David Rice Screening The Future

AVPS Senior Consultant David Rice has been invited to speak at Screening the Future 2011: New Strategies and Challenges in Audiovisual Archiving to be held at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision March 14th and 15th. Screening the Future is being produced by the European Commission-funded Presto projects, a series of initiatives working to “develop solutions to preserve audiovisual content and provide services to share knowledge regarding audiovisual preservation”. The event will mark the launch of PrestoCentre — a self-sustaining continuation of the Presto projects — and participants “will help set the agenda for AV preservation in Europe, and benefit from interacting with leading institutions, funders, vendors, and policymakers”.

David will will be speaking with Skip Elsheimer (A/V Geeks) on the panel “Introduction to Transcoding: Tools and Processes”. From the programme description:

• “Digital formats evolve over time. This session will demonstrate the basics of transcoding and the utilities, strategies and challenges involved in efficiently providing access to digital audiovisual media collections. It will examine software-based tools and applications, identifying what to look out for, how to evaluate lossless and lossy transcoding methods, quality control, and verification.”

Those of you who have seen David’s and Skip’s Digitization 101 panels at the past several AMIA conferences know they are highly informative while also being highly entertaining and accessible to a wide audience, opening up the seemingly obscure world of digital video and audio in a way that is as tangible and revelatory as inspecting a film by hand. David has been developing some new avenues of investigation to discuss about transcoding, so this should be another great presentation.

Other speakers over the two days include Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive), David Rosenthal (LOCKSS, Stanford University), Jeff Ubois (PrestoCentre), Matthew Addis (IT Innovation), Richard Wright (BBC R&D), Peter Kaufman (Intelligent Television), Marius Snyders (PrestoPRIME Project), Jan Müller (Managing Director, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision), Paul Miller (Cloud of Data), and Seamus Ross (Faculty of Information, University of Toronto).

Full details and registration information can be found at http://screeningthefuture.eventbrite.com/
Also see
PrestoPrime http://www.prestoprime.org/
and
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision http://instituut.beeldengeluid.nl
for more audiovisual preservation information.

How To Make An Americký Quilt

When I was living in the Czech Republic a friend told me a story about installing cabinets in her apartment. The details escape me now (please don’t be disappointed) — I just remember that it was a long and difficult process. One thing did stick with me, however. When the project was complete, she and her boyfriend sat on the couch, admiring the new cabinets, and said, “To je Amerika” (or more closely, „To je America”). Loosely translated: That’s America.

My friend said it was an idiomatic expression used to describe some sort of task or goal that seemed impossibly out of reach but was finally attained. It’s been awhile since that time, and the world has gone through a lot since then, so I’m not sure if this Cold War leftover is still similarly deployed. However, it made a deep impression on me, partly as a surprising statement of faith made to a young Turk of an American all upset at the blah blah blah of the blah blah blah (the words are there but not worth expressing — I hope I have matured somewhat since then), but it also made an impression on me as someone who had spent much time studying US literature and history and struggling with the definition of America. So much effort spent spinning my wheels deeper into the morass of semantics and cultural politics, and here the Czechs had the answer the whole time.

—

Okay, I’ll cop to being facetiously pat just now, but there is a mote of a true concept in there. In my interactions with international, especially European, colleagues, and in attending panels at various IASA conferences I have noted a greater focus or interest in projects at centralized, national archives or broadcasters. A number of nations have policies of mandatory deposit into state archives, or in some manner are stakeholders in media productions based on arts funding or control of broadcast stations. So, this focus makes sense for them, and the lack of a national focus makes sense for us.

Why? This is no knock on organizations like NARA, Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian — they are some of the most vital institutions we have and absolutely necessary for developing professional standards and guidelines. However, they are still decidedly American in nature, i.e., federally republican, i.e., central authorities with a local influence that ranges from some to let-us-alone, i.e., caught in the eternal conflict of Unity vs. Multiplicity.

—

I’ll cut to my point here because, despite my obstinate insistence otherwise, I well realize that the majority of my audience (and humanity in general) have little interest in Henry Adams and his theories of history. (Though if you’re curious and a masochist, boy do I have a doozy of a thesis for you to read…)

I’ll also cut to the chase because, well, there is no answer here. I would venture that most practitioners in our field spend a lot of work and free time thinking about how to make archives work better. Not that they are ill-functioning now, but rather the concern is how better to allocate resources or develop methodologies that will help preserve more stuff and provide wider access for as long as possible. This blog post started as a thought experiment pondering the prospects of an archive model similar to those of European states. But the conflict between local and federal responsibilities has littered American history with grumblings, with protests, with riots, with a war… This is not something for the generic parameters of a weblog to overcome (no matter what a brilliant writer I am).

