Showing and Telling Film Heritage Institutes and Their Performance of Public Accountability
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showing and telling film heritage institutes and their performance of public accountability vertonen en vertellen filmerfgoedinstellingen en de vervulling van hun publieke mandaat (met een samenvatting in het Nederlands) Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit Utrecht op gezag van rector magnificus, prof.dr. G.J. van der Zwaan, ingevolge het besluit van het college voor promoties in het openbaar te verdedigen op vrijdag 11 december 2015 des middags te 12.45 uur door Nicolaas Hendrik de Klerk geboren op 21 december 1956 te Leiden Promotor: Prof. dr. W. C. Uricchio table of contents Acknowledgments 3 Preface 5 1.Introduction: Shared poverty 11 2. All that orbits the film 29 - A case of reframing 32 - A hangover case 40 - A paratextual case 51 - A case of mythology 64 - A case of appropriation 84 - Conclusion: a case of looseness 94 3. Selected writings 103 - 3.01. ‘”Pictures to be shewn”: programming the American Biograph’ 104 - 3.02. ‘A few remaining hours: news films and the interest in technology in Amsterdam film shows, 1896-1910’ 128 - 3.03. ‘Program formats’ 147 - 3.04. ‘What the papers say: the case of the film-related papers of Jean Desmet’ 152 - 3.05. ‘The moment of screening: what nonfiction films can do’ 162 - 3.06. ‘Das Programmformat: Bruchstücke einer Geschichte’ 172 - 3.07. ‘Een onmogelijke opdracht: J.C. Lamsters filmopnamen voor het Koloniaal Instituut’ 176 - 3.08. ‘100 Years of image control: the case of J.C. Lamster’s films for the Dutch Colonial Institute’ 209 - 3.09. ‘Dark treasures: rediscovering colonial films’ 222 - 3.10. ‘”Volgt het voorbeeld van John Wayne: over onze grenzeloze nationale cinema’ 231 - 3.11. ‘The transport of audiences: making cinema national’ 244 1 - 3.12. ‘Dream-work: Pan Am’s New Horizons in Holland’ 255 4. Showing and telling: an exploratory survey 273 - Set 275 - Formats 281 - Survey 286 - Evaluation 386 5. A programmatic conclusion 401 - Safeguarding 403 - Future scenarios 410 Dutch summary 421 References 428 2 acknowledgments Without the help, in various ways, of the following people this text, its introductory chapter in particular, would not have been the same. Roland Cosandey (École cantonale d’art de Lausanne) Scott Curtis, (Nortwhestern University, Doha) Tom Gunning (University of Chicago) Daan Hertogs (archival consultant, Nijmegen) Nicholas Hiley (University of Kent at Canterbury) Ratana Lach (Bophana Centre de Ressources Audiovisuelles, Phnom Penh) Sabine Lenk (Utrecht University) Martin Loiperdinger (Trier University) Diane Pivac (Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, Wellington) Dafna Ruppin (Utrecht University) James Steffen (Emory University, Atlanta) Dan Streible (New York University) Lee Tsiantis (Turner Entertainment Group, Atlanta) Klaas de Zwaan (Utrecht University) and my former colleagues at Eye, Amsterdam: Rommy Albers Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi Anke Bel Ton Söder Catherine Cormon Simona Monizza Leenke Ripmeester 3 I want to thank two people more specifically. First of all, professor Frank Kessler, of Utrecht University, who invited me to join the two monthly postgraduate seminars during the time I was writing this PhD. As peer group contact opportunities they were extremely important and stimulating for me. Secondly, my supervisor professor William Uricchio, of Utrecht University and MIT, Boston, for his encouraging and very perceptive comments, from the tiniest detail to the largest concept. It was not for his lack of trying that I finally decided to write this PhD, as his attempts to interest me in doing this date back to the late 1990s at least. I hope it was worth the wait. 4 preface The following dissertation consists of two parts. First of all, a core of 12 peer-reviewed articles on film archival and film historical topics that I published over roughly the last decade and a half. They are all rooted in my research and curatorial work in a film heritage institute in the Netherlands, at the time known as the Nederlands Filmmuseum. During my tenure there my work focused on the histories and contexts of materials that were largely uncharted in both film archiving and film historiography; it was concerned with such topics as early nonfiction film, colonial cinema or the program format. Although the original occasion for my employment at the Filmmuseum was research on early cinema, soon it became a voyage of discovery through the entire archive, a voyage fueled by ongoing surprise. Sheer surprise at the types of material I had been unfamiliar with (and, at the same time, a humbling experience for someone who thought he knew enough about the history of cinema to be eligible for the job). Joyful surprise at the immense variety and wealth of these materials and the opportunities for research and presentation they offered. But an unsettling surprise, too, because I gradually learned that many film heritage institutes were—and are—not in the habit of acquainting their public with the variety and wealth of their collections. As my own experiences and ideas have