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Adding Another Dimension

After reading both Roger Ebert’s and A. O. Scott’s recent pronouncements on 3-D in film, I realized it was finally time for me to make a statement to settle the issue (“Why I Hate 3-D (and You Should Too)” & “Adding a Dimension to the Frenzy“). A caveat on my bona fides here — excluding Jaws 3-D on VHS (with someone sitting next to me who had seen it in the theatre pointing out all of the awesome points that were in 3-D), the only 3-D viewing experiences I have had have been Captain EO and Beowulf. The former I don’t really remember because I was an annoying rebellious teen on a long family vacation at the time, which meant I was too busy with teenaged self-focus to pay all that much attention. All I really remember is Disneyland being closed due to rain (only the second or third time ever), getting ohsoclose to the Psycho house, and practicing my tuba in the back of the family Suburban parked on a San Francisco side street. Like I said.

The latter I try not to remember because it was not my viewing choice, but also because the poem Beowulf is a personal favorite. I’m not a stickler for strictness in adaptations, but for some reason I take a principled stance that something like Beowulf or other medieval texts gain very little (and lose much) from the insertion of more modern concepts of character, plot, and motivation. Never mind the image — the stories themselves work much better as 2-D, flat narrative.

But that’s enough dimensions laid out to show my obvious expertise on the subject; back to critics who think decades of training and practice actually mean something. When I read Ebert’s essay in Newsweek when it came out, I found much to agree with. Like my assessment of Beowulf several of his arguments point to the feeling that 3-D does not add anything to character or storytelling that is not already in the script, that 2-D artistry does not cover, or that our imagination does not already account for. Scott concedes these points to a degree, but offers the counterpoints that we may all be surprised by the ultimate artistry of 3-D once/if it reaches a mature state, and that what it currently has the potential to add is the magic of the cinema viewing experience. When done well, it is able to compliment our imagination and take us out of our seat and into the world of the film. This is, of course, something traditional film can do, but 3-D is able to do it in a new way, which makes it all terribly exciting and profit generating in the here and now.

All of this fretting over the significance, quality, and fortitude of 3-D is, as Scott suggests, just a lot of noise that won’t be sorted out until further down the road. The format may be a blip on the screen, or it may be the next revolution in moving images, but there is no way to know right now and no commentator has the correct answer. New will become old and will become fodder for reassessment.

However, from a different angle, “a new way” is of great concern here. Standards and best practices for preserving (especially video and digital) moving image materials are still being hashed out for the old way. How, then, should we (or do we really need to) account for 3-D? Is it an outlier or do we need to scrap everything and establish systems and workflows that mainly accommodate 3-D? Many organizations are discussing their system and infrastructure needs for storing and managing their digital video assets. They are well aware of the jump in hardware and software requirements from SD to HD, but now lately it has become apparent that they will have to start considering the requirements for handling HD 3-D because there could likely be someone in the organization that would want to use the format. This is why, in the archivist’s case, the persistence of 3-D’s application matters. Would an organization’s management of assets have to center around tools that are powerful enough to handle HD 3-D (tools that may not yet exist in reliable forms), or would they be able to plan for a less intensive system with some work-arounds for the dribs and drabs of 3-D? The more cost effect solution for today may be the right choice, or it may end up being much more costly in the future when the system has to be rebuilt.

As in the consideration of the cultural impact of 3-D, there is no easy answer immediately at hand. The difference is, cultural relevance can be left up to history to interpret; the preservation of these materials should not and cannot be left to some undetermined point in the future to handle. There are a number of difficult (and at times expensive) technical and ethical decisions that need to be made when preserving our audiovisual heritage, but decisions delayed will create more difficult (and certainly more expensive) circumstances to overcome.

The decisions are difficult because they are important because the materials matter. But I feel we archivists will have no trouble overcoming them. You see, we actually view the world in 4-D (usually taught in the 2nd semester of most archiving programs). We have to look ahead in time to envision the future access and use (or potential decay) of audiovisual materials, and, really, 3-D is a childish medium compared to that.