I’ll get down to brass tacks here because, though there are no answers, there are some answers, perhaps even enabled by our mixed bag of a national psyche. From the inside, amidst the processes and obsessions with the details, it is much easier to tease out the faults in a system. Fresh perspective can come from an outside view. If we look back to Tocqueville — again a European that defined America for us — we see that he had a great admiration for the federal/local partnership. From his point of view it was inspirational and spoke to the quality of the American spirit to see local groups or government structures bond together to get things done, whether that be human services, infrastructure, or general community support. The federal structure was there to provide guidance or more when necessary, but “local” institutions and initiative were just as important and vital to society. It is not a top-down structure but a bi-directional system of influence.

—

With this in mind I feel like it’s absolutely imperative that we (as individuals and as a collective nation) throw our support behind archival and preservation projects working the federal/local, centralized/decentralized partnership, projects like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s American Archive, a long term effort to preserve and make accessible to the public 40,000 hours (to start) of radio and television material from across the landscape of public broadcasting. This is a visionary plan, not to establish the be-all end-all archive of America, but to provide access to a rich history of material that is both artistic and exemplary of life in the 20th Century. The creation of this archive will show just how integral audiovisual materials have been in shaping our lives, but also how public broadcasting has shaped the development of the broadcast media and our understanding of the world.

Supporting local autonomy and trying to get funding to the lesser-haves is important, but sometimes the infrastructure and guiding vision of a centralized system is necessary. Stations from every US state and territory with a public broadcasting station will be contributing to the American Archive, but in the end it all needs to fit together and follow the same parameters so it is useable by the widest swath of the public possible. We can all experience nationally distributed productions like Austin City Limits and Fresh Air, but the American Archive will also open up those local productions like Oregon Experience or Policy and a Pint that bring new insights from and about this big, complex country we inhabit.

And when the American Archive is up and running, I can look forward to that day when we can sit on our couches, open our laptops, and say, “To je Amerika.”

— Joshua Ranger

AVPS Makes The Rolling Stone

AVPS President, Chris Lacinak was recently quoted in the Rolling Stone article “File Not Found: The Record Industry’s Digital Storage Crisis” (written by David Browne and published in the December 23, 2010-January 11, 2011 issue). Mr. Browne interviewed Chris as an expert reference in the area of digital preservation and file management of audiovisual materials to help illuminate the challenges faced by record labels in accessing legacy digital files.

The article was prompted by this summer’s release of “The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age” by the National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB) and Library of Congress Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). Chris’ testimony in front of the NRPB as a representative for the Association of Moving Image Archivists and the Audio Engineering Society Technical Committee on Archiving, Restoration and Digital Libraries was used as background for the writing of that report. An essential text, the report is not a damnation of digital media and digital preservation but rather a call for renewed focus on the issues facing audio preservation that are having near term effects on accessibility and persistence.

We’re very happy to have been a part of the Rolling Stone article, but even happier that they took note of the issue and reported on it, which also shows what an important impact the NRPB report is having in creating awareness for audio preservation.

(And for those of you surprised we did not make the cover, Rolling Stone offered it to us but we had to turn it down. For modesty’s sake.)

Chris Lacinak To Speak At 80th Music Library Association Annual Meeting

Philadelphia has become a popular destination for AVPS the past several months, what with all the conferences and marathons and such. The love continues (in a brotherly sort of way) at the upcoming Music Library Association Annual Meeting.

This 80th edition will take place February 9th-12th, 2011 at the historic Loews Hotel in the Philadelphia City Center. This year’s theme is Born Digital: A New Frontier for Music Libraries. Thursday, February 10th AVPS President Chris Lacinak will be speaking with Kimmy Szeto of SUNY Maritime College on the Technical Metadata for Music panel sponsored by the Bibliographic Control Committee. Chris and AVPS have been involved in a number of recent projects dealing with metadata for digital audio, including being a part of the research and drafting of the ARSC Technical Committee Metadata Study and development of BWF MetaEdit, a powerful new desktop application that enables the analysis and editing of metadata in Broadcast WAVE files. BWF MetaEdit was developed in association with the Federal Agencies Audio-Visual Working Group and is available for free download on SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/bwfmetaedit/.

The use of digital formats for audio is well established, but the development of methodologies and tools for preservation and collection management is a growing but still emergent field. It’s great to see the MLA focusing on these topics and working to move the field ahead. The Annual Meeting is good opportunity to get involved, and if you do head to Philly, say hello to the folks at McGillin’s Olde Ale House for us.

Naturalistic Artifice

One thing I’ve always loved about film is the delicacy of the frame. Well, I very much doubt I always would have stated it in such terms. I can certainly say I have nearlyalways been a sucker for that feeling that — despite the fact that you know there’s a crew of people watching the events transpire, that just beyond that hill the cowboy is riding over is the LA Freeway, that those neck bolts are glued on and those boots have lifts — in spite of it all you can still think the whole thing is unmediated reality, captured and being replayed before your very eyes. Outside the frame informs and contributes to creation, but inside the frame lives and breathes and exists as a separate entity.

——

Or, mostly does. There are those times when things ring so false that it kills the spell and pulls one out of the film completely. This isn’t necessarily the result of unrealistic special effects or non-naturalistic acting. Godzilla is no less effective for being an actor in a rubber suit on a tiny set. There is momentum to the story and beauty in the skill (or A-for-effortness) to create with limited resources that all contribute to the willful suspension. But there is an egregious example of when good films go wrong in the Coen Brothers’ recent True Grit, an otherwise solid, thoroughly entertaining film.

