valid but limited lines of reasoning. Limited because aesthetic arguments tend to be easily dismissed by those not of like mind or similar background as mere opinion or too soft, but also limited because it does not take full advantage of the skills a humanities education provides: analysis, questioning, interpretation, empathy, awareness of audience, historical perspective, and more.

As with all formats, the risks associated with digital media and its material differences from film are real and definable. The way those risks and differences are communicated — both in terms of creating awareness and establishing means of dealing with them — will greatly affect our ability to deal with the challenges and to gather the resources we need to do so.

Next: Don’t Kill the Carrier Part the Second: The Digital Dilemma is a Resource Problem not a Format Problem

— Joshua Ranger

Interesting in itself, the story within this story is actually about how when, several years ago, Basinski was “archiving” these works (his word for what consisted of playing the tapes out to CD until it reached capacity while he made some tea) the oxide on some tapes began to flake off during playback. Instead of stopping the tapes, he let them continue to play until, gradually, all of the binder was gone. The audio captured is a haunting fragmentation and lurching decay of the audio signal which he fashioned into a series of works entitled The Disintegration Loops.

“Everything and Nothing” from WNYC’s Radiolab

While I have to admit that these works are quite moving, I also have to admit that the way Basinski used the term archiving to describe what he was doing also moved something within me to snap. This seemed to be the point at which some dawning realizations gelled, at which a nagging thought in the back of my head became a lens projecting truth onto the screen of my mind. Archive is a word that should be archived. Archive is a word that is dead.

You see, I believe that words have a weight to them, a density that increases and decreases across time. They become muscular through regular exercising, atrophied through disuse, chipped away at by re-appropriation, or grow slow and heavy with the burden of associations, their definition becoming amorphous and diffuse. In this way words become tools or cudgels or shackles, acting for us or upon us on the metaphysical and perceptual planes as such instruments would on the physical. In my view, archive and the words derived from it have been co-opted and negatively connotated, stripped of definite meaning and weighted with preconceptions.

I often run into the feeling out there from those outside the field that archives are inaccessible holes, deep in the recesses of an institution, the place where one dumps stuff one cannot stomach to discard but cannot really see a future use for…though even in such cases it may be preferable to stash those items away in a desk drawer one seldom opens and is not exactly sure of the contents, just because it’s such a pain to request assets back from the archivist. And the archivists, the guardians of these dungeons, are the Grendels of an institution — uncompromising hoarders of treasures, made grumpy by the joyous, uncaring excesses of man, preferring exile and avoidance of daylight.

But flip the coin, and archives become deep cisterns of knowledge and reusable content where an individual can discover their ancestry, remix a video, or learn about the fascinating history of People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive Award. It is also where an organization can develop new content out of old, push a retro or ‘classic’ marketing campaign, feed materials to the Web or social media, or derive a new product from old R&D.

Flip the coin again, however, and an archive is a portal to access digital surrogates — either public à la something like the Internet Archive or private (as in Kenneth Goldsmith’s wrong-headed claims) like one’s personal iTunes library. In this sense archive seems to just be used to refer to a collection of things that exist and are arranged together. These models may have an actual collection policy and preservation-oriented archive behind the scenes, or it may be based off of derivatives embedded or linked from other sources that may disappear at any time, or it may be an asset management and access utility pulling from one’s harddrive.

Flip the coin yet again and archive becomes a verb, some vaguely defined act that has been used to mean moving a file to a different folder on a server, sticking an item on a shelf or in a drawer to be accessed sometime…maybe, digitizing a work and putting it on DVD or online, or, in general, just letting someone else worry about the dang thing. Used in its lay or commercial sense, archiving something has less to do with quality and fidelity to originals than with removing clutter or establishing access via preferred platforms.

One may be impressed at this cornucopia of meaning, or proud at the sheer number of columns ‘archive’ would take up in the Oxford English Dictionary (Would we call that an archive of language?). However, my concern here is that this coin has too many sides, too many opposing facets, and that makes it invalid currency. The weighted or confused definitions mean that the ideas we attempt to communicate around discussing the work and importance of archives are often misinterpreted or unaccepted, their value lost in the exchange rate or enforced duty.

