The dilemma of archival leftovers
Bits & Pieces is a one-of-a-kind collection of unidentified film rushes. Today, however, digital technologies are making it possible to identify many of these images, forcing curators to revisit the collection’s narrative. How is the Eye Filmmuseum to deal with this new landscape?
by Elif Rongen, curator of silent film at EYE Filmmuseum
A film can filled with leftover fragments that are impossible to identify and thus impossible to catalogue properly. That was the starting point for the Bits & Pieces Collection.
It began in the early 1990s. Then Filmmuseum’s deputy director, Erik de Kuyper, and filmmaker Peter Delpeut were fascinated by the leftovers they found in the depots of the museum’s archive. They felt the need to preserve and show these images to the audiences, even if it wasn’t very clear what they were looking at. So they built a special catalog for this: Bits & Pieces.
As time went by more compilations were made by various curators, and a set of strict principles emerged for adding to the Bits & Pieces. The compilations must echo the archivists’ amazement at first sight. Thus, the fragments are used as they have arrived to the archive, unedited. They must not be longer than a few minutes each. They must contain ‘something’ spectacular, intriguing, unexpected, fascinating, beautiful, cinematic. Such attributes can apply to anything within the fragments: the content, the subject matter, the colours, the image itself, the framing, the lighting, the decay, the atmosphere, the décor… But perhaps most importantly they must be unidentified, because when a fragment is identified it becomes part of something bigger that can be easily registered into the database under its own name.
Better technologies, less Bits & Pieces
In the recent years, the production of reels for Bits & Pieces has decreased, but not due to a decrease in film material entering the archives of the museum. We still very regularly receive old film material (in fact nowadays we get more fragments than longer prints). That said, the can that contains our Bits & Pieces’ top candidates doesn’t fill as quickly as it used to in the earlier days.
This is because new technologies help us identify footage better and quicker than ever before. Leaving aside the fact that at the beginning of Bits & Pieces there were many fascinating unidentified fragments already waiting to be compiled, the technological tools to identify film in the early nineties have been drastically upgraded.
Today, thanks to more dynamic and faster ways to share and identify media, almost every meter of film containing a substantial image gets swiftly identified and properly catalogued. A research that used to take a week, is now completed within minutes. And though in general this is good news, for Bits & Pieces this means that only the dullest and most generic fragments are left unidentified, like a couple sitting on a bench in a park, or someone sitting in a living room drinking coffee, footage of parades, ordinary animals doing ordinary things, etc.
The old and the new way of archiving
I remember when I started working in the identification of nitrate holdings in the late 1990s at EYE (back then Nederlands Filmmuseum). In those days it was unimaginable to take a quick picture with the phone, or to quickly consult big databases online. We used to take notes, make drawings, make long distance calls describing images to other curators, and go to the library a few days later to leaf through the big source books in search of answers.
But that time is over. Now we use our smartphones to take pictures of footage, WhatsApp them simultaneously to experts all over the world, post them to Facebook and ask the international community of film curators for tips, or even upload them to Google image search to see if we can get lucky with a match. If needed, we can also run very quick and easy searches in immense filmographic databases using the name of a fictional character. We can search for films in digitized history papers or film trade records.
Given the speed at which technology develops, we can imagine that the toolkit used by curators for the identification of old footage will only get better and better. As individual databases interlink using aggregators, the search for films will become more centralized, and as translation tools make better use of self-learning technologies, like Machine Learning, surfing through metadata in search of world-class hidden gems will open its spectrum to even the most remote languages. In addition to all that, lighter video compressions will make it possible to embed entire films in the film catalogs, something that post-Youtube generations might take for granted, but what for many film archivists is still a dream to come.
The future of Bits & Pieces
Using today’s technologies, it becomes very easy to identify many of the earlier fragments included in Bits & Pieces. This fact conflicts with one of the rules on which the collection’s unique aesthetic was founded. Adding to that the fact that new suitable candidates for the collection are getting harder to find, does all this mean that Bits & Pieces is coming to an end?
The short answer is no.
In 2018, we added 24 new Bits & Pieces, bringing the current total of fragments to 647, roughly 15 hours of material. We are still pleasantly surprised by the anonymous archival images we are confronted with, such as the gorgeously coloured footage of a fashion show, or the idyllic images of two men taking a ride on a mountain road. Haunting faces of people looking straight to the camera, like those of a group of tired WWI soldiers walking along the trenches, or the snippet of Captain Wilkins waving to the camera as he is about to take off with his ‘kangaroo’ aircraft for a flight from England to Australia in 1919.
Using today’s technologies, it becomes very easy to identify many of the earlier fragments included in Bits & Pieces. This fact conflicts with one of the rules on which the collection’s unique aesthetic was founded.
As this last example gives away, not all the Bits & Pieces we select today are entirely anonymous, yet they still qualify as odd archival leftovers that would remain unpreserved if we weren’t committed to making them part of the collection.
In essence, Bits & Pieces is about finding ways of sharing what normally would remain behind shut doors. Whatever the future brings, technology should work toward opening up the obscure parts of the archive as our archival tools and understanding evolve. The curator’s role should be to supervise and guide this narrative, deciding which elements to highlight or leave in the shadows.
In the case of Bits & Pieces, watching audiences eagerly try to identify the images has always been a fulfilling experience, for in this process they feel challenged to engage with the archive in a playful manner. This kind of experience is just as valuable to us as fitting the collection pieces neatly within the timeline of film history. If technology now helps us more than ever to identify the fragments, this doesn’t change our overall commitment to go on with Bits & Pieces as a means of sharing our pleasure and amazement with audiences. On the contrary, in the coming years technology will no doubt enhance this commitment in ways we might not yet be able to imagine.
