Dossier: Materiality and the Archive

Kit Hughes, Heather Heckman

The Velvet Light Trap, Number 70, Fall 2012, p. 59 (Article)

Published by University of Texas Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/vlt.2012.0021

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/483358

Access provided by University of Leeds (13 Sep 2017 20:52 GMT)

Kit Hughes and Heather Heckman 59
Dossier: Materiality and the Archive
F
or some film and media scholars, the ma-
teriality of media may provide an ongoing
fascination; for others, materiality may only
become visible during occasional archival
research. For film and media archivists, however, interact-
ing with stocks, screens, and servers is part of daily life.
For this issue, we approached a number of well-known
archivists and asked them to reverse the traditional,
service-based relationship between archivists and scholars
in which archivists often provide scholars with a needed
service. For this dossier, we wanted to know what media
scholars can do for media archivists. We asked archivists
to tell us what questions they have about the media
material, with the hope that their needs might guide
scholars in their pursuit of material mysteries.
The answers we received did indeed highlight areas
ripe for research, but they also pointed to fundamental
methodological questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the
digital conversion was a central issue in the responses.
But so, too, was an anxiety about the approaches taken by
media scholars. Contributors posed some hard questions,
ranging from how we can develop a scholarly vocabulary
for home movies, to whether humanities training is up
to the task of preparing scholars to grapple with the
complex technologies of media.
We hope that readers are stimulated and inspired by
these pieces, and we deeply thank all of our contributors
for their participation.
The Tantalizing Challenges of the Home
Movie Archive
Dwight Swanson
In 1998, when I was finishing my initial training as an
archivist, film scholars areas of expertise were broadening
The Velvet Light Trap, Number 70, Fall 2012
DOI: 10.7560/VLT7006 2012 by the University of Texas Press, PO Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819
kit hughes and heather heckman
beyond the cinema, as indicated by growing interest in
ephemeral films and the early rumblings of the Orphan
film movement. Still, films were still films (even if they
were on video) in the sense that they were nearly always
discrete, complete, finished items. Having decided to
focus my career on home movies, I ended up working
with much more amorphous films that are frequently
complicated mixtures of gestures, shots, and sequences
spread over hours of a familys collection. The stuff that
home movie archivists deal with often comes in as a
cardboard box full of reels, some of them 8mm, some
of them 16mm, maybe some hi-8 and VHS videotapes
thrown in for good measure. Some of them are labeled,
some are not. Some are edited, titled, and lovingly crafted,
while some are barely viewable or were never processed
at all. No matter how hard we work at sorting, organiz-
ing, and cataloging, the nature of the material means
that there are nearly always complications that require
scholars to untangle.
Rick Prelinger, who is arguably the person currently
posing the most challenging questions to home movie
archivists, writes in his provocatively titled essay Do
Physical Objects Have the Right to Exist? that infor-
mation is archival capital, but too much information is
a liability. Currently, that information, as far as home
movies are concerned, is becoming less and less visible in
its original analog forms as archival backlogs pile higher
and higher and the old technologies become unavailable.
Archivists are struggling mightily to find the technology
and funding to make them available digitally, and progress
is being made, but the challenges of providing online
access to such a mass of materials are daunting. A recent
focus of home movie archivists is to use the Internet to
create virtual collections of home movies from both pub-
lic and private archives so that for the first time scholars
have access to vastly greater numbers of films, with the
60 Materiality and the Archive
belief that this access will guide deeper understanding.
While we may be able to offer some curatorial pointers,
we will need to rely upon researchers and other viewers
to uncover the most significant discoveries.
Frankly, home movies are often a mess, which makes
unleashing them all the more interesting. Because they
were primarily created as domestic documents, by screen-
ing home movies in public or watching them with a
researchers eye, we are asking them to do something
that they werent originally intended to do. Other genres
of films developed canons based on some consensus
shared (however tentatively) by audiences, critics, and
scholars. Home movies, on the other hand, did not have
audiences beyond the living room, did not have critics,
and only recently have had scholars who paid any atten-
tion to them. As home movie scholarship grows with
each dissertation, conference panel, article, and book,
I encourage people to move beyond case studies and
individual collections and to start thinking about bigger
questions, such as why home movies look the way they
do, what their regional and cultural differences are, and
(one of my personal interests) why everyone films their
kids opening Christmas presents. Answering questions
like these requires spending a lot of time immersed in
the collections, but thats where the exciting revelations
will be found.
