This document summarizes a talk given by Rick Prelinger on the concept of "evidentiary cinema" and the potential role of home movies in archives. Some key points: - Home movies challenge conventional archival practices due to their granular documentation of everyday life. They resist over-narrativization and bridge individuals to larger histories. - Home movies could help archives by mobilizing public participation in collection, description, and analysis. This would help address the asymmetry between institutional and personal histories. - Integrating personal records into archives presents opportunities to build new relationships with the public and enable new forms of scholarship through open access to large amounts of amateur footage.

1. The New Evidentiary Cinema
Rick Prelinger
UC Santa Cruz, February 2013
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2. 2
In recent years we've seen a lot of work that's based on archival materials, and seen a fair amount of
research and writing about archival cinema. This is an excellent trend, in my view, but I think
something's missing. There's very little talk about archives themselves -- we leave that to archivists
and the occasional philosopher. I think we might be making a tremendous mistake. While moving
image archives are conceptually at least as old as cinema itself, it sometimes seems as if their
relationship with cinema -- especially with cinema studies -- is still emergent. As eaters, we're
starting to demand more information about how our food is produced. Perhaps we should try to ask
more about how archives produce history.
And defining the specificity of the archives is tricky, too. We're in an age of historical simultaneity,
where archival and contemporary images, text, sound and artifacts combine and interoperate within
the culture. The "archive," whatever it is, is difficult to distinguish from contemporary media
distribution channels.
So today I'm going to set the stage by reviewing some of the work I'm engaged in on archives and
their future. I'll speak about the unstable state of contemporary moving image archives, suggest
what I think is their unfulfilled potential, and propose some possible trajectories of convergence
between repositories and makers, opportunities that might radically change the nature of collecting
and production. I'll also suggest that certain sectors of archival cinema might have the potential to
bridge cultural and community divides. And I'll finish by describing my own film work over the past
few years.

3. Exactitude vs. anecdote
3
1898: Boleslas Matuszewski, a cameraman, proposes the Motion Pictures Historical Depository
(Dépôt de cinématographie historique). While his employer Louis Lumière is said to have stated,
"Film is an invention without a future," Matuszewski suggests a public archives that performs regular
screenings, mandatory deposit for the national patrimony (dépôt légal), and a periodical devoted to
film preservation. In support of his initiative, he cites film's "authenticity, exactitude, and precision
that belongs to it alone." But Paula Amad, in her book Counter-Archive (from where these
translations are taken), points out that Matuszewski is not completely resolved: he also expresses
concern that the cameraman might "slip into" "anecdotal History." Exactitude vs. anecdote.
We'll come back to this later.

4. A few words regarding archives
4
Throughout this talk, you'll see me switching hats, even though it makes me uncomfortable to
acknowledge that archivists and makers fulfill separate and distinct roles. This is not inevitable. And
yet archives and makers desperately need one another, even if most of them don't yet know it. The
archives offers a great deal to makers: the opportunity to play simultaneously in past and present, to
perform historical interventions in a world much in need of context, to invoke spaces and activities
that are difficult or impossible to simulate, and to quote with authority and humor.
And these are just points of departure -- I'd contend we've hardly come to terms with what we as
makers can do with our collections. And when archives are criticized as dysfunctional, rarefied, or
unavailable, makers could offer them the opportunity to redefine themselves as open workshops,
mothers of production and exemplars of populism. This is a LIFELINE that might refresh the aging
and poorly examined consensus that permits archives to remain open, as essential cultural
institutions.

5. "For it is in the nature of
artistic creation to
confer importance."
— Bertolt Brecht:
"Telling the Truth: Five Difficulties" (1935)
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But despite their antinomies, both archivists and archivally-focused mediamakers inhabit unstable
territory.
Well, so what else is new? This is the 21st century. But permanence is inscribed in the archival
charter, if anything is; instability is an almost unspeakable condition. And even though today's
complex and crowded media landscape greets most moving image work with indifference, and the
boundaries between amateur and commercial, vernacular and professional media chip away at its
authority, many makers might take strong exception to any characterization of their work as
unstable or ephemeral. In fact we often perceive ephemerality as an indicator of amateur and
vernacular imagemaking, while custom and the market encourage those who self-define as artists to
produce discrete works, works that bear titles, works that can be distributed, collected and
preserved. "For it is in the nature of artistic creation to confer importance," said Brecht. But the red
velvet curtain frames fewer and fewer works today. The eternal, ahistorical present absorbs what it
can, and much of the rest is forgotten. And, sooner or later, unplayed and unshared media devolves
into unplayability.

