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This chapter interprets the archival discourse at the 1993 National Film Preservation Board congressional hearings as an indirect outcome of the Culture Wars and the Christian Right's successful attack on National Endowment of the Arts, the primary funder of film preservation in the United States. Federal funding for preservation had been drastically reduced at the same time that the film archive was increasingly understood as the memoryscape of the twentieth century. Part of the purpose of the hearings (and the report that followed) was an attempt to redirect the federal government's film preservation priorities from Hollywood to orphan films and to shift some of the financial burdens of preservation onto film studios. Paramount to the hearings' discourse was that all American citizens might shape their historical consciousness by accessing a wide array of cinematic genres, and for the first time in archival history orphan films were discursively placed front and center. The successful paradigmatic shift from a Hollywood centered preservation plan to an orphan-centered one served to dramatically expand the type and scope of cinematic histories preserved within film archives.

This chapter focuses on the creation of the American Film Institute (AFI) in the 1960s and the colorization controversy of the 1980s and how these events opened the door to both the potential and the problems of archival accessibility. Guided by the New Frontier philosophy and the film industry's capital, the AFI sought inexpensive film viewing technologies so that students and filmmakers would have easy access to films. The AFI cracked open the ideological gates for archival accessibility; however, as the colorization controversy revealed, the innovative technologies that brought about the ability to replicate and exhibit films inexpensively also created the capacity for people outside of the archival setting to alter the content and meanings of the film canon. This archival threat revealed the ways that classic Hollywood films had become a part of the nation's cultural memory and also had the potential to generate profit for those who owned the rights to them. Colorization technology also revealed a significant and troubling fact about the cinematic artifact: powerful people and new technologies could dramatically alter films sitting safely in the archive.

The film archive that has sought to preserve the filmic world of the twentieth century is a project that is as nearly complicated as modernity itself. While critics and theorists have necessarily looked to cinema as a way to make sense of temporal and spatial shifting taking place in modernity, focusing on how and why archivists and film preservationists have attempted to save cinema sheds new light on how modern people imagined and then created a way to confront, reveal, confine and hold on to the recent past. In other words, this is a study of how modern people apprehended the past and conceptualized and enacted history making, by way of the film archive. It details archivists' and preservationists' perceptions and methodologies for securing artifacts that they deemed culturally and cinematically significant so to understand how they negotiated the present and imagined the future, while laying claim to the past.

The use of film in public libraries has a long history nearly as old as the medium itself—a past we must consider in order to help us better imagine the future of film and media in school, public, and academic libraries. Libraries constantly reinvent themselves to align with the times. Amid ever-rapid changes in media and technology, looking to the past offers steadying perspective. During the 20th century, as television and film rose in popularity and significance, librarians and educators gradually adapted to society’s shift from a print to a visual culture and recognized that audiovisual media, including radio, film, and television, could promote learning. In the early 1900s, film programs were already being used to promote the library as well as generate interest in books. Public libraries were also experiencing reform as they shifted from primarily serving academics to catering to the needs and interests of the general public. During the same time, debate over the positive and negative influence of the moving image and effects of screens was already underway. Gradually over decades, movies have found their place in library collections, from the documentary-style educational film to blockbusters on VHS tape. And as the popular format for film and media shifts to digital, librarians are faced with the tasks of preservation and digitization of physical collections.

When restoring a film, the aim is naturally always to provide the definitive version. However, many factors make this an impossible mission. This chapter draws on actual film archival practice and theory, exposing a minefield of obstacles facing any academic study trying to examine film history based on restored works. The focus is on silent cinema restoration, intertitles, and translation issues. Using Mark-Paul Meyer and Paul Read’s categories—from a one-to-one duplication to the creation of an altogether new work—the aim is to give an insight into the complexity of silent film restoration and the practical, and sometimes very unacademic, nature of the actual restoration work. The fact that most film restorations typically concentrate on image quality rather than titles, which are often merely supposed to support the visual action, adds to the complexity of transparency about the provenance of the filmic titles as an object of study.

This chapter discusses the definition of film heritage, and investigates the fundamental tasks of film archives. Film heritage could be defined simply as ‘all films made more than five to seven years ago’. A significant percentage of film heritage that still exists today is seriously affected by damages of decay, and is threatened by deterioration. A complete and sustainable preservation of film heritage is therefore a matter of high urgency. There are three fundamental tasks of film archives. Firstly, the safeguarding of the collection: to acquire, thus minimising the loss of value, and restore if necessary the films to their original form. Secondly, the presentation of the collection: offering as much as possible in the way of screenings, exhibitions, and publications. Thirdly, the development of the collection: adding value, giving it a connection to current times and contexts.

The authors start by noting the continued intense and wide-ranging interest in Hitchcock and his films. They argue that the sheer range of his work over half a century—covering silent and sound, Europe and Hollywood, popular and experimental, and a variety of styles—renders him perhaps the closest we have to a universal representative of the medium of cinema. His status as a central figure is illustrated by the importance that his films have held for the film archive movement as it developed from the mid-1930s onward, notably in the United States and France, as well as in his native Britain. This work of preservation has kept the bulk of his films in regular circulation, and it assists the kind of exploration of less familiar elements that the book itself goes on to undertake.

This chapter discusses the function of film and images as tools for preserving memories and cultural identity. Archived images of Maori or Tuhoe elders are rare and should be prized and protected because they contribute to the identity of an entire people. These ideas are tied in with descriptions of the post-production and film editing process.