Ephemeral to Canonical: The First 33 and the Next 100 Years of Collecting Useful Media

Ephemeral to Canonical:
The First 33 and the Next 100 Years
of Collecting Useful Media
Rick Prelinger
Beeld en Geluid
6 November 2015
1Friday, November 6, 15
A surprise and a paradox. The surprise is that what we've been calling Useful
Media (what Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson call "a disposition, an outlook,
and an approach toward a medium") continues to be useful in ways we might not
have predicted. The paradox is that there seems to be little correlation between
"usefulness" and "collectibility." At least in the US, many people have tried very
hard to throw most of it away, but useful media turns out to have many lives. This
might be worth remembering in light of the current unstable condition of physical
media in archives; many institutions are under pressure to discard precisely what
may be most useful in futures that we can't foresee. As I look at the number of
microcinemas playing original 16mm prints, and the new artist-run wet labs
starting in North America and elsewhere, and how the excitement around the
Digital Bolex camera is causing the prices of Angenieux lenses -- lenses that you
could not easily give away a few years ago -- to rise, I wonder whether there is
ever such a thing as a deﬁnitive media transition, because transition leads to a
new appreciation of tradition. We may instead be witnessing a process by which
media cycle in and out of currency.

graffiti in the Jam Handy studio by unidentiﬁed worker, Detroit, photographed 2011
So Bert (Hogenkamp) has asked me to talk about the past and future of
my own collection and useful media collecting in general. This needs to
be done without trying your patience, since this seminar is really an
homage to Bert's work and to the ﬁeld he has helped so much to
emerge, but I will try.

I began collecting in 1982 with all the consciousness of a sleepwalker.
I did not have a mission statement or an acquisitions policy. I'd been
working as director of research on a documentary film about post-
World War II America, and part of my job was to collect the kinds of
films that had influenced the development of society, culture and daily
life in the US. Very quickly it became clear that while people's
memories were full of images from popular film and TV, what those
images revealed about their times was quite often nothing more than a
new fiction grafted onto the structure of the old.

In other words, if you were to credit a film or a TV program with
changing the culture you might well be repurposing that fictional
object as a seed of a new and equally fictional narrative. This is of
course a tremendous simplification of cinematic historiography, but I
quickly ran into the limits of using clips from popular media and
focused instead on educational and sponsored films. Useful cinema, or
ephemeral film, as I began calling it around 1983, was tremendously
useful in reconstructing histories that had been poorly told. It had
immense evidentiary value, not just in terms of the information
embedded in its images and sounds; it was also a dense container of
intention, a record of the twists and turns of ideologies. The
temptation was irresistible to collect as many of these films as rapidly
as I could.

I mentioned media transitions. These extended moments seem to
occur ever more frequently, and are difficult for archives, because
technical platforms that we have relied on go into spasms of
obsolescence, and reproduction and reformatting costs rise very
quickly. But for those who collect, moments of media transition offer
dramatic opportunities. In a period roughly bounded by 1980 to 2000
-- with most happening in the first of these two decades -- a massive
transition from film and photochemical technology to video technology
occurred (first tape, then discs in different formats, then files). (We
have a similar opportunity today with videotape, DVD and the short-
lived carriers of multimedia works.)

Jam Handy
Organization vaults,
Detroit,
photographed
winter 1984-85
In the 1980s film quickly became a liability and was often available for
the asking or for the cost of transport. At that time there were very few
collections of ephemeral film in the United States, excluding
government-produced films collected in accordance with regulation,
the few that had been selected for permanent copyright deposit, and
the pioneering American Archives of the Factual Film, whose collection
now reposes at LC.

former Highway Safety Films studio, Hollywood Lane, Mansfield, Ohio,
photographed September 2014
Collectors stepped in where archives had not, assuming the burden but
also the benefits of collecting these materials. Before I began, I knew of
two main collections: Archive Film Productions and the private
collections associated with what was then Streamline Film Archives.
Both were administered almost completely for stock footage sales.
Between them they had collected perhaps a few thousand items. Their
names are worth mentioning, because they were the first US collectors
to exploit the riches of the public domain and make materials available
to media producers. Within two years my collection had become the
third.