6. Internet Archive
San Francisco
British Film Institute
Berkhamsted
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Whether it lives in a neoclassical building with columns or an prefab steel structure in an industrial
park, the moving image archives has few claims to stability and even fewer to permanence.

7. Moving image archives:
short history,
little theory
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Moving image archives are youngsters with pretensions to eternity. Conceptually, they're as old as
cinema itself, but most are much younger, less than thirty years old in fact. And, aside from a few
conspicuous exceptions, most of the several thousand North American moving image repositories
that we can identify as such are accidental -- they sprang up to address problems for which no
other solutions could be found. These young, accidental institutions aspire to collect some of the
most unstable and ephemeral media forms and preserve them forever (and, not incidentally,
preserve cinema culture as well). Can we imagine a more presumptuous, impossible mission?
And while archives and archivists have formed a variety of official and unofficial networks, the field
is far from coordinated, and whatever consensus seems to exist is typically assumed rather than
spelled out. Our founding principles, codes of ethics, and relations to our users are frequently ad
hoc, inconsistent, in flux. And unlike the textual archives field, where practice is often informed by a
body of generally accepted theory, moving image archivists seldom look up from their rewinds. The
politics embedded in our workflows are hardly discussed. There's a disturbing tendency to eternalize
the present when it comes to thinking about the way we do our work.

8. 8
Compared to our European colleagues, North American moving image archivists have little
theory of our own, and whatever there is flows exceedingly slowly from theoreticians to
trenches. In fact, I'd contend that much archival work is a largely unexamined, hands-on
externalization of cinephilia. So in the absence of a theoretical basis for much of our work, I
would argue that we must instead speak with resolve.
In all fairness, our empiricism may be more of a feature than a bug. Compared to libraries,
museums and textual archives, moving image collections are a relatively new sector of
memorykeeping, and this renders us more open to new ideas. There have been some
conspicuous examples of paradigmatic shifts in our field in the past generation: storage
overtaking film-to-film copying; the idea of "access as preservation," ephemeral and orphan
documents moving from periphery to center, etc. Archives are, in fact, more open to
externalities than they are to developing their own ideas. They react more than they act: to the
strictures of enclosure laid down by the commercial media industry, to legacy ideas about
archives put forth by theoreticians of the textual, and to organizational and budget constraints
set by managers. And they often react anxiously.

9. 9
If, to paraphrase Howard Besser and many others, the default condition of analog
material is to persist, while the default condition of digital material is to decay, I would
suggest that the default condition of the contemporary archives is now anxiety. Anxiety
pervades archival practice. Archives accustomed to artisanal collecting, selection,
appraisal and preservation are now facing firehoses of data and media that no entity
(even a Google) could ever completely collect. Systemic austerity has undermined the
consensus that archives perform essential functions, and we are seeing the shrinkage
and even disappearance of key institutions. (National Archives of Canada, Georgia State
Archives, to name two). Universal online access to holdings, an exciting prospect to some
archivists, is still a threat to many. Will archivists follow typesetters, telegraphers and
switchboard operators into oblivion?

10. Trapped between the
promise of permanence and
the reality of ephemerality
http://www.oscars.org/science-technology/council/projects/digitaldilemma/
http://www.oscars.org/science-technology/council/projects/digitaldilemma2/index.html
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And even the specific materiality of the physical materials we collect is called into question. During
the film era, archives embraced the certainty of celluloid, even though that might have been
deceptive. Film-to-film copying was a stable, physically based method.
Today's "digital dilemma," as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences puts it, traps archives
between photochemical technologies that will likely soon be extinct and digital workflows that
produce bits we don't yet know how to preserve. In the case of film, we can still collect, but we soon
won't be able to copy; and in the case of new digital formats like DCPs (digital cinema packages) we
have as yet little assurance that we can either collect or copy the materials.

