On the Preservation of Avant-garde and Experimental Cinema
Mary Lea Bandy
As the twentieth century, and the current millenium, approach their conclusion we are looking back through one hundred years of filmmaking, in alarm but not in panic, to consider what we've done and what we must do. Among our collections, we now see that we have amassed holdings of experimental film that, depending on definition of categories and determination of chronology, span much of the history of the film medium. In terms of preservation, however, the safeguarding of avant-garde and experimental work is in its infancy. We are only beginning to focus seriously on a substantive body of filmmaking that has been regarded as less needy of immediate attention than deteriorating nitrate or fading color footage.
The definition of experimental filmmaking is, I think, constantly changing, as we discover and re-evaluate new approaches, methods, ideas in films of every period, from the 1890s to the present. For purposes of this discussion, however, I intend avant-garde and experimental filmmaking to mean films made as a form of personal expression, films that seek to be artistically and technically innovative, that push past traditional boundaries, and are made without regard to the demands of a commercial marketplace. This definition embraces experimental documentaries and animation films; films by photographers, dancers, poets, painters, printmakers; films by Dada and Surrealist artists such as Man Ray and Duchamp, by painters such as Fernand Léger and Andy Warhol, and by sculptors such as Joseph Cornell and Richard Serra.
Experimental films may be startlingly realistic or utterly fantastic, they may be political tracts or journalistic exposés, they may focus on social injustices, racial hatred, or war. They may tell Russian soldiers how to clean their scalps, New Yorkers how their windows are washed, the British how their mail arrives so fast. They may be abstract studies of light and shade, form and image, motion and rhythm, they may be rapid or slow, still or blank. They may be diaries, self-portraits, dreams, or views through a window or door. They may be the most exploratory, perceptive, or visionary art of modern times.
Experimental films are, for most audiences, an acquired taste, often regarded as too provocative, suggestive, or obscure to attract a general audience. Thus the world of the vanguard remains small, particular, and largely uncompromised. The filmmakers often support themselves by teaching, by printing or editing or performing services for other filmmakers. Collectively, the avant-garde has had a profound impact on filmmaking in many parts of the world - and it is thanks to archives, cinematheques, and festivals that their works are seen. But the only way that this by now important history may be analyzed and interpreted is for archives to step up our efforts to safeguard what has survived.
Vanguard filmmakers have been, in general, no better than D.W. Griffith or various studios or even today's leading mainstream filmmakers, when it comes to readily recognizing the value of depositing original materials in archives. They, too, must be asked again and again to consider placing films in proper storage, and they do not adequately consider questions of preservation and access. Andy Warhol, for example, whose sizable collection is now at MOMA, kept reels in his home, in closets - an all too familiar situation.
Avant-garde filmmakers, not unlike amateurs, addressed the possibilities of working outside the studio system, with minimal crews and portable or certainly less expensive equipment. As a result, we have films in a variety of formats, the majority in 16mm, 8mm and Super 8mm. The 8mm formats, although widely used, are on the verge of becoming outdated, non-standard formats, and there are increasing limitations even with 16mm films.
The Museum of Modern Art has collected experimental films beginning in the mid-1930s, when Iris Barry traveled abroad and acquired work from France, Britain, Russia, Germany. Over ensuing decades, the Film Department has eagerly sought American and international avant-garde films, as have other American archives, particularly Pacific Film Archive, Anthology Film Archive, and the Department of Film at George Eastman House. MOMA has addressed the issue of access to these films, perhaps better than their preservation, because MOMA made these films immediately available in 16mm through our Circulating Film Library, and subsequently in its exhibition programs. From the Library's beginnings in the 1930s, through today, its holdings of experimental work have grown to include some 600 titles. The MOMA Archive holds pre-print materials on a number of these titles, as well as prints and negatives of other titles by many of the same filmmakers, which are available only for archival loans.
