This is part two of a two-part blog post. For part one click here.
What drew you initially to the work of Alice Guy-Blaché?
The incredible collection of nitrate and safety film, and related copyright and paper documents that bring these rare materials together in one place here at the Library. When I served as curator of the American Film Institute Collection and liaison to the Library of Congress from 2000 to 2008 I tried to acquire a diverse and representative range of material from different eras, but I also wanted to build on pre-existing moving image subjects in the Library, and particularly what was not accessible for viewing. Curation requires both responsibility and judgment in selecting material, whether it be a singular item or more. Keeping similar material in a singular location has many advantages for an institution and for the researchers and the public it serves.
The Library’s moving image collection is the most diverse and largest in the world thanks to copyright law and the acquisition of public domain material. The American Film Institute (AFI) was created for this reason, that is, to acquire public domain materials, and especially moving image on nitrate stock that had been destroyed during the Library’s paper era of registration. Due to the hazardous nature of nitrate, copyright submission in those years was limited to documents and paper prints or photographs of frames from a film, and for this reason the majority of silent era productions have been lost.
I became interested in digital preservation, which was initially controversial, especially for the American archival community. But the motion picture industry drives preservation and my European colleagues were exploring digital media, so I continued to researc