An archive can take on many forms and many roles that are not necessarily compatible or recognizable as the same thing from organization to organization. Similarly so, archiving is a broad collection of actions applied in degrees as a given situation demands or allows. I started off by saying I would not use the word archive anymore, but, really, there is a choice here about whether to cut and run or to dig in and work to better define and communicate the issues. It seems like an insurmountable challenge, but then again, I hear that archives are full of the stories of people making a difference.

— Joshua Ranger

Amongst the materials in the collection are film and video works created by Rivers, including footage of his then adolescent daughters he documented over several years for a series he entitled “Growing”. In this footage, Rivers shot his daughters topless or naked bodies and interrogated them about their bodies and physical development. Around the time of the announcement, it came out that Rivers’ daughter Emma Tamburlini had been trying to have those materials removed from the official papers as held by the Larry Rivers Foundation and have them given to her and her sister. She has stated that the process of the filming led to several emotional problems during her life and (understandably) does not want non-consensual, revealing images of her open to public access. When the Tamburlini story broke the NYU response was non-committal and the Rivers Foundation maintained their line of not giving the items to the daughters, but only a few days later NYU declared that they did not want the “Growing” materials as part of their acquisition.

The speed and tenor of NYU’s decision underscores the more clearcut nature of the privacy issues involved here. Accusations of exploiting children in such ways can cause even the most stagnant bureaucracy to react at a closer to reasonable pace. However, though this one issue is somewhat resolved, it points to the emergent concern of privacy in this age of accessibility. In the past, the combined issues of distance, a closed/secretive tradition, and format obsolescence helped keep archival materials little accessed and difficult to locate. Digital archives, online catalogs, and electronic finding aids have changed that, but, equally influential, is the shifting cultural paradigm towards greater sharing of information.

The current get-offa-my-lawn-kids! blame for this shift are the Zuckerbergs and the Anonymouses, those harbingers of “Wait — maybe our parents had some things right”ness…A concept that appears to have a fairly strong toehold if Salon and the New York Times both have articles within a few days of one another discussing the sad breakdown of the differentiation between “secrecy” and “privacy”. (Though, one has to admit, there is a reasonable argument for laying the start of things on the Boomers who put their colonoscopies on national television, discussed the presidential penis, gave the German prime minister a shoulder massage, and burdened decades of poor English literature students with confessional poetry.)

I needle here a bit because, admittedly, I have to agree with the current urge towards reassessment, but I am loathe to sound like I’m the cranky-old-man I really am. I blog in a public (to the five people that read this…Hi, mom!!!!) arena and reference personal topics, but I chose what to present and how to present it.

However, I would be utterly mortified if I saw that some home movie/video of me from youth were floating around out in the digital ether for anyone to see, to set to ironic music, or to gently mock in a series of Facebook comments. I was a goofy adolescent who enjoyed making people laugh (as opposed to my current instantiation of a grim middle-ager who enjoys curing insomnia), and much of the “archival” footage of me that may exist out there reflects that. Similarly, I always felt that the classroom was a place to test ideas, writing styles, and pushing concepts to logical conclusions in the name of learning (not the name of being correct). The idea that a grade school friend’s family could have sold some VHS tapes on ebay or that one of my alma maters (again, NYU) did in fact want to put all student papers online makes me understand the (perhaps exaggerated) fear of photography stealing one’s soul.

I should also note that this isn’t just a shift in the level of accessibility to materials, but also a shift in estimation of what is considered of historical (or monetary) value. The influence of bottom-up historical research, the appreciation of home movies and amateur documentation, and the nostalgia/re-purposing market have all contributed to private or semi-private materials becoming a more respected part of the cultural (or marketing) fabric of contemporary life. Once the provenance of your spinster aunt or insufferably boring neighbor, the previously mocked 8mm films and interminable slide show have become National Film Preservation Foundation targets and footage licensing fodder, distorting their real or imagined Antiques Road Show value.

In the initial Times article about the Rivers acquisition there was an interesting pull quote from David Joel, director of the Larry Rivers Foundation. He stated that he would not destroy the “Growing” films and videos because “‘I can’t be the person who says this stays and this goes. My job is to protect the material.’” I recall my first reaction to this quote, that it was insensitive and overly worshipful of the capital-A Artist and his capital-W Works. Though my own strong feelings about the exploitation of Rivers’ children persist, after a year of pondering I wonder now if Joel’s adamancy was the right tact, having a reverse psychological effect of preventing the materials from being publicly accessed or destroyed and, at least in some way, protecting the materials for some future date. Being thus protected, I’m not sure if they should ever be released, but, just as preserving everything is neither possible nor desirable, where and how do we sketch the line separating (or defining the convergence of) accessibility, discretion, and ethics?