Three projects best illustrate the situation at MOMA today, and the problems involved for archives preserving this material: the Andy Warhol Collection, the 8mm/Super 8mm project, and the Hollis Frampton films. In planning each of these projects, we asked these questions: 1) How do we persuade filmmakers to donate the original materials to archives, especially before those materials have deteriorated? 2) How do we preserve films made in formats that are outdated today? 3) How do we provide access to experimental and vanguard films? Each of these projects posed distinctive problems, and offered creative solutions, which by no means have been fully realized.
The Films of Hollis Frampton
In discussions with independent filmmaker and teacher Bill Brand in the late 1980s, I made it clear that we welcomed deposits of experimental films. I expressed interest in acquiring the films of Hollis Frampton, a major and influential vanguard filmmaker and theorist who had died in 1984. Bill Brand and Bill Sloan, Librarian of our Circulating Film Library, talked with Frampton's widow about our distributing the films; some time later, she decided to deposit with us more than thirty short and feature-length 16mm films, and we signed a contract with her to distribute the films. Brand undertook to make prints from reversals, often the only surviving materials of experimental films.
Typically, this was the option we had to take: to make a dupe negative directly from a reversal, in much the same way we would make a dupe negative working off a projection print. Formerly, we could either make an exhibition print from the reversal original, or a dupe negative and then an exhibition print. Now, according to our film conservator Peter Williamson, with silent film we must go from original reversal to reversal print, because of unreliable lab processing. For sound film, we go from reversal to dupe negative to print. We cannot make a reversal print with a good sound track because the chemicals involved in reversal printing had to be changed to meet new requirements set by the Environmental Protection Agency. Kodak agreed to change the chemicals and make reversal stock available with the warning that the sound track may not be good. The answer today may be to go to color negatives or black-and-white negatives.
The 8mm/Super 8mm project is a collaboration of MOMA and the San Francisco Cinematheque, to exhibit and preserve films made in the 1960s-80s by filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, Ken Jacobs, Vito Acconci, and others. Standard preservation practice has been that any material in a non-standard gauge will be blown up to the next conventional size. That would mean, in this case, to 16mm film. But the project organizers, Jytte Jensen and Steve Anker, working with filmmaker Phil Weisman, are experimenting with labs to try to make negatives in the original formats, or at least to end up with prints in the original formats, which would be exhibited in retrospectives.
This project raises a number of questions: how do we preserve films in formats where stock, lab equipment, and expertise are not available in equal proportion? Some labs have discontinued 8mm printing and processing, so the lab work will have to be customized, and will be expensive. How do we provide access to non-conventional formats? If we succeed in making negatives and prints in 8mm formats, will exhibitors be able to show them? If we blow up negatives to 16mm, will the final prints be as good? And what about the shrinking market for 16mm film? Will colleges and universities show these films in 16mm? One may not have thought to hear this position from MOMA, but we believe that for exhibition purposes video formats should be investigated. If color, sound, and image can be reproduced well, it may be that in ten years experimental work will be readily available on cd's.
Ideally, then, it would seem that preservation should continue to be done in the original format, that is, film to film copying (possibly with blow-up), but access would be through video formats. Archives generally can afford to make only one dupe negative when preserving a film, whether in standard or non-standard format. The problem soon appears, however, in terms of providing future access to prints. Increasing or continual demand for access endangers the preservation materials, when the dupe negatives must be used repeatedly to make new prints. Even video transfer may cause damage to negatives. Ideally, again, two negatives should be made.
The Andy Warhol Project
This brings us to the Andy Warhol project. John Hanhardt, Curator of Film and Video at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, researched Warhol's films during the last several years of the artist's life, and succeeded in persuading Warhol to deposit his collection in an archive, at MOMA. Following his death, his colleagues, the Warhol estate, and subsequently the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts agreed to deposit almost the entire film holdings controlled by the estate at MOMA, and to support the preservation and distribution of this collection in an innovative collaborative project.
