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Finding the Film ArchiveA Comparison between Milan and Canberra in Times of COVID-19
How have different film archives in different cities and countries responded to the coronavirus pandemic? What does this reveal about the priorities and practices of a given archive? What are the procedures that have been put in place to deal with the extraordinary coronavirus crisis? I chose to conduct interviews with Matteo Pavesi, the director of the Cineteca Italiana (Italian Film Archive) in Milan, and Meg Labrum, the general manager, Collections Branch, at the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), Canberra, to answer these questions. I wanted to better understand how COVID-19 was differently impacting film archives and was particularly interested in ones based in frontline cities such as Milan. What I learned was that while online archive use has risen at the Milan Cineteca, the NFSA has not seen a significant change in online use. As Labrum explains, in Europe, people "appreciate, celebrate, use, know about their archive." In Australia, the film archive is instead a "kind of interesting, slightly odd, cultural provider."1
My interest in the question of how film archives function in lockdown was piqued by the conversations I was having in February and early March with colleagues and friends abroad. Speaking to people in Milan—and these are friends in industries that do not intersect with film—I learned of the tremendous difficulties they have experienced during their weeks of social isolation. I also learned, however, of the particular regard their film archive enjoys as a source for entertainment and history. Parents enthused about family viewing experiences, where children explore film history with them through streaming services in the home.
For those of us in Australia, however, the situation is quite different. For example, Storm Boy, an Australian classic film, was streamed on May 15 in a one-off event, which was part of an NFSA Live series of online programs. Subscription services and free online streaming of feature films and film programs are otherwise unavailable. Again, anecdotally, when we successively entered our own period of social isolation in late March, on the heels of Milan and London, I was not aware of an increased interest in film history or of families sitting down to access content through the NFSA. The sense I now have of the NFSA's institutional invisibility in mainstream culture in Australia is reinforced by articles that elide mention of film archives in our mainstream media. For example, an article by Paul Byrnes, appearing in Melbourne's Sunday Age and the Sydney Morning Herald on April 25, is enthusiastically titled "To Infinity and Beyond Netflix: Your Guide to the Wonderful World of Free Online Movies." While selling itself as "a pandemic guide to finding free movies online," it makes no mention of the NFSA (or, indeed, of any FIAF archive). Instead, readers are directed to Bemafilm, Kanopy, Tubi, The Internet Archive, and YouTube. Published at the peak of our shutdown in Melbourne—when we were allowed outside an hour a day for exercise—the article struck me precisely because it made no mention of film archives, while employing the kind of language I use as a screen scholar to celebrate the importance of film history. Stating that it offers "a fistful (for no dollars) from the grand sweep of movie history—the good, the bad and the ugly," it asks, "What would you rather watch in these trying times? Something new and awful, or something old and good?"2 Byrnes proposes that free online streaming services offer film history as we find it or, rather, as it exists. No [End Page 96] questions are raised about provenance, storage, or restoration. Moreover, there is also no acknowledgment of archival work, the vital role of the archive, or the expertise of its staff. The Internet Archive is consequently described as "a paradise for film lovers, scholars and those who just love a rummage in the digital attic."3
This silence regarding the film archive as an available cultural resource is not unique to the film critics and reviewers in Australia but emerges in more general discussions of the arts. A recent article about "Australia's Arts Leaders" does not include Jan Müller, the CEO of the NFSA, or any film industry or cultural heritage leader, for that matter. "The arts" consequently seems to represent the performing arts and not an intersection of screen and live performance content. Hence, when a panel was convened to explore Australia's response to the crisis in relation to the arts, it was the CEO of Opera Australia (Rory Jeffes), the director of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (Sophie Galaise), the artistic director and CEO of the Melbourne Theatre Company (Brett Sheehy), the artistic director of the Australian Ballet (David McAllister), and the artistic director of the Sydney Festival (Wesley Enoch) who were interviewed. Each panelist responded to four questions: How are you going at the moment? What do you think of government responses? What do you make of the surge of digital content you and others are creating? and What help do you need to recover after the crisis?4 It is in the effort to have film history spotlighted, both as an available "art" and popular entertainment, that I undertook the following interviews.
CONTEXTUALIZING THE ARCHIVE: A CINETECA COMMUNITY IN MILAN
The Cineteca Italiana5 is a regional film archive renowned for its silent film holdings. With a collection of more than thirty-five thousand films, it is noted for having one of the largest stock of European silent films. As Pavesi explains, it was both coincidental and fortuitous that in December 2019 the archive began participating in a digitization project to build Italy's cultural patrimony. Once films are digitized, they are released free online through the archive. Prior to COVID-19, the Cineteca attracted a specialized public of around three hundred users to its site each day. In March, the archive attracted more than 4 million users. Why and how did this change in online users occur? During the shutdown in Milan, a staff of six worked hard to release twenty films weekly on their free streaming service. In addition, film is made newly available under thematic headlines: Pavesi and his team curate sections on Milan, silent film classics, animation, war, short films, and children's film. Because Italian households might only have one computer, children's content is released on weekends. Families find films they like to watch together.
