To collect or not to collect

Cinema’s existential dilemma?

Abstract

In the history of cinema, the collector is often described as a pioneer, a dubious term, but which nonetheless describes individuals whose passion and tenacity was often realised in the birth of cinema’s museums and archives. This paper intends to look at two aspects of the affective state of collecting cinema; the first connected with tensions which surfaced at times between filmmakers’ view of their craft and the collectors’ view. The second connected with contexts where the filmmaker is also a collector, an increasingly widespread contemporary phenomenon with American filmmakers, from Lucas to Scorsese to Spielberg but also visible in filmmakers who were collectors/archivist of their own work, such as Andrzej Wajda and Stanley Kubrick. A well-known example of the first aspect, and its affective fall out, is the ‘spat’ between Henri Langlois and François Truffaut, part of the history of The Cinémathèque FrançaiseMusée du Cinéma. Langlois’ insatiable acquisitions of ‘all things’ cinema had undoubtedly a compulsive nature, but it also had an underlying anxiety about loss, which reminds us of Benjamin’s ‘fate of the object’. The second aspect examined of collectors’ affective state is a consideration of Bill Douglas, a British filmmaker whose extensive collection of ‘all things’ cinema went on to form the eponymous museum at the University of Exeter in Southern England. Bill Douglas unlike Truffaut did not consider the filmmaking craft exclusive of collecting, he was clearly steeped in both. This paper will consider these opposing views, that of the compulsion to collect and hence the desire to transfer the film-object and its pluralistic interpretation into the ‘magic circle’, and that of viewing the film-object in its singular and specific ‘non-collectable’ moving essence.