Archives and AbsencesAuthor(s): William UricchioSource: Film History, Vol. 7, No. 3, Film Preservation and Film Scholarship (Autumn, 1995),pp. 256-263Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3815092 .Accessed: 15/06/2011 09:00

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Film History, Volume 7, pp. 256-263, 1995. Copyright ?John Libbey & Company ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in Great Britain

Archives and absences William Uricchio

R eceived wisdom holds that virtual re- ality seeks to create an ever more pre- cise simulation of the physical world, something akin to its exact replication.

But the increasing feasibility of virtual reality's tech- nological fulfilment threatens an epistemological crisis in which the issue of greatest import becomes not sameness or mimesis, but the difference be- tween the virtual world and the 'real' world. Virtual reality, extrapolated to its fullest point of develop- ment, is far more significant for what it cannot de- liver; as a discourse on the limits of representation it offers a compelling meditation on the nature of ontology. And so it is with archives, at least from a structural perspective. Scholars draw upon various archival holdings to construct representations of the past, as telling for their limitations as for their 'completeness'. As with virtual reality, the effort at totalization teaches us as much about the limits of representation as about the event represented.

This sort of discussion obviously draws upon contemporary debates in the field of cultural his- tory, particularly those regarding the (contingent) nature of representation. Issues ranging from the unstable nature of facticity, to the balance between determinant structure and individual agency, to the

place of the researcher's subjectivity in the con- struction of historical narratives, have all under- mined traditional historiographic assumptions and invigorated the self-conscious interrogation of the historical process'. The nature, form, and implica- tions of the residues of the past accumulated in the historical records that we commonly take as 'evi- dence', while not always central to these debates, have nevertheless played a crucial if implicit role in the deployment of historical arguments. Of course, scholars employ archival records for purposes far exceeding 'mere' representation, and - at least

looking at the situation from the archivists' perspec- tive - the recurrent historical problems of agency and narrative play a minor role in acquisition, cataloguing and preservation, but the virtual re- ality analogy raises intriguing questions about the constructions of the past that can be extrapolated from necessarily limited archival holdings. In the pages that follow, I would like to reflect on some of the archival experiences which have informed my research, paying attention to the shifting fabric of constraints that have veiled and shaped access to the events of the past. Three types of structuring limitations will be discussed: overt policies which restrict access to otherwise available material; overt policies which define and restrict the very collection of material; and, the general historical filtration processes which, by preserving some rec- ords and ignoring others, shape the archival rec- ord every bit as effectively if far less overtly.

From controlled access to censorship In the course of an extended visit to the Federal Republic of Germany's Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, I came across several documents in the UFA- Kultur- film files of the mid-i 930s which discussed the sale and production of films for television exhibition. The documents were intriguing as much for what they revealed about UFA's vision of its own future as for what they suggested about a largely unex- plored period in television history. Although my primary research task during that visit centred around non-fiction film typologies and production

William Uricchio is Professor of Film and Televi- sion at Utrecht University. Contact: Theatre, Film and Television Studies, Utrecht University, Kromme Nieuwegracht 29, 3512 HD Utrecht, Netherlands.

Archives and absences257

patterns, I collected what television material I could find and meanwhile checked more obvious sources to fill the evident gaps in my knowledge. The preliminary research I accomplished revealed that popular (or even scholarly) memory had ac- corded very little acknowledgement to the consid- erable development that German television underwent between 1935 and 1944. The more closely I looked, the more I became intrigued by the subject of Germany's television history - a his-

tory marginalized even within the massive (and otherwise impressive) television study project cen- tred at the University of Siegen. This closer investi-

gation also involved a degree of self-criticism: I, like other scholars, had overlooked passing refer- ences to the development of German television in

already examined sources such as the trade pa- pers Lichtbild-Buhne and Der Kinematograph. I realized that the aleatory nature of archival re- search sometimes gave rise to surprising dis- coveries but perhaps more often concealed yet more interesting ones. Further lessons awaited as I

pursued the topic.

Despite the ready availability of records often unavailable to researchers of other national broad- cast histories, my German television project faced sometimes severe archival difficulties for a number of reasons, the first relating to initial acquisition and cataloguing decisions. Before 1944, the Ger- man government divided oversight of television among three ministries, the postal authorities re- sponsible for technological developments, the pro- paganda authorities for programming, and the air ministry for potential military capabilities. Rivalries within and among these agencies inflected the pro- duction and archiving of records, resulting in dis- tinctions between form (technology) and content (programming) that today seem misguided.

