Evolution of American Moving Image Preservation

Mann, Sarah Ziebell. "The Evolution of American Moving Image Preservation: Defining the Preservation Landscape (1967-77)." The Moving Image I:2 (Fall 2001):1-20.

Sarah Mann's article is a detailed history of the NEA and AFI's attempt to federalize moving image preservation in the 1960s and 1970s in the areas of film and television recordings. The American Film Institute was formed in 1967, and unlike other NEA areas, mandated that preservation be part of the activities that the organization would be involved with.

Because there were already a number of film preservation activities in the US (unlike the UK which only had the British Film Institute), like the Museum of Modern Art, the George Eastman House, the National Archives, and the Library of Congress, the AFI was seen as a funnel for funding these and other film archives. These activities were coordinated by the AFI's Archives Advisory Committee.

While the AFI had a large pot of money in its early years from government and corporate supporters, it ran dry quickly. The AFI moved on to fund "sexier" projects such as a school for filmmakers, and gradually reduced the amount of funding for preservation projects. In the 1970s, the AFI gained independence from the NEA. At that time, television broadcasts were seen as important cultural records to be maintained and preserved. One of the prominent efforts in this area was Vanderbilt University's program of off-air tpaing of nightly newscasts. These formed the basis of the Television News Archive. Lawmakers began to see that preserving this material was important as film, and included in the 1976 copyright act a provision to create the American Television and Radio Archives (ATRA) at the Library of Congress.

Another case that Mann talks about is the court case Gilliam v. ABC (1976) which was one of the first to bring the concept of "moral rights" (droit moral) to the American legal system (I think, don't quote me). Gilliam was Terry Gilliam, who had helped to create the British TV series, Monty Python's Flying Circus. But because the US hadn't signed the 1886 Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, that couldn't be used as an argument.

Gilliam won because of an interpretation of the Lanham Act, which is a trademark statute that prevents "misrepresentation that may injure plantiff's business or personal reputation, even where no registered trademark is concerned." Kind of round-about, but the moral rights of the creators were protected for their creative works. It also brought out the concepts of what corporate copyright owners could do with an artists' works, even those they commissioned; what autheniticity is, and where the concept of "integrity" comes from when talking about a work of moving image and sound. (Sort of like the Metropolis re-creation by Giorgio Moroder in the 1980s).

Basically, this is a worthy article which discusses how federal film preservation efforts began and the rocky road it's been on from 1960-1980.