The Coens are kings of artifice, and I love that about them. The obsessive focus on accents and speech patterns, the broad characters, and the paradox of stories driven by what seems like fate but also the complete randomness of an uncaring universe push the films through from over-the-top to more true than reality.

However, towards the end of True Grit there is an emotional midnight ride across the moonlit forests and prairies of the Indian Territory back to the border of ‘civilization’. There are a few wide shots done on location for this extended scene, but most of it is done in closeups of the characters, with the trees, stars, and moon in the background and a horse’s head in the foreground. They obviously needed to shoot the closeups in the studio in order to control lighting and movement, and to embue it with the proper emotional hallmarks the scene calls for. But something about the perspective is distorted, the light source seems changeable and misdirected, the digital night sky is off color, and the actors and props have a glow around them that looks more like the results of half-assed green screen work than an atmospheric choice. All I could think about was how ugly and ill-executed it all was, a poor attempt at trying to digitally recreate that eerie Coen nighttime aura. The emotional thread was lost, and a great move became merely good.

My sense here is that, trained on low-budget, primarily on-location filmmaking, the Coens are not as skilled at the art of studio artifice. Additionally, digital effects, though more democratizing for creating certain aspects of filmmaking, does not really fit the DIY aesthetic because, when done imperfectly, they look worse than cheap analog effects, similar to the Uncanny Valley hypothesis in robotics. The package of chicken parts gorged upon in Night of the Living Dead will almost always look more realistic than an anatomically exact digital replication of a disembowelment. Or, the vision that came to my head during the True Grit scene, a shaken carriage and swung tree branches will always look better, as in this scene from Mario Bava’s Black Sunday http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd5D04kizts#t=8m25s
or the glass matte, illuminated moon here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFoQOoD3ZAk#t=5m07s.

——

What I’m driving at on one level is an obvious and oft stated sentiment, that art is an artifice, that it is a false representation of reality, often driving at capturing some essential idea or cultural reality. Some of the genres that most readily portray this are mythology, ballet, opera, and some theatre. Cultural archetypes played out in high emotion or melodrama, they communicate a story of existence or humanity or an idea, not of documentary.

The trend in literature and film has been, however, towards the development of ‘realism’. In film this has been expressed through changes in acting styles and the technical aspects of filmmaking including effects, lighting, locales, and capture devices. It has thus far been a zero sum game. Yesterday’s gritty realism is today’s hash with ham and tripe.

——

The conflict between high artifice and realism comes to a head in Black Swan, one of the most talked about films of the end-of-year movie push. (When my film archivist colleagues and my parents have seen and are discussing the same intense indie horror drama, there’s little question it truly counts as most talked about.) Black Swan is causing a fuss because it is engendering such high levels of love and hate. A summary of the sides can be found by comparing the reviews in the New Yorker and the New York Times (and their later Oscar buzz followup). From one view the movie is misogynistic, does not accurately portray the world of ballet dancers, and verges on camp in it’s extremity. From the other point of view, it is a grand meditation on the creative spirit, the pressure put on women to fit conflicting roles of innocence and experience, and of a culture obsessed with youth, beauty, and perfection.

At risk of alienating my reader and the spam-bots, I fall more into the latter camp. Reading the film as part horror and part grandiose story like ballet or opera, it seems a disservice to criticize in terms of naturalism or realistic drama. The characters and actions are types or ideas embodied by moving, fleshy entities projected on a screen. I don’t think people who dislike Black Swan don’t understand this; I would assume many of them are passionate fans of The Red Shoes or similar Technicolor fantasies. I would put forth here that a root of the conflict is film technology. Handheld cameras and grainy small gauge or digital video footage have been coded as ‘reality’. Horror films have often taken advantage of this in order to seem scarier or gruesomer because it holds out the vague possibility of actuality (see Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Blair Witch Project). However, when this story veers off into melodrama or the tropes of horror (like scary, implausible mirror reflections) we are not expecting from seriousarthousecharacterdrama it creates awkwardnesses and confusion in the audience, often manifesting in the immediate as laughter.

Mickey Rourke’s character in Aronofsky’s last, similarly shot film, The Wrestler, takes the same death-embracing leap into a life wholly given over to art and performance as Natalie Portman’s character does at the end of Black Swan, but that film was not so roundly dismissed. Did the milieu — working class New Jersey and the minor league wrestling circuit — fit expectations of grainy digital video better and mask the soap opera-ishness of professional wrestling? Would Black Swan be less controversial if shot in glossy, deep focus black and white? I saw The Strange Love of Martha Ivers in the same movie theater as Black Swan, a highly melodramatic noir film with a powerhouse Barbara Stanwyck performance. A handful of people were snickering at every overblown emotion until another audience member yelled out, “It’s not funny!”

They stopped, and a good movie became great.

— Joshua Ranger