11. 11
The digital dilemma makes news, because it resonates with widespread concern about the fate of
our personal and family records, and about the survival of fragile documents of mass self-
expression. This shared territory of concern between archivists and the public they represent could
be better exploited, but it's usually associated with anxiety and a discourse of loss. In fact archivists
are not above triggering their own version of moral panics when they need help. We saw this with
the "Nitrate Won't Wait" campaigns of the 1970s, and we're seeing it today with digital anxiety,
which conflates format obsolescence, bit rot, fear of the cloud, distrust of large corporations, and
more.

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I've spoken on other occasions about how tradition, fear of loss of control, and excessive deference
towards copyright holders (who may not even exist) cause archives to erect walls of enclosure
around the materials they hold. This is self-defense at its most destructive.
For a long time I've been interested in trying to bridge the divide between archives and makers. This
was one of the reasons I started working with Internet Archive in 1999 to put thousands of our films
online. This was generally a success -- there have been many tens of millions of films viewed and
downloaded -- but it hasn't influenced many other archives to do the same thing at scale. They
stream but refuse to allow download or reuse. And while access to archival moving images has
improved steadily since that time, it is still something of a radical act to open up archives for uses
not explicitly vetted by their custodians.

13. 13
Much of my work over the past several years has centered around home movies, and my new
project is made completely out of them.
Archives were largely indifferent to home movies for many years. Since the 1980s interest has
grown, and home movies have even acquired a cachet of trendiness in some quarters. There are a
few archives principally devoted to collecting them, and the nonprofit Center for Home Movies
seeks to foreground them in the public mind and raise money for preservation and access.
I'd suggest it's critically important to look seriously at home movies today. Why?

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Home movies challenge conventional archival practice. Archives that have focused on records of the
state, institutions and businesses or on works of artistic and historical importance aren't well
equipped to catalog extremely granular records of everyday life. When you collect home movies you
are, in the words of Brecht, forced to choose between being human and having good taste. Home
movies require a new curatorial attitude that can stare infinity in the face and smile.
And home movies may be exactly what archives need in order to reengineer themselves, to leverage
a new social economy of access and help ensure their survival. I'm going to offer a few propositions.

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Home movies have become populist documents, in part because of their extreme granularity, in
part because of their quotidian character. Solitary computer viewers and crowded auditoriums alike
are intensely fascinated with records of the minutiae of daily life, especially when they’re highly
localized. Doing urban history screenings for the past seven years has been for me a profound
awakening.

16. 50th Grand Conclave, Omega Psi Phi, December 27-30, 1965
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Home movies can surprise, and they can be counter-stereotypical. I used these images from the
50th conclave of the historically African American Omega Psi Phi fraternity in a Detroit program,
and within 8 hours after they went online they were posted to the fraternity's website. This is not
the usual "ruin porn" that visitors to Detroit often photograph and distribute.

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I've come to realize that cinema began with home movies (Lumiere -- Workers Leaving the Factory,
which both a home movie and an industrial film) and hopefully ends with home movies as well.
Home movies address a major problem besetting documentary film today, which is
overnarrativization. Please hold for a polemic.
To get a film into top-level distribution, you need a cast of characters. You need a narrative arc,
quite often a classical three-act structure. You need jeopardy or an insoluble contradiction, and
some sense of closure or hope at the end. In short you need to observe the some subset of the rules
of fiction to make non-fiction. The process called "storytelling" is presented as inherent to human
consciousness and above criticism. Naturally this is not always the case, but it's characteristic of
much mainstream work.
Critically, home movies resist overnarrativization, since they already imply a narrative. When you
have a shooter and a subject, you have a story. You don't need to impose one on top of the
evidence.
When you enlarge small film to a big screen, you envelop an audience in evidence. You present the
familiar while estranging it. You bridge the gap between image and audience that all filmmakers
must bridge, but much more easily.
And you link individuals with larger histories.

