Film archive

The institution whose job is to keep films in existence during the long middle period when nobody is making money from them. Not a library of DVDs. A climate-controlled physical store, a catalogue, a legal mandate to acquire, and staff whose employment does not depend on anyone watching anything this year.

The last part is the one that keeps failing here. The Philippines has had a functioning national film archive for roughly fifteen of the years since cinema arrived in 1897. The first state archive, created in 1981, lost its collection and had its database destroyed by water leaks; there was then no state film archive at all from 1986 to 2011. Neither state archive was killed by fire. Both were killed by a change of government. No permanent archive building has ever been built.

Worth holding next to that: the country’s most effective archive was never the state’s. It belonged to a private broadcaster, and it stopped when that broadcaster lost its franchise.

Source: The institutional history is compiled in this course’s cinema research map from Bliss Cua Lim’s archival scholarship, the FDCP’s own documentation, and SOFIA’s published history. The legal position is RA 9167 (2002), whose entire national archive mandate is one item in Section 3, free at lawphil. There is no Philippine film heritage law. The fifteen-of-the-years arithmetic is this course’s own, built from the institutional dates rather than taken from a published statistic.

First used in: 3.2 · A cinema that lost its own childhood