collecting amateur content (to make an archive) the nosarchives.com case study. cecilia pagliarani
TRANSCRIPT
speaker: Cecilia Pagliarani
Collecting Amateur Content (to make an archive)
the nosarchives.com case-study
nosarchives is a private memories archive set up in 2010 by my partner Manuel Kleidman and me as a kind of democratic adventure.
In six years we gathered more than one 100 family funds consigned by direct heirs, and 350 anonymous funds whose heirs we managed to locate.
This archive was born from passion, after seeing for many years, while working as a documentary editor and director, how productions were handling archival images, without any specific ground rules. Establishing a clear position in regards to the heirs was our first important step, as shown in the video. Our position is that of gallerists, nothing more and nothing less. We showcase their works and for that we deserve to be compensated.
Thanks to the existence of our archive and through their publication, those celluloid films become artworks, according to the law, and we represent them for all kinds of use, commercial and educational.
A DEMOCRATIC ADVENTURE
Goals and Issues of a private memories archive
1. State of the art in the relationship between the state and the private memories archive.
As its status is based on a stretch of the copyright law, an amateur film and photographs archive is just now gaining some sort of legitimacy in eyes of institutions - at least in Italy.
Obtaining public funding to maintain the archive is almost impossible. This is because the activity is perceived as interesting, so there's eventually a possibility to find support for the modernization of the technical instruments, but is not yet considered of "cultural interest" and is therefore not granted annual funds for its general work.
The commercial nature of nosarchives.com is a incentive to the access to funding cause the conservation of private memories is perceived like a sharing activity between citizens (of the world) but not as an actual commercial activity.
b. PersonalThe lack of funding establishes a a chain of alternative plans that prevent the installation of a stable employment setting, both in terms of personnel and of activities. Through agreements with educational institutions such as local universities and colleges, we were able to continue our scanning and database ingest work with trainees, with a turnover of about three months each. This creates issues for what concerns the handover of competences, as easily imaginable, and puts the archive management in the position of never being able to truly delegate actions, such as the administration and compilation of metadata. However, much satisfaction and inspiration came from this peculiar relationship with the students, some wrote their dissertation on nosarchives, others inspire the "pop" nature of our communication.
nosarchives.com's collectingAt least twice a month, we receive boxes full of materials that the author's families send or bring to us. How is this trust built, and why giving it to us and not to others?
And specifically, why would a family from Luxembourg (Merlo) or from the south of France (Bonnet) comes to us and not to an archive from their own country?
1. The precious help received from Hubert best to conceptualize our position in relations to the heirs definitely allowed us to have the right approach to difficult matter, so anarchically treated until not long ago. Therefore, unlike other archives with way bigger means than ours, we were able to maintain a strong coherency of image and message, since our first day online until today.Families know that they're not signing any release, nothing is being ceded to the archive, they never feel defrauded of their material, that is none other than the simulacrum of their lost affections. We always keep this in mind when dealing with their materials. They know that we don't have any funds to digitalize their films for free, so they offer a minimum refund to have a copy of their memories. All materials are returned to the owners after they've been organized, cleaned, numbered and scanned. The heirs contribute to the descriptions of the images by mail. They're involved in every phase of the process and know that for every sale they'll receive 50% of the price paid by the productions. This policy doesn't bring much gain to the archive, but it allowed us to increase the number of contributors from 8 (in 2010) to 25 (in 2015).
2.Our trainees also work as memories agents.
The knowledge we try to pass on is the curiosity regarding the magic of the celluloid image, and I think we've accomplished that, as many of our family collections came from our own trainees' research work among their acquaintances.
3. Cultural actions turn into marketing actions.
In 2012 our archive included about 4000 and we started to wonder how to let the world know about our collections, which date back to 1920 (a trip around the world in 9,5mm) up to 1985 (work tripes in Asia and Italian engineers' visits to oil-plants).
We then decided to organize "Il gusto della memoria", that from a simple showcase evolved into a contest-based festival since it's 2013 edition. The only rule in our contest is to submit a film comprised of at least 60% of images taken from nosarchives.com. This year, the Istituto Luce became a festival partner, both as a footage source and as a co-producer of the winning films along nosarchives.
Collecting's rarities The archive mainly receives 16mm, 8mm and 9,5mm films, while super8 reels are rarer (at the moment, we have more than 10 spanning various decades). But there's also astounding facts that have happened:
1. Mister Matrigale, along his non entirely interesting holiday movies from his motorcycle trips around africa in the 70s, also brought us a suitcase full of his grandfather's belongings. This man is about 80 years old and his grandfather would shoot photos about 150 years ago. We found 580 glass plates shot between 1880 and 1915, depicting Rome with dirt roads, navy cadets in Naples, their official balls and the thermodynamics laboratories. A true rare gem that as today is gaining Mr. Matrigal a lot more than his own films.
2. nosarchives is hosted for 5 months by the prestigious 'Bottega Margutta', head venue of the Via Margutta International Association (that has been Rome's official street of artists since the Renaissance). Various historical roman families have brought us their films, until one day Francesco Piccolo arrived with two 35mm reels. Our scanner can't process 35mm films, but by simply looking at the negatives we realized it was a professional print, developed by a famous cinema laboratory. It's the film of his mother's first wedding, with the famous notary Staderini, shot by Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia, a master director of the “White telephones” genre and author of 6 Totò movies. This encounter sparkled the birth of a research and restoration laboratory, set up by nosarchives.com in collaboration with the Cineteca Nazionale and the La Sapienza University of Rome. A DVD documenting this process will be produced in the upcoming months.
Achivements attained in 5 years of the archiveCollaborations with historical and film research institutes of the Lazio RegionsCINETECA NAZIONALEDASS (Arts and films studies department of the La Sapienza University)ISTITUTO LUCE CINECITTA’(from 2015 also partner and co-producer of the Il Gusto della Memoria festival) Institutional RecognitionREGIONE LAZIOUNESCO
clip video “L’Aldilà”
A brief introduction to our future plansA new location, into the most importat restoration lab of Rome AUGUSTUS COLOR, member of DigItaly
A fanny way to collect, nosarchives bougth a 12m peniche to cross the european rivers to collect and organise screenings ( of course in summer season)
A new website,Nosarchives should rebuild its web portal. But how? Which website could work as a reference? Nosarchives is working with a lot of young people, but instead of convincing them to think like an archive, the archive itself is being convinced by them to think “young”. Pictures are now shared facebook, to stimulate and describe what we are experiencing: an historical selfie. So, how are we supposed to uncover the historical part of our work? Will a decriptiondo? Is it enough?
Nosarchives would like to imagine a pathway towards a mental process of different creations. Extirpate the image from the past turn it into future, by creating creative space of work, by reusing the digitized materials. Pull it out from its original contest, and give it an actual one: a work on the archive film timelessness and anachronist essence. Emotions versus the footage history, how to contain both?
