*They're doing the work of the angels here, but there sure are a lot of tall weeds.
Those who worship the Ninth Muse end up in the museum
(...)
H: Are there ongoing fundraising efforts, or does it come from the endowment?
DK: I wish it did! We have a nice endowment that came in part from Lillian Gish. She donated quite a few dollars years ago to preserve silent films. We draw from that. We have another endowment fund from a former head of our film department board. Otherwise we go to friends of MoMA, people we know who are interested in these films. The Film Foundation, certainly, Martin Scorsese’s group, is a major funder for us. There’s also the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and so on and so forth.
H: Do you have a favorite archive or distributor to work with?
DK: Everybody is in this because they love the medium. I love working with Eastman House, the Library of Congress, UCLA, the Academy, many of the foreign archives we work with constantly — the Czech Archive, we just completed a lot of recent work with. It’s a very collegial field. There’s no sense of competition. We all have way too much on our hands. We have 35,000 films at MoMA, which is not big by archive standards. They probably have ten times that many in the Library of Congress, for example. But digitization is very expensive and very slow, and if we want this work to live beyond the next ten years or so, we really have to get down to digitizing it at a much faster rate. It’s hard to see where that funding is going to come from.
H: How does MoMA maintain its commitment to 35mm restorations when seemingly almost everyone else has more or less given up on that?
DK: I think everyone would like to maintain a 35mm output, and we do when there’s money for that in the funding. But for a digital project, it does add $50,000-$60,000 to make a print at the end. There are times when you think twice about that. We can get halfway through another project for that same price. That’s something that’s very fluid. We don’t have a set policy on it. But the feeling is that if the money is there, we would like to make a print, or at least a dupe neg (which is a negative that can be used to make other prints), largely because we’re not sure what the state of digital preservation is going to be. It’s changing all the time. The codecs change from year to year. The different carriers for the digital information change constantly. Who knows if they’re going to be able read LTO tapes in 10 years? So your safest bet is to get it on 35mm and keep it nice and cold in a dark place.....
