THE SCHOLAR, THE ARCHIVIST AND THE FILM

In this time of technological transition from analog to digital film, along with changing practices, different perspectives, expectations and demands are at play. Scholars are re-evaluating the object of their study and archivists are rethinking the aims of their work. Both are questioning the nature of film and how film is changing while moving from grain to pixel. It is precisely at this time of transition that the dialogue between scholars and archivists can be particularly valuable for both theory and practice.

However, although both film archivists and film scholars are dealing with similar dilemmas, the dialogue between them is limited. In particular, archivists are quickly discouraged by theoretical approaches that seem far away from their practical concerns and scholars are suspicious of practice driven by compromises. As a result, scholars often neglect film as material artifacts, and archivists work with little reference to theoretical frameworks derived from academic research. As film theorists today can rightly pose the questions:

The same questions can be rephrased and posed by film archivists:

Answers that address both questions are rarely attempted. There is very little theoretical work in the field of film and media studies with explicit reference to archives and archival practice. In a way, reading film and media literature one might think that the materiality of film, the significance of film as material artifact, has very little importance for theory, and that the objects of the scholars are not necessarily the same of the archivists.

There are a few important exceptions to this lack of dialogue, as a number of seminal works have been inspired, in one way or another, by the already mentioned FIAF Conference held in Brighton in 1978.