From Criticine News (31 August 2010)
In Alexis’s last blog entry on August 29 2009 he wrote:
DEAR FILM DEVELOPMENT COUNCIL OF THE PHILIPPINES
You have the mandate to start the National Film Archive. I have heard that your first priority project in relation to archiving is the digitization of some 70 works into high quality digital copies. While this may be useful, perhaps inquiring into the state of and assisting the various archives in the country (UP Film Center, Mowelfund et al) whose current holdings (which include rare prints if not master negatives of some titles, let alone the entire history of alternative/experimental cinema in the country) are being stored in deplorable conditions, may be even more important. Have you thought about this? Saving the master negatives or prints and storing and caring for them properly will ensure their survival far longer than digital copies (of which we are still uncertain), and in their original state too. Steps need to be made NOW to ensure that we don’t lose more of these films.
I know you would like high quality digital copies of films to be available for public screenings, and its embarrassing when you’re asked for titles, even recent ones, and don’t know where to get them, but to push for this at the expense of the archiving itself, when the situation is clearly a SOS one for many films/archives is a serious mismanagement of priorities.
I saw this poster recently in the National Film Archive of Thailand, an institution that has done so much with so little and continues to do more (I believe you can learn much from them), and thought it would be useful to share it with you:
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Alexis wrote this a few weeks after he Nika, and Lav Diaz visited the Thai Film Archive. They had come to Bangkok that precious week last year for an event Lav would later describe as a “very prole” restrospective of his films. It would never have happened without the kindness of the three good souls from Manila who had taken the time to come – to come to talk and listen, each so acute in words and yet were better listeners still. Out of gratitude for their sincere approach to our homestyle event, we wanted to show them an indie spirit shrine.
So one night we took Alexis, Nika and Lav hurtling along the city’s never-ending elevated highway to a province bordering Bangkok. Out there among the abandoned fields and half-finished condos nestle a cluster of modest buildings in which the Thai Film Archive lives. There is a small restoration and storage bungalow, a cramped library inside an adapted storage carriage, and a museum. Dome Sukwong, the founder of an archive now in its 26th year and which for the most part has been living off a pitiful annual budget, showed them around. Inside the museum, Dome got Alexis to crank an old camera. A flickering image of a miniature figure appeared on the wall – a king takes a step in 1897. “Faster!” the guardian of the spirit shrine whispered to Alexis. It was a wondrous minute, like watching magic passing hands from the bearded visionary to the fresh-faced one with an infectious laugh.
After Alexis and Nika flew back to Manila, Lav mentioned that the humble scale of the archive, its quiet persistence, had resonated strongly with Alexis. The night before the visit, the question of how films die in Southeast Asia had already found its way to us. We had met up with the archivist Brigitte Paulowitz, who has a special interest in film archiving in the region and has helped to train people for the Thai archive. The conversation quickly turned to a topic that was bothering both Alexis and Lav, and which he subsequently wrote up on this blog: the push for digitisation of old films in countries such as the Philippines where much still remains to be done in terms of storing prints in acceptable condition. It was a rich, long night around a bar table on the pavement, a crash course in archiving dilemmas, with Brigitte setting us right on a few myths. In terms of storage, it’s not necessarily cheaper to transfer film prints to digital, and in terms of longevity there is no comparison between the two. With intelligent use of vernacular architectural knowledge it’s possible to construct storage buildings in Southeast Asia that won’t cost the earth to run. Look to archives in the region for examples of what’s being done successfully. For thinking on storage, look to Laos rather than take as the starting point the fanciful notion of the handsomely resourced archives of the West.
A sense of possibilities against impossible odds. I guess Alexis might have been struck by this. Or at least it would have been characteristic of him to draw from our nocturnal encounters this kind of inspiration, and then to take it upon himself to speak out about the hard things and the possibilities already around.
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The next issue of Criticine hopes to build on Alexis’s call for a serious look at archiving decisions and practices in the region, and we would gladly welcome contributions on such topics as:
Archives in Southeast Asia – institutions, collections, practices, histories
Possiblities, polemics, controversies
Archive footage or other material in film, video, artistic practice
Private archives, non-institutional forms of collection
Archiving Southeast Asia – materials held outside the region
Interviews with archivists, collectors, filmmakers
Any other topics that resonate with Alexis’s blog and that you feel should be included in this issue
Please email us at criticine1@gmail.com
Criticine.com | about founder Alexis A. Tioseco
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