Seeing/Not Seeing
Paolo Cherchi Usai
Once upon a time there was a thing called persistence
of vision. Then, when video began to question the su-
premacy of film in terms of image quality, the key term
of reference chosen for the debate was definition. In a
telling harbinger of things to come, comparisons between
the electronic and the photochemical frame were for-
mulated in pixels. It was a blatant contradiction in terms,
and yet most of us played along in the destructive game
of what looks better or worse on screen (the HD-
TV vs. 16mm competition goes back to the early 1990s).
The imminent demise of film as a commercial me-
dium comes with the belated realization that to make it
a matter of better or worse was a bit like claiming
that oil paintings are better or worse than frescoes or
that an orchestral score is better or worse than its piano
equivalent. If no one would claim such a thing in the
domain of fine arts, why did it happen with cinema? The
answer, we were told, is painfully simple: movie audiences
dont care about the difference. And if audiences dont
care, why should we, the specialists?
There is no reason why film scholarship should be
satisfied with this explanation. In film projection, be-
cause of a blade shutter or another device equivalent
to it, the screen is dark for at least half of the time,
meaning that almost half of the movie we are watch-
ing is actually made of darkness. This doesnt happen in
digital projection. Think about it. The difference is just
too big to be meaningless to our senses, let alone to our
aesthetic judgment.
Digital projection can indeed mimic movie flicker-
ing, but why in the world should it want to do so, given
that its components are not still images? So far, all we
have been able to come up with in describing what was
lost in the translation from analog to digital are words
like tactile, or texture, or hypnotic. Until recently,
this kind of vocabulary was shrugged off as nostalgic or
fetishist. Interestingly enough, the reactionary connota-
tions of both labels are being taken for granted by the
digital intelligentsia.
In a way, digitals indifference to history is as reaction-
ary as the emotions it purports to condemn, but thats
beside the point. Film studies have become so clever at
splitting hairs in many other matters, but they havent
even tried to address the basic question of whether or
not persistence of vision (or the phi effect or beta
movement, its more sophisticated successors) makes a
difference at all in the way we understand the things
we see; incidentally, this may also be digital images best
chance to emancipate itself once and for all from its
photochemical ancestor.
A Handful of Silver They Leave Us
Erik Piil
With audiovisual collections, archivists now more than
ever are charged with the task of defending the preser-
vation of a work on its original carrier (whether it be
analog, optical, or born-digital media), with an obliga-
tion to question any means of preservation that become
insensitive to traditional needs and practices. An obvious
example in contemporary times is motion picture film.
With the decline of manufacturing and lab processing
Kit Hughes and Heather Heckman 61
facilities, the next generation of film archivists will gradu-
ally lose the ability to perform photochemical film-to-
film preservation on their materials, opting instead for a
digital alternative.To these bare bones, future practitioners
will add new flesh in the form of bits, pixels, interpolated
values of blue, green, and red.
How will we describe the existence of these now-
absent film objects, even the nonvisible parts of these
objects? Recently an archivist opined that as film becomes
extinct, so does its persistence of vision.A distinction be-
tween knowing what the experience of cinema is like and
knowing what it means to experience the projected film
image suggests that a new type of propositional knowl-
edge is gained upon experiencing film on its original
intended carrier.To borrow a phrase from a well-known
avant-garde filmmaker, a respect for the ineffable in cin-
ema is therefore an essential aspect of its preservation.
Resembling manuscripts in their uniqueness and rar-
ity, film objects will become an invaluable resource to
scholars in the future, with archivists presenting systems
to touch on the past experiences of cinema. Still, a further
inquiry into the ontology of format specificity is needed
from todays scholars.There is a horizontal synthesis that
comes from scholars who provide archivists an unseen
side of a work, utilizing our ties to both space and time.
Alterity in the Archive
Greg Wilsbacher
As digital conversion makes the moving image more
readily available and easier to incorporate into new work,
we will see more professional communities coming to
our archives. More work, more insight, more possibilities.
This is to be welcomedin fact, this has already been the
case for a number of years for a good many film archives.
So how can film and media scholars help all of us make
this transition?
From my perspective, greater recognition that insti-
tutional decisions about archival film and media may be
driven by the concerns of communities other than the
film and media studies community is needed. Decisions
are not inherently wrong-headed or misguided because
they dont directly address the priorities of film and
media scholars. Whether, for instance, scarce preserva-
tion funds are spent in a manner that is consistent with
one communitys priorities does not mean that they are
being spent irresponsibly. Some archives may place a
high priority on processing and making available certain
types of materials over others. Time, money, and human
resources shape what happens in archives.
