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Author
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Topic: Serbian film archives in danger of being lost
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 01-04-2005 11:37 AM
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4144783.stm
Serbia losing its cinema history
By Matt Prodger
BBC News, Belgrade
As a country Serbia and Montenegro is neither large nor wealthy, and yet it has two of the biggest archives of newsreel and feature films in the world.
But years of neglect and a lack of money mean that some valuable and unique items of visual history are now being lost.
Beside a busy, rainswept highway in Belgrade lie the shabby offices of Filmske Novosti, the old Yugoslav newsreel archive. Deep in the basement is almost 100 years of history on 15 million metres of film.
Images of the field battles of World War I, the communist partisans of World War II, a unique visual record of the Non-Aligned Movement born in the 1960s, Tito's Yugoslavia, Gaddafi's Libya, Nasser's Egypt...
Yet these images will soon be lost forever, because Filmske Novosti is in crisis.
Cramped conditions
The corridors are lined with teetering stacks of film cans. There is so little space that the staff pile them anywhere they can - even in the toilet and the kitchen. The air is damp, the cans rusting, the temperature far too high for the delicate film.
The basic problem is finding the money
Miodrag Perisic
The Serbian government lacks the money to maintain the collection. Archivist Miodrag Perisic says that appeals for help from abroad have fallen on deaf ears.
"The reaction has been poor," he says.
"The only answer is 'We can help you'. But even then it's only to offer know-how, advice, and nothing more than that.
"We need help to maintain, to really refresh, this archive and to get new technology. The basic problem is finding the money to do so. It's heart-breaking.''
Feature films
It is not just news footage that is under threat.
An ageing building hidden in woodland on the outskirts of Belgrade houses some 100,000 feature films: one of the biggest collections in the world.
Among them are films like Karadjordje, the epic tale of the man who freed Serbs from Ottoman rule. It was the first film to be made in the Balkans - in 1911 - and was painstakingly restored abroad.
The situation is really very tough
Dinko Tucakovic
Dinko Tucakovic from the Yugoslav Film Archives shows off a priceless Lumiere camera, one of the first, and a Charlie Chaplin cane donated by the actor's granddaughter. But neither eases his worries about the rest of the archive.
"The situation is really very tough," he says.
"First of all our country has major economic problems, and film archiving is very expensive anywhere in the world.
"The second problem is we don't have proper space for storage. And at the moment the most serious problem is we're understaffed - heavily understaffed."
Just five people are in charge of maintaining and repairing thousands of films. Just how many they do not know, because they have not had time to count. At the current rate it will take decades to go through them.
Meanwhile a large part of film history is destined for the bin.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/europe/4144783.stm
Published: 2005/01/04 11:20:00 GMT
© BBC MMV
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 01-04-2005 01:45 PM
Since when was it only the former Yugoslavia which has a problem with lack of public support for audiovisual archives? They don't have enough money, don't have proper storage facilities and don't have enough archivists. That situation applies to virtually every public sector audiovisual archive in Europe. Simply on a back of an envelope calculation I worked out that in my insitution, with only one full-time technician plus me doing some preservation and telecine work when she's snowed under or on leave, it would take us 706 years £70-90 million in consumables (depends on how you average the estimates for the volume of material that would need duping, and on what criteria you make the decision), equipment depreciation and lab orders to fully examine, repair and if necessary copy to preserve our entire holdings. And believe it or not, those figures look pretty good compared to those of the other UK regional archives!
I'm not saying that the Serbians aren't faced with a very serious problem, but this piece does seem to imply that they're the only ones. As the recent BFI 'restructuring' has shown, even internationally known institutions which were once considered centres of excellence in film preservation are being squeezed of money and cultural influence by governments throughout Europe. Compared to the volume of taxpayers money which goes into traditional, paper document archiving, it's an international scandal.
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