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Things That Shouldn’t Be Archived #8 — Valentime’s Edition

Because “Love is in the Air” (1979)…

Portions To Be Archived: Skilled house bands
Portions To Not Be Archived: The idea that Tom Jones needs show girls to be interesting; Disinterested cover songs based on lazy, cliched selection process

Portions To Be Archived: Knowledge that if you take care of your body it will take care of you; Knowledge of the great electronics available in Argentina
Portions To Not Be Archived: Potentially world-destroying amount of sexy on one stage — remember the lessons of multiple copies in geographically separate locations

Portions To Be Archived: Crazy musical production numbers
Portions To Not Be Archived: Crazy musical production numbers; White jump suits and levers; Pirate shirts

Portions To Be Archived: Those moves!
Portions To Not Be Archived: My former memories of Mr. Jones in concert (circa mid-90s) as not so spry

— Joshua Ranger

Getting Out Of The Fog

I had a mildly indulgent movie-watching weekend, having gorged on two DVDs (John Carpenter’s original The Fog and the first disc of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. — I am not a prideful man.) and one theatre-going experience. I wouldn’t say that three flicks in one weekend is indulgent — there have been times where that was an average day (I am not a prideful man.). What was indulgent was taking the time to listen to the audio commentary on both DVDs, something that I rarely ever do (Okay, now I am a prideful man).

I dig the whole film-school-in-a-box concept that a stack of DVDs plus audio commentaries is a useful learning tool, but maybe for the same reason I’ve never cared for reading scholarly introductions to novels I’m just not that into it. Or, likewise, maybe I’ve been too influenced by the insightfully codified breakdown of Commentary Tracks of the Damned to have much patience with them.

Of course I’m not a total curmudgeon (or pretend not to be) and do enjoy certain commentary tracks. I will always listen to the likes of John Waters and Werner Herzog, and I have a special affinity for listening to the filmmakers, producers, and crew members from older B-movie and horror films discuss all the tricks and workarounds they had to figure out in order to overcome lack of funds, inadequate equipment (and sets and actors), and other roadblocks of low budget filmmaking. I just happened to hit the perfecta this go around in the chance to listen to John Carpenter and Debra Hill discuss the struggles and solutions in making The Fog as well as to the handsome, handsome raconteur Bruce Campbell.

An interesting convergence between the commentaries was a repeated focus on the differences between filmmaking and special effects in the past and contemporary, primarily digital processes. For Bruce Campbell (and series producer Carlton Cuse) these musings are more about nostalgia and appreciation for a filmic past. They point out various shots and props that would now be created with green screen or CGI effects rather than with miniatures, foam, location shoots, and optical trickery, but equally important to them is waxing poetic about the connections their production had to old Hollywood. They put forth that they were likely the last people to use certain Western sets and ranches that are probably housing developments today, and they are proud and feel lucky to have employed the actors, stuntmen, horse trainers, gun wranglers, and other crew that had been working on films and television shows for 40+ years and were at the tail end of solid careers.

Carpenter and Hill have a similar gee-whiz-look-what-we-did attitude — perhaps even more so since they appear to have had a lower budget for The Fog than the Brisco County pilot episode did — but there’s a certain tinge of sadness to their reminisces. Campbell and Cuse have a dang-we’re-lucky nostalgia for film history; Carpenter (and maybe Hill) seem to have an elegiac nostalgia for their own past, a period of their lives when they were young and energetic and driven to succeed at all costs, when creativity came easy and the critical plaudits flowed from alternative and mainstream interests alike.

I’m not sure I can rope Hill in here — she went on to a great degree of success as a producer and as a pioneering woman in Hollywood executive circles — but, in spite of some secret-success-upon-reassessment films*, Carpenter realized very little widespread accolades after Starman in 1984, only 4 years after The Fog. He would seem to have a much greater feeling of loss for the successes of his youth

*No knock on Carpenter here — I’ve always been a fan of Big Trouble in Little China and They Live, and Cigarette Burns is one of the best Showtime Masters of Horror I’ve seen.

Carpenter’s lament very much seems to follow the pattern set out by Raging Bulls and Easy Riders — the young, innovative, Nouvelle Vague-ish director who, with significant support from a female work and/or life partner, makes some revelatory low budget early films, transitions to bigger budget studio fare and, at some point, ditches the woman and makes a bloated, ego-driven project that is seldom fully recovered from.

I realize it isn’t entirely fair to psychoanalyze Carpenter from afar, but as an English major from the 1990s focused on authors from the 1790s, such was my training. I will say, though, that this is nothing personal. Or, rather, it is deeply “personal” to me. What I’m interested in here is how one maintains one’s motivation through success, ease, and beyond.

