TIFF’s analog treasures
Festival given 1,460 film prints for preservation and archiving
Analog film isn’t going anywhere.
In fact, a bunch of it has found a new home in Toronto.
TIFF announced earlier this year that they are the beneficiary of a substantial collection of 16-millimetre and 35-millimetre film prints.
Donated by NBC Universal, Mongrel Media, eOne/Les Films Séville and Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler, the 1,460 prints significantly bolster the cultural institutions’ celluloid film collection, something director and CEO Piers Handling says TIFF is “obviously interested in keeping alive.”
Eleven Alfred Hitchcock films, including Rear Window (1954), are part of this donation. Other notable titles include The Big Lebowski (1998), Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) and John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). While archiving is not one of the festival’s key functions, Handling said that to actually own a collection of these artifacts is “crucial” for TIFF’s future and the future of the medium.
“We want to give audiences the experience of looking at these works as they were originally shot,” he said. “Original artwork is really important . . . (and) become increasingly valuable in the same way original paintings become valuable.”
It’s so important because “digital is a replica,” Handling said. “You can probably make a digital reproduction of the Mona Lisa, and it might be very accurate but it’s not the Mona Lisa.”
With the world moving dramatically into the digital sphere, preserving the legacy of film is being left to institutions such as TIFF, he added. They plan to take “great care in projecting and preserving them.”
“I embrace the digital future but respect our analog past,” said panelist Katie Trainor, the film collections manager at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “I don’t see them as opposing figures, but a marriage that has yet to flourish.”
She didn’t think that analog film was on an endangered species list either, citing blockbuster celluloid films such as Hateful Eight and Star Wars as mainstream approaches to the medium.
“The interest is there but there’s a lot of business on the back end,” said James King, senior booth manager at TIFF Bell Lightbox.
Having access to physical film, experts who know how to produce it and working parts for old-school projectors will be the only thing keeping it back, he thinks.
King added that engaging a new generation of specialists in the analog world will ensure the tradition of “seeing a film in the way it was intended to be screened” doesn’t die out in the digital age.
But saving film costs money. To store and take care of one film print for four years will run TIFF an estimated $350.
To raise awareness about their material and archival project, they have launched Save This Moment, a campaign running until Dec. 31. Canadian actor Keanu Reeves even lent his voice to the cause.
The first $15,000 raised will be matched by an anonymous donor.