Politique des archives

		Politique des archives European Cinema and the Invention of Tradition in the Digital Age Vinzenz Hediger

Who we are depends on what we believe we know about ourselves. What we believe we know about ourselves depends on what we remember, either first hand or by being told. Most of the things that we believe we know about ourselves – or ‘the world’ – are things that we know by being told. Much of our knowledge about ourselves is mediated knowledge, then: transmitted orally and through writing, printing and image media. This is why traditions are not just inherited – through complex transmission media such as custom and ritual – but can be and are invented, as historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and Terry Ranger point out. This is also why entire nations can be born from stories told in books, paintings and other media. For what it takes to make a nation, pace Ernest Renan and his famous speech, ‘What is a nation?,’ delivered at the Sorbonne on March 11, 1882, are not just people bound together by culture or kinship, but stories about the great things that a certain group of people accomplished together in the past and may therefore be capable of accomplishing again in the future. Switzerland is a case in point, and one that I happen to know first hand. In response to what they perceived to be the growing threat of socialist internationalism, the Swiss turned their conglomerate of Canons into a modern nation state not least by adopting a play by German writer Friedrich Schiller as their founding myth in 1891. Thus William Tell was sent into battle against Karl Marx and the specter of communism.

So knowledge transmitted through stories and other forms in various media is crucial to the process of outfitting oneself with a suitable past that may, or may not, be conducive to political action in the future. But if most of our knowledge about ourselves is mediated, and if media enable history both as a discourse and a profession, media have a history themselves: a history of media forms and apparatuses, a history of how forms and apparatuses were put to use and how they in turn shaped the conditions of their possible use. My interest here is in this history, and in how the history of media intersects with history as produced through media. My focus is on contemporary European cinema – or rather Cinema in Europe for, as I will argue, there is no such thing as European Cinema. I am interested in European cinema as a medium for the invention of tradition. However, being a film scholar rather than a historian, my interest is in the invention of cinematic tradition as much as in the invention of tradition through the cinema, or rather in the invention of cinematic traditions as a crucial site of the invention of tradition through media. My concern, then, is with the shape and dynamics of cinematic memory in the age of digital video technologies, with a special focus on European cinemas, and under the conditions of what I would like to call, taking my cue from the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, the industrialisation of memory. Stiegler’s is an apt phrase here because, as I will try to show, creating a cinematic memory through digital technologies is a process crucially guided by economic considerations. In fact, as I will argue, archives have now become an important driving force in the global media economy. What I would like to do in this contribution, then, is to think about a conceptual framework for how this process plays out on the European stage. I would like to approach this task by way of a reading of two recent news items.

One World, One Market

The first news item is from Variety and was posted on the Hollywood trade paper’s website on May 22, 2005:

1. ‘Star Wars Hits Int’l Zenith’, Variety online, 23 May 2005.

Opening in a total of 105 foreign countries and 114 markets with over 10,000 playdates, Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith obliterated the international record with $144.7 million in its first five days, with most markets opening Friday. That figure eclipsed by $15 million the foreign launch record set in 2003 by The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

The massive launch for Sith underscores the ongoing shift in studio strategy to treat international and domestic as a single market for major releases. Move is driven by the desire to take advantage of increased multiplexing in overseas markets and the need to close the window on pirating as tightly as possible. (1)

2. ‘Global Promo Rocks’, Variety online, 19 June 2006.

3. ‘International Audiences Dig Indiana’, Variety online, 25 May 2008.

The figures are quite staggering: 105 foreign countries, 114 territories (the difference between countries and territories is that a country such as Switzerland contains three language markets, hence three territories, and Belgium two), more than 10,000 prints for a simultaneous premiere, a so-called ultra-wide release. But then, this is Hollywood distribution in the new century. In fact, when The Da Vinci Code premiered with 12,200 prints in June of 2006, the 7,300 prints for Mission: Impossible III was considered low and the 8,500 prints for X-Men represented the ‘middle ground’. (2) By 2008 and the premiere of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a combined 12,920 prints were considered standard practice for a wide release. (3) I personally remember a time, twenty-four years ago, when American films such as Milos Forman’s Amadeus (1984), a big US production by a central European director about a central European composer shot largely on location in central Europe, would run for more than a full year in a large movie theatre in downtown Zurich, Switzerland, before it even began to roll out to theatres in the smaller cities of that small country in Western central Europe. Switzerland alone, a country with somewhat over 600 cinema screens, had more than 100 prints of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith playing simultaneously on the first weekends.

The Star Wars premiere is of course not the first time that this has happened. The age of the Global Simultaneous Hollywood Blockbuster premiere dawned with the release of the first installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy on December 19, 2001. But while this first example of an ultra wide release on a global scale could still be explained through the exceptional nature of the film in question, the strategy is now here to stay, as Variety indicates. Let me quote that weighty sentence once again: ‘The massive launch underscores the ongoing shift in studio strategy to treat international and domestic as a single market for major releases’. As a consequence, one should increasingly be prepared for films that are tailored to suit the needs of the Global Same Day Release strategy. Among other things, this means that Hollywood has become more thoroughly than ever before a transcultural cinema, a cinema of films that appeal to audiences regardless of the cultural specifics of their national background, and of films that can be marketed with one largely homogeneous campaign that works the world over rather than with culturally specific campaigns tailored to the needs of each and every one of the 114-plus markets encompassed by the Hollywood distribution system.

4. See my ‘Blitz Exhibitionism. Der Massenstart von Kinofilmen und die verspätete Revolution der Filmvermarktung’, in Demnächst in ihrem Kino. Grundlagen der Filmwerbung und Filmvermarktung (Marburg: Schüren 2005), pp. 140-160.

The Variety article on the Star Wars film also indicates the reasons for this shift. The first reason why the studios have adopted the new strategy is because they could. Over the last few years, many countries in the world have seen a shift to an infrastructure of Multiplex cinemas in suburban locations. Multiplexes are entertainment waterholes for the mobile and relatively affluent middle-class youths that Hollywood has in mind as their audience – that is people who have the disposable income to buy not only a movie ticket and the food that usually goes with it, but also the DVD of the same film and merchandising products. Multiplex cinemas offer homogeneous price levels for cinema tickets throughout a given market and thus create a crucial precondition for the wide release. Hollywood had been experimenting with the wide release since the early 1930s and had actually finessed the strategy of mass premieres supported by heavy advertising on electronic media (radio and television) during the war years with a series of hard-hitting, B grade RKO propaganda films. (4) However, the studios only adopted the strategy for major productions in the 1970s, when a suburban Multiplex infrastructure in the US had replaced the downtown movie palaces and subsequent run theatres of old. Now that the world has been thoroughly multiplexed (with the exception of most of Africa, where there is not much of that movie-going middle-class that Hollywood is interested in to begin with), the strategy can be expanded to a global scale.

