I was recently outbid on Ebay for a Spanish one-sheet of Roots of Heaven the highlight of which was a full length painting of Juliette Greco. It turns out the guy who went $34 to my $33 was a big Greco fan from France. Going down the list of his previous bids (why does Ebay allow this, doesn't it violate my privacy?), I noticed they were all Greco items. So here's this guy in France buying up Greco items all over the world, building his own personal library of artifacts, going on "archeological" digs to unearth more material.

A friend of mine believes that eventually all music and images will be available on-line. Instead of trying to find The Twisted Nerve, I'll be able to download the score, the film, stills, posters, scripts, the whole thing someday.

But for now, despite the miracle of the net, it seems far far away. And the way people collect and horde and want what no other person has seems at odds with the idea of a universal data base.

I always thought it would be a neat idea to have a centralized film music museum/library, a place where everybody donated their collections of LPs, CDs, etc. when they died and where anyone could obtain material they wanted. If I wanted to own every available note of Sarde, all the LPs and CDs and tapes would be there and CDR or downloadable copies could be sent out of everything.

I've been thinking about this notion of scarcity and preservation and conservation. Out of studio neglect or its short-sighted thinking that a lot of its material couldn't be of future value to anyone, we have a legacy of lost films, damaged film score tapes, tossed-out sheet music, etc.

Now, when buying Cds or DVDs, I often think that I'm part of the preservation process. That the money I put down helps pay for the restorations and that as long as I hold the DVD in my hands, there's one print of the film that won't fall into obscurity.

I wonder about this in two ways. First, am I a sucker? Is it just a marketing ploy? Not that the studios intentionally let things rot and ruin just to create a future urgency to buy stuff. But aren't we now being asked to pay to preserve their material so they can save a few bucks in having to do it themselves?

Second, why am I as a collector thinking of a future beyond my own use of things. I buy a CD, I play it, I like it, I die, why should I give a damn what happens to the music or my own small collection of it after that? Why should I care about the preservation of this cultural material? When did I become a librarian, an archivist? What's the appeal of thinking that I'm responsible in some small way for keeping culture safe by collecting? And is this my idea or one that I've been propagandized to believe in by the groups that profit from such concern? Are things as bad as I assume or is it another 'big lie'?

Why do I really think that if I don't own a copy of something, it'll go down the tubes of neglect and be lost like the ancient scrolls destroyed from the library at Alexandria? In many ways, we're still recovering from that ancient destruction because we believe so many secrets from the past were lost there. But how can I shield culture from the ravages of current violence? What good is a collection after the neutron bombs have fallen and there are no more people around?

Time and time again I'm reminded that I don't own culture, that movies and books and scores are all copyrighted and belong to others. I can only rent culture and borrow the material goods of it throughout my lifetime until, unlike Egyptian pharoahs, I reach death (or bankrupcy) and can't take it with me.

In the documentary about film preservation, The Race to Save 100 Years, Martin Scorsese acknowledges that the people who own our collective memories should feel the responsibility to preserve them. Do they? Maybe yes. Maybe only so far as video sales are concerned.

The left, like Godard or that Rosenbaum guy from the Chicago Reader, all see property as the crime and so suggest that the ownership of this material belongs to all of us.

I'm torn on this issue. As a collector, I'm a property-owning bourgois and can understand the idea of private property and wanting to profit from it and defend it against loss or devaluation. As a curator, I want to see all this stuff safe, sound, and available. And, I support bootlegs and piracy, because, although it's a black market and theft, it gets material out there that would never see the light of day otherwise and I only live so long. So I'm part bourgois and part criminal (like just about everybody else in the secular world).

But just who owns culture and has access to it and who'll preserve it and pay for it are political questions and in a sense they are secondary.

What matters more is just what our personal collections mean. Certainly we enjoy the use of material. Is that enough? And is there nothing to worry about really? Will everything finally work out and in the end will the complaint be that there's too much to choose from not too little preserved.

