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A Biopic Unexamined
19 February 2010
In the current Newsweek Ramin Setoodeh ponders on what he claims is the death of the biopic (“Are Biopics History?“), wondering why it is that the genre seems to have died off of late. Setoodeh cites the several films from just the past year or so that have been considered financial and/or critical failures. I find his argument a bit specious on this point because many of his examples are foreign or art house type films (not traditional big money makers), but also because he refers to Julie & Julia as a recent success that thrived at the box office because the Julie half of the film panders to the narcissism of our particular cultural moment.
Yes, the film made money, but I didn’t read any reviews nor did I hear anyone claim that they were drawn in by Julie. Rather, the opposite, that the Julia Child sections were vibrant, fun, full of master acting, and that there was a noticeable downturn in audience mood when shifting away from those scenes to the present day ones.
Okay, now that I have that out of my system (Can you tell what I watched last weekend and has been on my mind? I mean, besides Ong Bak 2.) I will say that Setoodeh’s approach to his argument is specious, but he has a good point overall: Biopics are not the surefire hits we are lead to believe they are bound to be. He attributes this to present day tastes, that it used to be a popular genre but we just aren’t interested in the Famous Person story anymore, and his citation of failed films (with exceptions) is proof.
This is wrong.
Sure, for every Ray or Walk the Line there are 5, 10, 20 Amelias or Creations, but this was also the case in the past. There were Lawrence of Arabias and Pattons, but you also had your The Great Moment (sorry Preston) or your sloppy, miscast flicks like The Babe Ruth Story. These are the failed or just mediocre productions that are put out every year by studios and filmmakers. The difference is that these minor films from the past are not remembered while the flops from the past 5 years are still vague memories. Only the successes (or the mega failures) from the deeper past are recalled, giving a skewed sense of what actually happened if one doesn’t do proper research. Without that research, the half-remembered past is not a valid touchstone to base an argument on. An incomplete picture of the past creates a false interpretation of the present.
This brings to mind some topics of discussion at the talk Sam Stephenson and Chris Lacinak gave last night about the Jazz Loft Project. Sam was asked about any interesting stories from the interviews he has been doing with people connected to the Jazz Loft. His response in part was that the most interesting stories are coming from the “minor” characters involved — the mediocre or failed musicians, the peripheral non-musicians that hung out, the bartenders and shop owners in the neighborhood. He put forth that perhaps the big name musicians are not interesting interviews because they’ve been interviewed too many times, have pat answers, and have an image or story to maintain, and he feels that the deeper story of Jazz history is going to come from the bottom up. By the same token, the tapes from the Jazz Loft give a fuller picture of Thelonious Monk’s leading role in creating what have been called the Hall Overton charts for his Town Hall concert. Received wisdom has claimed that Overton produced those charts mostly on his own, but the forgotten tapes the Project has preserved tell a very different tale.
I think this approach can equally be applied to film studies and film’s relationship to cultural studies. There are stories in and from all of the people and history surrounding the creation and reception of a film. A biopic is not successful because it is a biopic, but, as with any film, because of that convergence of people, technology, and events. Lesser works are just as telling about those factors, and can also inform how we view the successful films as well as history and cultural shifts. We often argue that we have to preserve as much as possible because we don’t know what will become culturally significant in the future, but we also have to maintain the insignificant because it, too, is a piece of the picture of the past.
— Joshua Ranger
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This blog post was written for the Film Preservation Blogathon in support of the National Film Preservation Foundation. The NFPF is the independent, nonprofit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. They work directly with archives to rescue endangered films that will not survive without public support.
The NFPF will give away 4 DVD sets as thank-you gifts to blogathon donors chosen in a random drawing: Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900-1934 and Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film, 1947-1986.
Donations to the National Film Preservation Foundation can be made here.
AVPS Meets The Future Of Personal Archiving
16 February 2010
Our own David Rice has been invited to speak at Saving Our Present for the Future: Personal Archiving 2010, a conference for “practitioners in personal digital archiving” hosted by the Internet Archive. Dave will be on the Tools panel addressing different means and uses for the capture and analysis of metadata. Co-panelists include John Kunze of the California Digital Library discussing PairTree and James Jacobs of Stanford University Libraries discussing LOCKSS.