Detroit Yellow
Pages, 1964
I had been collecting for almost exactly a year when I began to get access
requests. Since I had been working as a stock footage researcher, most
requests came from colleagues or others that knew of my field of expertise.
In 1984 I went into business as a stock footage provider, aided by relatively
permissive copyright laws that caused some hundreds of thousands of U.S.
nontheatrical films to enter the public domain. We handled hundreds of
stock requests per year, the proceeds from which funded archival operations
and acquisitions of new material. The collection grew almost faster than I
could house it. In 2005, when the last past of our collection was physically
acquired by Library of Congress, it comprised around 200,000 cans and
some 60,000 productions, 45% of which we held in preprint form. Since that
time I have focused on sponsored films of special merit and home movies.
The home movie collection is quite large at this point and, as home movie
collections do, poses all kinds of questions for archival workflow and theory,
questions we as a field will be dealing with for many more years.

We generally consider moving image archives to be resources
maintained principally for scholars. But the volume of scholarly
research requests was very low throughout the 1980s. I can count on
two hands the number of scholars who attempted to work with our
collection until late in the decade.

Poor tradition of access
Obscurity
Difficulty and expense
Not primary resources
Little intellectual framework
Not cinema!
Some reasons why:
-- There had been a generally poor tradition of access to moving image collections in most
archives, and in many "special collections" environments lack of film-specific experience causes
films to stay unpreserved and unavailable
-- People just didn't know this material existed. Two attempts to create a union catalog of U.S.
moving image holdings have failed
-- It was difficult and expensive to see this material; you had to travel in most cases and look at
original film if this was allowed, and often it was not
-- The prejudice that moving images are not primary resources has often kept scholars from
considering them seriously
-- Finally, we didn't have the intellectual framework to understand this material. I now believe we
had to begin by telling the story of how, why and for whom these films were made, and only after
that story propagated to certain cultural sectors were people prepared to look seriously at the
films. Interestingly, it took quite a number of years for cinema studies scholars to begin looking at
this material. Most of the people who contacted us represented non-mediacentric disciplines. I
think it's fair to say that useful cinema was not seen as cinema for many years; in fact many
people probably still don't make room for it within the realm of cinema. This has now changed.

The gentrification of ephemeral film
1. films of evidentiary value emerge as cultish alternatives to
films dominated by experiential value
2. fans/scouts delight in the détournement and
recontextualization of works once produced to persuade
3. used as stock footage
4. adopted by social sciences and humanitiesscholars
5. Laserdiscs and CD-ROMs
6. adopted as topic of cinema studies, (after much delay)
7.“representational transparency” gives way to “how it works”
8. highly-curated DVD releases
9. NYU Cinema Studies class on sponsored films (2007)!
0. formerly cultish and “counter-hegemonic” films become
privileged objects of study; 400,000 itching to be analyzed
In fact, the past 25 years has seen what I sometimes call the “gentrification” of ephemeral film. Here is
one possible staging of that history, at least so far as I was involved
we are back to point zero

The question of scholarly access to moving image archives is actually
not simple. Scholarly research is considered to be one of the main
modes of access that we want to enable and privilege, but as we know
-- but don't often say -- there is much less research going on than we
would like. I would never advocate making these materials unavailable,
but the per project (or per capita) cost of each research event is huge.
Now, state institutions are institutions of record, so the cost of access
events may be less relevant, but it is important to be on top of the
access situation and resist any attempts to reduce access. The growing
interest in materiality of media and the work that's collectively labeled
"media archaeology" is likely to trigger new demands for access to
physical materials, even as most archival viewing has already shifted
online.

The Dollars and Sense of
Business Films, 1955
Just as we were an atypical collection, founded by an individual and
funded by our business side, our trajectory took an atypical course. In
Europe and especially the Netherlands you have demonstrated that
massive cultural digitization projects can be undertaken at the national
level. In the US we have not done so. Instead we built an idiosyncratic
project not based on standards or consultation with stakeholders, and
made it happen very quickly. Once we digitized several hundred titles,
I worked with Brewster Kahle to build our ﬁrst little webpage in a long
afternoon. Soon we had 1001 online ﬁlms; now it's over 6,000. This
was a completely life-changing experience that few archivists or
individuals have had: we are now digitizing and uploading everything
we can put online.