5. A detailed account of the legal history of Hollywood’s fight against the VCR may be found in James Lardner, Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese and the Onslaught of the VCR (New York: Norton, 1987).

6. Cf. Harold L. Vogel, Entertainment Industry Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Some rather optimistic predictions suggest that the home video tally could rise to four times the volume of the theatrical market by 2009, with the theatrical market remaining at its current income level. Cf. Jill Goldsmith, ‘DVD Sales Forecast at Four Times B.O.’, Variety online, 14 August 2005.

7. Cf. Thomas Schatz, ‘The Return of the Hollywood Studio System’, in Conglomerates and the Media (New York: The New Press, 1997), pp. 73–106.

The second reason why the studios now use the Global Ultra Wide Release is that they think they must. Piracy has long been a major issue for the Hollywood studios, who fought the introduction of the VCR in court in the late ‘70s before heartily embracing the home video market as a new source of untold revenues and riches. (5) But piracy has become more of a problem in the age of the Digital Versatile Disc and online platforms. The DVD has all but obliterated the difference between the first and second generations of a copy (and thus also the master, or ‘original’, along with that difference) and has opened up new opportunities for the enterprising home-entertainment pirate. Piracy of films on home entertainment formats has of course become all the more of a problem for Hollywood studios since the average Hollywood film now only takes in about 25% of its revenue at the box-office, while more than 50% of the revenue come from the Home Video market. (6) Ever since the video boom of the 1980s the theatrical release has basically been the launch phase and market introduction for a product that becomes really profitable only in the subsidiary markets, i.e. on home video formats and on pay-TV. (7) This also means that Hollywood is now making four times the money on any given film that they were making twenty-five years ago, which explains why bankable A-list stars now make twenty-five million dollars per movie rather than three to five in the 1980s. The theatrical market, while accounting for only a quarter of revenues now, has seen almost steady growth over the last two decades, and the number of tickets sold have now reached levels last seen in the early 1960s. Given this background, the Global Ultra Wide Release may indeed be seen as a strategy to forestall piracy and get as much money out of the theatrical run of the film as possible, before pirated copies start to circulate and dent the novelty of the film for fan audiences.

What the Variety article reports on, then, is not only an American film industry fusing 115 global markets into one, but also an American film industry waging a global war on the terror spread by the uses and abuses of the same digital technology that has lifted the industry’s revenue potential to a new level. The second news item I will introduce is one that was all over the media in Europe a few years ago.

The Non-Existence of European Cinema

On the weekend of the 4 June 2005, the French voted on the European Union constitution. A document drafted under the guidance of former French president Valérie Giscard d’Estaing, a career politician and sometime novelist who compared his work on the European constitution to that of the American founding fathers, the European constitution would have united the no longer so sovereign European Union member states under a strong legal umbrella. Thus the constitution would have marked an important step toward a political unification of Europe. Alas, it was not to be. Not sufficiently enthused by the idea of creating a supranational political bond between European nation states, the French largely considered the vote on the constitution as a referendum on two unrelated issues, on the introduction of the Euro and the monetary union, and on French interior politics. Unhappy with both, they voted the constitution down, letting the Germans in particular standing in the rain, whose government had speedily ratified the constitution in parliament one week earlier. (The Germans, by the way, would never let the populace vote on an issue like this. They still don’t trust themselves to be mature enough for direct democracy.) Just two days later, the Dutch gave the Constitution the boot as well, voting the proposition down with almost a two-thirds majority. With the constitution virtually dead on arrival, the British stopped their planned referendum, and then the EU governing body decided to give the whole process a year’s pause for reflection.

Many were the reasons offered by political analysts for the failure of the proposed constitution. The constitution, a two-hundred page tome, was too arcane a document (some said), and the politicians, too certain of the wisdom of their course of action, failed to explain its contents to their voters. The constitution would have given too much power to the Brussels bureaucracy (others said), and when given the chance to speak their mind on the issue, voters declared that they preferred to retain power on a local, regional or national level rather than delegate it to a vague supranational authority. Thus the 2005 referendum in both France and the Netherlands established a pattern that repeated itself in the June, 2008, referendum Ireland held over the Lisbon treaty. To the dismay of the EU, the treaty was voted down by a majority of the Irish, who retain a constitutional right to hold a referendum over every major piece of EU legislation. On a sad note for the film scholar, amidst all the theories that politicians proposed to explain the EU constitution’s failure, and the obvious lack of cohesiveness of Europe as a political idea, no one blamed the cinema.

8. Jean-Michel Frodon, La Projection nationale (Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 1998).

Why should they? Well, film scholars have spent considerable intellectual energy on attempts to theorise the complex relationship between cinema and nation over the last fifteen years or so. Apart from increasingly sophisticated discussions of the notion of national cinema in the wake of the work of scholars such as Andrew Higson and Natasa Durovicova, particular attention was devoted to the contribution of cinema to the nation as an imagined community, to cite Benedict Anderson’s influential definition. Perhaps no one went further in his attempt to theorise cinema’s contribution to the nation than Jean-Michel Frodon, the former film critic of Le Monde and now the editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma, a fully-owned subsidiary of Le Monde which Frodon was dispatched to save from a perceived decline into high theory and tastelessness, not to mention a very real prospect of financial ruin. A seductive late bloomer in ‘70s apparatus theory’s discipline of thinking in analogies, Frodon proposes in his 1998 book La projection nationale, a study inspired by the mediologist Régis Debray, that there exists a structural affinity between cinema and nation. (8) Both are based on the principle of projection: the projection of moving images in the case of the cinema, the projection of notions of a common destiny in the past and in the future in the case of the nation. What could be better suited for projecting those projections that make a nation than the art and technology of projected moving images, i.e. the cinema? Thus, according to Frodon, the cinema is the preferred machine for the production of the nation in the 20^th century.

Analogies like this have a playful and metaphorical side, which bears mentioning from my perspective because in Germany (where I now teach), most French philosophy is read very earnestly, even when it is at its most playful and metaphorical. Thus, for instance, Gilles Deleuze’s cinema books are treated as classic texts of film theory rather than as intriguing specimens of modern literature in a cinematic mode, as Raymond Bellour proposes we read them. However, if one decides to take Frodon’s analogy of projections, for the sake of argument, seriously, one could argue that a European cinema, were it in existence, should rightfully have contributed to the creation of a European supra– or supernationality through a process of supranational projection. Through the projection of such a supranationality, a European cinema could at least have helped to prevent the failure of a project like the European constitution. And it is not for lack of trying that such a supranational cinema was not there to help out the politicians in a time of need.

