Showing and telling: film heritage institutes and their performance of public accountability

Abstract

Een herziene handelseditie van dit proefschrift is verschenen onder dezelfde titel, bij Vernon Press in 2017, ISBN 9781622732401 - This PhD expands on 12 previously published film historical and -archival articles and essays. An extensive introductory text was written to string these articles and essays together and forge them into an argument for improving the performance of film heritage institutes vis-a-vis the public. In the first chapter of that introduction I sketch a general, critical picture of the way publicly funded film heritage institutes tend to use their gatekeeper function to restrict the range of materials given in their care in their public presentations. In the following chapter I present a brief series of case studies, each focusing on an 'uninteresting' archival artifact that is usually not activated, i.e. lifted from the darkness of the vaults into the pubic light. I show how by they can be meaningfully presented by relevant contextualizations. While the case studies were based on my work in a film heritage institute, the next section of the introductory chapter expands my 'personal database' and contains a survey of the public presentations and public information of 24 film heritage institutes worldwide during the month of February 2014, based on their websites. In my evaluation of this survey I conclude that film heritage institutes in their public presentations tend to emphasize more recent works (certainly early cinema is all but absent); that their presentations tend to be technologically inconsistent and the inconsistency unexplained; and that their almost exclusively aesthetic focus tends to be based on tradition rather than research. My findings are theoretically underpinned by (art) sociological considerations, notably from works by Howard Becker, Anthony Giddens, Diana Crane, and Victoria Alexander, and by archival science, notably Hans Booms's concept of functional context (i.e. geographically and historically local contexts that are relevant for the materials in an institute's care).