Film and Video Preservation
Compared to the much older formats – books, manuscripts, artworks – film is an extremely young medium. Consequently, the profession of moving image preservation has only really been adopting any kind of industry-wide standard since the early 1990’s. Most archivists who work with film collections inherit a kind of collective responsibility for the actions of our predecessors, which manifests itself both theoretically and practically, since the conditions of our holdings today are affected by the techniques they employed. The leads to a heightened level of accountability for the preservationist, who has to balance myriad issues of authorship, accountability, historical efficacy and technical history in every level of decision-making.
These issues are particularly acute when dealing with hand-made experimental works by artists, who often labored painstakingly over every cel and animation drawing. It takes a certain level of knowledge, both of the history of the genre and of the technical aspects of the films’ production, to properly approach a preservation project.
Taking all of these factors into account, iotaCenter takes its Preservation program very seriously. We have a long and rich history of enacting carefully realized film preservation projects, and have preserved more than 30 titles to date, including films by John and James Whitney, Jordan Belson, Pat O’Neill, Mary Ellen Bute, Hy Hirsh and Jules Engel. Many of these films were partially funded by grants from the National Film Preservation Foundation (NFPF), from which we have received over ten grants. Most of these film and sound elements are stored and maintained in our deposit at the Academy Film Archive, with whom we collaborate on preservation projects. The Academy has taken a vested interest in collecting and preserving experimental works for some time now, and preservationist Mark Toscano has a deep and varied knowledge set about these artists and their works.