The Personal Archiving 2010 conference is a full day of panels and discussions centered on current practices and on the development of recommendations & areas of research for individuals and for institutions in regards to preserving personal archives in a digital age. With the proliferation of digital materials being created and the mounting challenges to maintaining them there are a number of technical, social, and economic issues that need to be addressed. The conference looks to educate practitioners on what they can be doing now and to start establishing best practices & resources that will guide the future in preserving the past. Read more about the conference, including a list of participants and panels, at Television Archiving. And kudos to Dave!
In Media Res #1 — Scratch Cassette
15 February 2010
Here at AudioVisual Preservation Solutions we scour the world for microtrends so you don’t have to. More efficient access to YouTube time-wasters means more things to waste time on.
This week, cassette scratching from France.
A little of the first goes a long way, but check out the unhousing of a tape about a minute in on this next one.
Sigh. Another example of feeling one’s age through the familiar becoming retro nostalgic chic.
— Joshua Ranger
(Thumbs up to likecool.com for pointing these out)
Jazz Loft And AVPS At February ARSC New York Chapter Meeting
10 February 2010
Chris Lacinak has been invited to speak with Jazz Loft Project Director Sam Stephenson at the February 18th New York Chapter Meeting of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. This past November Sam published his new book, The Jazz Loft Project: Photographs and Tapes of W. Eugene Smith from 821 Sixth Avenue, 1957-1965, and the project is kicking off a multi-city exhibition tour of photographs, film and audio from the collection. To celebrate the opening of the exhibit in New York on February 17th, Chris and Sam will be speaking about the project and preservation efforts involved in bringing these unique, revelatory materials back into the light. The exhibit will be on view at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center, Donald and Mary Oenslager Gallery from February 17 to May 22, 2010.
The meeting of the ARSC New York Chapter will take place at the ARChive of Contemporary Music, 54 White St., Tribeca, New York. Doors and refreshments at 6:30 and meeting will be from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM. The meeting is free and open to the public but voluntary contributions to help defray expenses are welcome! Vist http://www.arsc-audio.org for more information about the organization or to become a member.
About The Jazz Loft Project: From 1957 to 1965 legendary photographer W. Eugene Smith made approximately 4,000 hours of recordings on 1,741 reel-to-reel tapes and nearly 40,000 photographs in a loft building in Manhattan’s wholesale flower district where major jazz musicians of the day gathered and played their music. Smith’s work has remained in archives until now. The Jazz Loft Project is dedicated to uncovering the stories behind this legendary moment in American cultural history. More information about the Jazz Loft Project at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University can be found at http://www.jazzloftproject.org/
Not Fading Away
8 February 2010
Last week marked the anniversary of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly and three others. I’m a fan of Buddy Holly’s music, but I’m not a fan of the nostalgia induced stagnation of people and historical events. As the memory of that period continues to fade away, our mental definition of someone like Buddy Holly shrinks and becomes more conceptual. A few images that highlight the thick glasses and goofy, youthful grin, a handful of songs (albeit excellent ones), and some vague notions of unfulfilled promise and rock n roll tragedy are what mostly remain.
Of course, I’m not innocent of participating in storage habits that contribute to the degradation of memory. I had Buddy Holly tucked away in a certain sized file drawer, very content to continue enjoying him in the way I had defined. Pleasurable contentment, but certainly nothing exciting. This is where the power of archives can change things.
Thanks to the archival work done at Universal Music Group and their Hip-O Select imprint, a master collection of Buddy Holly’s studio and personal recordings was released last year as Not Fade Away: The Complete Studio Recordings And More. And thanks to the power of Lala I was able to check out the recordings I was unfamiliar with (and purchase some), and really learn something about Buddy Holly. There are a number of cover tunes where you can really hear what his influences were, but also how he picked them apart and reconstituted them into his own sound. Also extremely valuable are the in-between moments of just messing around in the studio and the personal recordings. You hear the creative process, and understand a mind that is playing around with music and sound trying to find some new direction with it.