9. For an outline of Mitterrand and France’s role in shaping Europen film funding policies sind the early ‘80s, see Pervenche Beurier, Vers la création d'un espace cinématographique européen? (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004).

In fact, the aforementioned Debray, whom Frodon names (in his introduction) as the inspiration for his book, deserves mention here again. A former comrade-in-arms of Che Guevara in the ‘60s, Debray was one of the closest advisers to French socialist president François Mitterand in the ‘80s. Whether the idea was Debray’s, Mitterand’s or someone else’s, the project of an European cinema deriving from Europe’s strongest national cinema – the French cinema – was high on the list of priorities for cultural policy of France in the ‘80s and ‘90s. (9) Ever guided by the notion of French culture’s universal appeal and civilising mission, France, and Mitterand personally were the driving forces behind what is the most obvious attempt at creating an institutional framework for a supranational European cinema, the European Commission Media programs for financing European co-production, distribution and education in the field of cinema.

10. See Nasreen Muni Kabir, Talking Pictures: Conversations on Hindi Cinema with Javed Akhtar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).

There are even models for what a supranational European cinema – a cinema of supranational projections of a coming Europe, a cinema that transcends regional and national cultural boundaries and still remains culturally specific – could look like. For a particularly instructive example look no further than India and the Hindi cinema, now globally known under the label of Bollywood. As the famous screenwriter and song lyricist Javed Akthar, creator of the angry-young-man characters played by Amitabh Bachan in 1970s blockbusters, points out, Hindi cinema is not a national cinema in the conventional sense. Hindi cinema is just one of many regional cinemas in India, competing with the Madras-based Tamil film industry for most films produced per year. However, Hindi cinema is the only regional cinema with a national audience, or with an audience that goes far beyond the 400 odd million Hindi speakers in northern India. Accounting for this supra-regional appeal, Javed Akthar proposes to think of Hindi cinema as ‘India’s 17th member state’ (India is composed of sixteen member states divided up roughly along linguistic and cultural boundaries). (10)

Hindi cinema, Akhtar suggests, is an imaginary territory, located everywhere and nowhere in India and somewhere between East and West, inhabited by everyone who chooses to live his or her life of dreams and aspirations through the films that run under the Bollywood label. Akhtar’s formula of the 17^th member state aptly captures Hindi cinema’s condition as a post-colonial, not-quite national, or rather hyper-national cinema that incorporates a multiplicity of cultural differences without giving preference to any specific set of cultural traits, a condition that is undoubtedly one of the key elements of Hindi cinema’s enduring success in India and with Indian audiences residing abroad. At the stage of European unification that we are now, European cinema could be similarly thought of as an imaginary 26^th member state, an imaginary territory, located everywhere and nowhere in Europe, inhabited by everyone who chooses to live his or her life of dreams and aspirations through films originating from somewhere close to that territory, incorporating a multiplicity of cultural differences without giving preference to any specific set of cultural traits. However, despite all the best efforts by state and European authorities, and even though many cinema networks, particularly of the avant-garde, have always been European rather than national in scope, such an imaginary 26^th member state has so far failed to emerge on the European stage. Hence also, and sadly so, there was no European cinema there to blame for its failure to provide the necessary supranational projections and thus preventing the failure of the European constitution.

Again, many reasons may be cited for this failure of a European cinema to emerge. For one, the French seemed to believe in the project more than some of their other European partners. Cinema has never had a high cultural and political priority in Germany, for instance, where the theatre is the state’s and the cultural elite’s preferred art form and where the industry that most closely resembles Hollywood – in that it successfully exports unique products that are basically outlets for the buyer’s fantasies – is the car industry; it is certainly no coincidence that Mercedes cars are still wildly popular among the wealthy in Los Angeles, whereas they have been losing out to other, more reliable brands on the domestic market lately. Also, Hollywood clearly has mastered the art of unifying the global market under a line of transcultural, or culturally neutral products more thoroughly than any other film industry and has left the competition reeling. In fact, it could be argued that Hollywood has successfully occupied the imaginary space of the 26^th member state, and the only way that is left to define European cinema is ex negativo, as a plan to evict Hollywood and repossess the imaginary 26^th state. Thus, European cinema is in a sense that feature of European films, or films produced and watched in Europe, which potentially pits them against Hollywood films, that crucial difference that means they are not Hollywood films.

11. Coincidentally, an Astérix album released in October 2005 makes the anti-American subtext explicit by pitching Astérix and his friends in a battle against very Yankee-like extraterrestrials. For a history of French anti-Americanism, see Philippe Roger, The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005).

One could now, of course, issue a call to arms to fight the oppressor, much in the spirit of Debray’s former companion Che Guevara, or again in the spirit of the French comic book hero Astérix. But this has of course been done so many times before that it would hardly seem original. Indeed, Astérix himself has been sent on a mission to evict the Yankee invaders from the 26^th state, as the protagonist of the first international blockbuster movie franchise emanating from French soil. (11) So heavily political an enterprise was the production of these films that some French newspaper critics, who despised the first two films and thrashed them in their reviews, wrote that it was still every Frenchman’s patriotic duty to go see them to assure their financial success in the face of Hollywood domination. Also, issuing another call to arms would perhaps be fruitless because I sometimes suspect that the Europeans are actually quite happy leading the lives of Astérix’s villagers, occasionally beating up on the oppressor but otherwise wiling away in happy, blissful marginality. For as much as René Goscinny, the author of the Astérix comic books and the ‘Molière of the bande desinnée’ (as one German critic likes to call him), is one of the key French writers of the 20^th century, I have never quite understood why, if they have the magic potion that makes them invincible, Astérix and his Gaul companions do not release their secret weapon more widely and send the Roman occupation forces packing for good. Apparently the fantasy of defeating the Empire is less appealing than the fantasy of settling for a blissful life of marginality and a culture of defeat. Maybe it is this fantasy of a happy culture of defeat that accounts for the raving success of the Astérix books and films not only in France, but also in Germany, as well as in South America. In Italy, on the other hand, producer Claude Berri had to hire local favourite Roberto Benigni for a major part in the first Astérix film in order to overcome what was perceived as a long-standing immunity of the Italians to the charms of the French comic book hero. It is interesting to speculate whether this resistance may or may not have something to with an Italian sense of somehow being part of the American adventure.

