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An Impending National Catastrophe?
The Fate of Britain's Film Heritage

Britain possesses one of the world's finest collections of historic films, recording the history, life and culture of the entire 20th century and the last moments of the century before that. This collection, the National Film and Television Archive, represents a national heritage, comparable — even though younger — to the British Library or the National Gallery. Yet this great heritage is under imminent threat of irreparable devastation from ill-considered reconception and re-structuring.

The bodies entrusted by the Government with the care of the National Film Archive — the Film Council and under it the British Film Institute — seeking opportunities of financial retrenchment, have determined to impose drastic cuts in the maintenance of the archive. Overall their plan is to save some one-third of the annual budget, to reduce the highly specialist staff by around 40, and to "rationalise" the Archive's necessarily considerable real-estate holdings, to realise capital funding.

The proposals threaten:
(a) to dismantle one of the world's most admired and emulated film conservation units
(b) to reduce the level of the archive's acquisitions and holdings
(c) to minimise accessibility of the collections
(d) to introduce new layers of bureaucracy, with poorly defined responsibilities
(e) to abandon the Archive's existence as a national heritage collection, reducing and hijacking it to a purely institutional asset.

The group "Custodes Lucis" — "Guardians of the Light" has published a protestation representing various sectors of the international archival and film history community, and has set up a site informing in detail of the threat.

www.filmarchiveaction.org

Please visit the site and add your name in protest against the planned abuses of our film heritage. The site offers the possibility to complete a form.

(Information taken from "film archive action").

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