18. Robert C. Binkley, Manual on Methods of Reproducing Research Materials, 1936
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The near-infinite quantity of home movies requires public mobilization to locate, collect, view,
analyze and describe them. Public participation helps unpack details that are part of local
knowledge or specialized practices. User tagging has yielded dramatic results at Texas Archive of
the Moving Image and Flickr Commons.

19. Personal records: a new frontier
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Home movies' special resonance can help to create new relationships between individuals and
institutions. Specifically, home movies broach possibilities for archives to collect and provide access
to personal records, which I consider one of the great opportunities of our time.
Archives need to integrate what we currently think of as "personal archival material" with
institutional collections. We have focused on the fonds [the organizational scheme inherited from
institutions whose records we hold] rather than the flavor. The two kinds of collections constitute
two oppositional, yet codependent, ways of addressing the past.
There is a growing asymmetry in the historical record, especially in a time when it is starting to
become widely recognized that institutional histories fall far short of documenting lived and social
experience. The "digital turn" may ultimately be less wrenching to archives than the challenge of
merging personal and institutional. But I think we must take it on. There's no way we can simply
collect and display mass media, institutional and government records and call that history. We have
to merge the collective and the personal.

20. Modest objectives:
1. Move home movies into cultural mainstream
2. Accelerate pace of traditional research, scholarly and
educational use of home movies
3. Enable new areas & forms of scholarship, incl. digital
4. Build corpus of reusable footage
5. Move from boutique approach; open up massive amounts
of material
6. Enable automated & machine analysis
7. Skew online moving image environment toward
home movies, away from more established genres
8. Geocodes, tropes, archaeology
9. Encourage evolution of archival workflow & practice by
problematizing legacy practices
20
And we need to find a way to build participatory physical archives (explain). We've been doing this
for a year in SF with a group I convened. And others, like Jacqueline Stewart at Northwestern and the
South Side of Chicago, and Theaster Gates, of the Dorchester Projects Library and Archive in
Chicago, are doing similar work.
Here are some of our humble objectives. (Key points: #5, #6, #7, #8, #9)
I predict that home movies are going to be the raw material of research and scholarship in areas we
have yet to imagine. All of life is their territory. Imagine the Ethnographic Jukebox, where tagged
sequences can be retrieved by keyword and compared. Imagine a geotagged database of the entire
world as shot by home moviemakers over time. Imagine lipreaders turned loose to interpret what
immigrant families of the 1930s were actually saying. Imagine algorithmic analysis of home movies
by the millions, perhaps not to describe action in detail, but to separate home movies into “buckets”
of similarity for further analysis. Just as digital scholars are teaching machines to read and analyze
texts, we need to teach machines to watch films.

21. Prelinger Library, downtown SF, Wednesdays 1-8 pm
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In participatory physical archives, our users actually handle and process materials. What if we
generalized hospitality and touch as attributes of modern cultural repositories? Could we actually
let users touch unique materials? Could we enable participation not only in the research room and
auditorium, but at the bench? We can say no, or we can try to engineer ways to make this possible.
Let's let the public into the back of our archives, museums and libraries, and see what happens.
Hospitality, from Derrida as interpreted by Verne Harris, South African archivist and archival
theorist:
here is a sense in which the notion of hospitality demands a welcoming of whomever, or whatever, may be in need of that
hospitality. It follows from this that unconditional hospitality, or we might say ‘impossible’ hospitality, hence involves a
relinquishing of judgement and control in regard to who will receive that hospitality. In other words, hospitality also requires
non-mastery, and the abandoning of all claims to property, or ownership. If that is the case, however, the ongoing possibility
of hospitality thereby becomes circumvented, as there is no longer the possibility of hosting anyone, as again, there is no
ownership or control.
Jack Reynolds, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://www.iep.utm.edu/derrida/#SH7b, last updated 2010-01-12

22. 22
That speculation, which I believe to be true, has led me into a new project, which I'm currently
working on, thanks to the kindness of Creative Capital. It's a feature-length, all-archival film whose
title is NO MORE ROAD TRIPS? It's just been announced that it will premiere as a work-in-progress at
SXSW this coming March. I'm furiously editing.
The motivation behind this film is my fascination with the North American roadscape, and my
curiosity about its future. It's a dream ride through 20th-century America, made entirely from home
movies, asking whether we've come to the end of the open road. Have we reached "peak travel"? Can
we still find fortune (and ourselves) on the highway? Are we nomads or stay-at-homes? I'm building
a journey from the Atlantic Coast to California out of my archives of 9,000 home movies. The
footage is quite incredible; history bleeds out of it. And, like my urban films, the soundtrack will be
made fresh daily by the audience, who will be encouraged to recall their past and predict the future.
There will be titles here and there, and I'll be using various techniques to trigger comment.