The Whitney Museum staff has undertaken the cataloguing of each title, including extensive viewings of videotape transfers, to determine cast and other production information. Working with Peter Williamson, researcher Callie Angell attempts to determine which is the definitive version of a particular title - not an easy task with Warhol films! We prepare a schedule for a year at a time of a group of titles to be preserved, balancing, for current lab capacities, black-and-white and color films, silent and sound films. We make two sets of dupe negatives and prints, one set for the archive, the other for the Film Circulating Library. The archive negative and print are our protection masters; all access to titles is restricted to the Circulating Library materials. We anticipate completing about half the collection with the funding that has been committed by the Foundation.
The most important result of the Warhol project - and it has been one of the most complex and time-consuming projects we have ever undertaken - is that as soon as a title is preserved, it is made available. Access is immediate, and international. Films which have been unavailable in good, viewable prints for nearly three decades are widely seen at archives, cinematheques, and festivals, and there is as much interest in Warhol's experiments today as there was in the 1960s when these films were made. This is a direction we need to follow for many vanguard films, but it is both arduous and costly - I know of no other such filmmaker with the resources of a major estate and foundation to support research and preservation projects.
I believe increased access to preserved titles, particularly with regard to experimental films, is key to persuading other filmmakers to deposit their films in archives, as well as to determining which formats should be tried for preservation and viewing. Archives thus need to consider the issue of access at the time preservation is planned. It is no longer sufficient to make pre-print master materials; preservation is only fully completed when a viewing print has been made. This, of course, is nearly impossible to achieve for most restorations, given the staff, laboratory, and budgetary constraints which all archives face.
In the United States, access has become an issue of primary importance. The National Endowment for the Arts, which has funded preservation through the National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the American Film Institute, announced it would cease funding for basic nitrate preservation from 1996 forward. After immediate and strong protest from the archive field, the NEA has offered a compromise: it will organize a new program, through its Media Arts division, that at a more modest level will fund preservation of films of "artistic excellence." This competitive program will require archives to stipulate how they plan to make these films immediately available to a wide public, and the government grants must be matched by two to one (i.e., if an archive is awarded $25,000, it must raise $50,000 additionally).
This NEA program could, in effect, be important in stimulating preservation of avant-garde films, presuming that panels judging archives' applications are knowledgeable and sympathetic to experimental work. Long regarded as works of intentional artistic expression, experimental films have been seen to occupy a small if not marginal niche in archival programs. I firmly believe that just as the silent cinema is becoming ever more valued and appreciated, in these fin de siècle years, so too are "personal" and "portrait" films, abstract, animation and documentary films. The visionary filmmakers of the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union, who contributed so richly to the artistic development and culture of the twentieth century, will be the subject of greater study and interest in the twenty-first, with our help.
Après cent ans de cinéma, nous constatons que nous avons amassé un grand nombre de films expérimentaux couvrant un siècle d'histoire. Cependant, en termes de préservation, la conservation de films expérimentaux et d'avant-garde n'en est qu'à son enfance. Nous commençons seulement à présent à à nous int"éresser à une partie importante de la production cinématographique qui, jusque là, semblait mériter moins d'attention que la décomposition du nitrate ou l'évanescence de la couleur.
Pour cette discussion, l'auteur propose la définition suivante: “le cinéma expérimental et d'avant-garde englobe des films réalisés comme une forme d'expression personnelle, cherchant à être artistiquement et techniquement innovateurs, qui refusent la référence aux codes d'expression traditionnels, réalisés sans égard aux impératifs d'un marché commercial”. Cette définition englobe un grand éventail d'oeuvres personnelles. Collectivement, l'avant-garde a eu un impact profond sur la réalisation de films partout dans le monde. C'est grace aux archives, aux cinémathèques et aux festivals que ces oeuvres ont été connues. Il s'agit à présent de sauvegarder ce qui a survécu.
Or, les réalisateurs d'avant garde ne réagissent pas mieux que d'autres lorsqu'il s'agit de les convaincre de déposer leurs oeuvres dans des archives et d'aborder des questions de préservation et d'accès.
Les films expérimentaux sont souvent dans des formats qui posent de plus en plus de problèmes: les formats 8mm, le 16mm, etc.
