ABSTRACT

This article takes Peter Jackson’s use of Imperial War Museum footage in They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) and its reception as a starting point for considering the dilemma for film archives over how to enable their work to reach greater audiences without compromising their own reputation or the integrity of the collections they are custodians over. The first part of the article considers some of the issues around the distinction between film restoration and digital enhancement, and some of the pitfalls inherent in a range of well-established archival practices for ‘outreach’. The second half or the essay considers the resistance of military and film historians to the understanding of film footage as evidence, taking the 1916 documentary of The Battle of the Somme as a key case study. Overall the article argues that essay films, and invitations for film-makers and visual artists to offer creative responses to collections should be backed up with a route back to the source material within the collection, and that attention should always be paid to the necessity to explain archival footage to a general audience in the many instances where such footage doesn’t ‘speak for itself’.

摘要

本文以彼得·杰克逊在《他们不会变老》（2018 年）中对帝国战争博物馆镜头的使用及其接受作为出发点，考虑电影档案馆在如何使他们的作品能够吸引更多观众而不损害他们自己的声誉或他们保管的藏品的完整性。本文的第一部分考虑了围绕胶片修复和数字增强之间的区别的一些问题，以及一系列完善的“外展”档案实践中固有的一些陷阱。后半部分或文章以 1916 年索姆河战役的纪录片为例，以军事和电影历史学家对电影片段的理解为证据的抵制作为一个关键案例研究。总的来说，文章认为散文电影，以及邀请电影制作人和视觉艺术家对收藏提供创造性回应，应该以回到收藏中源材料的途径为后盾，并且应该始终注意必要性在许多情况下，档案镜头不能“不言自明”，向普通观众解释档案镜头。