As we look to the May 2020 Orphan Film Symposium, devoted to Water, Climate, and Migration, I think of the first symposium 20 years ago, when the first presenter was a geologist. Conceptions of preservation begin with where stuff is stored; often the answer is underground.
Water, climate, and migration. Each of these intertwined topics is of course highly topical and attracting urgent attention, but they have always been important subjects.. In conceiving of this symposium we have not used the significant word Anthropocene, but it now haunts our thoughts about historical audiovisual recordings of planet Earth, its physical and atmospheric environments, its landscapes, oceans, shores, cities, farms, flora, and fauna. (Earth’s moon and solar system have been experiencing human impact too. The storied searches for lost master video recordings of the July 1969 lunar landing have received considerable media attention during this 50th anniversary of the moon walk. This week we read of the Arch Mission Foundation landing an archive/library “backup” of the planet on the lunar surface and “solar locations.”)
The communities of archivists, preservationists, and librarians have generated a significant body of thought and action-plans around concerns about Anthropocene destruction. The critical literature is too vast to summarize, but we can point to resources such as Project ARCC (archivists responding to climate change) and the Libraries and Archives in the Anthropocene Collection, which stemmed from a two-day 2017 colloquium on “the impact of environmental change on historical memory institutions,” hosted by NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program. (Video recordings here.) MIAP student Danielle Calle has been writing about “Adapting Moving Image Archives to the Anthropocene” throughout her two years in the program.
The connection between saving orphaned works and environmental issues existed from the beginning of the Orphan Film Symposium. At the first event in 1999, the first speaker on the first panel was a geologist. Tom Benjamin of Iron Mountain Film and Sound Archives was introduced by Ken Weissman (head of the film lab at the Library of Congress) as working on “the front lines” of the profession.
Here’s a transcription of his presentation (“Environment Trends for Motion Picture Preservation”) at Orphans of the Storm: Saving “Orphan Films” in the Digital Age.
Occasionally, media archivists get attention when celebrity comes near. In 2016, Tom Benjamin the geologist-archivist was the guide for the History Channel when no-less-than Ozzy Osbourne and son visited Iron Mountain’s noted underground facility in Pennsylvania. For the TV series Ozzy and Jack’s World Detour, Tom and colleagues brought out of archival storage the master audiotape recording of Mr. O’s first single after Black Sabbath: “Crazy Train,” written and recorded by Osbourne with guitarist Randy Rhoads and bassist Bob Daisley in 1980.
Here’s the 3-minute scene from the episode called “Iron Mountain Men.”
(Longer cut viewable here.)
The relationship between climate change and human activity is sometimes measured as a Cold War phenomenon, or at least something that became tangible with the systematic detonation of atomic weapons in the late 1940s and 50s. Fitting then that both Ozzy’s 1980 song and Tom’s 1999 remarks invoke the Cold War. “Heirs of a cold war / that’s what we’ve become / Inheriting troubles / I’m mentally numb,” sang the crazed British vocalist. More to our point, the Iron Mountain expert reminded his largely American audience at the first Orphans, “Underground storage first became attractive as an indirect result of the Cold War. The Russians had the bomb. We had the bomb, and folks were concerned about nuclear attack. The massive underground structures built as refuges from nuclear fallout are now being retrofitted for new purposes, including film vaults.” The connection to atomic insecurity is quite direct in the case of the company that launched as “Iron Mountain Atomic Storage, Inc.” in 1951. (See “Our History.”)
By 1999, moving image archivists were aware that the Library of Congress and the Packard Foundation had acquired the former Federal Reserve Bank bunker in Culpeper, Virginia, to house the film, video, and recorded sound collections of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center (opened in 2007). That underground facility too originated as a Cold War defense against nuclear attack.
Another of the major motion picture storage enterprises, Underground Vaults & Storage, traces its origin story similarly. In 1959, “during the height of Cold War nuclear concerns,” a working salt mine in Kansas was marketed “as a safe haven for sensitive information and assets.” (“About Us, Underground Vaults.” ) “Safely tucked away from prying eyes and disaster,” millions of items sit “encased in solid stone, more than 45 stories below the ravages of man and nature.”
The association of preservation with underground geology continues into the realm of digital preservation. When Linda Tadic (former president of the Association of Moving Image Archivists and teacher in both the NYU and UCLA programs) launched a digital preservation service for “off-cloud, green storage,” she called it Digital Bedrock. (Her slide presentation “The Environmental Impact of Digital Preservation” is here.)
When we convene NYU’s “Orphans 12” at Eye Filmmuseum, May 23-26, 2020, we might recall Giovanna Fossati‘s saying our theme was chosen “because Amsterdam.” She was referring to the subject of water, but we might also remember that the Nobel Prize recipient who popularized the term Anthropocene in regards to climate change — Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen — was born in Amsterdam.
— Dan Streible