To be sure, Im not suggesting that the film and media
studies community remain silent about the archive; film and
media scholars are stakeholders in the archive and should
advocate for their concerns, and they deserve to have their
voices heard. But they are not the only stakeholders.
Every community views the world through a complex
mixture of historical tradition, culture, and politics (in-
cluding my community of film archivists and curators).
But even within a community, some traditions dominate
others, with ill effects. There are many kinds of film ar-
chives, for example, and up until recently the publicly
dominant model of the film archive as practiced from
within and as used from without was that of a museum
of cinema art. But many film archives do not archive an
art form so much as they archive an information car-
rier. Film or video or digital files are not inherently art
any more than the printed page is art. But as Stephen
Bottomore (Rediscovering Early Non-fiction Film,
Film History 31 [2001]: 16073) noted, an aesthetic ide-
ology underpins much scholarship on and exhibition
of nonfiction film. In this sense, both my community
and the film and media scholarly community have a lot
of work to do to constantly expose this ideology and
provide opportunities for nonnormative scholarship and
archiving to flourish.
Different communities come to the archive with dif-
ferent points of view, and archivists ought to listen to
them all; the future of the archive and of film and media
scholarship will be stronger for it.
Patterns of Decay: For a Study on Discoloration
of Tinted and Toned Nitrate
Daniela Curr
Preserving the chemically tinted and toned images of a
silent film can often be a challenging endeavor, and not
only because of the technical limitations in reproducing
applied color techniques with modern photochemical
or digital techniques.1 The first problem the restorer has
to face is to interpret and decipher the colors he or she
sees: Are those the original ones, or has the look of the
film changed over the years?
62 Materiality and the Archive
Certainly such a question is crucial when working
with nitrate and unnatural colors, but it applies to
chromogenic stocks as well.2 In time, all dyes tend to
change their chemical structure, resulting in loss of color,
darkening, or even change of hue, and this process is nor-
mally affected by exposure to light and storage conditions
such as temperature and humidity.3 There is a difference,
though. In chromogenic stocks, color fading affects the
overall color balance of the picture and is generally quite
easy to spot, denounced by altered whites, blacks, and skin
tones.The essentially monochromatic look of tinted and
toned images instead does not provide color references
to imply decay: no skin tones, no real whites and blacks
deliberately colored.4
Knowing how and to which degree the dyes and
the colored metal salts used in tinting and toning decay
is consequently of primary importance for anybody
involved in the restoration process in order to repro-
duce as closely as possible the original colors. Discolor-
ation of chemical tints and tones is, however, a subject
little studied and researched by both film archivists and
scholars, and the literature that explores the subject is
extremely scarce.5
Is it possible to investigate and describe how dyes used
in the silent period normally behave in regard to discol-
oration? Are there dyes or particular hues that under the
same conditions fade faster or in a different way from
others?6 Are there particular characteristics that can be
described for chemicaland thus colordegradation
of metal tones? In a few words, can academic research
help archivists and technicians in identifying recurrent
patterns in discoloration of nitrate materials? This could
help in the creation of guidelines to link todays coloror
absence of colorto its original appearance.
In developing this research, manuals and catalogs
published at the time by stock manufacturers would be
a necessary reference.7 Important information could be
retrieved in scientific journals focused on chemistry and
film or in studies specialized in art and objects conserva-
tiondyes used for film were often employed as textile
dyes as well.8 On top of these sources, a great contribu-
tion could come from research institutes specialized in
image stability that could help with tests, experiments,
and analysis of materials. Obviously, archivists would
need to be involved as well in order to support the re-
search with their experience and factual observations on
film materials.
In brief, the model would be that of art restoration,
where a close collaboration between restorers, historians,
and scientists is already a consolidated tradition.
Notes
1.Tinting and toning are two of the applied color methods com-
monly used in the silent period, others being hand- and stencil coloring.
Tinting consists in the immersion of film into a dye solution, resulting
in color applied on the entire film surface, including the perforation
area. Consequently, shadows appear black, and highlights are colored.
With toning instead, silver is partially or totally replaced by a colored
metal compound (metallic toning) or by metal salt then colored with a
basic dye (mordant or dye toning).As a consequence, toned film shows
colored shadows, while the highlights and the perforation area stay
clear. See Usai, Silent Cinema; Read, Unnatural Colors. For modern
techniques, see Read, Tinting; Ruedel, Curr, and Op den Kamp.
