Let’s be honest, the promise of the digital age has not been realized. As we entered the 21st century with a world wide web maturing beyond its infancy, the rumors and beliefs that everything would be accessible via the internet circulated with excitement and enthusiasm. Yet in hindsight, we know those thoughts were incredibly naive. With the passage of time, we witnessed the fracturing of content collections as rights holders siloed their catalogs into subscription services, with an emphasis on new releases and original programming. So, what about the century of cinema that preceded it?
That history is holding on by a thread, as hard media continues to degrade over time, from film stock to DVDs. As a result, there is an urgency to transfer material to digital formats in an effort to save these titles for future generations. Yet, the need for preservation is a truth the industry has had difficulty embracing. The silent era serves as a glaring example, as most studios saw no reason to properly archive film prints, a fact that was compounded by the composition of early film stock which contained the volatile chemical silver nitrate. According to estimates from the Library of Congress, approximately 75% of films from that time are lost forever. Those are artifacts of history that we will never recover. With studios and streaming services marching ahead with little regard to the past, other institutions, including libraries, must take on the responsibility for preserving cinema history.
The preservation of film and television is labor intensive and expensive and will undoubtedly take a village to accomplish. We have witnessed this as institutions like the UCLA Film & Television Archive have led efforts to restore titles with degrading print quality, to then make these titles available to academic scholars and the public via repertory film screenings or streaming outlets like The Criterion Channel and/or Kanopy. Once restored and digitized, the integrity of these films is maintained while also ensuring increasing accessibility, scalability, and searchability. While the restored film is by no means immortal due to challenges like format obsolescence (who among us still has a laser disc player to view those early Criterion restorations), the life of the movie can be extended and that is something both historians and cinephiles can appreciate.
Appreciation goes beyond entertainment, as cinema is a rich medium for education. Film offers a window into the past, as moving images provide context that books and photographs cannot. It is therefore crucial that audiences have access to, in borrowing a phrase from Paramount, “a mountain of entertainment.” These titles cannot simply stay stashed away in a vault or on a server; people need access. And this is where institutions like libraries come into play. Whether in a hard format within a library’s physical collection or on a streaming service affiliated with libraries, such as Kanopy, democratizing access to these materials is vital, especially given the dwindling collections on Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, and Paramount+ where film history is not viewed as a programming priority (with the exception of TCM, whose future remains uncertain given cord cutting and the possible sale of parent company Warner Bros. Discovery). Consumers are also enduring regular subscription increases, further limiting access to content as viewers decide what services to keep and which to drop. In October alone, both Disney+ and HBO Max raised their subscription prices, while Netflix did the same in January and Peacock in July. What we are currently experiencing in streaming is completely counter to the promise of digital, where viewers are limited in what they can see and must routinely turn to aggregators like JustWatch and Letterboxd to figure out if a title is even streaming, and if so, where.
Being able to see these films without such hurdles is key, as preservation is as much about the proliferation of storytelling as it is about archiving. This is where library-style collections and curation can welcome curious viewers and lead them down unexpected paths, as they are free to explore catalogs arranged by subject and theme, country of origin, date of release, artist portfolios, etc. This is accomplished through the integration of metadata that libraries excel at providing. In tagging film and television programs with important information, these institutions make titles more approachable and discoverable and frame the titles within both scholarly and general interests. Within collections such as those available at public and academic libraries, titles are there when viewers are ready to be educated and entertained.
So, in an era obsessed with the immediacy of social media and the flood of content from a wide range of creators, there remains a desperate need to preserve the past. And while libraries and their budgets are under attack, this means the burden of film preservation must be tackled by the industry, private collectors, and libraries in harmony. Thankfully, partnerships with organizations already doing this work are available. See film suppliers like Kino Lorber or Film Masters, that provide their restored titles to streaming services like Kanopy. This collective effort is a viable route to follow if there is any hope of saving cinema and as someone who truly loves film and its rich history, I applaud these efforts and encourage other institutions to play their part in this monumental endeavor.
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