But I shall not dwell further on the question of cinematic and other art and empire. Let me rather turn to a different question: the question of cinematic art and cultural memory which, as I will try to show by the end of this essay, ties together the two news items that I have cited. In order to do this, I would again like to go back to the summer of 2005 and introduce a third news item. In the week of June 15^th 2005, in another Global Wide Release roll-out, Batman Begins, the fifth installment of the Batman franchise, premiered in more than ten thousand cinemas worldwide. The film did not break any records, but it was still quite successful. However, despite the success of Batman Begins, the weekend marked the seventeenth consecutive weekend on which the total box-office revenue was below that of the same weekend of the year before. In fact, while the overall box-office in the US has seen steady growth from 1985 through 2004, there has been a marked slump in the last twelve months, and 2005 ended up being the worst year for the US film industry on its domestic market since 1985. This caused much concern at the time since, much like the Global Wide Release Strategy, the trend was a global one and touched on the arthouse market as well. Thus for instance in Switzerland, where arthouse movies have a market share of 30%, one of the highest in the world next to France, one of the most important arthouse movie theatre chains saw a drop in attendance of up to 30% in 2005, while overall attendance dropped by 14%. Still, American movies were the hardest hit. Their market share in Switzerland sank to 60% in 2005, from more than 70% in the late ‘90s.

Just as in the shift to the Global Wide Release Strategy, there were two explanations that specialists offered for the box-office crisis. The first explanation concerned the quality of the films. New productions, it was argued, had begun to disappoint the movie-going public, and thus audiences stayed away. In a way, this went for the arthouse market as well, which is driven by star auteurs such as Pedro Almodóvar and blockbuster films such as Alejandro Amenábar’s The Sea Inside (2004), much like the popcorn movie market is driven by super-blockbusters such as Star Wars. That year had no Almodóvar, nor a Sea Inside. The second explanation is the home cinema and DVD boom that has also lead to new forms and patterns of movie watching. For some years now, young moviegoers in the 14-to-28 age bracket have increasingly tended to view films on DVD at home and in groups. For many potential moviegoers, the DVD party has become a plausible alternative to a visit to the movie theatre.

12. Brian Lowry, ‘Sumner Takes a Grand Stand - Redstone backs Sibling Rivalry’, Variety online, 11 January 2006.

13. Cf. Joëlle Farchy’s 1994 essay ‘Die Bedeutung der Information für die Nachfrage nach kulturellen Gütern’, in Demnächst in ihrem Kino, pp. 193-211.

14. Arthur DeVany, Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry (New York: Routledge, 2003).

15. Since I am trying to explain an economic phenomenon, i.e., a pattern of consumer choices, my underlying notion of quality here is economic rather than aesthetic. Quality, then, is not what makes a film valuable as a work of art, but that what the consumer perceives to be the grounds for his/her satisfaction – whatever these grounds may be in substance, and however insubstantial they may be from the film critic’s viewpoint.

16. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Vol. I: Conflicts and Divisions; Vol. II: Traditions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

Some Hollywood movie moguls such as Paramount owner and Viacom head Sumner Redstone dismissed any notion of a lack in quality as the reason for the box-office slump, and they have actually been vindicated, at least partly. (12) After the slump of 2005, the world wide box-office picked up again in 2006 and continued to grow, albeit only slightly, through 2007 and the first half of 2008. The 2005 slump still deserves interest for the theories and explanatory models it produced. In fact, I would like to argue that the two explanations most often proposed to explain the slump are actually related. In short, the films viewed on DVD, many of them so-called classics, set standards of quality that are difficult for new films to live up to, and thus impair their chances for success. By this, I do not mean to say that old films are necessarily better, but that they are more reliable and represent less of a risk for the viewer. Buying a movie ticket always involves a rather unreasonable risk. (13) Films, like all cultural products, are information goods, as the economist likes to say, and as such, they are experience goods. Search goods are goods with reliable features that allow you to search the market. Experience goods are of unknown quality – until you consume them. A typical search good, a bottle of Coca Cola, will always reliably taste the same. A typical experience good like a film will always be different. In fact, in films, the audience does not know whether they will like the film until it is too late, i.e. until after they have paid for the ticket, and the producer does not know whether he will find an audience until it is too late, i.e. after he has already invested the money necessary to produce the film. In films, as William Goldman once said, ‘nobody knows anything’, or, to use a phrase coined by economist Arthur DeVany, films create a situation of ‘symmetrical ignorance’. (14)

On the other hand, a successful evening’s entertainment, as you will recall from your own teenage years, is very much about avoiding disappointment. In the time of DVD, when the entire cinematic heritage is potentially available in pristine quality and can be played on home cinema equipment that almost reaches the sound and image quality standards of a good theatrical screening, watching a movie on DVD that you already know or a movie that has been sold to you as a certified classic and recommended by reliable sources such as your personal friends is a safer choice than going to the movie theatre and buying a ticket. (15) Assuming that many of the films watched on DVD are films from the recent and some of them of the more distant past, one could argue that what we are witnessing right now is a hypertrophy of the cinematic past, analogous to the hypertrophy of memory diagnosed by French historian Pierre Nora, (16) who coined the term lieu de mémoire (‘realm of memory’) in the 1970s: the cinematic past is eating away at the cinema’s present and potentially also its future. In economic terms, the novelty of a film has long ceased to be the necessary condition for its marketability; novelty is no longer the decisive product differentiation feature. If this were not the case, no one would issue DVD editions of thirty-year old films such as Jaws (1975). But if in the classical Hollywood period, i.e. up until the mid ‘50s, a film’s commercial lifespan was in most cases strictly limited to two years of theatrical runs, things have radically changed since. In fact, under the conditions of the hypertrophy of the cinematic past, novelty can actually be a feature that speaks against the film, as I have just tried to suggest.

An important question to raise here in order to better understand where the economic fault lines run through cinematic memory would be question of where and when the consumable past begins. What makes a film from the past coterminous with a felt present? Are films like Jaws or The Godfather (1972), for instance, both over thirty years old, ‘old films’ that are just safer bets than new films, or are they rather perceived as those paradoxical creatures, ‘contemporary classics’? And when are films becoming so old that their lack of novelty, of newness, is being felt again, and that novelty, this time ex negativo, becomes a criterion for consumability and marketability once more? Questions an audience researcher interested in the shape and dynamics of cultural memory might ask of contemporary audiences, and questions that will of course interest the philosopher as well. Philosophers such as Herman Lübbe have repeatedly diagnosed the ‘shrinking of the present’ as one of the key conditions of modernity, i.e. the condition that what is felt as being present and new has a tendency to become obsolete ever more quickly in societies guided by ideas of progress, growth and innovation. Apparently, in the realm of film art, the present is now expanding again to include a past that is coterminous with the present, and a future that ceases to be the time when the present becomes obsolete but rather emerges as the realm of the eternal life of the film-product that never dies.

17. Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919-1939 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007).

Mass Market Cinephilia

What is interesting is that the film industry has actively, and in fact quite frantically, set for itself this trap of better movie choices outside of the cinema, and of higher quality standards on the home movie market. This is the outcome of a concerted effort to educate the general public to become movie lovers who care about the medium’s past as much as about the latest blockbuster release. It could also be characterised as the outcome of an attempt to industrialise a specific convergence of new media technology, archival impulse and cinephilia. Very broadly speaking, cinephilia has been around since the 1920s as one of the driving forces of the film society and avant-garde networks that Malte Hagener convincingly analyses in his book on European avant-garde networks. (17) The archival impulse, the impulse to create archives for the cinematic past and preserve films threatened by loss, emerges in full force at around the time of the introduction of sound. While films were considered to have a commercial lifespan of a maximum of two years even before the introduction of sound, the arrival of the new media technology rendered old silent films completely worthless in the eyes of their producers, who proceeded, in the years after 1928, to destroy not only the surplus copies of their films, but also the negatives of up to 80% of all films shot before the introduction of sound. The cost of storing the negatives was considered to be more significant than the financial loss incurred by destroying the films outright.

Attempting to counter the loss of the cinematic heritage, cinephiles such as Henri Langlois started to collect and safeguard old films and created the first film archives and cinémathèques. At first, the screening and watching of those old films were quasi-religious rituals, reserved to the initiated. The Cinémathèque française, as Jean-Luc Godard describes it in his seminal video work Histoire(s) du cinéma, was a cathedral of cinema, and the screening of each film by the high priest Langlois a spiritual revelation. In the immediate post-war years, when André Bazin was writing about the ontology of the image and the love for film that redeems reality, another new media technology emerged that turned the film archive into an economic asset and helped to transform cinephilia from a quasi-religious sentiment to a potential economic force, a love that redeems the past and turns it into a capital for the future. Scorsese would be an example for this stage of cinephilia, having watched all the neo-realist films on American television where they were screened in the early fifties when Hollywood films were not yet available for television.

18. ‘Warners Film Library Sold’, Motion Picture Herald, Vol 202, No 10 (10 March 1956), p. 14.

19. For more on this process, see the relevant chapters in William Boddy, Fifties Television: The Industry and its Crtics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); and Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (London: BFI, 1992).

20. On the impact of the VCR on Hollywood business practices see also Frederick Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002).

21. Barbara Klinger, ‘The Contemporary Cinephile: Film Collecting in the Post-Video Era’, in R. Maltby & M. Stokes (eds.), Hollywood Spectatorship (London: BFI, 2001), pp. 132-151.

22. ‘Analysts Bullish on Pic Libraries’, Daily Variety, 15 August 1991).

An important step in the secularisation and economisation of cinephilia occurred in the US in the mid ‘50s. In 1956, Louis Chesler, a former mining engineer from Canada, bought the television rights to Warner Bros. pre-1948 films for 21 million dollars, an amount set by Jack Warner, as legend has it, because the contract was signed in New York’s famous restaurant 21. (18) Within a year, Chesler had earned more than the purchase price of 21 million dollars from the sale of television rights to the Warner Bros. animated cartoon shorts alone. From then on, the sale of television rights to old films became a major source of revenue for the Hollywood studios, a process for which the trade papers quickly adopted the expression ‘mining the archive.’ ‘Mining’ is a common expression among historians for archival work, but it is particularly apt in this case. Mining the film archive actually yields pecuniary rewards (while most historical research does not); Chesler’s former occupation was actually that of a mining engineer. (19)

In the ‘70s, another new media technology, home video, initially intended as a technology for ‘time-shifting’ (as it was then called) – for time-delayed watching of video programs – brought to the fore another facet of convergence of cinephilia and the archival impulse: the collector’s impulse. The VHS format prevailed over the Beta format mainly because the two-hour storage capacity allowed for the recording of movies, which the one-hour Beta cassettes did not. (20) The burgeoning home video market of the ‘80s was driven to an important degree by the buyers’ impulse to own their favorite films, to have them at their discretion for viewing much like books on a shelf. This possessive form of cinephilia had long been known in film collector’s circles, and it could be said that it was this impulse that lead to the creation of such remarkable film collections as that of the late William Everson, the largest private film collection in the US. With the introduction of VHS video, however, the collector’s impulse became quite commonplace and established itself as a mass-market phenomenon, as recently theorised by Barbara Klinger in her work on film collectors. (21) Finally, in the early ‘90s, new digital storage and reproduction technologies were developed, and the DVD emerged as the new standard format for home viewing. That the love of movies would drive the spread of the new technology as much as it had driven the VCR revolution was assumed as a given by Wall Street analysts as early as 1991. In the future, the major asset of studios would be their library, one analyst suggested. ‘Despite technological changes, what is going to be delivered in these systems is the movie … it will survive any technological upheaval.’ (22) As indeed it does, for it is an object of love, and love conquers all.

What has changed is the reach of that love, the reach of cinephilia. If in the first cinephile screenings, access to the cinematic past was limited to the initiated, we are now living in a cinematic culture of democratic (or secularised) initiation to a past that is now a public secret. To be part of those who are in the know about the cinematic past is still something special, but everybody can belong to that group: That is, in a way, the address of the Collector’s edition, or of DVD labels such as the Criterion Collection. It is also no coincidence that DVD editions usually contain extensive ‘making of’ films – the Lord of the Rings collector’s edition DVD, for instance, holds (to my knowledge) the world record, with a ‘making of’ that lasts for no less than seven hours, almost as long as the three films combined. ‘Making ofs’ are precisely a format of democratic initiation into a public secret. To be part of the group who knows the secret of how the movie was made is something special, but it is knowledge available to all who are willing to pay for the DVD. Through its address of democratic initiation into a public secret, then, the ‘making of’ mirrors, rehearses and intensifies what I propose to read as the scenario of contemporary mass market cinephilia: namely, the democratic initiation to the public secret of the cinematic past.

23. ‘Vault Holds Vivendi's Reel Value’, Los Angeles Times, 26 August, 2003.

That the democratic initiation into the public secret of the cinematic past has become a driving force of the global media economy may be seen from an important recent business decision, General Electric’s decision to finally enter the movie business and acquire Universal studios from the failing French media conglomerate Vivendi. General Electric, the world’s largest company, a producer of aircraft engines and weapons technology and the owner of the NBC television network, has had other chances to buy into the film industry, but again according to analysts, they were only prepared to do so now, in a media economy where the revenue from the studio’s film library, from the sale and rental of its catalogue of old films and television series, guarantees a steady income that minimises the financial risks of producing new films. (23) Thus the relationship of the cinematic past to the cinema’s present is now a paradoxical one. While it can be said that the past eats away at the present in terms of the viewer’s attention, it can also be said that the past subsidises the present in terms of film production and film financing.