— Joshua Ranger

All Well And Good

One of the topics that led me to a career in archiving — perhaps out of fascination or perhaps out of dread — is the speed at which a culture can begin to view a pattern or idea as a set-in-stone, age-old tradition. The presidential pardon of a Thanksgiving turkey is spoken and thought of as if it were instituted along with Article II of the Constitution, but it was actually first performed by George H W Bush in 1989. The historical record preserved in archives informs us of What-Was, but, of equal importance, it reminds us that What-Is Wasn’t-Always.

Of course, though this area is of great concern to me, that does not mean I am immune to it, as I was reminded by a New York Times Magazine On Language column a couple of weeks ago (“Wellness”, April 12, 2010). I had had no idea that the term ‘wellness’ was relatively new and had been relatively controversial in its application. I had grown up with the word, and had even taken the required Wellness class in high school, a course that combined Health and P.E. I didn’t think much of it at the time — just another core requirement taught by one of the cadre of football coaches to suffer through — but in hindsight there was plenty of packaging going on. Chapter 1 in the textbook was a long form definition of wellness, and the class was continually sold as a great advance in teaching innovation (MWF we’re going to watch filmstrips about health and hygiene, TuTh we’re going to play ping pong or go bowling or something.).

All that Wellness, and yet still I was not immune to a short-sighted view of culture.

Lucky for me (and for you) I spotted a more interesting trail splitting off from Memory Lane. I’m still hacking my way through some of the undergrowth, but I began to consider archives as part of the health-wellness continuum of institutions. There are a number of factors that are considered to point to the health of an organization or industry. Finances, leadership, business models, investments, future prospects — all of the things that are included in Quarterly or Annual Reports to show that things are good and going to get better.

As the Blue Ribbon Task Force report on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access has made clear, there need to be new lines of argument developed to convince stakeholders and decision-makers that investment in preservation is worthwhile. Perhaps one of these new lines is how archives contribute to and reflect on the overall health, the wellness, of an organization. The maintenance of an institutional past through a preserved, accessible archive establishes a source of materials that can contribute to the achievement of an organization’s goals and missions while also developing a respect for the past and long-held traditions that can contribute to organizational pride, employee well-being, and guidance for the future.

There’s a general idea, on-the-ground as it were, that how one treats one’s family, friends, and material goods in one’s private life is a reflection on how that person might interact with or treat others in the public realm. Depending on how much you agree with the Supreme Court’s definition of corporate personhood, this might be a leap here, but perhaps, too, we could say that how an organization treats their archive and history might be interpreted by employees, investors, and the general public as a reflection of how the institution would deal with them. A high level of care and respect for institutional character and past may translate into a view of that organization’s high level of care for people and for producing high quality work. This may not be of direct monetary economic benefit, but it is certainly of social economic benefit that can contribute to the furthering of an organization’s goals.

These are just the rough beginnings of some ideas here. What’s more certain is that we may have gone to the well one too many times with unfocused arguments on why archives are important and preservation should be funded. Nobody would really disagree with that statement, but it doesn’t mean they would take actions to support it. Creating the prompts or incentives for following through with support and funding is where we need to do some focused cross-training in order to start help moving archives — and the culture — further up the wellness continuum.

— Joshua Ranger

Things That Shouldn’t Be Archived #5 — High School Edition

Because I care about you, dear reader, and because I care about the development of a more refined culture through the dissemination of audiovisual materials, I was perusing YouTube last night. I happened upon a video simply referred to as “Final Countdown — Acoustic Version”. I will not share that with you here. I feel that Arrested Development has completed the cultural work of that song and it needn’t be further addressed (see — I am looking out for you).

What I stumbled upon next was a video by the same performer, one which brought back a flood of memories:

Thing is, you see, “Thunderstruck” was my graduating class song in high school. I’m not quite sure how that came to pass. It was not a new song at the time, nor had it been incredibly popular like the class songs from preceding years. I’m not saying I disliked the song, but I think my submissions for consideration at that time included some Pink Floyd song, “Staying Alive” arranged for kazoos, and then probably something like Mozart’s Requiem or some such. All I’m saying is, there must have been an arranged effort to nominate an old AC/DC song to commemorate the greatest years of our lives.

It’s true that the past is a foreign country, but so, it sometimes seems now, is my hometown.

