Dark Ages
As I approach finishing my degree as a Moving Image Archivist I find myself having to explain what exactly that is. How is a "moving image" archivist different than a librarian?
Maybe 10 years ago, when film wasn't entirely "dead," people who were interested in cinema history understood that museums and archives had to keep copies of films, usually a pristine print, in cold and dark conditions. Film was the original "master artifact."
Now that things are produced, delivered, and stored digitally, the public at large have a false impression of how long things will last. I've heard more than once, "now that it's on DVD it'll last forever."
No. DVDs have a half-life of 10 years, and the images are seriously compressed. Not a master.
Furthermore, digital files have a habit of failing suddenly, fatally and permanently. They don't slowly fade or go brittle before our eyes in plain sight. They are hidden behind a cloak of bits-and-code conversion, unreadable and inscrutable until they are called out and reconverted to analog and readable form... if we remember to check every so often.
Same the program to actually render the bits and code. What good is a WordPerfect document if you no longer have access to the program?
And then, there's the hardware to read it. Floppy discs, Zip drives, CD-Roms, all matters of hardware that becomes harder to recreate as time goes by. While 35mm film has been a standard for over 100 years, there isn't a digital format that has lasted meaningfully longer than a decade. And even songs ripped by the first iteration of iTunes can't be read by the newest version.
I'm not suggesting that all of the letter and photographs written and committed to computers instead of paper or film will disappear without anyone realizing. But I'm guessing over 75% of personal correspondance, that our pictures uploaded to iPhoto or left on a CD from Costco in the bottom drawer, files and files on your harddrive that you don't retrieve when you get a new computer, 3 years from now, all that will disappear.
We won't realize it until it's too late. The irony is that we are awash and overcome with information, most of it accessible through computers, digitally. And yet so little of it will survive to be referred to in the future. All this information, all this history, gone and a black hole to the future, like the dark ages.
That is what moving image archiving is about.
Graham Greene’s first screenplay unspools against the backdrop of a post WWII Vienna still under control of the Allied authorities. Joseph Cotten stars as a beleaguered pulp novelist unwittingly embroiled in a vast conspiracy. Orson Welles famously plays the amoral Harry Lime, a charismatic racketeer haunting the back alleys and underground sewers of the ruined city. Greene’s world-weary script is brilliantly enhanced by Carol Reed’s expressionistic visual style, not to mention Anton Karas’ indelible zither score. A commercial and critical success on its initial release, The Third Man is now widely recognized as a masterpiece of film noir and a high point in the history of British cinema.
Richard Widmark’s trademark combination of sleazy glibness and sweaty desperation finds its ideal expression in the role of London club tout and compulsive striver Harry Fabian. Described by a rival as "an artist without an art," Fabian attempts to make his mark as a promoter in the Greco-Roman wrestling racket, a sport that takes brutality to the level of art both in and out of the ring. With its chiaroscuro cinematography and stylized portrayals of underworld characters—Francis L. Sullivan as a grotesque club owner, Googie Withers as his ambitious wife, Herbert Lom as a vicious racketeer, Polish champion wrestler Stanislaus Zbyszko as "Gregorius the Great"—the film sketches a place that is nominally London but really a realm of fevered urban imagination. The recurring image is of Fabian scrambling through dark alleys, trying and failing to get ahead of his fate—an appropriate motif for director Jules Dassin, who made the film while in exile from McCarthy-era Hollywood. —Juliet Clark, Pacific Film Archive.
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