Intangible Heritage or Corporate Memory: from Conversions to Conservation

Abstract

Unlike cinema, whose history is often told as a story of famous studios, directors, stars, and films, the story of film schools can be perhaps more productively traced through the stories of founders, change makers, graduates, technological innovations and in particular the institutions’ archival practices. In this paper, we will be concerned with the history of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS) as the preeminent screen and broadcast sector school in Australia. More importantly, we will examine the relationship between the school’s history, its relationship with the National Archives of Australia and its desire to record significant markers, graduates’ achievements, and academic endeavours in the story of film. No doubt, the preservation of students’ works and their subsequent films, together with film critique writings through the school’s academic journal Lumina, stand as affirmation of the school’s role as incubator of talent and passion. As such, these archives chronicle the smaller ground-up histories of individuals as some have evolved from talented students to world renowned filmmakers. Furthermore, we will focus on AFTRS’ promotion of its archive and this history as a reflection of its own entity and influence on Australian society, as a marker of our time, and indeed of its place in the screen and broadcast sector in the world. Nonetheless, we also believe that diverse and obsolete formats, a range of course levels and content, as well as organisational and legal processes cannot be assimilated into one grand historically significant archive. Indeed, these are dispersed within AFTRS through corporate memory, cataloguing systems, information technology systems, and archival rooms. With the maturity of the digital era, analogue conversions and conservation seem to be directly linked to the idea of open access as the school navigates the evolving landscape of copyright, intellectual property and censorship. We will therefore examine non-linear and evolving systematic archival practices of old and new material as they continue to pose challenges at AFTRS. Similarly, we will investigate the acclimatisation of the “original” versus “copy” dichotomy in the digital and online sphere but from a conservation perspective, and how the notion of posterity and the multitude has in effect blurred the notion of the historical document.