Dear Gossips,
At the end of October, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences laid off 16 employees, all from the AMPAS archive and the Margaret Herrick Library, which houses millions of film artifacts. Now, filmmakers from the indie space are sounding the alarm about the potential harm to film preservation, which is in a woeful state, overall. Preserving films is expensive, and practically no one resources their preservation departments—if they even have one—well enough to properly conserve and catalog films, leaving thousands of films vulnerable to loss.
The importance of film preservation is tantamount to understanding the artistic and technological progression of a relatively new art form (just 100 years old), but it has NEVER been a priority. The Library of Congress estimates 75% of silent-era films are lost, with much of the loss occurring during the shift to sound, when studios went bust practically overnight, and new technology made silent films seem suddenly worthless. Now, we’re left with a partial record of that era of filmmaking, an incomplete picture of cinema’s first wave of creation.
I’ve been saying for years that contemporary films are extremely vulnerable to loss, between the expense of preservation, disinterest from the executive class, and now the ability to simply delete whole films off servers, making it as if they never existed with the blink of an eye. It just takes one studio to go under with no one to save the catalog and poof, a century of cinema could be gone. Or a buzzkill CEO who resents his own business to defund a department—or, say, a cable channel dedicated to showing old films—and whoops, there goes years of work saving films for posterity.
The Academy’s job cuts are supposed to better align their archive with their recently opened museum—a bigger boondoggle I have rarely seen—and that does make a certain amount of sense, but it also sort of looks like the Academy is prioritizing that which can be displayed to pull in tourists, and preserved films aren’t always a hot ticket. If anything, they’re almost a liability in an age when a lot of people simply do not want to engage with older films. But rather than invest in preservation and make a case for classic cinema, we’re seeing what looks like the further devaluation of preservation as a vital part of cinema.
I don’t have an answer except to support repertory cinema if and when you can. Going to screenings of classic films is the best way to demonstrate their value to the CEOs who control most of the American film libraries. Preservation takes money, so it has to look like a good investment, because as with most things, we’re at the mercy of the wealthy when it comes to preserving our cinematic past.
Live long and gossip,
Sarah