23. 23

24. a new evidentiary cinema:
• seeks evidence in broad spectrum of
documents (home movies, etc.)
• celebrates localism and place
• linked to participatory archives projects
• exploits the recognition of the familiar as
a route to parsing the unfamiliar
24
Some thoughts on how a new evidentiary cinema might work.
An undogmatic attitude towards inputs
Often rooted in a place or region
Could be the result of participatory archives projects
Embeds media parsing exercises by relating unfamiliar imagery to the more familiar

25. a new evidentiary cinema:
• interactive and informal
• Elizabethan model of spectatorship
• pro-story, anti-"storytelling"
• avoids overdetermining audio, narration,
editing
• lets sequences play; paced for rejoinders
• relies, upon other things, on the attraction
of the image itself
25
As minimal as can be
Different kind of editing, since you need to allow for audience rejoinder
in its own way like editing classic comedy
Lets images speak for themselves in all of their ambiguity

26. a new evidentiary cinema:
• trigger comment, not emotional
reactions
• trust audience to find their own
narratives in the material
• set up a contract between host and
audience, and between viewers
• not live presentation of predetermined
piece, but throwing film into arena
26
Barrett Watten, a so-called language poet who teaches at Wayne State, wrote a little poem called
"Narrative," in which he likens narrative to malware, and describes the shenanigans he had to go
through to eliminate malware from his machine. I take it as a warning of how complicated it will
be to rid our filmmaking of unnecessary narrative.
Doing so about trusting the audience and relinquishing a certain kind of control (the Derridean
"unconditional hospitality"). It is throwing the film to the wolves. But the wolves are friendly.

27. some antecedents:
• sports spectators
• Elizabethan theatre
• comedy club
• Question Time
27
If I could specify the ideal audience for this, it would be sports spectators, with keen eyes for
detail, interacting with the players and with one another, unafraid of making noise.

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EVIDENTIARY CINEMA suggests a different ecosystem of archival usage and reception. It brings
archival materials to the public in a form that they can easily recognize as coming straight from
archives. It enlists audiences in finding, providing and sharing archival material in a live,
community-oriented context, and recruits archives to push out materials to the public (CHS, SFPL,
WNP, etc.). It engages audiences with material rather than with personalities (characters, actors, etc)
Functionally, it's a disintermediation between archives and their public.
And, interestingly, since my works are completed by the public through their vocalizations,
constitutes a live, realtime workshop situation
For me, it's not so much giving people permission to speak as it's asking them to actively reclaim
the record, and for newer Americans, offering them a record for them to reclaim on their own terms.

29. 29
From my own experience, I have noticed evidentiary cinema triggers recognition in audiences in
part because it evokes and simultaneously alleviates their concerns regarding their own personal
archival records.
-- "If these pictures survived, maybe mine will. And perhaps mine will be as interesting to future
audiences as are these."
And the process of parsing the everyday historical record suggests to people that, scale aside,
decoding and interpreting the record of the present will be possible.
Finally, evidentiary cinema underscores and promotes the potential of the archives. It is one of what
I hope will be many strategies to re-thematize the repository -- not as a place where films go to
die, but as a place of origin, where old works are revived and new works are born.

30. Exactitude vs. anecdote
30
To return to the concern I recalled at the start.
Boleslas Matuszewski worried in 1898 that film's "authenticity, exactitude, and precision" might be
weakened by a camera operator's predilection for "anecdotal History."
Evidentiary cinema collapses Matuszewski's warning. It presents the appearance of exactitude with
the intention of triggering anecdote. In so doing, it aims to bridge the divide between individuals
and history.

31. rick@archive.org
@footage
31
Thank you.