But the post-war division of the German nation exacerbated this tripart division, posing further problems for the researcher. An archival record already affected by war-time loss and destruction was split between the east and west, leaving each side with partial but ideologically advantageous documentation. In the west, the Bundesarchiv's col- lection of propaganda ministry records encour-

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258 William Uricchio

aged examination of the way that the Nazi's televi- sion programming had functioned within a top- down political party structure dependent upon 'injecting' fascist ideology into those at the bottom, an interpretation that contributed to the 'Hitler as madman' historiographical explanation that ab- solved the mass of the German people from re- sponsibility for Nazi outrages. In the east, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) State Archive, inheritor of the post ministry records on technology, held evidence that showed active col- laboration between the German Reich and multi- national electronics corporations, contributing to the 'fascism as capitalism run amok' historio- graphical explanation that linked the current rulers of West Germany to the Nazi past2.

Archival access problems added to those al- ready arising from document distribution and ideo- logical agendas. Some record collections in the west, such as the US-run Berlin Document Centre, were only selectively accessible to east or west German researchers; others in the east, such as the State Archive, proved extremely reluctant to make records available that hadn't first been screened by local experts. Restrictions in both cases often entailed requests for specific information, such as the name and birthdate of the sender, the date, and the contents of the document one wished to inspect, a procedure that prevented the fortuitous discoveries so crucial to historical research. The German Reich's initial tri-part division of responsi- bility for the medium, together with the partial na- ture of the east and west's archival holdings and the pointedly ideological uses to which these rec- ords had been put, contributed to the disappear- ance of the history of early German television from collective memory.

Despite these and related problems, re- searchers of the NS period tend to be aware of their privileged position vis-a-vis colleagues work- ing in US, British, or Soviet history of the same period. Germany's defeat resulted in de facto de- classification, as the victors, together with the new regimes, seized, copied, preserved and made available, albeit in limited fashion, the relevant do- cuments. But while using German sources to docu- ment the history of German television proves promising, pursuing the search beyond German archives proves more problematic. For example,

the German archival holdings are far more useful than those at the British Public Records Office, where the records which deal with British intel- ligence awareness (if any) of German television remain classified. Yet even the Public Records Of- fice seems forthcoming by contrast with the stone- walling treatment accorded scholars by the US companies, IT&T and RCA, that continued to co- operate with the Reich in the development of televi- sion throughout the war. The trans-national technological evolution of the television apparatus makes the role of US-based multi-national corpora- tions in the development of German television less than surprising, but active collaboration in the de- velopment of television-based guidance systems for rockets, bombs and torpedoes, or in the manu- facture of such military hardware as fighter air- craft, seems more transgressive. Fortunately, the GDR archivists preserved the relevant German holdings on this involvement, but checking that do- cumentation from the US perspective has been far more difficult. The corporations, with little to gain from such historical research, have not been eager to open their archives. But the ever-vigilant eyes of the Hoover-FBI provide at least some sense of the US government's level of interest in and awareness of corporate activities. In the case of IT&T, for example, a secret congressional sub-committee authorized a long term FBI tap on chairman of the board Sosthenes Behn's telephone and do- cumented the extent of his corporation's involve- ment with the Reich. Yet while evidence had been collected, scholars could not necessarily access it, since the strategic value of IT&T's holdings in cen- tral Europe to a cold-war obsessed US government resulted in the suppression of the material gathered during the final years of the war. Freedom of Infor- mation Act appeals to the FBI notwithstanding, Behn's telephone transcripts remain unavailable, and other material regarding the corporation's German activities during the war are available only in heavily censored form. The National Archives, repository for, among other things, the original congressional investigating committee files, was more responsive to appeals for the de- classification of the relevant records, so that in the end, much of the material considered off-limits by the FBI (including the transcripts) can be found in another federal agency3. At least in this instance of

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governmental responsibility for the archival rec- ord, inefficiency and duplication have had a tremendous advantage. The larger point, how- ever, is that archival policy can be responsive to the interests of the state, and that national interests can be mobilized to mask and delimit the re- searcher's access to the existing historical record. Hence, the little that has been written to date on

early German television is shaped by the ideologi- cal context of the German Reich, the post-war divi- sion of the nation, the cold war and multi-national

capitalism.

Structural absences

Restrictions and censorship offer particularly vex- ing barriers to archive users, but the presumption that the offending documents actually exist and

may some day be considered sufficiently inno- cuous to be made available still remains. More- over, the ever-present possibility that the material censored by one agency (or individual, for in the end appeals are decided by particular agents), may be made available by another encourages persistence as a particularly useful research strategy. But in the case of archival film and televi- sion holdings, the budgetary restrictions that necessitate the selective preservation of some texts and the de facto destruction of others have rather more permanent and irrevocable consequences. Although the basic problems of preserving the two media are roughly the same, film is actually in a much better position than television. The relative durability of celluloid, film's longer institutional his- tory (including its place in museums, archives and the academy), and its aesthetic status, all contrib- ute to a higher preservation profile than that ac- corded television. So let's look at the limits of this 'best case' preservation scenario.