So every new media technology, it would seem, offers a new outlet for a democratised cinephilia and acts as an engine for the contemporary film culture of democratic initiation into the public secret of the cinematic past. It is in that sense that what I propose to call the industrialisation of film cultural memory may be understood as the industrialisation of the convergence of new media technologies, cinephilia and the archival impulse.

The Chronopolitics of European Cinema

This brings me to a key point: the question of European Cinema and the invention of tradition in the digital age. The invention of tradition in the 19^th century, the creation of a suitable past to legitimise political aspirations and actions of the modern nation states, always had a geopolitical dimension. At the beginning, I quoted Ernest Renan to the effect that the nation consists of a community’s sense that its members have done great things together in the past and that they will do so in the future. In the second half of the 19^th century, in the imperial phase of colonialism, among the great things that the nation projected to do in the future was usually the mission to civilise the world, to bring western civilisation to the rest of the world. In order to properly do that, however, one first had to conquer and rule the world. Imperial geopolitics, in other words, always went hand in hand with chronopolitics: spatial rule was intertwined with a project of organising time, a project to rule over and through time in the sense of organising a past that was conducive to plans of action in the present and the future.

As I have tried to show in my discussion of the second news item, on the level of cultural policy but also, for the last few decades, to a large extent on the level of critical discourse, the question of European cinema has usually been framed in terms of geopolitics. European cinema is that which the Imperial Hollywood cinema is not, and the need, plus the political will, to build a European cinema that finds its expression (not least in the Media programs of the EU) has always been framed in terms of a plan to repossess that imaginary additional EU member state, that 26^th member state. But if European cinema is a geopolitical category, albeit defined ex negativo, and if geopolitics always come with their related chronopolitics, what about the chronopolitics of European cinema?

24. Letter from Jean Benoît-Lévy to Jean Renoir, June 6, 1943. UCLA Arts Special Collections Jean Renoir Papers, Collection 105, Box 4, Folder 1.

In order to begin to give an answer to this question, I will have to go back to the year 1943 and two French filmmakers in their American exile. The first filmmaker is Jean Renoir, who in this year had just finished his Resistance drama This Land Is Mine for RKO, starring Charles Laughton as a French small town lawyer taking on the Nazi occupiers. Renoir needs no introduction, but the second filmmaker probably does need an introduction, because he has not yet entered the canons of European cinema, despite an impressive body of work of close to 300 films to his name. He is Jean Benoît-Lévy, France’s most prolific and most respected director of educational and science films of the interwar period who spent his American exile years in New York. In a letter of 6 June 1943, Benoît-Lévy congratulated Renoir on the artistic success of This Land is Mine. In his letter, he proposes a curious operation. Writing about what is clearly a film financed, produced and marketed by an American major studio, Benoît-Lévy asserts that this film will most certainly become a French classic. ‘This film is French by virtue of the fact that it relies entirely on our [national] conception of cinematic art, which consists of selecting a strong Idea and putting every resource of the author’s talent at its disposal. It’s French because, being the work of an individual and not the fruit of an anonymous collaboration, it is the expression of the soul of the film’s auteur’. (24)

What is striking about Benoît-Lévy’s statement is not only the clarity of his alignment of ‘auteur’ cinema with ‘French national’ cinema, but also the fact that he applies this notion to an American film. In an excess of patriotic sentiment, characteristic perhaps of a Republican in exile, he performs a conceptual operation of appropriation: he turns a Hollywood film into a genuine specimen of French national cinema, on the basis of its perceived merits as an auteur film. For this operation to work, however, he has to assume a crucial dichotomy. The key difference between French and American cinema is that French cinema is auteur cinema whereas American cinema is not. The auteur is the distinctive feature of the French cinema as a national cinema, and a French auteur will always make French films qua auteur films, even in exile. Taken to its logical extreme, Benoît-Levy’s definition of French cinema as auteur cinema means that every auteur film is eventually a French film.

25. Alexander Horwath, ‘The Market vs. The Museum’, Journal of Film Perservation, no. 70 (1, 2005), pp. 5-9; followed by Nicola Mazzanti, ‘Response to Alexander Howarth’, pp. 10-16. (Mazzanti’s initial presentation is unpublished; the account of it offered here is based on Howarth’s remarks.) This issue of the Journal can be downloaded from <http://www.fiafnet.org
/pdf/uk/fiaf70.pdf>.

As absurd a consequence as this may seem at first, it is important to note that Benoît-Lévy’s appropriation of Renoir’s American film for the French canon is quite identical in territorial distribution and strategy with the procedure that the Cahiers critics applied to the studio-produced films of Hitchcock, Hawks and others in the ‘50s. The Cahiers critics went beyond Benoît-Lévy in that they applied the notion of auteur to directors who were not of French origin. In what can only be described as a case of Freudian family romance – i.e. the fantasy of an exchange of your disappointing real parents for more satisfactory and glamorous imaginary parents – Godard, Truffaut and their companions chose American directors over the French directors of the tradition de qualité to create a useful ancestry for themselves as critics and future film directors in their own right. While Henri Langlois had already included non-French directors in the canon of his film collection as early as the ‘30s, the originality of the politique des auteurs – and later the auteur theory as it was imported into the US by Andrew Sarris in the ‘60s – really was that it radically deterritorialised the notion of the auteur and cut lose the connection between auteur, cinema and French that still formed the basis of Benoît-Lévy’s attribution of artistic value to Renoir’s film.

The outcome of the Cahiers critic’s appropriation strategy was paradoxical in two ways. First, by deterritorialising the notion of the auteur, the Cahiers critics laid the groundwork for their own contribution to French cinema, a contribution that of course reconfirmed the idea of French films as auteur films so dear to Benoît-Lévy’s heart. Second, the French notion of the auteur as the distinctive feature of a national cinematic tradition suddenly became universal. In the wake of the Nouvelle Vague, every nation now had, or had to have, its significant auteurs and its New Wave. The auteur concept had of course been around for a long time, at least since the early ‘20s. In fact, Benoît-Lévy almost certainly did not think that he was being particularly original by defining the French film as the auteur film when he wrote his letter in ‘43. One could argue, however, that the auteur concept only became really productive when it was used – by the Cahiers critics in a fashion first exercised by Benoît-Lévy in the ‘40s and maybe even earlier by film archivists such as Langlois – as a conceptual tool for a guerilla-style appropriation of a non-European cinematic past in an attempt to invent a tradition and create a usable past that would allow them to act as directors on the European stage. This is without doubt the one example of a chronopolitics of European cinema in the second half of the 20^th century that has made a lasting impact not only on European, but also world cinema.