Or maybe not. I started looking around for other videos related to “Thunderstruck” and, judging from the number I viewed, found that it’s quite the touchstone for expressing one’s emotions and one’s virtuosity (that is one hell of a guitar riff). I found some fun stuff:

So all in all I had an accelerated ride over the smooth-to-pot-holed road through the neighborhoods of nostalgia, ironic appropriation, kitsch, and detritus. What I learned on my evening vacation was, really, you’ve got to hold onto the night, hold onto the memories, because, although we’ve come to the end of the road, these are days we’ll remember.

Oh — I also learned that, in spite of everything, bagpipes still kinda rock.

AVPS Part Of PBCore 2.0 Team

AudioVisual Preservation Solutions is pleased to announce we are part of the Project Management team on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting PBCore 2.0 Development project. AVPS will be working in tandem with team members from WGBH in Boston, Digital Dawn, and the CPB to help this important endeavor successfully achieve its goals. This is an exciting opportunity for AVPS to collaborate with several top notch organizations and to help further establish a strong metadata standard that can be readily adopted across the audiovisual production and archiving communities worldwide to help facilitate use, preservation, and access by the greatest possible audience. The official press release below:

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting Launches the PBCore 2.0 Development Project

(Washington, DC) – – The Corporation for Public Broadcasting today announced the launch of the PBCore 2.0 Development Project.

The PBCore 2.0 Development Project will expand the existing PBCore metadata standard to increase the ability, on one hand, of content producers and distributors using digital media to classify and describe public media content (audio and video) and, on the other, of audiences to find public media content on a variety of digital media and mobile platforms.

The PBCore 2.0 Development Project will also work to enhance the PBCore standard to ensure that it will be able to satisfy the demands of multiplatform digital content as well as an evolving World Wide Web. Since PBCore’s development in 2005, it has become not only one of the most widely-used metadata standards in the world, but also the basis of other metadata standards. At the same time, in the last five years, the number of digital media applications that would benefit from PBCore has grown significantly. An updated PBCore will benefit not only public broadcasters, but all users of metadata standards based on PBCore.

PBCore 2.0 will be managed by WGBH, AudioVisual Preservation Solutions and Digital Dawn. For more information on the PBCore 2.0 Development Project, please go to www.pbcore.org

Live Taping

If the New York Times does indeed veer back towards a subscription fee or micro-payment model for their online content, I’m starting to feel more and more like I’m going to have to pay up — or at least maybe see if there’s a micro-subscription option for receiving the articles I want (movie reviews, articles about running, mentions of taxonomies, and anything about salt or chocolate — I’m a man of simple tastes). One of the hooks has been the overall fantastic, innovative work the paper does with interactive and media content, but I also think that a number of their critics are at the top of their games right now. I’ve referenced A.O. Scott several times in other posts, so I’m obviously a fan of his, and I’m always struck by the approach that Technology Columnist David Pogue takes. His review of the iPad was smart, fun, and even-handed, but two recent pieces have been especially pertinent to the work of media archivists. A blog post of his from February on reformatting his MiniDV home videos (“Why We Make Home Videos”) nicely expresses the importance of recorded media in our personal lives and provides some advocacy points for why preservation matters (and why it needs to be tackled sooner than later).

He even says “videos” instead of “movies”! [swoon]

A follow up column on the experience of migrating his MiniDV content (“Moving Taped Past to Hard-Drive Future”) takes a more technical than emotional bent on the process (though it does end with a stirring call-to-arms for everyone to start similar projects). I hope you read the article, but, in short, Pogue ran into some roadblocks with his first plan and had to go back and revise his strategy. I think it’s telling about the challenges involved in audiovisual preservation, especially as we move more into the digital realm, that what seems like a simple process (stick the tape in and let the machines do their work) brought some consternation to a tech expert (and one who gets personal emails from Steve Jobs, none the less). Yes, people should start working on reformatting their personal media collections, but there are a number of avenues, and branches of options off of those avenues, in deciding how to best do it, and not everyone has the resources at hand to help in those decisions.