2. Chromogenic stocks, initially developed by Kodak and Agfa in
the 1930s, are the only ones still actively used. Here images are cre-
ated by yellow, magenta, and cyan dyes distributed in three different
emulsion layers that are coated as a sandwich on the film base.
3. It deserves to be mentioned that in one of its manuals on tinting
and toning techniques, Kodak guarantees the short-term stability of
toned materials but advises against their long-term storage: In no
case, however, if the instructions are carefully followed will the toned
image deteriorate during the active life of the film. . . . Should film
have to be stored for long periods of time, toning is inadvisable, nor
is it advisable to tone valuable film unless duplicates are available
(Eastman Kodak 19).
4. Tinting and toning sometimes were also associated, resulting
in particularly suggestive dichromatic images with highlights and
shadows colored in two different hues.
5. Exceptions to this trend are the fundamental studies by Paul
Read. See, in particular, Tinting and Toning Techniques, where he
defines some fading characteristics of metal tones, and Unnatural
Colors, in which he provides an extensive database of tints and
tones formulations.
6. Of a certain interest is the reference to the lightfastness of some
tinting dyes provided in an essay unfortunately available in German
only; see Ledig and Ullmann.
7. In the 1910s and 1920s, Kodak, Path, Agfa, and Gevaert pro-
duced manuals that often included film samples. See Usai, Color;
Berriata.
8. Several studies have been conducted on the lightfastness of
textile dyes. Of course, for archival film the time spent in the dark is
definitely longer than the time spent exposed to projection light, so
dark-fading studies are also relevant.
Works Cited
Berriata, Luciano.Regarding a Catalogue of the Tints Used on the
Silent Screen. Tutti i colori del mondo: Il colore nei mass media tra
1900 e 1930. Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 1998. 13539.
Eastman Kodak. Tinting and Toning of Eastman Positive Motion Picture
Film. Rochester, NY: Eastman Kodak Company, 1918.
Kit Hughes and Heather Heckman 63
Ledig, Elfriede, and Gerhard Ullmann. Rot wie Feuer, Leidenschaft,
Genie und Wahnsinn: Zu einigen Aspekten der Farbe im
Stummfilm. Der Stummfilm: Konstruktion und Rekonstruktion. Ed.
Elfriede Ledig. Munich: Diskurs Film, 1988.
Read, Paul. Tinting and Toning Techniques and Their Adaption for
the Restoration of Archive Film. Tutti i colori del mondo: Il colore
nei mass media tra 1900 e 1930. Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 1998.
15767.
. Unnatural Colors: An Introduction to Colouring Tech-
niques in Silent Era Movies. Film History 21 (2009): 946.
Ruedel, Ulrich, Daniela Curr, and Claudy Op den Kamp. Towards
a More Accurate Preservation of Color: Heritage, Research and
the Film Restoration Laboratory. Color and the Moving Image.
History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive. Ed. Simon Brown, Sarah Street,
and Liz Watkins. London: Routledge, 2012.
Usai, Paolo Cherchi. The Color of Nitrate: Some Factual Observa-
tions on Tinting and Toning Manuals for Silent Films. Image 34
(1991): 2938.
. Silent Cinema: an Introduction. London: British Film Institute,
2000.
Toward a Science of Film and Moving Image
Restoration
Ulrich Ruedel
As the technology of creating and presenting moving
image works moves into the realm of digital technolo-
gies, visual characteristics that have shaped more than
a century of moving image culture and film grammar
become divorced from their roots in materials chemistry.
For the archives, this presents an unprecedented chal-
lenge as much as an opportunity. More than keepers of
individual works, archives become the repositories for an
entire craft, culture, and technology. The original mov-
ing image materials gain in cultural and historical value,
whether as pieces of art, as best surviving master materi-
als, as remnants of how the works were originally seen,
or even as rare archaeological samples of their materials
chemistry and related visual properties. But saving the
works only will not suffice.
