NARA and MoMA
Spring, the season of lilacs, sunshine, and general renewal, means something else for students of The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation: marathon road trips to points south for a crash course in archival practices at some of the country’s finest institutions. This annual extended field trip offers two complementary rewards: an opportunity to work with equipment that the Eastman House Motion Picture Department does not have; and insight into procedures, work flows, and best practices in the real world. (One Selznick alum has likened Eastman House to NASA in its cleanliness and precision.)
Our first stop was the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, Maryland. The film department, managed by Selznick alumna Criss Kovac, is charged with preserving and making accessible the motion pictures created by the Executive Branch of the US Government. This encompasses far more than the duck-and-cover curios of the 1950s—everything from the IRS instructional films and US Information Agency propaganda shorts to documentary classics of the New Deal and all manner of military footage. Miles of it. The US Military is, by far, the most prolific “studio†of the Executive Branch. (In fact, NARA’s film archive is the only one I know of where one sometimes needs high-level security clearances for the rather prosaic task of sprocket repair.)