Academy Film Archive

If the press reports are accurate – and I am sure the Academy Board of Governors would have insisted on a management correction by now if they were not – the summary dismissal of a large number of the Academy Archive’s most experienced staff is not only an insult to today’s hard fought labour laws but a crime against personal humanity. Only a management on the brink of collapse would fail to discuss such action with the staff involved before making such a decision public, and then lock them out of the Archive’s database so that they were unable to complete documentation on current restoration projects or communicate with colleagues in other American film archives, some of whom would almost certainly have been collaborating on current restorations. I am glad literally thousands of people have signed the petition protesting this cowardly action.

However, as a former Chief of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress, I would like to address another issue, which I have not seen mentioned. Unlike in Britain (I was previously Curator of the British National Film and Television Archive), where film preservation is to a large extent directly or indirectly funded by government, the only film preservation funded by the American federal government is that carried out by the Library of Congress and the National Archives. The other major American film archives – the Museum of Modern Art, the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the George Eastman Museum and the Academy Film Archive, as well as smaller specialist colleagues — rely on a complex mix of foundation grants and donations, industry support, and gifts from individuals who realise the international importance of America’s cinema heritage.

These archives must collaborate. Many of the American films that need restoration are orphans – with no “relatives” and no-one to love them – and relevant materials for these films only exist because archives in America (and all over the world) have recognised their importance and spent public and private money on looking after them. The USA’s film archives rely profoundly on each other, and to remove a brick from the wall is to invite its collapse – that is, to endanger the survival of the American film heritage and public access to it. It is an act of cultural vandalism. 

There is a great irony here, too. On the one hand, we have the federally-funded National Film Registry recognising the importance of the country’s film heritage by selecting 25 films each year for safeguarding, and on the other we have the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose very existence depends on the cinema, dismissing staff who have spent years accumulating technical and informational skills in the field of film preservation, and who have contributed largely and significantly to this heritage.

One can only surmise the reason for the Academy’s financial problems. As one of the co-founders of the London Museum of the Moving Image, I appreciate that film museums are expensive, and the Academy’s Film Museum may have overrun its budget. When building MOMI, we took great pains to ensure that the Museum had a defined budget and that it could not claim funds from the British Film Institute’s other key activities, like the National Film and Television Archive, the National Film Theatre and the international film Journal, Sight and Sound.  If this is the situation that has occurred at the Academy, it is another example of poor management. Perhaps the Academy Board of Governors should be considering summary management dismissals rather than destroying respected and on-going film preservation activities?

David Francis, O.B.E.

Former Chief of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division at the Library of Congress, USA

Former Curator of the National Film and Television Archive, now known as the BFI National Archive, UK

Current Director of Kent Museum of the Moving Image, UK