Film archives collect, preserve, and exhibit motion pictures. All three stages have their pitfalls and challenges. Selection is one of them: there is never enough space to store everything and never enough time and money to preserve everything. Something has to be let go. In fact, tens of thousands of films have been lost, and archives share the responsibility here with wars and natural catastrophes. When a film gets selected for preservation, other problems emerge. Should one work with a print or a negative? What if there are multiple versions of the same film, and is there such a thing as a definitive copy? How should an archive work with living filmmakers who want to alter their fifty-year-old works? And exhibition is hardly a straightforward undertaking. Could an archive make anything from its collection available to everyone, or should there be ethical restrictions? Who is to make the decision, and how does one avoid censorship? These are the questions archivists ask themselves regularly; the survival and accessibility of the world’s film heritage depend on them. 

Dr. Peter Bagrov is a film historian and archivist. He is Senior Curator of the Moving Image Department at the George Eastman Museum and Director of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation and the Nitrate Picture Show. Since 2023, he has been the president of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF).

Sponsored by the Film and Media Studies program, the Russian department, and the division of literature and languages. Free and open to the public.