— Joshua Ranger

The death of film has been predicted and/or declared repeatedly over the years because of the extended slow down of stock and equipment production and the decreasing number of places to have it processed. A recent news article about the end of film print distribution in Hong Kong and Macau has many people thinking that this is the big third act coughing fit that can no longer be dismissed or fully recovered from. The topic has led to an extensive thread* on the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) listserv, producing a collective mind version of the 7 stages of mourning as people are alternatively depressed, angry, unbelieving, and hungry (hey, an archivist’s gotta eat).

A definite undercurrent to the posts is, essentially, “Film is the awesomest! Digital is a stupidhead!” (I simplify, perhaps in too many ways, to cover the large volume of responses.) A good point was made by Leo Enticknap** that the tightly clasped fist holding film to our hearts does not seem to exist in the same way with video, the response to this elicited on the listserv then being, “Well, duh.” It was expressed there (and in many places before) that film is special because one can see the image without a projector and there is magic in the creation of the image, while the invisible electrical pulses and signals of video and audio are empty and unloveable. (Sniff! As am I. As. Am. I.)

This is not true. I have a number of colleagues and friends in the field who love video and audio precisely because it is so mysterious and who find electricity magical. Also, an audio signal is at least as simplepure as the filmic image, representing exactly what occurred in actuality to create and transport sound through the air.

Of course there is no real arguing a point among formats here. –philia is –philia, and there is no logical point/counterpoint discussion and resolution to passion and faith. I think of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s writing on sacred objects***. As he states it, in either the spiritual or ethical structure within a culture, “the forms, vehicles, and objects of worship are suffused with an aura of deep moral seriousness” and “that which is set apart as more than mundane is inevitably considered to have far-reaching implications for the direction of human conduct” (126).

I would stress that the reference is not limited to objects of religious worship, but all special objects or symbols (mascots, flags, lucky underwear) that store meaning and importance in the Everyday. As Geertz goes on: “Sacred symbols thus relate an ontology and a cosmology to an aesthetics and a morality: their peculiar power comes from their presumed ability to identify fact with value at the most fundamental level, to give to what is otherwise merely actual, a comprehensive normative import” (127).

For the cinephile or audiophile or philatelophile, their particular sacred object holds a similar rightness and beauty, establishing not an utterly guiding but at least a partial value system dependent on, in Geertz’s terminology, a metaphysical referent or a system that derives from an ontologically based ethic (127). In the field of film preservation, cinephilia has often been a driving force. However, there has been a gnawing concern in the back of mind that the worm will turn…or has turned. It seems that fetishization of the object – the reification of film, video, or whatever carrier – can equally be a detriment to preservation.

Reformatting is a fact of audiovisual preservation. The carrier will not persist and the content needs to be migrated to an accessible format. Scratch that. The carrier will not persist and the business model that produces that carrier will not persist. However, we cannot, we will not let go of that original object. First of all, out of fear, fear of going down in history as that person who decided that nitrate films should be thrown in the Pacific or early television materials should be thrown in the Hudson River. Second of all, the reason is… fear, fear of losing the object. Reformatting is trending towards the digital realm and, to many, digital files are even less real or graspable than video signals. Geertz states that, while theoretically possible, no culture has established an “autonomous value system” independent of symbols and objects (127). However, conceptually, this is what digital preservation can seem to be requiring us to do.

The reconceptualization necessary here will happen over time, gradually, the birth of digital neither as hard nor fast as the death of film. What will be a bigger problem to face is what do we do with all of the physical materials once they have reached a state of advanced/absolute obsolescence and/or decay. One of the promises of digital media is cheap (and increasingly cheaper) storage (though initial cost outlay does not make it seem so). Physical storage is not getting cheaper, and costs will keep rising as organizations reformat and store their originals away. In the very near future (if not already), organizations will start asking hard questions: If we have a preservation master (with backups, stored in separate locations), and a mezzanine copy, and an access copy, why are we paying to store 15,000 tapes we cannot play internally, would cost us X number of dollars to have played by someone else, and may have decayed beyond the quality of our preservation master? At what point do we say, “Enough. We’re moving ahead with what we determined was our best option”?