Le MoMA a recherché les films expérimentaux depuis que Iris Barry, dans les années 30, avait commencé la collection en achetant des films partout dans le monde. Comme d'autres Archives américaines (en particulier le Pacific Film Archive, l'Anthology Film Archive, le Film Department de George Eastman House), le Film Department a activement recherché les films d'avant-garde. Depuis les années 30, le MoMA a réuni environ 600 titres d'oeuvres expérimentales.
Trois projets illustrent la position du MoMA aujourd'hui: la Collection Andy Warhol, le projet 8mm/Super 8mm et les films de Hollis Frampton.
Les considérations communes aux trois projets répondent aux questions suivantes: 1) comment persuader les réalisateurs de déposer les originaux dans les archives avant qu'ils ne se détériorent? 2) comment préserver des formats obsolètes? 3) comment assurer l'accès à des films expérimentaux et d'avant-garde?
Une trentaine de films de Hollis Frampton, déposés par la veuve de ce dernier, ont été préservés, en vue de leur distribution, auprès du cinéaste et enseignant Bill Brand. Techniquement, il s'agit de transférer les films originaux du matériel réversible à des négatifs couleur ou n/b.
Le projet de collaboration entre le MoMA et la Cinémathèque de San Francisco, porte sur la préservation et la projection de films en 8mm et Super 8mm, réalisés dans les années 60/80 par des réalisateurs tels que Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, Ken Jacobs, Vito Acconci et autres. La pratique courante de préservation consiste à gonfler les formats non standard au format conventionnel supérieur suivant (dans ce cas le 16mmm). Les chargés de la réalisation du projet tentent cependant d'obtenir des labos des négatifs en format original ou, du moins, de disposer en fin de compte de copies de projection en format original. Ceci soulève de nombreuses questions d'ordre technique ainsi que Mary Lea Bandy le formule dans son article.
Le projet Andy Warhol, initié du vivant de l'artiste par John Hanhardt au Whitney Museum of American Art et poursuivi après sa mort par le MoMA, constitue une expérience de collaboration novatrice dans le domaine de la préservation et de la distribution de cette collection. Le Whitney Museum s'est chargé du catalogage de l'oeuvre de Warhol. Le MoMA prépare l'agenda des restaurations. Deux jeux de négatifs et copies sont prévus: l'un pour les archives, l'autre pour pour la cinémathèque de distribution. Le résultat le plus important du projet Warhol est la disponibilité, immédiate et internationale, de chaque titre préservé. C'est la direction que nous devrions suivre avec d'autres auteurs d'avant-garde, même s'il s'agit d'une entreprise ardue et coûteuse.
L'accès est un argument clé pour convaincre les auteurs de déposer leur matériel original auprès des archives. Il faut donc en tenir compte lorsque la préservation d'un film est prévue. Il ne suffit pas de tirer un master de conservation: un travail de préservation n'est accompli que lorsque une copie de visionnement a été tirée.
Aux Etats Unis, le National Endowment for the Arts a décidé de cesser le financement du transfert élémentaire des films en nitrate à partir de 1996 pour soutenir de manière limitée (selon le principe du financement par d'autres sources dans une proportion de deux à un) la préservation de films considérés d'“excellence artistique”.
Longtemps considéré comme une activité marginale, en cette fin de siècle, le cinéma expérimental et d'avant-garde est de plus en plus apprécié comme facteur de développement culturel et artistique du vingtième siècle et deviendra, avec notre aide, un objet d'étude du vingt-et-unième.
Después de cien años de cine caemos en la cuenta que hemos acumulado un gran número de films experimentales y de vanguardia que abarcan un siglo de historia. Sin embargo, en términos de preservación de este tipo de películas estamos en pañales. Comenzamos sólo hace poco a prestar atención a una parte importante de nuestras colecciones que hasta ahora parecía merecer menos atención que la descomposición de los nitratos o el esfumarse de los colores.