But, while a few select auteurs such as Almodóvar have become marketable brands in the last few years, it is now generally acknowledged that it will probably not be the auteur who makes the decisive contribution towards the creation of the 26^th imaginary member state. One frequently-heard reproach against the auteur as a concept suggests that the focus on auteur cinema in European state film financing has not particularly encouraged filmmakers to think about the crucial 14-to-28 age bracket of moviegoers that you need to reach if you want to achieve lasting success at the box-office. That may be so, but my point here is different. In a time when the archive has become the motor force of a film-driven global media economy, and when the past has in a way become the focal point of film culture and film-cultural activities, the archive has become the site where the territorial quarrels of world cinema are played out and decided. Accordingly, the work of the archivist and the film historian have acquired a new and thoroughly political meaning. The order of the day, then, is a new chronopolitics of European cinema: not a new politique des auteurs, but rather a politique des archives.

Politique des archives

Will I end this essay, then, with a call to action, a call for more funding for film archives and film restoration, for instance? No, for I would be preaching to the converted. All I want to say is that under the condition of the industrialisation of cultural memory, and with the chronopolitics of European cinema in mind, one should not, as a film historian and film scholar working on European cinema, be naïve, or modest, about the relevance of the work one is doing. Let me point to a debate that flared up among film archivists a few years ago to highlight this point.

At a 2005 FIAF conference, film historian and archivist Nicola Mazzanti, participating in a Technical Commission Workshop, proposed a vision of a future film culture driven by ‘users’, ‘access’ and ‘content’, a film culture in which ‘users’ (i.e., film viewers) gain access to the content (i.e., the archival holdings) through digital pathways, and without the guidance of either marketing campaigns or the expert knowledge of archivists and film historians. At the conference, Mazzanti’s contribution drew a response, several days later, from Alexander Horwath, director of the Österreichisches Filmmuseum in Vienna. Reacting to a general trend which he labeled ‘neo-liberal’, Horwath – in a text titled ‘The Market vs. The Museum’ (25) – defended the important work of the the museum and the curator, even under the conditions of a digital media economy. As I would like to argue, Horwath is both wrong about this supposed neo-liberalism, and right about the enduring importance of the curator – or, in my terms (which are somewhat different to Horwath;s), the archivist and the historian. In fact – as Horwath’s remarks suggest – the work of the curator (or, for me, the archivist-historian) has never been more important than under the conditions of a digital media economy.

Technically, the ‘neo-liberal’ vision is quite realistic. It is true that, for the foreseeable future, new and restored films will be stored in the analogue format of the polyester print rather than in digital files. Digital files pose problems of convertibility and stability, i.e., of long-term access, while projections for polyester prints are that they will remain stable in quality for about 1000 years. On the other hand, converting master prints to digital has become so cheap that there are few obstacles in terms of time or money to making entire film archives available in digital formats. As for distribution of these ‘contents’, their ‘access’, software engineers have been working on solutions for large-scale, searchable VOD (Video-On-Demand) databases since the mid ’90s, as witnessed in numerous contributions to scholarly journals such as Lecture Notes In Computer Science or Multimedia Systems. A specialty of software engineers of mostly Indian and Chinese origin (as the contributor names seem to indicate), these solutions evolve mostly around questions of storage and access. Some of the questions concern basic technical issues: how to pool servers for large databases? How to build data files by drawing on data stored on various servers? How to break down files into searchable units? Others concern problems of access, and come in two categories. A limited number of contributions address the user as highly knowledgeable about film and ask questions such as: is it possible to search for dialogue lines, individual words, individual shots, stylistic parameters such as lighting, music, costumes? Mostly, however, the proposed solutions are based on a profile of the user as someone with needs and desires, but little knowledge about film. They propose answers to questions such as: how to provide search leads to users? How to make databases searchable in ways that will attract, and satisfy, customers with limited knowledge of film history but clear-cut consumer profiles?

While none of the proposed solutions has clearly won the day yet, major media companies with large film libraries such as Newscorp, Time Warner or NBC Universal are currently jockeying for positions in the online market, buying up film-related websites and ticket services, with the long-term goal of building these sites into VOD access platforms. It is safe to say that the business policies of the major media conglomerates and the research and development activities of the software specialists will coalesce into well-defined business practices and generally adaptable software solutions in the not-too-distant future. It is also safe to say that these policies will prefer solutions addressed to ‘users’ with little knowledge about film, that is to film viewers who are very specific about their needs and desires but do not have the time to acquire the culture and knowledge that it takes to know which film from the vaults of film history corresponds to those needs and desires. Ideally, however, once the system is in place, we will have the technical conditions that make a film culture possible in which users have almost unlimited ‘access to digital film content’.

26. Philip Rosen identifies three aspects of what he calls ‘digital Utopia’: a belief among new media theorists in 1) the practically infinite malleability of the digital image, 2) the convergence of all media, and particularly all image media, in the new digital meta-medium, and 3) interactivity. One could argue that all three aspects are fulfilled by the vision of unlimited user access to film content: the infinite malleability of the digital image assures that old films will be accessible in the form of new and improved originals (viz. the 75-year Dolby digital edition of Gone With the Wind); the convergence of all media in the realm of the digital assures that all of film history will be made accessible through the new metamedium of the home computer; and the interactive user will leave his/her imprint on the digital archive by establishing, through access patterns, new canons. See Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2001), pp. 301-349.

27. The closing of Blockbuster video’s flagship store on Park Avenue in New York clearly marks a step in that direction. Spun off by former parent conglomerate Viacom in 2005, which bought the video store chain at the height of the home video boom in the ‘90s for more than one billion dollars, Blockbuster has seen a steep decline in revenue and profit for almost two years. Much of the company’s woes are attributed to the superior service of internet-based home delivery video rental services that save you the trip to the video store and operate without late fees. Cf. Jill Goldsmith, ‘Blockbusted! Vid Biz Gets Shaft from Jolting Techno-Changes, Quixotic Consumers’, Variety online, 9 October 2005; and Goldsmith & Steven Zeitchick, ‘Pics Revive Viacom Eevs – Paramount Profits Rise Before Conglom Split’, Variety online, 1 November 2005.

