Film Curation: Travelling Memories of Way Down West in Film Archives
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Film Curation: Travelling Memories of Way Down West in Film Archives Master Thesis Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image 10 August 2020 Faculty of Humanities Department of Media Studies University of Amsterdam Yitong Liang (Didi) 11105909 [email protected] Supervisor: Mark-Paul Meyer Second Reader: Asli Ozgen-Tuncer Table of Contents Introduction 3 Chapter 1 Curating Way Down West 7 1.1 Selection in Film Archives: from Archivist to Curator 7 1.2 Reassessing Way Down West 9 1.3 Selection and Preservation at Eye Filmmuseum 18 Chapter 2 Collaborative Film Programming 23 2.1 Remediation and Travelling Memory 23 2.2 Collaborative Programming by National Film Archives 26 2.3 Collaborative Programming by the Hong Kong Film Archive 34 Chapter 3 Alternative Strategies 40 3.1 Digital Loaning and Online Programming 40 3.2 Present and Future: Film Archives as the Public Sphere 48 Conclusion 50 Appendix A Figures 52 Appendix B Interview with the Reel to Reel Institute 58 Works Cited 73 2 Introduction In museums and galleries, many of the collections remain invisible to the public. In collaboration with the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, film director Wes Anderson and set designer Juman Malouf addressed this issue in their 2018 co-curated exhibition. They selected hundreds of never- before-seen artworks from over four million objects at the museum (“Spitzmaus Mummy in a Coffin and Other Treasures”). As first-time curators, the creative duo adopted unconventional strategies, including picking objects based on colour themes and providing limited text panels. The exhibition aimed to encourage the audience to draw connections between objects. This experiment challenged the existing curatorial approach of the museum and highlighted the effectiveness of collaboration across disciplines, cultures, and nations. One of the current challenges faced by memory institutions is to make their collections accessible to the public. In film archives, access refers to “the link between collection and user”: the archive keeps the collection, and the user is the person “who expresses interest in that collection” (“Manual for Access to the Collections” 6). Access can be active or passive: “active access” refers to programming and exhibitions, and “passive access” concerns the archive permitting access to the materials upon requests from users (6). Access enables people outside of film archives to learn about archival films and raises awareness of protecting film materials. However, the flip side of providing access is to safeguard film material. As Ray Edmondson said in Audiovisual Archiving Philosophy and Principle: “Preservation is the totality of things necessary to ensure the permanent accessibility–forever–of an audiovisual document with the maximum integrity” (v). With limited resources, film archives seek a balance between protecting archival collections and making them accessible. 3 In her book Saving Cinema, Caroline Frick suggested that “widespread, bountiful access is, itself, an act of preservation” (153). Creating many access copies can help prevent the loss of archival films. If the copies are widely circulated, they will continue to be preserved (176). This notion omitted that a selection process, before circulation, determines what films can be duplicated and seen by the public. Even if the copies are widely distributed, they must be displayed in a relevant context with acceptable image quality. Hence, film archivists play an increasingly significant role in the selection process. They have become curators, choosing films for acquisition, restoration, and film programming. Although many works of literature have examined the decision-making process from acquisition and restoration aspects, the programming remains underexplored. This thesis will investigate how film curators perform selections for film programming. The examined case study is Way Down West (1927), a Chinese silent film first collected by Eye Filmmuseum (Eye). Before 1957, a nitrate print arrived at Eye from the distribution collection of the Nederlandsche Filmliga (Filmliga), administered by the Central Bureau for League Films (CBLF). As an International film in the Netherlands, the film was less noticeable until its duplication by the British Film Institute (BFI) in 1980. Subsequently, various archives acquired copies of the film and held collaborative screenings. This thesis focuses on the events that have transformed Way Down West from a more or less neglected film to a desirable collection object among film archives. These events are collaborative programmes that influenced archival selections and led to acquisitions and restorations of the film. They also reflect the selection process for programming performed by various national and regional archives. This thesis will examine the events by addressing the following research questions: What are the key factors causing programming to influence archival 4 priorities? How did archival staff from various geographical locations perform selections for the collaborative screenings, and why? What are the alternatives for conventional programming approaches? This thesis aims to combine theory and practice as a research method. In the book Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, Mieke Bal advocated that one “must seek its heuristic and methodological basis in concepts rather than methods” (5). Following her advocacy, this paper will apply concepts from various disciplines, such as archival studies and media studies, to examine the research subject from a multidirectional perspective. Moreover, it will reconstruct related events based on primary sources, such as correspondences, programme brochures, newspaper clips, and a personal interview with the staff of the Reel to Reel Institute. In addition to literature and paper documents, it will integrate findings from the nitrate print into this research. This thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter will focus on reassessing the background of Way Down West. Section 1.1 will introduce the concept of selection and apply it in the context of film archives. Based on primary sources, Sections 1.2 will reassess the film through the audience viewing experience in the late 1920s. Section 1.3 will examine crucial factors that enabled the film to become a significant archival title by analysing its preservation history at Eye. Section 2.1 will introduce the concepts of remediation and travelling memory to examine collaborative programmes that featured Way Down West. Section 2.2 will focus on programmes that resulted in the preservation of the film between the 1980s and the 2000s. These events reflect the selections performed by archival staff, such as restorers, curators, and directors, and film archives, including the BFI, the Taiwan Film Institute, and the Hong Kong Film Archive. These events suggest that showing the film in transnational contexts can help enrich the interpretations 5 of the film and maintain its circulation. In contrast, film archives rely on these cultural events to perform activities, including trading films, seeking funding and gaining international recognition. The last chapter will explore alternatives for conventional programming approaches. Section 3.1 will examine digital loaning and online programming in three examples: the inaugural programme of the Reel to Reel Institute in 2020, the videos of Way Down West on online platforms YouTube and Bilibili, and the 2014 online exhibition Transcending Space and Time–Early Cinematic Experience of Hong Kong by the Hong Kong Film Archive. Finally, Section 3.2 will touch on the concepts of museums as the public sphere and wonder, to discuss the role of film archives in the present and future. 6 Chapter 1 Curating Way Down West 1.1 Selection in Film Archives: from Archivist to Curator The archive is not a neutral depository. Each act performed by an archivist entails selections. According to Jacques Derrida, the archive is a site shaped by “a selective power,” a physical location where one can practice “consigning”–choosing historical documents, whether papers or media, to be preserved and stored in shelves (42). A selective power refers to what to keep and how to keep, per the limitation of time and space, technology, and human desire to destroy his memories consciously or unconsciously (43). When the memories become externalised to one’s mind, such as transforming ideas into words on papers, these documents can then be secured or destroyed. Besides safekeeping documents, an archive must provide public access to the archival documents (48). If these holdings are not accessible to the public, they will ultimately be neglected, or which may have been led to destruction. Because of these limitations, archives are faced with an ongoing challenge to seek a balance between safekeeping materials and providing public access. Film archives play an essential role in saving film materials from deterioration and destruction. A primary goal of film archives is to secure fragile, flammable, and high-maintenance nitrate films. To handle the films systematically, Polish photographer Boleslas Matuszewski first proposed the archival workflow: people with interests would donate their film prints, and a committee made a selection of the film prints after appraisal, which led to cataloguing and choosing prints to screen or reserve (324). This proposal became a reality in the 1930s when a group of film enthusiasts founded film archives with the help of governments. Since then, the sequence of collection, appraisal,