I guess this is the point, then, where I should bring up some resources for people to consult about the reformatting of DVCam and MiniDV tape. They are touchy formats due to their small size and the makeup of the tape and binder, and it’s true that the formats are trending towards obsolescence, but there’s a lot of unique content out there shot on DV that’s going to need taking care of. David Rice has written a great piece about the ins and outs of migrating DV tapes, expressing the importance of capturing it as a data stream rather than as a video signal (“Digital Tape Preservation Strategy: Preserving Data or Video?”). Additionally, our free and open source DV Analyzer application is a simple tool that anyone can use to review the metadata in the DV data stream that’s carried over during a Firewire migration of DVCam or MiniDV.

(Allow me one geek moment here in response to Pogue’s article: Final Cut Pro can carry over the date and time metadata, but only if the captured stream is not re-transcoded during within the process. This may be accomplished by selecting File>Export or pulling the file from the Capture Scratch directory instead of using the Export>Using Quicktime Conversion option.)

The DV Analyzer tool also identifies and lists error codes in the DV stream that occur during playback. The garbbled video that Pogue mentions is likely a result of error concealment performed by the playback device — most typically misread data in frame being patched up with data from the previous frame — and DV Analyzer would provide the error detection code for those sections that could then be analyzed to see if it can be determined what the cause of the error was. Sometimes this is due to degradation, but often enough these errors are caused by the touchy nature of DV tapes. Many times the same errors will not appear if played through the deck again or run through another deck. Further information can be found at https://www.avpreserve.com/dvanalyzer/what-does-it-analyze/ or under the Case Studies section on the DV Analyzer main page https://www.avpreserve.com/dvanalyzer/.

A final important point from the article is how Pogue’s experience underscores how much we have to monitor and advocate for the tech companies to better understand and maintain the capabilities that enable preservation and access. The idea that professional film and television editors don’t need to know the date of when something was shot is fairly ludicrous. I doubt a news program would feel all right using footage for a story they can’t properly identify, or that film editors wouldn’t want to be able to find content from a certain date of shooting. Outside of this, the date stamp, timecode, and other metadata are absolutely necessary for the authenticity of archival materials, especially in matters of research or, increasingly, in legal matters (see this Times article about metadata as evidence). It’s maybe a tad idealistic to think we can always have an effect on corporate decisions, but a positive point is that a little vocal activity did do some good in getting Firewire ports back after Apple decided to remove them. Sure Firewire dependent devices were severely decreasing in manufacture, but there is so much out there that has been produced on those devices, and the future ability to access or capture that content for preservation extends well beyond the end of manufacturing.

— Joshua Ranger

You Have Chosen…Poorly

Sometimes I wonder if I suffer from a rare neurotic-ological disorder, one that might be termed Tom’sRestaurantaphobia — the fear of or inability to have a regular or favorite restaurant. Certainly there have been restaurants I’ve enjoyed very much and frequented over the years, each with 3-5 standby dishes I could happily and repeatedly select from based on my mood. But then something happens, and I start to fret about my patterns. Maybe I feel the staff starts to know me too well and looks down on my taste or lack of imagination. Perhaps I feel like I haven’t sufficiently explored the more esoteric corners of the menu where the really good food resides. Maybe I start to feel like too many other people start to like the restaurant as well, the experience just isn’t the same anymore, and it’s time to find something less defiled.

Or perhaps this isn’t such a peculiar condition at all. Perhaps I’m just…a critic!

Oh what a pitiful life I have wrought for myself.

Though, really, these behaviours I describe are characteristics generally ascribed to Critics — often as a few of the (manymany) given reasons people despise or denigrate such practitioners. A.O. Scott had a great apologia in the Times last week on the place of criticism and critics in the culture (“A Critic’s Place, Thumb and All”). Considering that it was syndicated and scheduled at 3 o’clock AM Sundays in many markets, you may not have heard that Scott was one of the team who took over a revamped “At the Movies” (the show Siskel & Ebert started). You may have been more likely to hear that the show has been canceled after its season ends in August. The associated post facto consternation and outpouring of appreciation has been fluttering around the internets lately.

Ah, the more things change, the more habits of mind stay the same.

