If The Industry Won’t Do It, Whose Job Is It To Preserve Cinema?

The Writers Guild of America reached a tentative deal this past weekend with the AMPTP, with the months’ long strike potentially set to conclude in the very near future. It’s a long time coming, with the entertainment industry having dragged its feet for years over necessary changes to protect workers’ rights and ensure fair wages in the face of seismic upheaval in the film and TV worlds. It remains to be seen if the deal will occur and which of the WGA’s demands were met (hopefully as many of them as possible), and this is far from the end of the fight for change. It’s only just begun. The very history of the artform is at stake.

We’ve spoken before on this site about the cavalier attitude that the current heads of Hollywood have for the work made under their rule. The condensing of decades’ worth of creativity into an assembly line of ‘content’ has fully revealed the active disdain the likes of David Zaslav and Bob Iger seem to have for film and TV as cultural touchstones. The age of streaming has led to the outright deletion of hundreds of hours’ worth of viewing material. Some of it didn’t even get the dignity of a release before their studio decided to erase them from existence for a quick buck. The supposed democratization of entertainment that the streaming era promised has quickly been exposed as a sham.

It’s fascinating how little concern the film industry, both domestic and international, has for its own archival preservation. It’s been this way since the very beginning. The vast majority of silent films have been lost to time, with most of them destroyed in studio fires or simply discarded by those who made them. In its infancy, cinema wasn’t seen as an artform but a passing frivolity that held little value beyond the monetary that everyone expected to dry up in a matter of years. It was seen as more financially beneficial for studios to scrap or recycle the reels for their silver content. Nitrate film was so dangerous that it had a habit of spontaneously combusting. Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation estimates that more than 90% of American films made before 1929 are lost.

It didn’t get any better once home viewing became an option, although one would think that the sudden accessibility of such works would make them easier to preserve. As technology improved and we went from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray, many films fell by the wayside, never converted into modern options. There are so many incredible movies that you simply can’t get a hold of unless you have a working video player or are willing to get involved in piracy (to the shock of nobody, the latter has seen a real revival in popularity over the past couple of years.) Most streaming platforms are also painfully uninterested in offering films or series predating the 1970s. Even when such rarities appear on our screens, it’s almost guaranteed that it’ll disappear soon, possibly forever.

The distilling of more than a century of artistic earnestness to the ‘content industry’ reveals the industry’s true intentions for all of its work: a gloop of IPs to be endlessly recycled and offered for a monthly fee, only until it’s more profitable to wipe it from the face of the Earth or hoard it like a cartoon dragon. That puts the rest of the world, especially those who actually care about film and TV, in a unique position. Whose job is it to preserve that which the executives in charge seem actively eager to get rid of?

The importance of physical media in this time is paramount, especially as bigger companies move away from DVD and Blu-ray releases in favour of the endless subscription-for-access model (boo.) Boutique companies like Arrow, Criterion, and Eureka are doing much of the heavy lifting in keeping rarer films in print. Even then, their copies fall out of print. Scorsese’s Film Foundation has done stellar work in preserving non-American works of artistic significance and making them available to the masses. Film preservation is expensive, often tedious, and frequently in service of a niche audience. That makes it tough to get funding, and even if all your stars are aligned, it can be brought to a halt by the sheer pettiness of copyright owners. And that doesn’t even get into the dearth of public funding for arts across the board from local, national and international governments.

Even the most ardent supporters of artistic preservation are fighting an uphill battle thanks to the law. You wouldn’t steal a car so why would you steal a movie? Well, if the company who released it made it impossible to access and had no desire to make it so, why would you be surprised when the torrents make a comeback? At what point does it become a matter of artistic and historical importance to ensure that a work can still exist in the face of corporate sabotage? I think we’ve long passed that moment and need to get to work. And yes, I mean ‘we’, the people who truly love film and TV and think it matters beyond its value for shareholder earnings. We can’t make Scorsese and Criterion do all the heavy lifting.

I can’t claim to be a leader in this field. I’m just a critic who owns a lot of DVDs. But I do think the enthusiasm of true culture vultures matters now, more than ever, on this issue. Get the films and shows you love in physical form if you can. Save those downloads. If your favourite show got pulled from streaming then get a hold of it somewhere else. I can’t actively advocate for piracy because I don’t want to get arrested, but I do think it’s worth reminding the powers that be that, when you strip away all other options from your eager audience, the inevitable will happen. Martin Scorsese is right: the soul of the artform is at stake and deserves more than the bean-counting executives who see everything as content.