Cafe, Poughkeepsie, New York, 2011
Digital access has dramatically multiplied the number of access events.
Counting both Internet Archive downloads and access events from YouTube
and elsewhere, we think there have been well over 100 million downloads of
our own material, and remember, we are a small collection. But the nature
of these access events is quite different from those for whom the archives
were originally conceived to assist. Moving image archives were once highly
enclosed archives of art, craft and record maintained primarily for research
use and secondarily for reuse. Today (and I speak especially of Internet
Archive and our own collection) the senses of use are reversed. We are
maintained primarily for reuse and secondarily for scholarly use. (And the
"freemium" model supports us to some degree through footage sales.) This
will not be a surprise to you at Sound & Vision, where a populist vision has
been baked into the core of your online activities and where your research
staff has worked hard with many sectors to come up with workable
scenarios for the future archives. But I think it poses issues with which we
have yet to come to terms.

Internal catalog,
Elmer Dyer Film Library,
Hollywood, ca. 1960s-1980s
The contours of the emerging archives have much more to do with
reuse than with the kind of legacy research archives used to support
almost exclusively. Large digitization projects function more like
national-level video-on-demand portals and stock footage sites than
projects to serve scholarly and teaching needs. Is this simply
replicating the marginalization of intellectual pursuits that we have
seen for many years, or is it an Internet phenomenon? In any case it
could be sobering for those of us who believe that historical records
might be presented in context. Not that many people care, and I am
not certain I care either. Can we not work to provide thoughtful
documentation and context but at the same time let images be images,
freed in most cases of the burden of carrying historical overload?

Jam Handy Organization main offices, 2900 East Grand Blvd.,
Detroit, photographed 2009
So a few thoughts about the future of collecting useful cinema and
making it accessible.
First, we still have a lot of film to take care of, at least in the US. A
great deal has found its way into fairly safe repositories, but much is
still to be collected, and much even to be found. And this category of
film is so huge that it will take years before archives know what they
have, or before they're able to do things like match up elements with
release prints. Just to accession and do very basic work (such as
recanning) on the collections that have made it to Library of Congress
in recent years -- ours, MacDonald & Associates and the American
Archives of Factual Film -- is a multimillion-dollar job that is far from
completely funded, and when it is will take years. And this is to say
nothing about digitization. So there is the film part.

And the disjunction between "usefulness" and "collectibility," as I've
said, is rather striking. So is the disjunction between "useful cinema"
and monetization. Putting aside the question of what constitutes
cinema (which seems even more open to question now than a few
years back) the new "useful cinema" of today, which I will tentatively
characterize as primarily distributed via the Web, is impossible to
systematically collect, given the resources and tools now available to
archives. And even if it were possible to collect a lot of it, would
anyone do so?

Internet Archive is collecting YouTube videos, but it generally only
grabs those that are referenced in Tweets, a small fraction of my
estimate of the 2.365 billion uploaded annually. And I have no
information as to who, if anyone, is collecting material hosted by
Vimeo and other online video sites. This is not necessarily a bad thing.
The difficulties in collecting born-digital material will point the way to
the importance of collecting other material, or at least I hope it will.

Possibilities: YouTube, where a lot of this material resides (but not all of
it), becomes more like an archives. This isn't impossible, but I think it
unlikely, if only because of energy costs and costs of administration. Two
years ago I was told that 100 YouTubers worked on deletions alone --
since Google's pockets are so deep, they must carefully assure
themselves that videos that are supposed to be taken down are actually
deleted from all of the machines across the world. Collecting at this scale
must be extremely costly. And we see no commitment to longevity,
persistence, resistance to outside pressures, etc.: I have elsewhere said of
YouTube that "we have exchanged the traditional archives for the
apparent archives, giving an appearance of completeness that is in fact
full of gaps" and described YouTube's "archival compact" with users as a
"noncommittal handshake." And yet it is a magnet for personal media,
and has achieved in ten years far more in certain realms than any
established archives has ever been able to do.

Robert C. Binkley, Manual on Methods of
Reproducing Research Materials, 1936
Binkley's populism and anticipation of the Net

Collectors fill the gap. This certainly happened with film. It has not
happened in the videotape/DVD era except to some extent for
published VHS releases. Perhaps partnerships that unite collectors with
nonprofit or public archives, as with Jason Scott and Internet Archive
(do people know)? will continue to be influential.

Paraprofessionals can help a great deal. I don't think we can ﬁnd funds
to hire everyone we need. Explain SF Participatory Archives Group --
whose primary reason for being seems to have been affording the
possibility for people who love ﬁlm to touch it. We will need to make
the walls between the archives and the public much more permeable,
and I don't just mean doing so through digitization. The most resilient
archives will be those that are most permeable. Think of wetlands
rather than gates.