There is a fascinating side note to the research Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner did for their landmark article “More Product, Less Process: Pragmatically Revamping Traditional Processing Approaches to Deal with Late 20th-Century Collections”. While analyzing processing times per cubic foot of (paper) archival materials, they found that institutions which received large processing grants had significant drops in processing rates. Significant as in going from averaging around 150 feet a year to around 50 feet a year. In the authors’ experience, spending $200 per foot in staffing and supplies was not unusual, but according to NHPRC records grantees often spent over $500 per foot on processing projects.

Greene and Meissner are puzzled at such actions and ponder the reasons, whether it might be that an influx of resources makes institutions let their foot off the gas a bit or whether the institutions focus in on detailed item-level processing rather than using the windfall to cover more materials at a higher level. It’s hard to know the reasons for sure, but the situation is reminiscent of the typical Walk Year scenario in professional sports: In the final year of a contract an athlete who had some early success but has dropped off a bit in production suddenly regains their fire and has a career year. Come the off season they get a long-term monster contract based on that season and, very often, immediately settle back to the former trajectory of complacency or late-career decline.

This is not to suggest archives are complacent (nor in decline) — a 9-month contract cataloging gig does not set one up for life like a guaranteed $80 million — but rather this is a consideration of the initial hurdles to implementation and the ups and downs of long term efforts that must be managed intelligently in order to achieve or sustain success.

The backlogs of work related to audiovisual preservation and the resources required to perform that work are significant, which is why it is so necessary to continue to develop innovative and efficient approaches to that work. I love cinema for the stories and visuals, but I also love it because I am inspired by the kind on innovation directors like Carpenter (or cinematographers, effects crew, etc.) use to take a vision from their heads and make it appear on screen. I’m lucky enough to get to see a number of archives use that same drive and creativity to achieve their goals, and lucky enough to work on those kinds of solutions as well…Hopefully in a way that will make the commentary track to my life a bit more interesting down the road.

— Joshua Ranger

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

Things That Shouldn’t Be Archived #7 — You Decide

Holiday traditions exist at the crossroads of cultural memory and personal memory (we’ll ignore the confusing cloverleaf interchange of invented memory for now — my holiday gift to you!). What I’ve always found interesting is how these traditions converge and conflict across national, regional, local, and idiosyncratic arenas. For example, my family always had corn at Thanksgiving, and I was surprisingly dismayed and unfulfilled when one year I had Thanksgiving with a friend’s family and they did not have corn, nor did they ever. Or there are Christmas trees which, where I grew up in Oregon could be had for a $5 permit and a thermos of hot chocolate. In New York I see trees starting at $20 per foot (not that an average apartment has all that much space for a very big one). Fake Christmas trees that are re-used every year start to make sense when one considers those kinds of costs.

Holiday songs follow this pattern to a high degree as well. We all had those small handfuls of LPs or cassettes (or CDs for you kids out there) that established the proper version of a song. Maybe this is why it seems that no new holiday songs are any good, but it also makes it very hard to really like a new version of a familiar song. Very much like re-makes of films or adaptations, the “original” (the version first established in our minds) almost always seems better. These kinds of arguments are convenient because of the quickness of a reaction tied to emotion or memory sense, but they are also difficult to articulate because they are often tied to memory. Corn is good and all, but there isn’t a really great reason why it is superior to peas and carrots and why peas and carrots leave a dark hole of sadness within me (but only on the fourth Thursday in November).

With that in mind, I offer up two more recent versions of The Waitresses’ holiday classic “Christmas Wrapping” for your judgement of which should not be archived in our collective memory.

First, the Spice Girls:

Then The Donnas:

You may have an immediate reaction even without listening to these songs based on which commercialized appropriation of feminism you most approve of, but give it a go. There seems to be a balance to successful remakes, covers, adaptations, and new traditions, a balance between capturing something essential about the original and with a creating a different take that opens up new meanings or a new understanding of the original or its contexts. Or maybe it’s just about what makes one shake one’s booty the most.

Happy Holidays!

— Joshua Ranger

Product Process

Less Process More Product was one of the buzz phrases I heard being bandied about like at AMIA 2010 in Philadelphia. (Other popular phrases included, “xxxxx” and “xxxxxx”.) The concept is certainly valuable, especially as a strategy in finding ways to deal with the massive backlog of backlogged collection processing. However, XXXXXX’s and XXXXXX’s originating article, while looking at the management of 20th century archival collections, is focused specifically on paper materials. We are well familiar with the problematic application to audiovisual materials of paper archival practices or ideologies related to areas such as cataloging rules, storage, arrangement, preservation, etc. As such, it would seem wise to, before subscribing wholesale to a nice turn of phrase, better define what is process and what is product in the archiving of audiovisual materials, what are the minimal levels required to perform each, and where do these and other concepts diverge or converge with practices assigned to paper-based materials.

