edited by Roger Smither and Wolfgang Klaue
Flicks Books, Wiltshire, England, 1996, 224 pp., £35.
Those FIAF members who attended the 1993 Congress at Mo i Rana, Norway, possess indelible memories of archive vaults built deep within a mountain, of daylight lasting almost 24 hours a day, and of a particularly stimulating symposium on the subject of "Newsreel Collections in Film Archives."
The symposium, organized by Roger Smither and Wolfgang Klaue, offered a broad spectrum of subjects - historical, technical and practical - dealing with the importance and development of newsreels within the world of cinema and the cataloguing and preservation of newsreels within the film archive framework. All of the wide-ranging papers presented at that Symposium are provided in this volume - an enormous resource for historians, researchers, and documentary filmmakers.
As seen in Bill Murphy's article, the preservation of newsreels parallels the preservation of film in general - there are regrettably few examples which remain from the early period; there are serious complications in acquiring the rights to these collections for the film archive which is preserving the material; there are massive amounts of important historical footage which must be transferred to safety film; and there is an increasing interest in the commercial viability of newsreels as visual records of history.
Henning Schou's essay provides an analysis of archival issues dealing with the conservation, restoration and reconstruction of newsreels. He stresses the importance for film archivists to refrain from providing film masters of newsreel materials for duplicating materials only. Of course, this is also an important rule in film archiving in general. But it is crucial when dealing with newsreels due to the demand from researchers and producers of compilation documentary films. Schou's in-depth discussion also covers issues of rebuilding newsreels which might have been cut up and used for stock shots, the importance of soundtrack preservation for the archivist, problems of grading, image steadiness and film processing.
Procedures and techniques of newsreel access and cataloguing are provided in papers by Ann Baylis, Harriet Harrison, Carlos Roberto de Souza, Olwen Terris and Roger Smither - all of whom participated in a cataloguing exercise with regard to the same target newsreel: World Pictorial News n° 277 (provided by the Imperial War Museum). Harriet Harrison provides a fascinating view of the frustrations and complexities of cataloguing - including standardization of terms and rules, dating of the material, linguistic issues, cultural biases, and computerized subject access methodologies.
Newsreels, which provided documentation of our visual history for many decades, have found their importance in recent years as the demand increases to produce more and more compilation documentary films to fill the expanding number of television broadcast hours around the world. To meet this demand, the role of the film archivist is crucial in preserving, cataloguing, and making newsreels more accessible. This volume pulls together 30 essays dealing with complicated issues of newsreel collections and their preservation for the future.Amy Kronish