We've lost ancient knowledge on one end and have a glut of culture on the other, kind of like a child who grows up and has only a few memories of being a kid and a lot of work to do in the present.

Interstingly, a lot of that work has to do with how to live and what to do. We think of movies and music as entertainment or art, but in a sense culture's not just a book we collect but a content about who we are and how we think we should live and feel and what it means to be a person. To talk about culture as an abstract thing is to talk about hardware without software or brain matter without thoughts, guts without feelings, life without spirit.

It's interesting this idea of body and soul and how we've reproduced it metaphorically as container and experience. We've also made an economics of it, we create and trade experience. So we aren't just collecting say a CD of the Raiders score but the emotions we can have listening to the Raiders score which is an ethereal intangible contained in a very material object of tin and plastic from an orchestral recording of some notes on a score page.

Manufactured memories. Handed-down emotions. 1000 CDs on a bookcase. $10,000+ worked for and traded away. All in order to feel something beyond the mundane and buy my way into the ego-stroke of pretending I have a role as patron and preserver. Maybe not so bad as that since I think I do it in the name of love...

You've touched on a lot of interesting and important points, and this is one of those topics which one can kick around for hours without getting close to a resolution or definitive statement (How's that for a LACK of a definitive statement?).

The need to preserve the past is something that's always moved in fits and starts, depended on fashion and economics and the simple, sad inventories of what remains to be saved when the sometimes fleeting resolve is reached to do something about it.

The term film "preservation" is a somewhat misleading and simplistic one, as film is, above all others, a medium dependent on technology and a vast array of disciplines. "Talking" films, especially, are a result of the coming-of-age and convergence of two 19th-Century technologies into something akin to the Germanic concept of "Gesamtkunstwerk."

The problem is that after everyone
has done his/her job on a film, and it goes to what's called "answer print," or the final, edited, dubbed, color-timed and scored negative that will then be used to strike release prints, the individual picture, sound and music elements that went into this amalgam are stored away, sometimes scattered in widely disparate locations, and under similarly inconsistent environmental conditions.

In past decades, it was felt by studios grinding out about 50 "A" and "B" pictures a year, plus assorted newsreels, shorts and specialty features, that the product was ephemeral and disposable. A film played a week or two, then was consigned to double-bills and then, ultimately replaced by the next two-week epic. The above-mentioned picture and sound elements were accorded even less value, except for possible use as "stock" footage, or library music cues to fill a hole in a new production's original score, or use as a "temp-track" for films in the editing and preview stage.

In recent years, when studios have appeared (I stress, APPEARED) to be concerned with their heritage and the old films in their libraries (motivated, not surprisingly, by the realization that there was money to be made by mining the past for home video), they have undertaken restorations, only to discover that the original elements in their possession had deteriorated -- often to the point of uselessness -- or had ceased to be in their possession at all.

Sometimes material in the hands of a collector -- illegally -- is the only thing that's stood between a restoration's realization and abandonment.

It's short-sighted, but what is one to do? One can argue that the owners of the finished work have the right to make it or its component parts available to the public, as it sees fit -- but does not have the right to let said material decay and be rendered useless by time. A library or archive, chartered in the public interest, cerrainly does NOT have the right to let its holdings deteriorate, but a commercial concern like a movie studio...I don't know. It follows, in certain ways, the arguements surrounding euthanasia and the so-called "death with dignity": are individual and corporate rights to be dictated by the delicate sensibilities of third parties?

That said, I do have to dispute one of your statements, though it may send a bit of a chill up your spine: "restoration" of a film for home video does not man that a new, positive archival print has been struck, and that it'll be stored away safely under optimum conditions. The wide array of elements needed for that restoration are often combined physically, on film, only to a limited extent, in that the final assmblage is done exclusively on digital video. Afterward, those elements are packed up and returned to their previous resting-places where, one hopes, at least some effort has been made to correct the conditions of high heat, high humidity, leaky overhead pipes and other kinds of neglect bequeathed on these treasures by earlier generations.