Regardless, Scott is not bitter or complaining about the cancellation, rather he takes the experience, and the general demise of full time critics industry wide, and turns it into a clear statement of the Critic not as cultural definer/guardian of the gates, but as an inquisitor and conversation starter. In his view, critics do not create the canon; they use their training and skills to prompt further review, discussion, and assessment of cultural objects by the wider audience. Their opinions might stick and do some work, or they might be wholly singular and completely off base. Whatever the case, he makes a salient point that the myth of the master taste-maker has been overstated. Culture is a massive, invisible beast that no one person guides. The nature of our minds desires an identifiable causality, but the creature is participatory and collaborative in its movements.

Another reason this article stuck in my mind (the critic has done his work!) is that the, er, criticisms of criticism are similar to the worries people express about the selection process in archives or for prioritization in preservation. There is the ideal that everything must be saved because we don’t know what will be considered significant in the future (“How dare that critic try to tell me what’s of value or not”…), which is balanced by the reality that there are limited resources for doing the work of preservation that may be better used through strategic targeting (I will refrain from my own critical valuations of priority materials here and confine this to a resource issue.).

A major difference here is that if a critic’s positive valuation is initially ignored, it can always be re-evaluated at a later date as long as that object is still accessible for critique. What we select to preserve does have a clear causal effect on the development of culture because the work of criticism and dissemination cannot be done without the original materials/content.

I’m not trying to get (too) high and mighty here about how awesome archivists are, but I am trying to illustrate how important the work we do is to many sectors of society. The argument that archives and preservation should be funded because of some future good is correct, but it is a nebulous concept that does not present easily identifiable results. In order to establish the incentives for continued (and increased!) funding to archives, we need to be able to define more tangible or quantifiable results and our role in enabling those societal/institutional/monetary benefits.

And where might the answer lie for this? Well, I’m still letting the concept stew on my brain’s back burner to assess it further, but, then again, I did already tell you I’m a critic. Maybe I’m just trying to help the conversation along.

— Joshua Ranger

AVPS To Present At JTS, ARSC

April showers bring May conferences.

AudioVisual Preservation Solutions continues their dedicated involvement in the Preservation and Archiving communities with upcoming presentations at the Joint Technical Symposium (JTS) and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) annual conference.

JTS is being held May 2-5, 2010 in Oslo, Norway under this year’s theme “Digital Challenges and Digital Opportunities in Audiovisual Archiving”. AVPS Founder and President, Chris Lacinak and AVPS Senior Consultant, David Rice will be presenting on “Migration of Media-Based Born-Digital Audiovisual Content to Files” along with co-panelist Richard Wright of the BBC. As always, there are a number of fascinating, forward-thinking talks scheduled, and as an added bonus JTS is being held in conjunction with the International Federation of Film Archives Annual Congress set for May 2nd-8th in Oslo. Check out http://www.jts2010.org/ for further details — well worth the trip you can a-fjord it.

Later that month Chris Lacinak will address the ARSC Annual Conference to be held in New Orleans, May 19th-22nd. Chris and Sam Stephenson of The Jazz Loft Project will speak about the history, findings to date, and preservation related to the audio recordings that are part of this revelatory history project. A great story to be told in a fitting location. Reflective of its diverse membership, ARSC always puts together a wide-ranging and informative selection of panels — a conference that should be attended in a great American city that should be visited. More on the ARSC Conference can be found at http://www.arsc-audio.org/conference/

Marshmallowing The Troops

Little known fact: I was a middle school Chubby Bunny champion. A moment of pride? Perhaps not, but when my only other award to that date was 2nd Place Most Interesting Cake in a Cub Scout cake bake off, I was eager to win something.

I have little doubt that the stirring Chubby Bunny competition has since been banned from schools nationwide and any record of it relegated to school newspaper archives…though I hope in my case it hasn’t been (I have never claimed that all archival materials are entirely benign or significant). For those unfamiliar with the particulars, the competitors in this event vie to see who can pack the most marshmallows in one’s mouth while maintaining the ability to fully vocalize “chubby bunny”.