In the case of both film and television, far more material should be preserved than can be. Most film archives with active restoration and preserva- tion programmes have developed a reasonably ar- ticulate set of priorities to distinguish between the films which will survive and those which will be abandoned, with organizations such as FIAF en- couraging open communication among different archives to minimize disaster. Yet, at least in the case of many film archives, the criteria used to

prioritize films for preservation and hence to shape the access of future generations to the cinema past emerge from an historically specific configuration of the field of film studies.

Many of the people responsible for archival

preservation policy, like many of the readers of this journal, were intellectually shaped during the for- mative years of cinema studies as a university dis-

cipline. The institutional apparatus for 'film as art', so central to the legitimacy sought by proponents of film studies (and their university administrators) included the auteur theory, art museum-sponsored screenings of experimental films, and the revival and expansion of the art house circuit. Although specialists may well be struck by the field's remark- able intellectual growth, these formative perspec- tives and assumptions of some thirty years ago remain central to archivists' policies. Distinct in- stitutional incentives contribute to maintaining a re- strictive and outmoded conception of 'film as art'. Some US film programmes earn their keep by pro- viding courses which fulfil arts requirements, while several major film archives justify their budgets by strategic alliance with the traditional elite arts. But the interrogation of canons and taste hierarchies mounted by proponents of cultural studies reveal that an emphasis upon 'film as art' may in many instances preclude an emphasis upon 'film as cul- ture', since the texts necessary for the latter ap- proach may be excluded by archival preservation policies.

I recently asked my students which theatrically screened film in the Netherlands had the greatest number of viewers this year. The answer to this trick question wasn't Schindler's List or Jurassic Park, but any one of a number of pre-feature film adver- tisements for Grolsch or Heineken or Camels, texts seen on average by five or six times the numbers of viewers of the biggest drawing features. Many of these advertisements are quite engaging, some pushing the limits of narrative or representation be- yond that seen in 'typical' feature. As texts in their own right, as cultural objects, and as central com- ponents in constructing the conditions of reception for the films that follow, these advertisements have tremendous importance. But they seem to be as invisible to many archivists, given their tunnel- vision of 'film as art', as they are to my students. The marginalization of 'ordinary' industrials, in-

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260 William Uricchio

structionals, advertising films, and so forth, seems

short-sighted even within an aesthetic framework. If the 1 1th century's devotional objects are the art treasures of today, who can predict whether or not the late 20th century's advertising will be the art treasures of the future?

Such marginalization seems even more short-

sighted from the perspective of cultural history. Archival acquisition policies must become respon- sive to 'the film as culture' rather than the 'film as art' paradigm, meaning that archivists must begin to take a longer and broader view instead of being attuned to the aesthetic norms of a particular period. But because the expansionist years of

many film archives coincided with such factors as the deployment of the legitimizing discourse of film as art, the institutionalization of university cinema studies programmes, and the training of a new

generation of film archivists, the perceived com- mon interests of archivists and scholars has grown uncommonly close. Historically specific notions of an academic field ('film as art'), reinforced by in- stitutional constraints and the personal investments of those involved, has spilled over into archival

preservation policy. In this regard, a latent tension underlying the

relationship of archivists and academic re- searchers might help us get beyond the familiar debate between preservation vs use. We might productively enhance the tension between preserv- ing material for the research questions of the future vs the research agenda of the immediate present. Such an effort might ironically contribute a wel- come dimension to the traditional antagonism be- tween the interests of archivists and researchers, serving the interests of future generations of re- searchers. But while so much of the filmed past remains at risk, we can only hope that the diver-

gent views of researchers and archivists can be

productively cultivated and deployed in a com- bined preservation effort.

The problems of historical filtration

While we might contest the existing preservation criteria of film and television archives, at least the terms are now and have been in the past reason-

ably clear - generally we know what to expect. Far more complex archival challenges face scholars

using non-cinematic historical sources in an effort to locate film and television within the cultural his- tory of our century. The first problem is that of the historical filtration of evidence, a process by which the archival selection criteria determined by a

period's dominant social formations shape and de- limit our access to the past. Evidence related to

marginalized social formations is often simply mis-

sing from the historical record since period archi- vists deemed it unworthy of preservation. On the other hand, a plethora of readily available evi- dence entails a similar but related problem con- cerning the researcher's historiographic assumptions. A fixation with readily available 'facts' can obscure the complexities and contradic- tions which help to construct a historical moment, privileging 'dead certainties' over the ambiguities of competing discourses.

