The Art Pillar continued (Recommendations 11–22) | What America’s Cinema Business Needs Now, Part 8
Let’s not fool ourselves: making a movie is a remarkably difficult thing to do. We beg, borrow, negotiate, compromise, lose sleep, delay gratification (including payments), sometimes make ourselves miserable, and occasionally make everybody around us miserable too. The list frankly could just go on and on. Against considerable odds, some of us even manage to finish the effin thing though. And when we do, we have many a reason to celebrate. Even when the movie isn’t everything we’d hoped.
But then what? After all that effort, how many of us have a credible plan for ensuring the film will still exist in twenty years? Fifty? A hundred? Wasn’t this something that was supposed to last forever? Don’t fool yourself. It’s not going to. Do you know where your audio stems are? When was the last time you ported your data? Most films that were shot digitally have not been preserved properly, and will likely soon become inaccessible. Poof. Woosh. Gone.
For far too many films, the archival strategy seems to consist of not much more than somebody having a hard drive somewhere. If it is a wee bit more professional, perhaps it is two hard drives, ideally not in the same house. Maybe somebody remembers the password to one of them. Maybe the company that owns the material will still exist in ten years, although given how the film business works, I wouldn’t put much money on that proposition either. We’ve all buried our heads in the sand, again.
Let’s do another little dance. Sing it with me. Change is constant, but not all of it is good. Producers retire. Companies are sold. Filmmakers die. Formats change. Storage fails. Rights get transferred, sometimes to people who couldn’t care less whether the film survives. And the materials that took so much effort to create can disappear with astonishing ease. Poof!
It’s a pretty strange way for an industry devoted to an art form to behave, don’t you think?
These first 22 of these 101 recommendations all belong to The Art, the first of our four pillars for sustaining authored cinema. In Part One of our 101 Things, we explored ten ways to make more ambitious cinema possible. But what good does creating more extraordinary work do us if we’re not also making sure it can survive? And what happens when future audiences want to discover a film, only to find that nobody knows where the materials are, which version is available, if the files are all corrupt, or even who has the right to show it?
America has extraordinary archivists, preservation organizations, laboratories, and historians. Shame on our industry for not using them better. Some have devoted their labor to rescuing films that the business abandoned. They’ve accomplished remarkable things, frequently with nowhere near the resources they deserve. I suspect many of us who make movies have been a bit too willing to let them worry about the consequences of our own neglect.
We need to change that. And I include myself in the responsibility. That’s a bit why I am writing to you today. Well, that, and because I don’t want you to forget about me sitting over here on my lily pad. Maybe I can be of help!
I suggested an Artists’ Bill of Rights back in 2023. Among its proposals was a requirement that any all-rights acquisition pay for archival preservation. Three years later, that still strikes me as a pretty reasonable expectation from our friends in the corporate world. Frankly, I think we should go further.
Preservation ought to begin before production, become part of our budgets and contracts, and continue throughout a film’s commercial and cultural life. We should give a movie’s future at least some of the attention we give its opening weekend.
The encouraging thing is that we don’t need to invent all the solutions. Some already exist. Some could be adapted and a few would require us to build something genuinely new.
Here are the next twelve recommendations.
Twelve Things We Could Do To Give Our Movies A Future
First, Let’s Make Preservation Everybody’s Business
11. Have film festivals request an archival and preservation plan with every submission. Imagine if Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca, and hundreds of regional festivals all began asking filmmakers the same questions. Where are the original materials? What masters exist? How are they backed up? Who is responsible for keeping them safe? What’s the plan for the next twenty years?
I’m not suggesting that festivals reject filmmakers who are clueless or can’t afford someone to help them with an archival plan. At least, not yet am I. A simple questionnaire could instead identify who needs help, encourage better practices, and connect people to expertise. It would expose how big the problem is, at least to start. One of you reading this now might want to build that template that we can all share. I hope I you won’t make me build one myself again. If we had that template, we might discover that a remarkably small intervention could begin changing things for the better.
What if five major festivals agreed to pilot the same questions, share what they learned, and invite everyone else to participate?
Possible partners: Sundance Institute, SXSW, Tribeca Festival, IDA, regional festivals, and the Association of Moving Image Archivists. FilmFreeway could add archive & elements to their application form. The major festivals could lead, but smaller festivals might prove equally inventive.
12. Establish “Filmmaker Recommended Practices for Archiving”. Every filmmaker and producer should have access to a comprehensible, affordable, regularly updated guide explaining what to preserve, how to preserve it, and what to do when circumstances change.
What files are essential? Which sound elements, subtitles, artwork, project files, and records should survive? How many backups do we need, and where should they live? Who maintains the archive after distribution? What happens when the filmmaker isn’t around anymore?
We should establish several levels of practice, from a genuinely achievable microbudget minimum to the more comprehensive requirements appropriate for larger productions.
Fortunately, the Association Of Moving Images Archivists (AMIA) already offers Preservation for Filmmakers resources, the Academy Digital Preservation Forum develops technical knowledge, and FIAF has long supported archival standards and professional exchange.
We could bring that expertise together with working filmmakers and producers to create a shared set of recommendations that funders, festivals, film schools, distributors, and professional organizations agree to promote. The innovation would be in making excellent archival practice ordinary, accessible, and widely adopted. Maybe it will even be fun!
13. Give every film and every significant version the equivalent of an ISBN. I think I even put this one in the first edition of my book way back when, but… Books have systems that allow publishers, bookstores, libraries, and readers to identify particular works and editions. Why shouldn’t movies have the same everyday clarity?
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