Like I says…

I guess I have marshmallows on the mind (though not on the tongue) in part because I’ve almost made it through another October to April confluence of my formerly beloved holiday themed chocolate covered marshmallow treats (May to December romances ain’t got nothing quite so bittersweet as that relationship). The other reason is because I caught this little (Stay) puff piece on YouTube about The Marshmallow Test, an experiment where young children were presented with a marshmallow and then given the option of eating it or of waiting 15 minutes and then receiving an additional marshmallow:

Two things immediately struck me about this experiment — besides, that is, the memory sensation of gooey sugar melting on my tongue. First was the fact that in the original experiment referenced by the news story the children were tracked to age 18 and it was found that those who waited out the 15 minutes were more likely display the greater levels of self-discipline and focus that lead to life success than those who did not. I think this speaks very well to the idea that the ability to plan and conceptualize future events and goals is an integral part to one’s overall wellness or success. Second to stand out was the association in the results of the test with the idea of instant gratification, of the mindset that what can be gained now is worth more than a greater, extensible future gain that results from more immediate short term investment.

This mindset is a major hurdle in the advocacy and support for archiving and preservation funding. As the excellent Blue Ribbon Task Force report Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital Information points out (Read it! http://brtf.sdsc.edu/biblio/BRTF_Final_Report.pdf), there is great economic and cultural benefit to the preservation of materials. However, despite those benefits, there has been an overall lack of clearly defined statements outlining the value of preservation in ways that sufficiently incentivizes organizations to fund that work.

We feel it in our bones that preserving the cultural and historical record is important — that is why we became archivists in the first place — but the Big Idea capitonyms that drive us (History! The Future! Culture!), while important rallying points, often result in vague arguments for why it is Important to Preserve this Valuable Material. This passion is good, but when an organization is faced with mandates to increase revenues or cut budgets, they are going to grab that marshmallow off the plate, floor, or wherever they can find it in order to attain immediate goals, regardless of the feast of unseen marshmallows down the road that initial fluff could engender.

Our responsibility now is to articulate the reasons why the short-sighted approach to sustaining the use and quality of archival materials is wrong and what the quantifiable benefits of preservation are. These are not necessarily monetary benefits. Economics is a social science, and there are institutional benefits derived from reputation, from fulfilling mission statements, from providing education, and from other identifiable, classifiable achievements. It’s important to point out that this issue will not be addressed solely on an institution by institution basis. The bottom line is the bottom line. But there will also be the need for the incentive provided by a strong Public Policy that outlines practices, gives support, and develops the infrastructure or reasoning that enables organizations to adopt long term preservation strategies. The Blue Ribbon Task Force has hacked a trail through the brush. It’s our time to build on that.

— Joshua “chumby bummy” Ranger

A Distended Note On The Vagaries Of Access And Preservation

(A preliminary note to the following distended note: As a public response to the named article, this was written with a general audience in mind. Please add any forgiveness for basic seeming statements to the usual forgiveness requested for syntactical idiosyncracies.)

To The Editors of The New York Times,

The recent article on the International Amateur Scanning League (“Duplicating Federal Videos for an Online Archive”) was certainly a textbook case of the networked distribution of a news story, seeping outwards through the archival community like a case of vinegar syndrome in a warm room of 1970s acetate stock. I’m sure many others, like myself, appreciate the impetus behind the actions of the IASL to duplicate and distribute DVD-based content from the collections at the National Archives and fully support the idea of the improved ability to access public domain materials. I did not see equal mention of the similarly inspired work done by The Library of Congress Flickr photostream (http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/) and YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/LibraryOfCongress), Smithsonian Folkways Radio (http://www.folkways.si.edu/explore_folkways/radio.aspx), and other fine efforts. Oh, The National Archives has a YouTube channel as well (http://www.youtube.com/user/usnationalarchives), but that is neither here nor there (rather, the internet is everywhere).

Getting back off focus, what I feel should be pointed out regarding the work that IASL and others are doing is that access is one reale in the archiving treasure chest of pieces of eight. Another segment is preservation, which itself is a multi-faceted strategy of efforts that includes, among other issues, proper storage, conservation, and transfers or duplications in a series of formats destined for different purposes. It is under this scheme that DVDs or low-resolution videos (like on YouTube) are created as access copies of the original materials. What is considered the preservation master, the item that is stored away for safety, is more typically a film (very stable medium) or uncompressed digital video or some other not terribly easy to access format. While it is possible that at some point in the future only the access copies might remain and they would be considered the de facto preservation master, it’s not really a great idea to use DVDs or low-res video as the main focus of a preservation strategy. Personally I wouldn’t really want to rely on that scratched up copy of The Gods Must Be Crazy IV: Crazy in Hong Kong or a variable quality, cut-up YouTube version of Teen Witch as the sole formats to maintain my cultural heritage.