And even more interestingly, there are just plenty of weird songs. My wife is a knowledgeable fan of 50s-60s rock and soul, but when she heard what I was listening to she had to stop and say, “That guy is whacked out. Who is it?” It was familiar, reliable, stuck-in-time Buddy Holly, stripping away our preconceptions and expressing himself fresh once again.
Check out my playlist on Lala here or in the player below (may need Lala sign-in to listen). (Ack! Lala is no more! Obsolescence strikes again.)
— Joshua Ranger
The Limits Of The Archive
5 February 2010
It was with not a great amount of trepidation that I attended the first in the series of Discussing the Archive panels at NYU last night. It wasn’t the usual trepidation associated with having to venture out of my UV-protected, temperature & humidity controlled house, but rather a slight concern after noting that a majority of panelists participating in the series come from the research side (professors of History, English, etc.) and not the archiving side of things.
At the time I wasn’t clear on why this situation was an issue with me. Maybe it had to do with the fact that my archiving program was housed in a humanities based department. When our paths crossed with supra-departmental students and professors in shared classes it was apparent that we, as budding archivists, had a different mindset about materials, facilities, and operations of archives than did those budding researchers. Not different bad, just culturally different.
Attending the panel last night clarified the foundations of that difference I think. As I listened to the panelists discuss the idea of The Archive and their interactions with Archives I heard what seemed like a severe disconnect with the materiality, the day-to-day of archives. There was discussion of power and control; of going to these cthonic, isolated, fragile locations full of crumbling materials, uncomfortable furniture and curt staff; of these inhuman institutions that define and defend what is considered culturally significant knowledge and can act as oppressors to unapproved subcultures.
This is why I distinguish between Archive and archive, because it felt like they spoke of it in the capital A sense, as a social concept, as an entity that was hooked into the cultural power structure and did its work silently, frustratingly, and without accepting outside input. Did I really choose such a monstrous profession? This did not sound like the archives and the archivists I know.
But before you start to think I’m sounding too offended — well, okay, maybe I did feel offended at first — I should say that hearing these reactions made me examine the relationship between researcher and archivist, and made me think that maybe this conflict arises out of having such similar desires that are pointed in slightly different directions. The panelists were urgent about the need for a record of the everyday, of the “voiceless”. I feel archives are concerned with preserving this kind of material, but, also, in my work I am greatly concerned with the everyday of the archive and archivist: workflows, communication, resource allocation, funding, advocacy, access, preservation. Researchers don’t see these mundane or toilsome actions that go into establishing and maintaining an archive. They see the public interface where there are large gaps between request and retrieval, strict safety rules, and, especially in the case of audiovisual materials, sometimes an inability to access. And all of this takes place in the midst of their own everyday concerns and worries about doing their own work. Ultimately the overall concerns are the same — to preserve, share knowledge, and make materials useful — but the professional practices associated with these goals differ.
I’m not sure this is anything that can be changed. In matters of great passion, such conversions are not common. Researchers will always want to use materials, and archivists will always want to protect them, but maybe some détente can be achieved, perhaps along the lines of an idea put forth in a recent post I did on communication transparency and also the general concern I have about better promoting the important work archivists do. It seems that frustrations can easily arise out of inability to access materials, and then those frustrations can easily be transferred to thoughts that the archive is being uncooperative or perhaps even incompetent. Lack of access can more often be tied to lack of funds to preserve, create access copies, or fully catalog materials. Researchers can be an agent in the preservation of materials because it is their demand that can help prompt funding, and maybe their improved knowledge about the everyday workings of the institution and their participatory role in it will make them an even more vocal supporter, enabling us to better support their work in turn.
