40 ROUND TABLE ONE ON ONE Content Management
SPECIALIST HELP Working in collaboration with an existing archive can be the answer for those with film assets to handle
But if you are a hedge fund, and you really want to make money out of this, I would be very careful. The up-front investment is high and it’s not easy to come across the necessary know-how, skill set and people. FEED: What about dealing with very old collections, like the assortment of Soviet animation that we mentioned? NICOLA MAZZANTI: With a lot of the film rights from the 1940s or 1950s, you may never, ever find out what happened or who owns those rights. But the nice thing about dictatorships, such as the Soviet Union and the Nazis, is that they kept very strong control on their assets for censorship reasons. As a film archivist, I love dictatorships. In many of the Eastern European, former socialist countries the rights were taken over by the state and when those regimes collapsed, the rights were then handed over to some sort of body, all together. The local film institute or a local library, something like that. Take the example of East Germany – the German Democratic Republic. The rights that belonged to them ended up in a foundation called DEFA (now at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst) after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and it’s all still there – or most of it is. And what the Nazis had retained at UFA [a German film company producing
FEED: So if a deal is made with an archive, the archive can potentially take over some of that work for you? NICOLA MAZZANTI: That’s what we do. That’s what normal archives do. The problem is that archives are facing the same problems with their own collections. However, the advantage is they have staff and they have infrastructure: machines and equipment. If you have analogue tapes and films, if you want to see what is on the film, you need the equipment to view it – and the problem is that certain viewing equipment is not manufactured any more. Publically-funded institutions have always played a counter-cyclical role. In political economy terms, or in economic terms, counter-cyclical means they provided the funding when the material was no longer interesting – industrially or commercially. Publically-funded institutions have been doing that for a long time. When the industry decided that their films were not worth anything any more – in the 1950s, 1960s or early 1970s – archives took them up because they were important cultural artifacts and saved them. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, Ted Turner came up with AMC and Turner Classics and started giving them a second life on cable. And then the DVD came. So, suddenly they became assets. But for decades, they were liabilities. That’s the reality of things.
and distributing motion pictures, which operated from 1917 through to the end of the Nazi era] all ended up in another foundation after the war. But when you have democracy, who knows who sold what to whom in a certain year? Very few countries are equipped with a centralised registry where there is an obligation to record transactions. Even if you do find out that you own the original production rights of film ‘X’, it is really difficult to find out if, in the meantime (in the last 50 years), maybe I signed over certain rights to Mr Epsilon or Mrs Epsilon, perhaps in certain territories or perhaps for a certain period of time. THE COLLECTION . THE PROBLEM IS, YOU NEVER KNOWWHICH 1% THE FAMOUS RULE OF THESE ARCHIVES IS: THE SALES OF 1%MUST PAY FOR 100%OF
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