In order to develop these points a bit more

fully, I would like to discuss two related projects that Roberta Pearson and I have worked on: the first concerns the conditions of reception for par- ticular films and the second the cultural controversy over cinema theatres in New York City between 1907 and 19134. The first project, a book on the

Vitagraph Company's literary, historical and bibli- cal 'quality films', looked at the film industry's use of such culturally prominent figures as Shakes-

peare, Washington, Napoleon and Moses in an effort to attain cultural respectability. The book, concerned not only with a 'top-down' analysis of the film-industry, but with a 'bottom-up' analysis of the probable responses of working class and immi-

grant viewers, falls broadly within the social his-

tory so much in evidence since the Second World War. As with many such projects, perhaps the

greatest research difficulty stems from the tendency of many archives to collect material related to the dominant social formations while ignoring more

marginal groups. And while finding copies of the Police Gazette, the nineteenth century equivalent of The National Enquirer, may be much harder than finding copies of the New York Times, obtain-

ing evidence perhaps more directly related to the

experiences of immigrant and working people of the period poses an even more difficult challenge. The collections available at the New York Public

Library, the New-York Historical Society, YIVO, and the Library of Congress are testaments to the

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Archives and absences 261

Fig. 2. The Princess Theatre, angling for an upscale audience by programming Grenadier Roland and The Fall of Troy (191 1). [Courtesy of Q. David Bowers.]

'best and brightest' of the period, but for the experi- ences of 'ordinary' people, one must look either to social survey studies or to more recently obtained oral histories. In either case, the material obtained must be very carefully considered, for it is far more mediated (either by a social science paradigm or by the ravages of time) than the sorts of material available when considering the conditions of cine- matic representation for representatives of the 'bet- ter' classes.

The difficulties of historical filtration can to some extent be offset (depending upon one's re-

search approach) by a creative use of non-cine- matic sources at certain archival collections. De- ciding that widely circulating depictions of figures such as Washington or Moses, or greatly simpli- fied versions of Shakespeare'sJulius Caesar or Na- poleon's career all helped to establish the intertextual frame to which many 'ordinary' viewers would have been exposed, we found treasure troves of popular imagery in such archives as the Arents Tobacco collection at the New York Public Library (with cigarette cards and cigar labels) or the Burdick Collection at the Metropoli-

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262 William Uricchio

tan Museum of Art (with advertising and packa- ging materials), or the Bella C. Landauer Collec- tion at the New-York Historical Society (with writing tablets and calendars). This extrapolated intertextual frame, reinforced by such sources as school text books and classroom chromolitho- graphs, church sermons, public statuary, parade floats, and public lectures, led to historically- grounded speculations about the probable condi- tions of reception for Vitagraph's films among working class and immigrant audiences which contrasted sharply both with our presentist expec- tations and with dominant period sources. In inter- rogating contemporary conditions of reception we had in some respects to 'create' our own evidence, but with the New York City nickelodeon project we faced a potentially overwhelming array of 'facts'. Intent upon understanding the social/cultural posi- tion of New York's nickelodeons, we attempted, like several previous scholars, to determine the number and locations of moving picture shows. Locating previously untapped material in New York City's Municipal Archives, we found that offi- cial city sources varied dramatically in their counts of the city's moving picture shows. New York had up to seven departments involved in some aspect of exhibition regulation, yet in 1908, the Department of Police counted 239 nickelodeons, the Bureau of Licences, 550, and the Department of Buildings, 800. Recourse to other archives, such as the paper- s of the civic reform organization, the People's In- stitute, located at the New York Public Library, led to still more 'facts', such as those of a People's Institute report on 'cheap amusements' that counted over 400 nickelodeons. Clearly, city offi- cials and reformers had political agendas which inflected their 'facts', but the extent of the discrep- ancy is striking. The situation is further compli- cated, since many of the more transient, tenement district nickelodeons were not recorded in the more official sources such as Trow's Business Di-

rectory but rather only fortuitously entered the his- torical record through newspaper reports of nickelodeon disasters or police shut-downs of mov- ing picture shows.