Continued access to audiovisual materials is dependent on preservation efforts, but preservation doesn’t really mean much without the ability to access. Archiving and preservation can result in flashy access-related outcomes but, as the Times article attempts to define it, they are often achieved at the expense of seemingly unexciting processes*. Preservation work can certainly be a slog at times – as is the case with certain aspects of any career – but it is much more complicated and engaging than Insert Disc Here And Turn Knob For Prize. We audiovisual archivists are proud of our professionalism and of the work we do, and are pleased to see that other people think it’s a cool enough field that they want to emulate us in their free time.

— Joshua Ranger

*(A derivative point in style and substance: Considering the extensive work NARA has done developing guidelines for architectural, storage, and environmental standards in archives, I’m not so sure of the need for anyone to have to ‘dust off’ a DVD before duplicating it as if it were some musty, forgotten item buried in the attic, as the Times would suggest. Thank you.)

Awarding The Unseen

This is not a rant about how less commercial films get little to no Oscar love. As a boy growing up I lived and died by the daily fate of the underdog Portland Trailblazers (especially in their many conflicts with the hated Hollywood cool of the Lakers), but at some point I had to mellow out and accept the minor historical significance of such events…Though just the mention of A.C. Green still gets my blood boiling red.

Nor is this a rave for Best Picture nominee The Blind Side. I haven’t seen it myself, but my dad really enjoyed it. I can’t call that an endorsement as I’m not so sure I agree with many of his cinematic tastes (sorry, dad, still haven’t watched the DVD of Tombstone you sent), but then again, I’m not so sure I would be going to things like Hausu at the IFC or W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism at BAM without having been exposed to his glee at certain films (Raising Arizona, So I Married an Ax Murderer) or without my mom’s feeding of a precocious five-year-old’s interest in Hitchcock, Godzilla, and Universal horror films.

Rather, after looking over this weekend’s nominees, and inspired by Virginia Heffernan’s recent New York Times essay about sound editing (“Sound Logic“), I began thinking about the unseen features of film.

What exactly is unseen in this what we term the most visual of media? Well, following from Heffernan’s piece, there is the obvious influence of the audio elements of a movie. These have a definite effect on the “viewing” experience, though that effect is obviously overlooked, seeing as how the Academy has to haul out the chalkboard every year during that part of the awards presentation to explain why sound design and editing matter.

But there are a whole host of other unseen factors that are a part of our ability to enjoy and access films, ranging from the crew to the film developers (or video migrators[?]) to projectionists. And if you really wanted to burrow down, you could look at the distribution channels and delivery persons and gas station attendants, lens manufacturers, raisin chocolate coaters, personal vegan chef/yoga instructor to the movie star’s dog… Truly, the film industry touches every segment of the American economy!

Seriously, though, there is a lot of unglorified (and unglamorous) works that goes on to produce and maintain the magic of the moving pictures, not the least of which is archiving and preservation. (Sorry. I love my field, but there isn’t a lot of pizazz I can impress people at cocktail parties with in discussing the normalization of first name / last name syntax.)

The simple wrap-up here is the warm fuzzy of, “Hey, we’re all winners and deserve our recognition too,” but that’s the Hollywood ending. Rather, and perhaps this is just a personal outlook meant for my own edification, there may be something positive to being “unseen” in the now. We do our work and focus on the day-to-day. Current cultural recognition does the same, unable to see the long term picture while it is awarding the moving pictures from last year. Our advantage is that we perform the Daily with an eye for the future, with the idea that the results of our work will help maintain a knowledge of the past and our present, a knowledge that will help later generations “see” what is no longer visible to them and what was not necessarily apparent to us.

With that in mind then, ultimately people will see that Sam Bowie vs. Michael Jordan was not such a clearcut pick at the time, that Goobers tasted better than they sound, and, perhaps, that Tombstone is the finest example of the Western genre ever produced.

— Joshua Ranger

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