28. See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (University of Chicago Press, 1998).

Rather than neo-liberal, I would characterise this vision of the digital film culture of the foreseeable future as a cross between what Philip Rosen proposes to call ‘digital Utopianism’ and the pop culture euphoria of ’80s cultural studies. (26) In the age of digital film archives, this vision suggests, we will see the dawn of a John Fiske-style film culture in which the ‘official knowledge’ of canons established and enforced by cinémathèques, academics and film critics is replaced by the ‘popular knowledge’ of the user with virtually unlimited access to all of film history. It is a film culture in which Quentin Tarantino – the video-store vendor with a wide-ranging knowledge of film history and a taste for trash – replaces Henri Langlois, the auratic gatekeeper of an elusive archive of masterpieces, as the paradigm of the archivist; a film culture in which the preferred form of knowledge is the tip that will direct you to a film that you will like rather than the value judgment that will direct you to a film that you, and everyone else, should know.

The video store is, of course, now proving to be the first casualty of the new online forms of film distribution, with home-delivery rental services such as netflix.com sounding the death knell for the big video store chains such as Blockbuster. (27) But in the digital utopia/pop cultural euphoria perspective, this only means that the physical site of the production of popular film knowledge that was once the video store is now in the process of dematerialising into the virtual space of the Internet. Which is a good thing, too, for along with the video store vanishes the problem of the inventory, i.e. the question of which films to hold in store and which ones not to have available since, in the digital online archive, all films will always be available to everyone. In fact, the digital archive that offers unlimited access to all content, will not even be an archive anymore. The idea of the Archive, as Jacques Derrida reminds us, has something to do with αρχη, power and rule. (28) The archivist establishes the rules of access and chooses who to let in and who not to let in. In the digital online archive, the power of the archivist will vanish and dissipate into the hands of the user, thus making the notion of a ‘digital archive’ as oxymoronic as, say, the notion of a ‘digital index’. Or so it would seem.

There is one point of communication between such late-Gramscian techno-euphoria and what has become universally damnable under the label of neo-liberalism: both celebrate individual liberty in terms of freedom of choice. Now I personally would find it hard to imagine a sufficient number of good reasons to support a claim that any celebration of individual liberty is in itself wrong. Rather, my problem with the late-Gramscian techno-euphoric vision of digital film culture is that it vastly overestimates the actual freedom of choice, as well as the degree to which freedom of choice will be able to work as an engine of a new and improved film culture.

29. Chris Anderson, ‘The Long Tail’, Wired, no. 10 (2004), pp. 170-177.

Chris Anderson (editor of Wired magazine) has developed his own vision of how digital storage will affect the visibility of films. (29) ‘Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bit stream’. Anderson’s argument, which applies to the online trading of both music and film, runs roughly like this: while, under the traditional film distribution system, a limited number of big blockbuster movies make most of the box-office money, leaving little space in theatres and video stores for smaller films (let alone arthouse films), things will be different once VOD and online distribution take hold. Under the conditions of potentially unlimited access to all films ever made, heretofore obscure and unknown films and even flops will end up finding their audience and making money for their copyright holders, thanks to users’ online recommendations. Anderson proposes calling this the long tail effect. In terms of the storage and distribution of knowledge about film history, user recommendation networks will take the place formerly occupied by the video store clerk with an encyclopaedic knowledge of his inventory, who in turn had replaced the auratic film archivist of the early days of the cinémathèque – or, in other words, every geek with a computer and a taste for movies will replace Tarantino who in turn had replaced Langlois. In terms of the economics of the archive, it is the user and the demand of the user that really turns the archive into a resource, according to Anderson.

30. Felix Oberholzer-Gee & Koleman Strumpf, The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis (Harvard Business School, 2004-5). Tracking file sharing activities by tapping into the login-data of users, the authors show that file sharing not only follows the patterns of marketing campaigns, but also has no perceptible effect on record sales. Rather, the slump in record sales has to be attributed to a new distribution of entertainment expenditures. This view is treated as heretical by mainstream commentators – which comes as no surprise. The entertainment and (particularly) music industry’s stance has long been that file sharing does affect sales, that it constitutes piracy and has to be outlawed. Among other things, Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf reveal the quixotic, or rather ideological, nature of that fight.

31. It is true that few marketing experts or studio heads anticipated the home video boom of the ‘80s, just as it is true that few anticipated that people would be willing to buy video cassettes with old episodes of The X-Files when these first became available in stores in the mid ‘90s. However, once these subsidiary markets were established, the conventional patterns of marketing soon took hold.

Unfortunately, a much-debated study of the online music market by economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf – which made page one of The New York Times when it was first published – shows that there is little evidence for the long tail effect, at least not in file sharing. (30) Apart from the fact that we are still a far cry from the digital Utopia of complete availability of every film preserved in the archives of this world, customer choices or user access patterns follow the patterns of marketing campaigns. For lack of time or better clues, users will access content as advertised, both ‘new’ and ‘old’. (31) If traditional cinephilia was a bond of love and curiosity, mass-market cinephilia is a blend of love and marketing. This also means that there is little incentive for the copyright holders and film library owners to make their complete holdings available to the freewheeling user who, through their browsing and viewing activities will spontaneously valorise these holdings and turn them into profitable propositions, and more incentive to focus on a few promising titles which are then marketed properly.

From which we can draw two conclusions. First, for the archive to become a resource, it takes more than just IT and a user with access. It takes significant investments in the marketing and distribution of archival contents. In that sense, the ‘industrialisation of cultural memory’, the process of actively making the cinematic past coterminous with the present and turning the archive into a resource, may indeed still be understood as an industrial production process, at least in the sense that ‘mining the archive’ involves the investment of capital and some sort of labour (not least on the part of the user, who invests his/her time, and money, in the viewing of a film). Second, since the user will not use his power of free and unlimited access even under conditions where such a thing apparently exists as in online music trading platforms, the αρχη, the power of the archivist remains unchallenged in one crucial way: He/she who really knows the archive will still be able to guide and control those who wish to search the archive (particularly if he also controls the copyright to the holdings).

But if the user poses no real challenge to the power of the archivist, the marketing campaign aimed at turning the archive into a resource does. The archivist-historian-curator and the marketing campaign are direct competitors on the field of the production of knowledge about film history. They both turn archival holdings into programs, and they both produce – and suppress – knowledge that could and does inform viewer’s choices. It is a competition and a challenge that the archivist can only lose by not accepting. Which is why, as Horwath rightly suggests, the work of the film curator (or, as I am putting it, the archivist and the historian) has lost none of its importance. Quite the contrary. As archives turn into resources of the global media economy, the work of the archivist, film historian and curator is more important and potentially more influential than ever before. Because writing film histories as a form of writing history through film in Europe and elsewhere – but particularly in Europe – just might turn into an invention of new traditions, with unforeseeable consequences.

And maybe – since we have been discussing parasite tactics – some of these new traditions will even be transmitted through marketing campaigns.

		© Vinzenz Hediger and Rouge November 2008. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.