— Joshua Ranger
Archivonomics
3 February 2010
Interesting article in the New York Times this morning (interesting hmm-that-deserves-some-further-thought, not interesting well-think-of-a-thing-like-that-!) about the legal status of the personal papers belonging to FDR’s former personal secretary, Grace Tully (“Bankruptcy Complicates Deal for Roosevelt Papers“). The donation of the papers to NARA / the Roosevelt Presidential Library has been held up for years in court cases, and now it has been further complicated by the bankruptcy filing of the current possessor of the papers.
This reminded me of the recent story about Billy Name’s archive of photo negatives from his years as the house photographer for Andy Warhol (“In Search of an Archive of Warhol’s Era“). The collection was under the management of a third party for many years, but over the past two years, possibly due to economic issues, the third party became less communicative, the archive inaccessible, and there is a fear that the collection is in someone else’s hands now and may not be recoverable.
We’ve all been aware of the tightening of budgets and funding resources due to the economic downturn, but these situations with the Tully papers and Billy Name’s works have me thinking that there are other kinds of threats to archival collections that will be rippling out for some time from the various financial troubles. This problem of the dumping or loss of works has been an issue before when film labs have gone out of business, but those have been related to the collapse of a certain business model. Recent issues of receivership, bankruptcy, or just financial mismanagement touches a wider range of entities.
I certainly wouldn’t propose not trusting third party management systems, storage vendors, and other businesses. Not every producer or holder of materials has the knowledge, wherewithal, or space to store, maintain, or manage collections, and experts in these areas are necessary to help. I would propose that any life-cycle vendor one is planning on contracting with be thoroughly researched and vetted, and that proper agreements be drawn and insurance considered. Trained archivists are well aware of this need, but perhaps it is something we need to better express to creators, collectors, and the general public. But even for ourselves, perhaps we need to keep reminding ourselves that a holistic preservation strategy involves greater considerations than destination formats and microclimates.
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There is a traditional poetic genre that speaks of the poet as parent to a poem, this thing they fret over and nurture until, finally, the poem goes out into the world on its own. It captures the sentiment well and is something I’ve felt about my own creations — once they are done I let them go to take care of themselves and move onto the next thing. However, a work can only “go out” and “make it” in the cultural milieu, it cannot fend for itself physically and maintain itself. The responsibility of caring for the work continues throughout our lives and beyond.
— Joshua Ranger
Lead, Follow, Or Go Out Of The Way To Visit
1 February 2010
In case you decided to be a little crazy today and not check your twitter feed, you may not have noticed that it’s Follow A Museum Day. (It’s also the anniversaries of the Greensboro lunch counter sit-in, Texas’ secession from the Union, and the establishment of the Canadian Royal Mounted Police. See — don’t you feel bad about not checking your tweets now?) To catch you up, Follow A Museum Day is an effort started by Jim Richardson to draw greater attention and support to museums worldwide.
I did my obligatory re-tweet on the topic because, hey! I support museums, and then I easily moved on to seeking out my next bit of information, building out some data collection tool, writing a report, or whatever it is I do to fill my days. But I’ve been mulling over some ideas lately about how to improve advocacy outcomes, about how to move from agreement to action. I’m still working out these thoughts, but I started to feel that this then was the wrong moment for me to not follow through on some of the very concerns that are occupying the back burners of my brain.
So, at least as a start, I began to think more deeply about not just about why supporting museums is generally a good thing (uhm, duh), buy why supporting something specific like their twitter feeds is important. There are plenty of arguments against blogging and micro-blogging and vlogging and whatnot — that they are frivolous, flippant, and generally inferior forms — but still, they reach people with ideas and content that seemed highly inaccessible before the spread of networked distribution systems. I consider myself very lucky to live so close to so many museums in New York City, but it’s still quite an undertaking to get to the Smithsonian museums, and even further afield to make it to the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, the Walker in Minneapolis, the Archway Museum in Nebraska, or back to the Douglas County Museum of Natural and Cultural History back in my hometown.