Archiving becomes better integrated with production. People have been
talking about this for a long time (back to Vertov and Svilova, if not
earlier) and many people routinely upload new work they make, but it
is not built into the system. In a utopian world makers would
internalize some kind of selection criteria and choose some of their
own work to be preserved. And in a utopian world they would also pay
for this to happen.

American Engineer
(Jam Handy Organization for
Chevrolet Division, General
Motors Corp., 1955)
We need to survey the field of useful media and decide what we want
to preserve first. This isn't the way it works in the US -- archives
propose projects to National Film Preservation Foundation and the
majority get funded. It is a beautiful but unevenly significant set of
films, if I can say so. We should sit down and come up with a list of ten
thousand unpreserved titles and grind away at it. (My Field Guide to
Sponsored Films, which I made with the NFPF, was supposed to be a
start at this process. It was a snapshot, not a canon, but we need to do
something!) In a similar way we should track contemporary digital
video production and select titles. I know there are a lot of digital
curators working now, but we have a long way to go.

Nitrate vaults, Kearny, New Jersey, the week of their emptying, 2011
And we need to do much, much better with the period when video was
king of the platforms. A hole in history continues to grow. This is
especially vexing for the pre-Internet video era. The indifference with
which archives, producers and others treated ephemeral ﬁlm between
the 1920s and the present pales next to the disregard with which we
treat 1980s and 1990s nontheatrical video productions. Almost all of
this material that survive exists only by accident, if it exists at all. And
in most cases original video elements are lost and only substandard
viewing copies survive. I do not consider this an unequivocal disaster,
though.

Cadieux Stages, Detroit
(former Wilding Picture Productions studios
photographed 2011)
Loss can be formative. Loss helps us better understand what is not
lost, and a sense of absence or suppression gives birth to new
histories.

Which leads me back to archival work as it has been, not as it is becoming. I
think it quite likely we are moving into a new age of hybrid curatorship that
will combine artisanal collecting with mass crawls, toward an age where
acquisitions and collections policy regain their authority over
technologically-enabled mass collecting. We are trying to drink from the
ﬁrehose because it is increasingly possible to do so, and because we believe
we have the tools to make this possible. Now, I would be the last person to
suggest we should not collect ephemera. There are ample historical
precedents suggesting that what we have collected by accident can often
prove to be more important down the road than what we consciously chose
to collect. But this is impossible in the age of personal media. And even if
we collect it all, should we? Do we want to think about a voluntary or an
involuntary acquisitions model? And should we invest in the toolmaking to
make these huge datasets touchable and coherent? I don't know. Unless we
work for the NSA or similar agencies, it will be a very hard sell to our
management that we should collect comprehensively.

Finally, I want to return to what I called the "unstable condition of
physical media in archives." Instability is actually a nice word for a
condition that is much worse: physical objects are a liability. We have
junked and continue to junk newspapers, many journals and books,
many special collections materials whose volume and permanent
research value are questioned. I am certain we will junk microﬁlm and
videotape. And some archivists whisper about junking ﬁlm. One day
data will also be a liability. Presentism -- applying current modes of
thinking to the past and future -- is just as much a danger for curators
and scholars as for the nonacademic public.

The crisis ecosystem of evidence-bearing physical objects has become really fascinating. The
expulsion of physical materials in favor of digital surrogates is akin to urban gentriﬁcation, and as
scholars and as a society we will one day have to answer for it. Because the attributes that distinguish
the physical are exactly what we should be preserving, and they are a pain. Physical objects, no matter
how many we discard, are incredibly persistent. And their persistence is inconvenient, and we are
being pushed to pit physical against digital so as to make room for apparent digital abundance.