Know Your Rights

At the library the other day I picked up the collected Crisis on Infinite Earths, a multi-title crossing mini-series DC Comics put out in 1985 that rebooted its whole universe of characters. (To save face here I’ll have to state that I also checked out McTeague by Frank Norris and a collection of Gogol short stories. So there.) I guess it’s a sign that I’m not a kid reading comic books in the 1980s anymore, but the two most interesting things to me about the series were 1) my amazement at the astonishingly clunky or just lame superhero/villain names, and 2) the fact that The Joker kills Ted Turner stand-in Harold J Standish III in order to steal ownership to his copyrights over colorized silent comedies (which went from worthless to $26million once colorized). It’s always odd to come across a cultural reference like that which was such a flashpoint at the time but which has faded so much in intensity. It really makes me wonder if my memory is correct, if it really was such a big deal or just something that made an impression on my young mind, like the cancelation of Sledge Hammer! or the popularity of Surf Nazis Must Die.

Whatever the case, I remember what a pariah Ted Turner was at that time (Pariah, by the way, is a character in Crisis on Infinite Earths. He was blamed for the destruction of his planet and was forced to watch planetary destruction occur elsewhere, often being blamed by the locals for causing it. See.) for being an uncouth, greedy monster with no cares for history, artistry, and the like.

I found it kind of interesting then when I ran across this article in the Wall Street Journal (“Haven’t I Heard That Song Before?”) about a recent trend of musical artists re-recording their catalogs in order to gain full rights to (the new versions of) their songs. Rather than just getting a percentage of what the rights managing record company earns from sales and licensing, artists such as Carly Simon and Suzanne Vega can take the full cut by distributing versions of their own songs they record with their own investment. The British band Squeeze has gone so far as to re-record their past hits note-for-note, with the stated goal of having film/tv/commercial producers license the Squeeze-owned replica rather than the label-owned one.

Outside of that last, blatantly commercial example, I don’t think many would classify what Carly Simon is doing in the same category as what Ted Turner did — despite how conceptually similar the actions are. American copyright law does not support moral rights as strongly as other nations do, but it is nonetheless something we keenly feel. Simon is remaking her own (to a degree, if one ignores musicians, producers, etc.) creations and Turner was remaking those of others. One may ask, of course, where exactly the droits d’artiste lie with film when there are so many different contributors to a single work. And one may also wonder at the ways in which Turner’s actions converge with the remix culture or with conceptual and performance artists like Sol Lewitt and Marina Abramović who license or allow others to recreate their works. The moral obligation is so often tied up with the emotional connection one experiences with a work of art that the (il)logic of law seems improper to say the least.

This single tangled thread is just another example — as if another were needed — of how the evolution of copyright law has resulted in a creature that resembles the Island of Dr. Moreau more than the Islands of Galapagos. Confusion and uncertainty are the norm when trying to understand the law as written and its various interpretations. That confusion is compounded by the prevalence of formants/versions/instantiations/etc when dealing with audiovisual materials. Placed side-by-side with no documentation (as can often be the case in archives), how would one be able to tell apart an original and a re-recorded Squeeze song in order to determine ownership? If only given an inventory of titles without the ability to listen to the recording, how does one differentiate “Tom’s Diner” from “Tom’s Diner”?

The answer is disarmingly simple in concept though it appears, for a number of reasons, to be difficult in execution of follow through. Sufficient and accessible documentation, strongly defined metadata schemas that are well conformed to, and, in the case of file-based materials, embedded metadata that travels with the digital object can all provide the means necessary for identification and rights assessment.

As much as condition, obsolescence, and valuation, rights have become a defining factor among the variables that drive preservation activities. Organizations that maintain clear rights to content are more likely to allocate resources toward actions that support reuse and re-licensing. Grants often stipulate an end result of preserved materials being made available for access, something not possible without proper rights. By that same token, some granting agencies will not fund reformatting work if ownership is not documented. This isn’t a death knell for orphan works or works with Gordian rights. The same type of documentation can be valuable in authentication of materials, especially in a digital environment, and in the tracking of due diligence efforts when trying to contact possible rights holders before moving ahead with re-use or preservation.

A major impetus behind the Crisis on Infinite Earths series was an attempt to address issues of continuity and the convoluted explanations that had been created to explain shifts in personalities or events that didn’t jibe with what a writer 40 years prior had conceived. The mess of trying to maintain characters and story lines across decades and multiple authors had led to too many Bobby-Ewing-It-Was-All-A-Dream developments, which also made the comics inscrutable to new readers. The DC answer was to cut off the gangrene and hope the limb would grow back all Swamp Thing like. Archivists are my heros, but I’m not sure they have that exact ability. We’ll just have to stick with emulating Organize and Document Man instead.

— Joshua Ranger

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