Genesis of a Profession: Origins of the Film and Television Archives Advisory Committees

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Genesis of a ProfessionOrigins of the Film and Television Archives Advisory Committees William T. Murphy (bio) On November 1, 1990, in a small but crowded meeting room at the Oregon Historical Society, the assembled archivists, librarians, curators, preservationists, and other interested persons formally resolved to establish the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA). They had come to Portland to attend what would be the last annual conference of the joint Film Archives Advisory Committee and the Television Archives Advisory Committee, more familiarly known as FAAC/TAAC (also, in writing, as F/TAAC). The Future of F/TAAC Committee had moved the formalization process forward by working on a mission statement and drafting bylaws, subsequently approved by the membership, and the rest, as they say, is history. Today, after some twenty years since its founding, the successor to F/TACC has become the premier professional organization for individuals, institutions, and enterprises that share an appreciation of moving images as an essential part of our cultural heritage and a desire to safeguard and preserve them well into the future.1 Many current AMIA members who participated in F/TAAC no doubt recall the modest steps that were taken to address the informational needs of an ever-growing number of archives, libraries, and museums that had custody of large film and videotape collections. Since the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the field had grown dramatically, a growth reflected in today’s AMIA membership numbers and in the services the organization offers to the archival community, ranging from basic training workshops to demonstrations of the latest digital applications. Early Years Several precedents mark the beginning of professionalization in moving image preservation and access, an audiovisual field that, in reality, encompasses many disciplines in the humanities, sciences, and technology. A reasonable place to start is with the idea that cultural institutions should take responsibility for collecting film and television materials along with traditional archival formats. Accepting large rolls of paper prints beginning in 1894 as copyright deposit copies for motion pictures was a landmark acquisition for the Library of Congress (LOC). So, too, was its acceptance of the first television program for copyright in 1949. Other institutions, such as the National Archives and MoMA, started collecting motion pictures in the 1930s, and on a broader level, the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), established in 1938, served the needs of its member archives, which, after the intrusion of World War II, contributed to professionalization on an international scale. As will be discussed, it was the American FIAF-affiliated archives that, in effect, formed the initial archives advisory committee or Film Archives Advisory Committee group. FAAC traces its origins primarily to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the American Film Institute (AFI), established in 1965 and 1967, respectively, whose relationship required participation of the major nitrate motion picture film archives. This select group included the AFI, which acted as the secretariat, the George Eastman House (GEH), MoMA, and the LOC. Subsequently, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), became a participant, and the National Archives and Records Service (NARS; National Archives and Records Administration [NARA] after 1985) became an observer because, as an agency of the executive branch, it could not accept NEA funding. To minimize competition and avoid duplication of effort, this core group of advisers initially convened to rationalize acquisition and collections policies among their own institutions. During most of the 1970s, the committee advised NEA on funding levels for film preservation for their own institutions, until the process was changed to allow peer review. NEA later funded other major AFI projects that were administered by its National Center for Film and Video Preservation, established in 1983. As the former center director, Gregory Lukow described it as follows: “By the late 1970s, when NEA grants advisory rules changed, FAAC changed from a group advising the NEA to a group whose expanding [End Page 103] membership ‘advised’ and shared information among themselves.”2 NEA’s crucial role is incontestable in the context of motion picture film, first in nitrate film preservation and second in cinema education, and arguably much less so in television and video preservation. Leading a media campaign promoting...