Para esta discusión, el autor propone la definición siguiente: “el cine experimental y de vanguardia abarca los films realizados como forma de expresión personal, innovadores en lo artístico y lo técnico, libres de ataduras a códigos de expresión tradicionales, realizados sin referencia a los imperativos de un mercado comercial”. Esta definición comprende una gran variedad de obras personales. Colectivamente, la vanguardia tuvo un impacto importante sobre la creacion de películas en todo el mundo. Es gracias a los archivos, cinematecas y festivales, que estas obras se conocieron. Se trata ahora de rescatar lo que ha subsistido de ellas.
Los autores de vanguardia no responden más que los otros al llamado que se les hace de depositar su obra en instituciones especializadas. Menos aún se prestan a discutir cuestiones de preservación y acceso.
Los films experimentales se encuentran a menudo en formatos que plantean cada día más problemas: los formatos 8mm, el 16mm reversible, etc.
El MoMA se encuentra en búsqueda de obras experimentales desde que Iris Barry, en los años 30, había iniciado la colección comprando películas en todo el mundo.
Como otros archivos Estadounidenses (en particular el Pacific Film Archive, el Anthology Film Archive, el departamento de cine de George Eastman House), el Film Department del MoMA ha tenido una política de colección de películas de vanguardia. Desde los años 30, reunió unas 600 películas experimentales. Tres proyectos ilustran la posición del MoMA: la Colección Andy Warhol, el Proyecto 8mm/Super 8mm y el fondo Hollis Frampton.
Consideraciones comunes a los tres proyectos responden a las preguntas siguientes: 1) ¿Cómo convencer a los directores de depositar su obra en los archivos?; 2) ¿Cómo preservar los formatos obsoletos?; ¿Cómo proveer acceso a los films experimentales y de vanguardia?
Proyecto Hollis Frampton. Unas treinta películas de Hollis Frampton, depositadas por la viuda de éste, fueron depositadas en vistas de su distribución, con la colaboración del director y profesor de cine Bill Brand. Técnicamente, se trata de transferir los originales en reversible a negativos color o b/n.
Proyecto Formatos 8mm de los años 60/80. El proyecto de colaboración entre el MoMA y la Cinemateca de San Francisco prevee la preservación y distribución de films en 8mm y Super 8mm, realizados en los años 60/80 por autores tales como Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, Ken Jacobs, Vito Acconci y otros.
La práctica de preservación habitual consiste en inflar a los formatos subestándard al formato convencional inmediatamente superior (en este caso a 16mm). Los responsables del proyecto procuran sin embargo de obtener que los laboratorios entreguen negativos o, al menos copias de circulación, en formato original. El autor aborda los interrogantes que esta práctica plantea.
El proyecto Andy Warhol. Iniciado en vida del artista por John Hanhardt en el Whitney Museum of American Art y proseguido después de su fallecimiento por el MoMA, este proyecto constituye una experiencia innovadora en materia de preservación y de distribución de la obra de este tipo.
El Whitney Museum se encargó de la catalogación de la obra de Warhol. El MoMA es responsable del calendario de preservación de las películas. Dos juegos de negativos y positivos fueron previstos: uno para los archivos, el otro para la biblioteca de distribución del MoMA.
El resultado más importante del proyecto Warhol es la disponibilidad, inmediata e internacional, de las obras preservadas. Aún tratándose de una operación costosa, vale la pena asegurar esta disponibilidad. El acceso es un argumento clave tanto para convencer a los autores de depositar su obra en los archivos como para obtener fondos. No alcanza con tirar un master de conservación. Un trabajo de preservación no está terminado que cuando se dispone de una copia de exhibición.
En los Estados Unidos, el National Endowment for the Arts decidió interrumpir la financiación del copiado elemental de películas en nitrato a partir de 1996 para limitarse a sostener la preservación limitada (según el principio del financiamiento por otras fuentes en la proporción de dos a uno) de películas de “excelencia artística”.
Considerada en este fin de siglo como una actividad marginal, el cine experimental y de vanguardia es apreciado como factor importante de desarrollo artístico y cultural del Siglo XX y se transforma en objeto de estudio privilegiado del Siglo XXI, con nuestra ayuda.