The films people access include silent travel films, animation films made during the fascist period, and publicity originally screened in theaters, showing (for example) bacteria fighting humankind in the tuberculosis pandemic of the 1930s. Current programs focus on advertisements from the 1950s and 1960s and on films that are comforting to the aged and others who are vulnerable (whose period of quarantine in the home will last longer). What is particularly interesting about the current streaming service is the range of reflections that can be brought to the films that reveal the public health notices issued in the 1920s and 1930s. As Pavesi notes in our interview,
just as today we see animations showing oxygen masks, in these works they reveal sanitoriums and the methods used to cure people.
These sanitoriums, built in the 1930s, are also architectural examples of great interest. Architecture is an interesting [End Page 97] aspect of films that are reread. We understand how sickness not only changes the history of a population, in a given place, but also the landscape, the architecture, the way we can look at life.
It is this capacity to see something positive in our shared experience that emerges from my interview with Pavesi. As he notes, although daily life is difficult, his work has been exciting, opening "a new and unexpected route" for the archive.6
THE NATIONAL FILM AND SOUND ARCHIVE: CONSOLIDATING THE DRIVE TO DIGITAL
The NFSA is a statutory body and part of the commonwealth public service and employs around 160 staff. Although Canberra does not have the tough quarantine measures of Milan and London in place, it is in an unusual situation. As Labrum notes during our interview, when the hail hit Canberra on January 20, "we did say—ironically at one stage—we had fire, we had hail, and there was pestilence coming our way." When it shut its doors to the public in late March, Canberra was already geared up for an emergency situation.
With staff working from home, Labrum sees the COVID-19 crisis as one that consolidates the archive's drive toward the digital. The crisis is consequently seen as "an experiment . . . testing just how far we can keep the collection open in a purely existing digital content context." When Labrum notes that "there hasn't been that much change in terms of [public] demand," I wonder what we need to shift this stalemate in Australia. Education? A revision of data management or platforms used to enable streaming access? An effort to review copyright, so that we might emulate the access enabled by European film archives? I am not sure. As a film historian, however, I know that our national collection is internationally significant precisely because we were the end of the line for global distribution services in the silent cinema. Indeed, when, in 1994, we returned more than sixteen hundred American films to the Library of Congress, it was recognized that "films were sent to Australia for exhibition when they were made and it was considered too expensive to ship them back to the United States afterward."7 While geographic isolation has therefore generated a film collection of which we can be justifiably proud—and while isolation has also helped us avoid much of the COVID-19 crisis—we remain isolated in terms of access from communities in cities like Milan and London.
While differences in streaming access and visitor numbers mark a clear separation between the Milan and Canberra film archives, each archive is an agile institution responding as best it can during the pandemic. The Cineteca is building a large following of online users and, between May 13 and 21, 2020, streamed its first festival of contemporary film ("A Festival of Contemporary Swiss Film," supported by the Swiss consulate general in Milan and run in partnership with Swiss Cinema in Venezia and the Swiss Institute8). The NFSA—located at a distance from Europe and in the unusual position of experiencing COVID-19 on the heels of bushfires and hailstorms—has closed services but continues to digitize magnetic tape in an ongoing effort to meet its 2025 deadline.9 In this respect, the pandemic reminds us not only of separation and distance but also of institutional resilience and our collective capacity to care. [End Page 98]
Victoria Duckett is a senior lecturer in screen and design at Deakin University, Melbourne. She has published extensively on actresses, archives, and early film. Because of COVID-19, she is currently organizing an online iteration of a conference—"Guglielmo Giannini: Entertainment and Political Activism"—that was to take place in March in Milan at the Università Statale. This conference draws on and uses the ten-thousand-plus materials collected in the Omeka archive she built, titled "Guglielmo Giannini: An Archive of Film, Theatre and Political Activism."
NOTES
1. Meg Labrum, Zoom interview with the author, May 6, 2020.
2. See https://www.smh.com.au/culture/movies/to-infinity-and-beyond-netflix-a-guide-to-free-movies-online-20200420-p54lhs.html.
3. See https://www.smh.com.au/culture/movies/to-infinity-and-beyond-netflix-a-guide-to-free-movies-online-20200420-p54lhs.html.
4. See https://www.smh.com.au/culture/theatre/top-arts-leaders-use-industry-roundtable-to-call-for-rescue-package-20200515-p54ta4.html.
6. Matteo Pavesi, Zoom interview with the author, April 22, 2020, translation mine.
