Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

collection and... witnessing the daily routine of a foreign archive’s
Director and important FIAF executive. And in fact, watching Jan at
his desk and phone, I kept an image that often came back to me,
later, as a concentrated sign of the world I was about to enter (or,
rather, of what it had been until then): a link in a chain of
complicities; a part of a bigger, but also relatively closed, secretely
tied world; a rather centralized but also immensely committed one.
As far as I can remember, neither he nor Tineke urged upon me their
own vision of the Ivens’ controversial work. Instead, they insisted on
the need to research and to go beyond all clichés, and, often and
often, they talked to me about... FIAF and its perhaps even more
intricate short history. Knowing that he had witnessed the post war
years (the first significant boom of the federation growth, and the
battles against indifference or sheer hostility), but perhaps also
anticipating what would come soon as signs of another kind of
indifference, or forgetfulness, by new agents in the film heritage area,
Jan took as his mission and pleasure to make me acquainted with
that idionsyncratic world. The relevant thing, however, is the way he
did it. It may seem obvious, today (but, more and more, it doesn’t to
me) but in fact, since those first contacts until the later ones, what I
remember is a repeated, genuine and open push forward. His
obsessive message was for me to go ahead, to carry the group’s legacy
and find my own way inside it. Like as if he was always saying: “it’s
just great to find someone younger really interested in this; there’s a
world to build and you have a role in it”. This, I cannot forget.
My first gratitude to Jan comes out of the fact that he always kept
faithful to this “push”, always repeating it. But then, over the years,
he progressively reinforced the other side of it, and I progressively
acknowledged its double message. As a matter of fact, I think that
very few other people insisted so much with me on the plain need to
record past history. Even in our latest meetings (and very specially
then) he kept urging upon me the awareness of this need, the
awareness of the lack of it (regardless of the few “memoirs” published
so far), the urgency to accomplish it. As in the begining, the push
forward was therefore inseparable from the push backwards, or the
need to remember.
Writing this now may seem a routine reflex in a personal tribute, or
just the natural archivist’s remark. Again, I believe it goes much
beyond that, and even more so when we acknowledge (or defend)
that FIAF cannot, and must not, recuperate its past tendencies. We
know only too well that the film archive movement irreversibly
changed, and I would personally add without ever being able to
meet some of its original goals. More than the archives, the overall
context radically changed, and new interests surrounded the
conservation and use of the film heritage, amplifying its challenges,
but not necessarily solving or softening some of its primary problems
and shortcomings. In this context, FIAF itself, however bigger and
apparently stronger it may be (and of course also because of that),
75 Journal of Film Preservation / 63 / 2001