10/8/15 10:55 AMThe Consortium for Slower Internet
Page 1 of 3http://slowerinternet.com/principles.html
THE CONSORTIUM FOR
SLOWER INTERNET
Slower Internet is about more than speed. The Consortium for Slower Internet pursues
projects that promote the following principles.
DURATIONDURATION
There is no inherent concern with information that is transmitted and distributed with
great speed, but Slower Internet suggests that information be consumed at a more
contemplative pace. If information is to be a central part of our lives, Slower Internet is
interested in finding ways to live with it on more human time scales; news, facts,
updates, etc should be absorbed slowly and given time for consideration. Systems that
PRINCIPLESPRINCIPLES
FORFOR
SLOWERSLOWER
INTERNETINTERNET
10/8/15 10:55 AMThe Consortium for Slower Internet
Page 2 of 3http://slowerinternet.com/principles.html
updates, etc should be absorbed slowly and given time for consideration. Systems that
emphasize duration are central to a Slower Internet.
DEFAMILIARIZATIONDEFAMILIARIZATION
The information delivered by Fast Internet is the white bread of data: predictable,
lifeless, sanitized for mass appeal. Slow Internet delivers content in unexpected formats
and spaces. The practice of defamiliarization encourages users to scrutinize their role and
participation in a given system. Seamless experiences are suspect.
AUTONOMYAUTONOMY
Fast Internet dazzles with maximum features at minimum price, but it often does so at
the expense of user autonomy. Increasingly, users are encouraged to sacrifice their rights
to own material they produce with a given system when services are rendered free of
charge. Slower Internet respects user autonomy by giving creators control and ownership
over their data. Charging reasonable fees for a service is always preferable to spying on
customers and appropriating their data to serve advertisements.
DIVERGENCEDIVERGENCE
Computers have long been universal machines, able to perform any calculation regardless
of content. A Slower Internet, however, requires that dissimilar tasks occur in a diversity
of spaces on a multitude of devices. Living with information does not mean that we have
to give any type of machine a monopoly over our attention. Slower Internet is a process
of cultivating a garden of machines that fit localized, individual desires.
The Consortium for Slower Internet
Made in Minneapolis, MN
http://slowerinternet.com/principles.html
And I want to mention a developing trend we might call the "reverse digital divide." At times
I've felt part of a digital vanguard: making CD-ROMs with the Voyager Company in the early and
mid-1990s. Putting archival ﬁlms online. Scanning books from our little library. Feeling a little sorry for
my friends on the other side of what was then a digital crevasse. But now it's different. Digitality and
privilege have been inverted. Speaking personally with a bureaucrat, collecting and touching artisanal
objects, writing with a nice pen, these are privileged encounters. The rest of the world wrestles with
phone menus, cheaply made goods and poorly designed websites. There are no stray bits in your slow
food. And slow media is coming back. Some friends are building an intentional community in
Mendocino County, on the northern California coast. They're installing ﬁber on their farm, but it
transmits data slowly, and their Internet service is only up between 8 am to 5 pm.

But there is a long-term contradiction here. As I said earlier this year at
FIAF, digitality is fragile. The digital turn is no different than other
disruptive waves of industrialization and, I must say, austerity. Its
promoters naturalize its power to overturn by invoking the old idea of
"creative destruction" and proclaiming that there are no alternatives. Its
sense of inexorability has roots in countercultures (as the scholar Fred
Turner found) as well as in ﬁnance and engineering, and it is promoted
day and night. Despite its apparent victory, digitality is fragile. It
requires a compliant social order, the accommodation of governments,
and the steady availability of energy. It is not a monolith; the Chinese
digital world works differently than the North American. And its
corporate structures and business models are experimental. We cannot
overreact today to a force that will behave differently tomorrow.

I find an empty center in many of our discussions. Since the very beginning
of the film archives movement, I think there's been a steady retreat from
explaining why we engage in collecting and preserving film, why archives
exist and why they're important, and what our goals might be. It is certainly
possible that one of the archivist's less celebrated skills is the ability to hide,
to maintain a safe environment for collections by staying under the radar.
And of course we have had to hide from rights owners who would repossess
materials and bureaucrats who might not understand the importance of
what we do. This is understandable, but we cannot continue to rely on
oversimplified, inoffensive, celebratory statements geared for public
consumption. The quiet we often maintain facing out is matched by a quiet
looking in. For the most part, moving image archives exist in a kind of
teleological vacuum. It's good that we exist, but I've yet to see much
thoughtful examination as to why. This retreat into indecision will not
survive the pressure of the growing record.

Amateur Cinema, December 1926
Useful cinema quite possibly offers an answer to this dilemma. (So do
home movies, for that matter). Useful cinemas tickle a populist nerve
by offering images of ordinary people and daily life, and is replete with
links to the local and the quotidian. Both sectors of ﬁlmmaking are also
without limit. They challenge archival workﬂow, selection and theory.
They force us to rethink almost everything about what we do, which is
perhaps why we have been so unwilling to address the challenges they
are posing. They bring day-to-day archives work into direct
engagement with critical archives theory. In both the physical and
ideological realms, they are at the same time our greatest challenge
and our greatest opportunity.

rick@ucsc.edu
@footage
Thank you.

Ephemeral to Canonical: The First 33 and the Next 100 Years of Collecting Useful Media

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