I’m sure I’ve written about this before, but I’m a strong believer that online access to cultural materials is an excellent thing and I wholly support it. What we often don’t consider is that the way we can support these efforts further is to utilize them. Funders will look at many aspects of an organization when determining whether to donate or award a grant, and one of those aspects can be use metrics. A Development department may put together reports showing the numbers of website visitors, downloads, newsletter subscriptions, testimonials, Facebook fans, twitter followers. We may not like to think about such things in association with Art or History, but being able to display significant use and consistent growth in use can be an important factor in an institution gaining funding for further development and access.
One of my mantras is a collection of materials is useless if it cannot be accessed, but I could also say that if a collection of materials is not being accessed it appears useless, and a useless seeming project is not going to receive further financial support. So become a fan, a follower, an inveterate site browser. It’s small, but it’s a start to moving from saying, yes, I support Cultural Institutions to performing an action that supports a cultural institution.
— Joshua Ranger
Transparent Plea
28 January 2010
Maybe I’m just in one of those rare moments of clarity that life brings, but the concept of transparency seems to have been popping into view a lot lately. There has been the recent open government directives in England and the US; a recent article in The New Yorker about Obama’s relationship with the Press that discusses the political promise of a transparent White House (“Non-Stop News”, January 25, 2010); and let’s not forget the high-power x-ray machines we’ll have to start going through at the airport security check…
Now audiovisual archivists deal regularly with transparency, ranging all the way from providing maximally possible access to the simple act of holding film or tape up to the light to identify the base material. All in all I’d say we’re pretty invested in the concept. But of course such an assumption makes me start to pick the idea apart to examine that commitment more closely.
I started out by thinking about the different kinds of transparency we strive for. At a basic level, there is a transparency of Data — formulating and exposing information in such a way that makes it readily available for search and analysis, such as in catalogs or campaign contribution records.
A level up from that we might have Workflow transparency — an openness about how work is done or how funds are allocated, such as might be required in scientific research or a grant funded project.
Finally, at perhaps a more meta level, we could define Communication transparency — the dedication to the idea of maintaining and expressing openness at all levels.
In some ways I think this last can be the most key…as well as the most overlooked. Overlooked not because it is ignored on the conceptual level, but overlooked because it becomes neglected in the real life practice of communication. Even organizations that are utterly committed to the idea of open records and organizational transparency can have difficulty in maintaining open communication among departments and various stakeholders. It isn’t that they don’t want to keep communication open, it’s more that in the day-to-day hubbub of the workaday world those lines can be easily dropped. Emails go unread or unanswered, messages unreturned, and interaction is subsumed by the focus on the thousand little fires that pop up and need our attention on top of the blazing inferno we’re already working on.
I like to think that archivists, despite our focus on the past, are typically a step ahead of the general culture because we always have to have the future in mind at the same time. That being the case, I feel we should already be thinking ahead of where initiatives like the Open Government Directive are and be considering how we can be more open in ways beyond content and access.
Why, ultimately, does this matter? If I haven’t already stretched yet another metaphor to its breaking point, I would say that transparency enables clarity, and clarity enables transference: The transference of materials, of skills, and of knowledge — which are all inter-dependent. Of course we are concerned with this transference externally in dealing with patrons, users, and funders of archives, but it is an idea that needs to be considered more strongly internally as well. How we communicate with our colleagues and institutional cohorts is equally important as proper storage and handling to the work we do to collect and preserve. Access is dependent on discovery via data as well as being dependent on properly cared for and handled materials. Increasing opportunities for access and increasing the opportunities to fund data collection and archival workflows can only be positively influenced by increasing our communication about what we do, how we do it, and where our challenges and ultimate successes lie.
— Joshua Ranger
Media Based Media
26 January 2010
I’m not sure what this newish song by The xx has to do with VCRs (besides being one more thing that makes me feel old when seeing that what is familiar to me has become a reference point of retro cool to a younger generation), but I’ve been digging this song. Is it too early to proclaim an audiovisual anthem of the year?
Also makes me wonder about a playlist for other songs inspired by formats or media types. “Watch The Tapes” by LCD Soundsystem? “Brimful of Asha (on the 45)” by Cornershop? Any other ideas? I wonder if Tamagotchi could be considered a file format…
—Joshua Ranger