Tough decision. Not mine nor anyone else’s to make for someone other, but, still, a decision we all can discuss and, hopefully, establish a reasonable set of outcomes and considerations that can inform the choices one must make. Preservation is not a single act, but a series of decisions and implications that follow the embodiment of content from object to object.

Maybe, then, as with the burial of Torahs and other sacred objects in Judaism, there needs to be some sort of ritual disposal, something that acknowledges the limitations of physicality and something that lets us say we shepherded these materials as best we could through their lifecycle so that their essence shall persist.

— Joshua Ranger

*Started by David Croswaith, [AMIA-L] Re: It’s the Beginning of the End for 35mm as Worldwide D-Cinema Roll-out Accelerates, Mon, 8 Aug 2011 14:20:01 -0700
**[AMIA-L] Reply: It’s the Beginning of the End for 35mm as Worldwide D-Cinema Roll-out Accelerates, Wed, 10 Aug 2011 11:33:39 +0100
***Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books. New York, 1973.

There is a debate about which element has primacy in this relationship — whether the mental (our ideologies) colors what / how we see the world, or whether our limited field of vision (both literal and figurative [see, it's difficult to separate out these terms!]) colors what our mental reading is (a la Sturges-as-told-by-Welles). I was looking back at a TED talk by Beau Lotto, founder of LottoLab and a science/art researcher, and was intrigued by the way he picked up this questions, sniffed it to check for ripeness, and viewed it from a different angle. In his talk he considers the evolutionary causality of visual perception on the brain, the idea that the brain is trained in how to see and interpret by the physics of light and vision.

In other words (just in case 16 minutes of his words were not enough…or too much), there are many ways in which variations in light, filters, shadows, distance, luminance, etc. can make very different objects appear indistinguishable or distort how we perceive them. This is what can commonly cause illusions or visual puzzles (or are the base of special effects in filmmaking). What Lotto suggests is that, when making a discernment in visual clues is beneficial to our survival, our brain learns to see through the filters somehow. When that discernment is of little or no benefit, the brain does not bother to learn and allows the default perception to remain.

In Lotto’s rubric, visual clues are information, and, to paraphrase him, there is no inherent meaning in information; it’s what we do with the information that creates meaning. This is the exact same point of view that needs to be applied to one’s understanding the importance of metadata, that meaningless yet all powerful pile of text. Metadata does nothing on its own, and seems like a bother to capture and maintain if it’s just going to sit there. But, with the right processes and applications defined and in place, there are innumerable possibilites for the social, educational, and business use of even the modest Y/N flag.

This would seem like the logical direction to take this weblogged rambling, but what struck me about Lotto’s talk is the feedback connection between the physical world and mental processes. This idea got me thinking about the assessment and preservation of magnetic media, things that, as objects, are very physical but that, because we require an intermediary (a playback deck) in order to see what is on the tape (or more correctly see the results of the signal that is stored on the tape, a signal that can have no discernable visual correlation to the image it produces) can seem very abstract and mystical.

Film is visual in its physical manifestation, as is its inspection. Every scratch, tear, splice, and oil stain on a film can be documented as well fading and shrinkage and what not — and the visual effect of these problems can be assumed or experienced even without playback — and this reassures us in the exact work that needs to be done to preserve the item. Video, partly because archives often lack playbacks decks in good (or any) condition and partly because those decks hide the tape/ cassette from our view and use unseen mechanisms/ processes (causing fear that something catastrophic and unpreventable will occur during playback), often has to rely on physical inspection of the cassette, tape, and annotations to make a preservation assessment of an item without actually viewing the content or the condition of the image produced. These physical clues can point to possible condition issues (some more reliable than others), though signs of condition issues don’t necessarily correlate to errors produced during playback.

Of course the simple answer here is, play everything back, which, yes, is the only true reliable way of 1) determining content of a tape and 2) determining the condition of the signal and resultant image/ sound. The simple question in answer to that answer is, Who has the 1) time, 2) money, 3) equipment to do that with every single item in a collection? Practically thinking, there has to be a more efficient way to process and assess collections. Messrs. Greene and Meissner have addressed this issue to a degree, but their discussion revolves entirely around paper collections and does not take into consideration the accessibility issues regarding audiovisual materials that make researcher-centric browsing much more difficult than leafing through a folder or box of letters.

