The anarchival condition

Bliss Cua Lim’s term for the situation Philippine cinema has been in for most of its existence: a film culture that keeps producing, at times prolifically, without ever building or sustaining the institution that would keep what it produces.

The word is doing something precise. Not “unarchived,” which would describe a backlog somebody could work through. Anarchival names a standing condition, in which the absence of the archive is a structural feature of how the industry operates rather than an oversight anyone is behind on.

It is the useful frame because it moves the question off individual negligence. Nobody threw the films away. The point is that the arrangement never included anyone whose job was to keep them, and every attempt to create that job so far has been ended by something that had nothing to do with film.

Source: Bliss Cua Lim, The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema, Duke University Press, 2024. Paid, with the full introduction free from Duke. Her argument is that Philippine film preservation fails for institutional, political and economic reasons rather than technical ones, and that the failure is ongoing rather than historical. Adrian Mendizabal’s review essay in Plaridel 21(2), 2024, is a free summary of the book’s argument.

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