Opening Session
09:30 - Opening addresses and conference procedures
GEECT Chair Manuel Damasio and Peter Hort from the University of Westminster 10:00 - Keynote - Why Is Film Archiving So Difficult?
David Walsh joined the Technical Commission of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) in 2006 and served as its head from 2011 to 2016, having learned his craft over many years in the Film Archive of the Imperial War Museum, London. Since 2016 he has been the Training and Outreach Coordinator for FIAF, taking a lead role in defining and implementing FIAF’s training initiatives around the world, and offering assistance and advice to those seeking to preserve their film collections, large and small. With the increasingly perilous state of audiovisual materials in all parts of the globe, but particularly in tropical and sub-tropical climates, the need to save what remains of the audiovisual heritage of many countries has become a matter of urgency, and this has become one of FIAF’s main concerns.Since the concept of preserving films for posterity began to gain ground in the 1920s and 1930s, archivists have struggled to save film collections which seem resolutely determined to self-destruct, sometimes catastrophically. Have things improved in the current digital age? Apparently not, given the dismal state of too many moving image collections around the globe, and the continuing obliviousness of a film and television industry in stubborn pursuit of the next big thing. What is it that makes the survival of this particular branch of cultural heritage so intractable? The reasons are clear; the solution less so.