What we need to do is change our view of a perceived lack of information attainable from certain analog media formats to a view of the value in what information is present or can be inferred, and that can be exploited for establishing strategies for planning, discovery, access, and the other necessary activities of archives. With the application of outside knowledge such the history and technical characteristics of video formats or typical production workflows, a box of mixed formats can shift from a jumble of plastics and worry to a clearer picture of potential production dates, priorities for reformatting, delineations of camera original versus production elements, ceiling targets for storage capacities and throughput, and more.

This still requires an item-level approach, but a quicker, more efficient one that also provides for improved collection management. The mediation between box-level and item-level processing for audiovisual material is still unresolved, but reformatting has to happen sooner than later, and even a basic item-level inventory supports planning for those efforts more practically and in a way that can better allay future costs — and looking down the road like that is yet another way we need to think about perceiving preservation efforts to help clarify the things we need to do today.

— Joshua Ranger

I recall a summer job I had in college painting dorm rooms. In one building I was given a special can of paint and tasked with putting a fresh coat on all of the fire extinguisher wall units. The paint was a bright, bright red and immediately reminded me of the color of fake blood used in low budget films from the 70s, especially of the exploitation ilk. This is the red of red hots (both kinds), Red #5 (the dangerous kind, from the 50s), and Glacé fruit (the kind of fruit that is actually bad for you).

It’s a conundrum — how does one delineate the point at which something fake looks more fake than other fake things — but something about the Somebody worked a few days to research and painstakingly recreate the correct shade and splatter pattern of real blood-ness of it all just…looks…fake.

I don’t want to make this a rant about the coldness of digital versus the warmth of analog — though I do tend to admire the ingenuity and physicality of practical effects — because computer-aided effects are not across the board bad. The issue is, more so, one of shifting perceptions of what constitutes realism and what one, experientially, accepts as the norm in visual representation.

I think here of a Cosby Show episode where the adults discuss how things like rubber bats and other haunted house-y type things in movies were enough to scare the bejeezus out of them, but kidsthesedays just roll their eyes at it all. Damn you, Rudy!

To reiterate, the problem we face is what people are currently accustomed to viewing versus what people were previously accustomed to viewing. Unfortunately, in terms of moving images, these shifts are gradual and not always noticeable in degrees, like how when you see a child every day you don’t exactly note their growth over a year, but if you see them once a year they will look very different. As a simple example, placed side by side, the differences in visual quality between VHS and DVD are noticeable but can be difficult to articulate, unlike, say, comparing classical portraiture to non-representational art. Additionally, the less we view VHS the more distant our memory of the particulars of the format become. We feel things should look like DVD or Blu-Ray or H.264 now because those are what we experience.

Trying to define why “This fakery is more fake looking than this fakery” is similar to trying to define why “This format looks better than this format”. The issues compound when one takes prosumer and professional formats into consideration. The limited scope of direct exposure makes it more difficult for a wider audience to differentiate. When dealing with preservation reformatting, the challenge becomes maintaining the look of the VHS or whatever source format, but also helping people who do not recall or never experienced the qualities of the source understand that this DVD ought not to look like what they may expect. Binder formulations, monitors, playback machines, codecs, and such are the bristle, paint, and canvas types of video that produce their own quality and have their own aesthetic, which qualities need to be maintained to the best degree possible.

In short, as a human of a certain age with a certain exposure to methodologies of creating bloody messes, I maintain a certain sense of what appears the “correct” presentation format, leaning more towards Karo syrup and less towards AfterEffects. This isn’t to say that one’s taste or eye cannot change — it does shift, as in the case of video — but there is a loss in the shift. A fading of memory, an alteration in perception, a dispersal of molecules. Inscrutable, intangible things that we cannot fully grasp onto in order to keep in place. Things that go away, we know not how and we know not where.

But then again, it was AMC Original Series The Walking Dead I was watching. I guess there are certain things we don’t want sticking around forever.

— Joshua Ranger

The audio was recorded on glass-based lacquer discs — a highly fragile format that, like most lacquer discs, is at severe risk for chemical and physical degradation. Last year the Met received a grant from The Monument Mens Foundation, an organization dedicated to honoring the work done by the MFAA and continuing to support the protection and repatriation of art works in areas of armed conflict, to preserve the audio and make it accessible to the public. Our own Chris Lacinak was very honored to be one of a group of professional advisors who provided the Met with guidance on planning their restoration.