The 'incompleteness' of this particular evi- dence base need not necessarily restrict historical interpretation, since considering discursive evi- dence concerning the period's dominant percep-

tions of the new moving picture medium proves far more profitable than searching for definitive 'facts'. I would argue that the portrayals of moving picture exhibition originating from the press and pulpit had far greater import than the numbers or even locations of the actual theatres. Indeed, if one wishes to understand the mobilization of public sentiment, the passing of legislation, and the film industry's responses, the period's own depictions tell us more than a futile attempt to reconstruct an historical 'reality'. Of course, some sense of 'em- pirical reality' provides a necessary reference point by which we can appraise press reports and other such data, but documenting perceptions gets us far closer to understanding the implementation of cultural policy. We should carefully interrogate competing discourses, retaining a high tolerance for ambiguity, rather than search for more and more 'facts' that might result in a monolithic inter- pretation.

Conclusion

The demands of the new cultural history encourage a far more creative use of archival sources than has hitherto been the case. Whether reading docu- ments against the grain, or finding alternative sources of documentation, or of 'reading' the very process of archiving (a la Foucault6), strategies exist to circumvent the originating 'intention' of previous generations of archivists. But in conclud- ing I wish to return to my most important point. I take the inevitable curse of 'presentism' far more seriously in the case of film archives, where it has an irrevocable character, than in the case of other archives, where it serves as a stimulant to more creative research strategies. The difficulties to re- searchers, present and future, posed by the aesthe- tically oriented preservation criteria of most film archives facing archival collections of films are far less negotiable than those posed by problems of historical filtration. Those films lost because they don't conform to presentist aesthetic criteria will constitute a significant absence for the future. And although future researchers may well have an easy time appraising our archival values and assump- tions, they will have an extraordinarily difficult time conjuring up films that no longer exist. Despite some strategic advantages in maintaining a level

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Archives and absences

of tension between archivists and researchers on the needs of the future vs the needs of the present, there may be a longer term advantage to closer

cooperation at least with regard to the questions raised by new developments in cultural history. One can easily criticize any selection process with such irrevocable consequences, and my point here is not to single out archival policy-makers as some- how conspiring to impose a particular form on film

history, but perhaps thinking more about the pro- cess and implications of constructing history, and less about defending a presentist notion of 'aes-

thetics,' will encourage more far-sighted archival

policies.

Notes

1. Recent expressions of these issues may be found in the work of Hayden White and Dominick La Capra, or in collections of essays such as Aram Veeser's The New Historicism and Lynn Hunt's The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

2. For a look at the research spawned by these differ- ent archival sources see William Uricchio, Die An- fange des Deutschen Fernsehens: Kritische Annaherungen an die Entwicklung bis 1945 (Tub- ingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 1991 ). For an overview of the research and its ideological implications, see my 'Television as History: Representations of German Television Broadcasting, 1935-1944', pp. 167- 196 in Framing the Past: The Historiography of German Cinema and Television, edited by Bruce Murray and Christopher Wickham (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992).

3. This is not to imply that all of my declassification requests at the National Archives have met with the same success. Moreover, certain collections seem to have been purged, or at least I have encountered

systematic episodes of document loss when search- ing for IT&T-related records in the State Depart- ments archives. In these cases, the record entry log indicates the existence of documents which the archivists have been unable to locate, and in the case of the ITT related records I sought, over 70 per cent of the entered documents were missing.

4. The first part of this research, which considers the conditions of production and reception for particu- lar films, appears as Reframing Culture: The case of the Vitagraph Quality Films (Princeton University Press, 1993): the second part, which considers the debate over motion picture exhibition in New York City, is forthcoming as The Nickel Madness: The Struggle to Control New York City's Nickelodeons in 1907-1913 (Smithsonian Institution Press).

5. Researchers from Russell Merritt and Robert Allen (who challenged the then dominant view that nic- kelodeon audiences were primarily working class and immigrant) to Ben Singer (who has embarked on an ambitious location analysis of NY nickelo- deons) have contributed to this quest. See Russell Merritt, 'Nickelodeon Theaters, 1905-1914: Build- ing an Audience for the Movies', in Tino Balio, (ed.), The American Film Industry, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin, 1976, pp. 831102; Robert Allen, 'Motion Picture Exhibition in Manhat- tan, 1906-1912: Beyond the Nickelodeon' in John Fell, (ed.), Film Before Griffith, University of Califor- nia Press, Berkeley, California, 1983, pp. 162- 175; and Ben Singer, 'Manhattan Nickelodeons: New Data on Audiences and Exhibitors', Cinema Journal (forthcoming). For a sense of our approach to the issue, see William Uricchio and Roberta E. Pearson, 'Constructing the Audience: Competing Discourses of Morality and Rationalization in the Nickelodeon Period', Iris 17, 1994, 43-54 .

6. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, (New York: Pan- theon, 1972).

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