One approach in the maturing of the youngest branch
of museology is to become, as other areas of cultural heri-
tage already have, more scientific. Moving images are argu-
ably the most technical of art forms, with properties deeply
rooted in the applied science of photographic chemistry. In
order to address the imminent loss of this technology and
tradition, archives can support and encourage its collection
and study in a threefold approach, encompassing science,
history, and conservation science and imaging science, by:
1. saving and studying the history of the photographic
sciences and motion picture technologies of more than
a century of moving image culture by collecting
scientific and technical documentation, research
files, and the archaeological film samples them-
selvesranging from single frames to entire test
reelsexemplifying and documenting the differ-
ent film materials, photographic chemistries, color
systems, and motion picture formats;
2. encouraging the application of scientific approaches
established in other areas of cultural heritage to
moving image artefacts, in particular, those of con-
servation science and archaeometry but also, for instance,
an experimental archaeology of topics such as
early applied color techniques in order to study
their visual properties and restoration behavior; and
3. deepening the understanding of the subjective,
psychovisual moving image experience and of the
analog and digital techniques used to provide it by
integrating the knowledge and approaches of imag-
ing and color science.
This is vital not only to preserve history but also be-
cause of the necessity of access to born-analog works via
digital versions and the potential digital restoration indeed
does offer. Precisely because it is outside and beyond the
original technologys realm, the expanded vocabulary
of digital imaging might offer opportunities to be more
faithful in some regards to a particular heritage image than
analog technologies allow. But like any translation, a deep
understanding of the original language is a prerogative.
As archivists, we can embrace the potential of modern
imaging technologies to explore the richness of historic
techniques to research. The science of imaging past and
present and of the materials chemistry of heritage images
need to be an inherent and essential part of this.
The Academys New Clothes
Leo Enticknap
The scholarly establishments response to the adoption
of digital technologies for archival film restoration and
access, and specifically the implications of that response
for the archival community, suggests a rather depress-
ing answer to the editors question. In short, scholars
64 Materiality and the Archive
(with a small number of honorable exceptions) have
shown that they cannot provide a needed service to
archivists, primarily because they lack the professional
competence to do so.
There is little doubt that we are in the teeth of a revolu-
tion in the technologies that provide access to archivally
preserved moving images. It has precipitated an intense
and polarized debate among moving image archivists as
to the ethical and cultural implications of what appears
to be the final decline of analogue photochemistry as a
mainstream storage and distribution medium. While it
has been rumbling on for the best part of a decade, the
issue was recently given short-term prominence by the
Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing of Eastman Kodak, the
company that manufactures approximately 90 percent
of the worlds film, on 19 January 2012. Industry com-
mentators are broadly agreed that if Kodak survives the
restructuring process as a corporate entity, it will emerge
from it having quit the film business.
The use of digital technology first for origination,
then for consumer access, then for restoration, and now,
finally, for theatrical exhibition has led, on the one hand,
to claims by its celebrants that it has broadened possibili-
ties, improved quality, and reduced costs (e.g., in Giovanna
Fossatis From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in
Transition [Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2009]) and, on the other, to assertions by its detractors
that the digital representation of images originated using
photochemical technology is fundamentally inauthentic
and thus unethical (e.g., Paolo Cherchi Usais claims of
a digital dark age). Film scholars have been caught
in the middle of this conversation within the archiving
community like rabbits in front of headlights. In general
terms, they have either resorted to obtuse cultural theory
in order to speculate as to the cultural implications of
digitally mediated access to archival moving images or
betrayed their ignorance of the empirical functions of
media technologies through a series of untrue and mis-
leading assertions.
For career preservation purposes, I do not intend to
name and shame the authors of prominent examples.
In the last two years, I have encountered eminent and
widely respected professors in print and mainstream
media interviews claiming that all film restoration is
now digital, that the projection of a 35mm film-out
from the digital restoration of an early cinema classic
represents an authentic viewing experience, whereas a
DCP cannot, that any and all copying of a digital audio-
visual asset is analogous to cloning (i.e., totally ignoring
the role of codecs in the creation of image data), and a
series of other misunderstandings, oversimplifications,
and half-truths.
In short, what we have is another embarrassing ex-
ample of a group of scholars who, trained in the humani-
ties, find themselves out of their depth when events and
public debate force them to address questions of science
and engineering but yet feel compelled to pass themselves
off as experts on the subject when the occasion demands
it. It is partly for this reason that the archival community
has, in the last decade and a half or so, evolved its own
infrastructure for researching the cultural and practical
effects of its work, represented principally by a series of
monographs and the journals the Moving Image and the
Journal of Film Preservation.The pertinent question is how
this work can inform the film studies establishment, not
the other way roundif that establishment is prepared
to take it on board.