traced a growing awareness of the importance of contexts of all kinds, matched by an increasing dissatisfaction with the almost exclusive approach to films as objects of art within film heritage institutes, I have never ceased wondering about this withholding of wealth. It is this unwillingness to share materials and information with the public that has prompted what follows. The selection of articles is accompanied, secondly, by an introductory chapter that is meant to connect these 12 articles. On one hand, this chapter argues a specific way of doing film heritage work, given the range of sources in the care of institutes dedicated to this heritage. In its most widely known form cinema was, and is, a theatrically presented, overwhelmingly 5 popular art, yet it also appeared, and appears, in various technological supports, in many other manifestations, for many other purposes besides entertainment or aesthetic enjoyment, in many performative configurations, in many different venues. Therefore, this introductory chapter to the selection of my publications is also meant as an intervention into the public role of heritage institutes more generally. On the other hand and in order to contextualize my observations and experiences in one institute, I have enlarged my database with an exploratory survey of the public activities of 24 film heritage institutes around the world. “Public activities” here refers to public presentations and visitor information about those presentations. I call it “exploratory”, because there is to my knowledge no research of any substantial scope or longitude of these activities. So this is a modest start, based on data collected during the month of February 2014 about those activities from these 24 institutes’ websites. To mark the difference between my own work in one film heritage institute and the information culled from the other institutes, these two elements of the introductory chapter are separated by respectively preceding and following my selected writings, making the latter quite literally the core of this thesis. As noted, my writings are rooted in my research and curatorial work and therefore they gravitate, insofar as they are about film, toward analogue materials. Of course, I realize that I write at a moment of change in media and information systems, yet I will deal with the digital at various points in my argument; and of course I discuss the websites from which I culled the data for my survey. Besides, in the concluding chapter I will suggest some of the opportunities of the digital turn. To sum up this thesis: in chapter 1, titled ‘Shared poverty’, I present a general account of what I consider the deficient public role of film heritage institutes. Chapter 2, titled ‘All that orbits the film’, teases out the topics of my selected articles’ specific histories and resonances and offers a sense of the range of historical contexts that are potentially relevant for the public activities these institutes undertake. The selection itself is reproduced in chapter 3. Chapter 4, titled ‘Showing and telling’, contains the survey followed by a brief evaluation. This evaluation zooms in on three aspects of the surveyed institutes’ public activities that, I think, are emblematic of their poor public performance: the limited temporal range of materials 6 presented; the lack of consistent screening policies in an era of technological flux; and the notion of film as a universal language that underlies a general focus on film as an aesthetic object. This evaluation is a stepping stone to chapter 5, titled ‘A programmatic conclusion’, in which I present my conclusions, the most general and critical of which is that knowledge transfer to the public at large is not film heritage institutes’ major concern. (Being general, there are exceptions, to which I will draw attention, too, in the course of this dissertation.) However, as it concerns programmatic conclusions, I also present a number of suggestions to counteract film heritage institutes’ intellectual marginality and improve their performance of public accountability and meaningfulness. Next, a brief word about the term film heritage institutes. I use this admittedly somewhat burdensome term to cover various types of institute dedicated to the custodianship of the film heritage of a given society. This role of the custodian can be seen as taking three functionally different forms: there are institutes that are solely devoted to collecting, researching, describing and/or preserving film and film-related materials; others necessarily restrict themselves to public presentations only, as they have no collections of their own; and then there are institutes whose presentations may draw on the archival collections they preserve, describe and/or research. One might distinguish these types by different terms: film archives, cinematheques, and film museums, respectively. However, the official names of my set of 24 institutes surveyed shows that this distinction in nomenclature is merely academic. Functionally, the institutes in my set would be museums, as they all have collections that are featured, to a lesser or greater degree, in their public presentations.