As always, it’s great to see a successful preservation project completed, and, going beyond Eisenhower, the story and (continuing) mission of the Monuments Men is fascinating, essential history. On a personal level, however, what this story brought back to me was a memory of what a scapegoat Eisenhower was when I was growing up — the middle-of-the-road, middle-of-America, caucasian patriarch who was the symbol of the hegemonic complacency our parents were oppressed with. Perhaps an exaggerated response considering the other forms of oppression occurring in the 1950s, but for years those too-brightly-lit, kinescope-distorted, early television images of Eisenhower in close up went hand-in-hand with scenes of mushroom clouds and children ducking under desks in various documentaries or other uses of stock footage.

But then something started to happen. Saving Private Ryan and The Greatest Generation made Boomers start to reconsider their parents’ lives. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq made people think about how the military is run and the president’s role as commander-in-chief outside the emotions caused by Vietnam. Eisenhower’s farewell speech, which included the warning about the military/industrial complex, became an ur-text of liberal politics. The past from my past became a different past as the interpretive position shifted from the heat of one moment to the glow of hindsight and the heat of another moment.

The cycle of generational context would suggest that I scoff at such softening as I continue to cling to my childhood anger at the dismantling of social, educational, and arts support in the 1980s. Reagan, too, has been making a comeback of late as both sides of the aisle fight over who best represents his ideology and his legacy. Either I’m a stubborn-headed fool or this is a good sign that I’m not too old yet.

A commonality in these parallel trends is the use of audiovisual materials to support reassessments — televised speeches, recorded visits of state, audio interviews — all of it easily distributable, easily accessible content. A commonality in this commonality is that, for the most part, one can assume these recordings come from major events covered by major news outlets. This is far from an assurance that such recordings would always be preserved, but, if they were, they would be and become part of the common cultural memory. Be because of the significant audience at the time. Become because of the repeated airplay they may receive in documentaries and news stories, a situation which can create a familiarity that causes people to believe they experienced the event the first time around…which then promulgates further reiteration of the same footage, becoming a visual shorthand for wide swaths of history. To half-misinterpret the old saw about Woodstock — if you remember being there you probably weren’t.

To me, this pseudo-echo effect has two meanings. First, audiovisual content is so powerful that it can embed itself in our memory quite easily. Second, we need to dig deeper with our support of smaller local, regional, or institutional archives and historical societies in order to uncover new stories that create a fuller picture of the past. The Eisenhower recording at The Met is a great example of this. DDE’s work with the MFAA, while incredibly important, has not been a major part of the wider representation of his military and political career. Thanks to The Met and the Monuments Men, we now have a greater understanding the career and the man.

One can also look to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s American Archive project, which is poised to uncover loads of locally produced programming that will be highly meaningful to our understanding of broadcast history and American culture, and as equally impactful to the pleasure we derive from both. Or among some recent clients I’ve worked with, one might look to institutions like Hartwick College in upstate New York whose archives contain a treasure trove of regional oral histories and audio or video recordings from the numerous scholars, artists, and cultural figures who have spoken at the college. Or the Tenement Museum‘s extensive oral history collection of Lower East Side residents, material that can be used to support research as well as the creation of exhibits and educational material which support the Museum’s mission.

It seems so common to repeat that humans and history are complex and deserve the full picture archival material can provide. Common, but worth restating because it is so easy to take for granted that archiving just happens, that of course everyone is taking care of their stuff because it is so valuable and that all that material is easy to find and use. Archiving is more than putting items in a box on a shelf. It requires active planning, management, advocacy, and promotion. As the MFAA and the military were aware, archiving and preservation do not happen unless we make them happen, unless we enable them to happen, unless we demand they happen. I reckon they were a might good generation after all.

— Joshua Ranger

The article was prompted by this summer’s release of “The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age” by the National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB) and Library of Congress Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). Chris’ testimony in front of the NRPB as a representative for the Association of Moving Image Archivists and the Audio Engineering Society Technical Committee on Archiving, Restoration and Digital Libraries was used as background for the writing of that report. An essential text, the report is not a damnation of digital media and digital preservation but rather a call for renewed focus on the issues facing audio preservation that are having near term effects on accessibility and persistence.

We’re very happy to have been a part of the Rolling Stone article, but even happier that they took note of the issue and reported on it, which also shows what an important impact the NRPB report is having in creating awareness for audio preservation.

(And for those of you surprised we did not make the cover, Rolling Stone offered it to us but we had to turn it down. For modesty’s sake.)