Scholarly Archivists/Archival Scholars: Rethinking
the Traditional Models
Oliver Hanley and Adelheid Heftberger
The question of how scholars can provide a needed ser-
vice to film museums and archives can only be answered
by taking a step backward. Archivists and scholars tend
to be placed in separate camps. However, if we were to
take a close look at the current generation of archivists
or lab technicians, we would find very little that separates
them from what we would consider traditional scholars.
Given that many of todays archivists have gone through
the traditional academic route, and many film archives
and museums themselvesas institutionsare heavily
involved in academic programs if not departments in
universities, it may not be an exaggeration to suggest that
every archivist nowadays is a potential scholar (and every
scholar a potential archivist).
An archivist is more than the person who lifts cans off a
shelf: we, and many people we know working in other ar-
chival institutions, manage to combine the benefits of a job
in an archive with our own scholarly interests. Likewise,
scholars are more than just people who create havoc in ar-
chives. If they can appreciate that watching a film on DVD
is not enough and put genuine archival film prints under
Kit Hughes and Heather Heckman 65
the microscope, scholars can raise questions about archival
material that may have otherwise remained unasked (and
unanswered).With archival-scholarly collaborations there
is the potential to apply research funding to key archival
activities such as preservation.We have already experienced
a move in this direction here inVienna with projects such
as Film.Stadt.Wien, ostensibly a content-based research
project that nonetheless helped the Austrian Film Museum
to save a portion of its amateur film holdings. In Swit-
zerland, three universities recently joined forces with the
industry (another important partner we shouldnt lose
sight of ) to help develop an automated digital restoration
program for archivesAFRESA.What other possibilities
lie around the corner?
If we wish to seriously put the traditional model of the
relationship between archivists and scholars to the test,
should we not reconsider the service-based model en-
tirely? To replace one service-based model with another
would not change anything.Archivists and scholars would
still be placed in separate camps. The main issue is not
about the one providing a service for the other. Rather, it
is about synergy, collaboration, interdisciplinary research,
and mutual benefit.That way, key problems facing media
archives todaysuch as the long-term storage of digital
datacould be dealt with more effectively.
To hold on to traditional relationship structures would
do a disservice to our discipline. Only by taking each
other seriously as knowledgeable people and establish-
ing joint projects can scholars and archivists come up
with results that are useful to both professions.
About the Contributors
Paolo Cherchi Usai is the senior curator of the Motion Picture
Department at George Eastman House, curator emeritus of the
National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, and cofounder of the
Pordenone Silent Film Festival and of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of
Film Preservation at George Eastman House in Rochester, NewYork.
Daniela Curr (project manager, Haghefilm Foundation, as well
as Haghefilm Conservations film preservation specialist and color
grader) has a background in literature and film studies (Universit
degli Studi di Milano) and has previously collaborated in research
projects with Italian film archives such as Museo Nazionale del
Cinema in Turin.
Leo Enticknap is a lecturer in the Institute of Communication Stud-
ies at the University of Leeds. Formerly the curator of the Northern
Region Television Archive, Enticknap maintains close links with the
archive sector and since 2008 has been a member of the board of
directors of the Association of Moving Image Archivists.
Oliver Hanley is a researcher at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna.
He holds a BA degree in film studies from the University of Kent,
Canterbury, and an MA in preservation and presentation of the mov-
ing image from the University of Amsterdam.
Adelheid Heftberger is a researcher and archivist at the Austrian
Film Museum in Vienna. She holds MA degrees in Slavic studies and
comparative literature.
Erik Piil is digital archivist at Anthology Film Archives in New York
City.
Ulrich Ruedel holds a doctorate in analytical chemistry from the
University of Muenster, Germany, and worked on optical biochemical
sensors and intellectual property rights before turning to the practice
and science of film preservation. Most recently, he worked as research
and development manager at Haghefilm Conservation and as project
manager for the Haghefilm Foundation.
Dwight Swanson resides in Baltimore and is a cofounder of the Center
for Home Movies and the producer of the film Amateur Night: Home
Movies from American Archives.
Greg Wilsbacher is Curator of Newsfilm Collections at the University
of South Carolinas Moving Image Research Collections. He holds
a PhD in English from Indiana University and an MLIS from the
University of South Carolina. His publications include Forgotten
History?: The Value of Newsreel Libraries (The Chronicle Review,
2009) and Al Brick: The Forgotten Newsreel Man At Pearl Harbor
(The Moving Image, 2010). Currently, he is at work on a history of the
original Fox silent newsreel, Fox News.